Can: Tago Mago

Can – Tago Mago (1971)

Glenn: Deep funk you’d feel weird shaking your butt to. Crisp production, with oddly EQ’d drums — muted. Like what you hear with a head cold or a fever. Two long sound collages — one of which contains my all-time favorite 2 minutes of Can (that’d be the opening of “Aumgn”), and the other of which is made up of shouting, carnival blee-boop organ licks, and delay pedal fuckery. A distanced feeling throughout. So is this emotionless post-rock jamming more to be admired than to be enjoyed? Or is there blood in these grooves?

Jordy: There is vibrant life in these grooves.  As my liner notes quotes keyboardist Irmin Schmidt: Can was like a “mighty, pulsing organism.”   Similarly, I would define the “life” of Tago Mago more in biological terms.  It has a regular heartbeat and bowel movements, for instance.  (Excuse me while I abandon this analogy…)

Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band: Trout Mask Replica

Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band:  Trout Mask Replica (1969)

Adam: What can we say about Trout Mask Replica?

Jordy: Probably too much.

The Microphones: The Glow pt. 2

The Microphones: The Glow, Pt. 2 (2001)

Phil: I don’t remember the first time I heard Phil Elvrum’s (now Elverum, see his interview with The Believer) masterpiece of separation and personal discovery, but I can say I have listened to this album several times in several different contexts and it stands apart as one of the finer releases of the Pacific Northwest’s Indie scene.

A friend of mine once told me she thought that every Microphones album sounded like the band practiced for four days straight without sleeping and then recorded. Production on Microphones records is almost always arrestingly simple and childlike, like no one cares if vocal tracks clip and distort or if the hard-panned guitars aren’t really in time. And Phil Elverum’s a smart guy. He could make everything line up just so if he really wanted to, but this approach to the recording process is either calculated naivete or an attention to something else altogether.

What’s important to Phil Elverum? Like any good artist, he seems to be concerned with expression; if this album was tight, in tune and clean, it would be a completely different statement. It would be an album about intentionally working through intense personal muck instead of an album about wandering around in a fog (or glow, if you will) of uncertainty, occasionally tripping over something transcendent but mostly thinking about uncertainty and its aftereffects.

“I Felt My Size” (far from my favorite track on the album) stands, in my mind, as the prime example of most of the elements that make this album exactly what it is. It starts with Elverum’s voice and guitar right up front in the mix with some noise in the very back, sounding very…Northwesty…until the drums come in and they’re just so gd compressed that you can hardly tell what they’re supposed to sound like. And then we get some weird auxiliary noises until the group choir comes in and tells us that Phil is not a planet at all, that he has found his place in the universe and it is certainly not much of one. So you have the sound of someone understanding that the universe does not really much care for them (a theme explored in the following LP Mount Eerie) and it sounds unsettling.

I think this album is unsettling because it is an unsettled album. It’s for grey days and feeling like you don’t have a clue and need to feel like somebody has gone through this all before. And so many have, but few have communicated it as well as Phil Elverum on this here album.

Glenn: I completely agree with you, Phil. This album always sounds just out of earshot — and that is unsettling. There are those albums I know by heart, from first note to last fade. London Calling, Astral Weeks, Kind of Blue, Crooked Rain Crooked Rain, Abbey Road. But, for me, this album is more like The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, Exile on Main Street, Amnesiac, and Camofleur: each listen is like the first listen, and something new comes to the front. The Glow Pt. 2 is perhaps the album I love best that I know least. There is something distant, almost unknowable about the album — fog, as Phil puts it.

Yet the mystical quality of the album seems steeped in the real world. For example, see “The Moon,” my favorite Microphones song. A glance at the lyrics shows it to be a straightforward narrative. But the childlike production is what makes the song poignant. Only so often do lyrics lines emerge clearly through the haze of guitars: “We walked around and stayed up late….And the wind and the mountaintop….My chest was full….And in its light I saw my two feet on the ground.” The fragments of story are more meaningful than the story itself, because you, the listener, must do the work to make sense of the song.

Phil: I’d be willing to cut “The Mansion”; I think it’s a really good lyrical centerpiece to the fog/glow of the album, but the title track is pretty stinking awesome.

