Arve Henriksen - Strjon

One of this year's absolute best albums has to be Arve Henirksen's Strjon, released on the peerless Rune Grammofon label. Arve Henriksen is a Norwegian jazz trumpeter whose tone is absolutely unique - breathy sighs give way to the occasional burst of brilliant purity, tortured moans lie alongside pretty delicacy. I can't recommend enough the experience of listening to this outside at night on headphones, and all the way through. It is an album absolutely in tune with the natural world, the creaking seismic fact of the physical earth alongside the foggy unknowns of spirit and fate. Played amongst the elements it really blooms.

"Black Mountain" opens the album after a short introduction and is atypical of Henriksen, but is certainly one of the highlights. Electrical bursts and tones invade the space with terrifying unpredictability, while underneath it all rides a mother of a bassline, like a minimal techno record found staggering weakly around after days alone in the tundra. In a perfect world Carl Craig would slap a pitch-black 4/4 beat behind this for the ultimate in introspective dance music...

"Green Water" is more familiar territory, a meandering trumpet line soaring over traditional piano and synth washes laid deep in the mix, plus gamelan stabs that coalesce to form a clanging groove, before dissipating into the mist again.

"Wind And Bow" is a stunning close-up of Henriksen's trumpet, the most intimate track on the album. Headphones an absolute must for this one to pick up every smeared note and tremor.

These are just to give a flavour of the different types of sounds on this record, and like I said, it really bears listening to in one sitting; its progression from oppressive dislocation through tentative curiousity and quiet understanding to ultimate sublimation into the elements is moving and wholly satisfying.

Arve Henriksen - Black Mountain

Arve Henriksen - Green Water

Arve Henriksen - Wind And Bow

And yes, he's playing an "ice horn" in that photo. Brilliant.

Maybe she's born with it.

Skipping across the music video channels over my cereal this morning I was agog at the sheer lameness of some of the trumpeted indie bands out there - I Was A Cub Scout ripping off the pacy emo-motorik (emotorik?) of Bloc Party, without any tunes, and Air Traffic were like Keane attempting the martial bits of Arcade Fire, without any tunes. Truly desperate.

Cue L'il Mama over at MTV Base. She doesn't need any "angular guitars" or played-out synths or doe-eyed Bambi-pamby vocals. In fact, she doesn't need any fucking instruments at all, just some clapping and some E-number-amped flow. The lyrics don't try to articulate why the girl left me or what's wrong with the state of things, they're about how great lipgloss is. She can dance too. An infinite number of Wombats clapping an infinite number of hands together could never come up with something this catchy, let alone be able to jack to it afterwards.

Lil Mama - Lipgloss

Of course, there are precedents for this sort of production, not least of all this all-time classic:

Clipse - Grindin'

Still absolutely fresh after five years. The funk holy grail is surely to reach the point, as these tracks reach towards, where a single rhythm barely coheres yet is still totally danceable. Any suggestions on the ultimate examples?

Malo in your face...

Las Malas Amistades are a bizarre musical anomaly. Signed to Honest Jon's they eke out what might be described as an 'individual' sound for themselves. Their latest offering is much the same as the first, only they move from the garden (Jardin Interior) onto the patio (Patio Bonito). Patio Bonito is a much more upbeat jaunty affair, with more fake trumpets, maracas and fiesta castanets.

At times they are just straight up weird, singing jolting out of key ditties on out of tune guitars, and third world keyboards with a stuck demo button. As much as I enjoy this, I'm aware it's a bit indulgent of me. However, at other times they sound like the soundtrack to a Wes Anderson film, the tinny samba beats on the cheapo casios placed in their element next to underdeveloped wah-wah synths and off-kilter vocals that just won't settle on a melody.

It's rare that any of the tracks hit the two-minute mark, often breaking off after one, but this works on their side, the ridiculousness not indulged too much - just the toes dipped quickly into a wildly individual and anti-intellectual musical experiment.

Las Malas Amistades - Hay Zombies En La Playa (I would like this to be my theme tune as I walk jauntily down the street with headphones on.)

Las Malas Amistades - El Mismo Pesimiso

Las Malas Amistades - Estrella De La Cancio

Read more and look and the cut and paste artwork here, make sure to flick to the blog, its not in English, but the artwork is super, I selected some for this post: bearded children (entitled 'crimino'), humping motorbikes, what to pick? I chose the gnomes on the settee.

NB: Malo in your face is in reference to track 2 from Jardin Interior, the lyrics for which are all about things that are bad, 'malo'. They translate to (courtesy of the sleeve, not google):
bad like a dog with a limp
bad like a kid with messed up hair
bad like a borrowed shoe
....and ends with the lines...
bad like a loan left hanging or like synchronised swimming.

Gastr Del Sol - dream examples.

In between listening to a luscious stack of new CD's (more from which soon on these pages), I've been enjoying drifting around work and Sheffield's pavements to various mid-90's Chicago bands, a scene which I can't get enough of. Jazzy beard-stroking guitar pop, full of melodious noodling and genuine warmth, with a playfulness that belies its intellectual image. The Sea And Cake's Oui has been heavily repeated as has Tortoise's TNT, plus the most simple and most skronked-out ends of Jim O'Rourke's spectrum. And above all Camofleur (1998) by Gastr Del Sol, an outfit made up chiefly of O'Rourke and David Grubbs, but which also featured Chicago legends like John McEntire back in the day.

Camofleur is a beautiful album, well worth buying for its invaluable whole-album listening experience. (I'm aware of how Chicago jazz-rock geek that sounds, but it's true). It's a blend of delicate chamber strings and piano, squiffy O'Rourkean polyrhythms, soft electronic effects and glitches, hypnotically repetitious guitar patterns, and careful, naive singing from Grubbs. What makes it unique is the way is hovers ecstatically in the space between the stricture of pop songwriting and the loosened world of free jazz and musique concrete, the aural equivalent of the gorgeous period between dreams and lucidity.

"Each Dream Is An Example" is my current favourite, setting a very traditional piano motif against fizzing electronics and muffled horns, before emerging suddenly into a new space at 2:50, a clearer, balladeering tone taking over, with chiming backing vocals from Edith Frost. Grubbs sings about the nature of dreams while simulataneously allowing dream logic penetrate the song - its soft 45-degree turns into new musical ideas without warning are the same turns our subconscious takes as we dream, at once nonsensical and natural, as it makes its wandering path through recent history. The lyrics make these synaptic rambles as well - the lucid "compress the days' events" segues into "the loss of a spouse is spice for lice", a line that I love for its silly somnabulent word games. (If you listen closely you can hear Grubbs smile as he sings this, imperceptibly heightening the loveliness of it all). Gastr Del Sol manage to create something that truly deserves the descriptor "dreamlike", music that is blithely absurd and skipping across the face of waking life.

Gastr Del Sol - Each Dream Is An Example

Thanks to Ian for lending me this and a bunch of other Chicago-based genius. Camofleur is out of print but you can get it on this listing at eBay for not that much. Maybe I'll burn you a copy if you ask me nicely.

Miho Hatori: A break in the clouds

Miho Hatori appeared in the Steel Press promo box a long time ago, when all we knew was cold and shadows. luckily, that day I was feeling optimistic, feeling I should make more of an effort to listen to all the bullshit we get sent, as some of it may turn out good. This one time, one and only time mind, it turned out good.

Ecdysis was released on Rykodisc last year, with some truly terrible artwork (above). It's quite patchy, making use of a hotch-potch batch of instruments with no connecting thread. It does, however, have this truly lovely stand-out track, "Barracuda", which I need to post before the sun goes in again and it gets all inappropriate.

Hatori's voice sweeps shallow and soft, tarnished with a strong accent. But don't get me wrong, this isn't some sort of insipid Beach Party job. The club-style organ is jaunty - off the mark, and the maracas and flashes of brass (listen carefully) in the back all sound as if played by some smooth-ass guys who dropped in from a tiki party. There's little bits of harmonica or something; some of those crazy wooden percussion instruments you get in primary school. It all adds up to something really catchy, floating along all top-heavy - hardly there without the plastic um-pa of that organ - it gets me every time.

Miho Hatori - Barracuda

Bird By Snow - Sky

Bird By Snow were a band that often played gigs in people's houses or on the beach when I lived in Santa Cruz, and it's good to see that they've grown to the point where they release their first CD in Europe this week, entitled Sky and released on Swedish label Kning Disk. They share the same underground Californian psychedelic folk sound as bands like Whysp and Little Wings (and more famously Vetiver and Devandra Banhart), a kind of tousled organic intimacy that forms a dusty niche away from the sheen of modern life. You can definitely hear the influence of Phil Elverum's Microphones/Mt. Eerie, the latter of whom Bird By Snow has supported in the past. This track has a fantastic slowly loping groove to it, overlayed with wheezing accordian and shamanic repeated vocals.

Bird By Snow - The Sound And The River Within The Sound

Takes me right back to magical SC, where I often used to share my walk to lectures with a family of deer, and bought incredible paintings by homeless hippies on walks back from the beach. Despite relocating to the Bay Area and travelling all over the world, Bird By Snow seems to have retained some of that Santa Cruz acid-hippie ethos:

"Open eyes wide, and take in “Sky,” bird by snow’s outrageously lush follow-up LP. Cloudy or clear, day or night, let us be absorbed in the one-always-giving moment, and know the sky not as vacuous hole, but as container (whole)."

You can buy Sky from the label website or from Bird By Snow's website, including the original LP version in mouth-watering gold sleeve with transparent blue vinyl and luxury booklet:

What a beauty. There's also a free live album from a gig on an island in the Baltic Sea you can download.