Glenn: I’ve always thought that the song “The Glow, Pt. 2″ would sound good arranged for brass quintet. Dig a French horn on that gorgeous vocal melody.

In fact, that’s maybe what we’re getting at in this conversation. This record glows with fog, but underneath it all lie solid melodies and good lyrics. Which is more than you can say about any other Microphones or Mount Eerie release (sorry, Phil; sorry, Phil).

Key tracks:

“I Want Wind To Blow”
“The Glow, Pt. ii”
“The Moon”
“I Felt My Size“

“and then my mind split open”

The Velvet Underground – “I Heard Her Call My Name” from White Light/White Heat (1968)

Last night, after drinking a wonderful Sazerac cocktail, I heard Yo La Tengo play Durham NC. The cavernous acoustics of the Carolina Theater didn’t help the sound, but the show still split my mind. One of YLT’s encores was a noisy version of the Velvets classic “I Heard Her Call My Name.”

Back in ’94, Yo La Tengo portrayed the Velvets in the film I Shot Andy Warhol. Watch a clip (but no YLT) here.

Catch Yo La Tengo live

Buy the Velvet Underground

Posted by Glenn

“In-dee-pen-dent. In-dee-pen-dent.”

The Books – “That Right Ain’t Shit” from The Lemon of Pink (2003)

I think I can speak for my fellow SWR-ians by saying that the Books fucking rule. I heard them live once on a wintry night in Chicago; I was shushed during the boring-ass opening act by an overweight beardo hipster; the Books killed; in a blissed-out stupor I talked with one of the Books afterward. The cellist. His accent was too thick to understand. I tried to shake his hand and he wouldn’t have it. (Later, Jordy asked me, “Is that what you call him? Is he a Book?) Their live set, to be sure, was fantastic. The kind of show where time disappears.

At any rate, our pal Rob tipped me off to the fact that the Books are working on a new album, to be released in the next year. In the mean time, they’re touring. I missed ‘em in NC; don’t make the same mistake.

Buy the Books (or just any old book, I recommend Wolf Whistle by Lewis Nordan)

Posted by Glenn

What (is this thing called) Love?

Eric Dolphy

Charles Mingus – “What Love? (live)” from Mingus at Antibes (rec. 1960)

Old-school SWR visitors might remember that I am batshit-crazy about jazz giant Charles Mingus. Some of his best work was done in the early-to-mid-1960s with alto sax/bass clarinet/flute whiz kid Eric Dolphy.

This is easily one of my favorite jazz recordings ever. The musical conversation between Mingus and Dolphy toward the end is both funny and moving, and Ted Curson’s trumpet solo kills. Drummer Dannie Richmond, as always, gives Mingus a unique rhythmic drive and texture. There’s another recording of this on the faux-live album Charles Mingus Present Charles Mingus, featuring the same lineup and much more Dolphy-Mingus interaction, but to me it doesn’t hold the same fire. Listen to it yourself:

Charles Mingus – “What Love” from Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus (1960)

Mingus loosely based the chord changes of “What Love?” on the jazz standard “What Is This Thing Called Love?” Take a listen and see if you can hear the resemblance:

Clifford Brown & Max Roach – “What Is This Thing Called Love?” from Basin Street (1956)
Clifford Brown – trumpet
Sonny Rollins – tenor sax
Richie Powell – piano
George Morrow – bass
Max Roach – drums

Bill Evans Trio – “What Is This Thing Called Love?” from Portrait in Jazz (1959)
Bill Evans – piano
Scott LaFaro – bass
Paul Motian – drums

There’s some fantastic video of Mingus and Dolphy together. Start here.

Buy Mingus here

Posted by Glenn

Two songs I adore

Cans

There’s no theme or commentary to today’s post other than it’s Friday and I adore these two songs.

Can – “Mushroom” from Tago Mago (1971)
Califone – “Sawtooth Sung A Cheater’s Song” from Heron King Blues (2004)

What sounds good to you this Friday?

More Califone on SWR

More Can on SWR

Buy the ‘fone

Buy the ‘an

Posted by Glenn

“Barracking, blundering, pillaging, plundering”

imagine that it's standing on top of a radio.

TV on the Radio – “Dreams” from Desperate Youth, Bloodthirsty Babes (2004) & “Shout Me Out” from Dear Science (2008)

TV on the Radio are one of those bands that people 25 years from now will listen to and say that’s what the ’00s were like. TVotR’s “life-during-wartime bellow that nailed our post-post-9/11 ennui” has been well-documented, not least because the band formed just after 9/11, but the epoch-defining quality of this band goes further than their evocation of dread, suspicion, ambivalence, and boredom. They are the first (pop) band I know of to use inorganic sounds (that is, electronic sounds meant to sound like they emanate from no instrument played with hands; possibily the buzz and hum in the foreground of so many TVotR songs is the White Noise of Don DeLillo) to do some other than evoke dread, suspicion, etc. They use the growl and hiss and chatter of dial-up modems and dead phone lines and blown tube amps and on-the-fritz iPods and overheated laptops and interrupted cell phone service to call forth, sometimes, joy, pleasure, regret — the big-time sweaty heavy-breath emotions. The ones that wear you out. No coincidence that “Wear You Out” is the final track on their first full-length.

And, in world where more and more pop music seems to be defined solely by what influences it has combined (as if making worthwhile art were as easy as mixing up a batch of frozen margaritas in a blender; would that that were true), TVotR seem like their own men. It is curious when you can spot the influence, where TVotR seem to pull from an alternative canon: David Bowie, Talking Heads, Peter Gabriel, Pixies, Talk Talk, barbershop quartets, Brooklyn noise (am I the only one picking up heavy TVotR vibes on the new Animal Collective record?), even Tom Petty (listen closely to the verse on “Shout Me Out”). Plus, what they do just sounds so right. At their best (these tunes, “Staring At The Sun,” “Blind,” “Wolf Like Me,” “I Was A Lover,” “A Method,” “Tonight,” “Golden Age”), it’s hard to believe that these songs haven’t always existed.

In conclusion: TV on the Radio fucking rules.

TV on the Radio on the Colbert Report

Interview with lead singer Tunde Adebimpe (includes the money quote: “Or these scientists who are working on making a self-contained black hole—how short is that victory party going to be? And how quickly is someone going to turn that to the worst application? It’s like, “We made a black hole!” “Oh cool, can we watch sex on it?” “No, not really.” “Can we kill someone with it?” “Probably.”")

Buy it here (uh, and how come when I search for “tv on the radio” on amazon, the first thing that pops up is Steve Harvey’s relationship advice book?)

Posted by Glenn

Harmonica Favorites, Pt. 3

Yes. Yes, please.

Talk Talk – “The Rainbow” from Spirit of Eden [1988]

Talk Talk used to be another Duran Duran until they holed up in a church and refused to let EMI hear anything from their fourth LP (Spirit of Eden).  Imagine, if you will, a horrified record executive listening to this commercially unpalatable nonsense, flabbergasted at a lack of anything resembling a single and no way to put on a successful world tour.

In any case, Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock (their final LP) are important records, the products of fertile and talented musical imaginations (most notably that of Mark Hollis), records that transcend genre and time.  If someone put out this record last year, it would be hailed as a triumph.  If they had put this album out in the seventies, it would be a hidden gem.

But this is a post about harmonicas, and I have never heard a harmonica sound like this.  All distorted and anguished and writhing, a beast of a thing, a perfect introduction to this brilliant “fuck you” of an album.  I mean seriously, harmonicas from a band that used to be just another new wave band?  Brilliant.

Buy it here

Posted by Phil

Humble Acceptance

Moaned and groaned and rolled my bones

Marquis de Tren and Bonny Billy – “81” from Get on Jolly [2000]

Many apologies for my lack of input on the old blogosphere. I’ve been in the middle of an intra-city move and a job switch, so the last month or two have been pretty stupid busy. But I have been listening to some good musics and found a bunch of represses in Chicago (Sam Cooke at the Harlem! Can you believe it?).

In any case, it’s February and I’m sort of sad and I can’t stop listening to this song. I picked up this cd in Indianapolis at Luna Music maybe a year ago and just started listening to it in November. It’s everything a great collaboration should be in that it highlights the strengths of each participant and allows both players to push the other creatively. Since I’m a stupid fan of Mick Turner (the Marquis de Tren, for this album) and I quite enjoy Will Oldham‘s stuff, it makes perfect sense for me to get into this collaboration.

Regardless, Oldham does some amazing things with these words and melodies, dovetailing them into Turner’s heartbreaking acceptance of Oldham’s offering. This song wrecks me. And I’m completely okay with it.

Hope you enjoy this one.

Posted by Phil

Buy it here

On John Coltrane and “Burning Out”

Coltrane on soprano sax, Eric Dolphy on bass clarinet.

John Coltrane -”India” from The Complete 1961 Village Vanguard Recordings (1997)

John Coltrane – “Jupiter” from Interstellar Space (1972)

I’ve wanted to do a post on John Coltrane for a while now, and given our recent discussions of “Burning out vs. fading away,” I figured now was as good a time as any (Coltrane died at age 40 of liver cancer). I’ll start by talking about Coltrane’s music.

The first track is “India,” recorded in 1961 at New York City’s Village Vanguard jazz club. I love the instrumentation here — Coltrane on soprano sax, Eric Dolphy (another premature death, 1964 at age 36) on bass clarinet, McCoy Tyner on piano, Jimmy Garrison and Reggie Workman on bass, Elvin Jones on drums, Ahmed Abdul-Malik on oud, and Gavin Bushnell on oboe. Now, until hearing Dolphy’s bass clarinet solo here, I thought bass clarinet was the domain of unpopular girls in high school bands, but I now know better. The liner notes to The Complete 1961 Village Vanguard Recordings say that the oud is providing the drone heard throughout the piece, but I don’t know much about the oud, and don’t know how it can create a drone (the liner notes also mention that there is indeed some confusion as to exactly what instrument is being played here). Any string players care to enlighten me? Also I have a hard time telling the soprano sax and oboe apart, but I think the first solo is Coltrane, and the third is Bushnell, but I’m not sure. Both sound equally squeaky to me. They both could be Coltrane. The second solo is the bass clarinet.

This music was revolutionary in 1961, a mere two years after Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue (which featured Coltrane) was released. Compared to this, Kind of Blue, which is a great bop album, sounds relentlessly structured. These Vanguard concerts, recorded over four nights in November of 1961, showed Coltrane already moving away from the hard bop style and into the free jazz exhibited on his later albums.

The second track is “Jupiter,” from Interstellar Space. This is a particularly interesting album, as it consists entirely of duets between Coltrane on tenor sax (and sleigh bells, as heard at the beginning and end of this track) and Rashied Ali on drums. This was the result of one of Coltrane’s final studio sessions, recorded in February 1967 (he died in August of that year). The album was released posthumously. I like this album quite a bit. It is as “free” as Coltrane ever got in his soloing, and yet it is never overwhelming like Ascension (Coltrane’s msot famous and most ambitious free jazz album) can sometimes be with its eleven musicians.

The Coltrane myth, as most every early-death-of-a-musician-myth does, centers on the question of what he would have done had he not died when he did. And the answer, plain and simple,  is that we will never know.

Now, on the question of burning out versus fading away, which Jordy’s recent post raised. I have been thinking about it in terms of why we tend to give artists who die prematurely more notoriety than those whose lives are not cut short. Glenn mentioned in a comment to Jordy’s post that premature death is good for the myth of an artist. I think that is true, but I’d like to take the discussion a bit further. The reason artists (not just musicians) oftentimes get more attention if they die prematurely is due to our society’s attitudes about death. We are afraid of death, in part because it is the great unknown. I think that we look to the work of artists who have died prematurely for insight into the big black hole of death. We think that maybe, because they died “before their time” (whatever that means), their art holds they key to understanding the one thing that no living person can truly understand. Of course, when these artists were alive they were just as clueless as we are, but we listen to their music or study their books or paintings in hopes that they will have some kind of  insight into this whole death thing.

I’m speaking entirely about Western traditions here — I know next to nothing about Eastern traditions regarding these matters. Can anyone out there shed some light on how these things are viewed in the non-Western world?

Buy the Trane

Posted by Adam

“I live sweat, but I dream light years”

The Minutemen – “Boiling” from The Punch Line (1981) and “The Glory of Man” from Double Nickels on the Dime (1984)

It’s been said plenty of times before (including here), but the Minutemen were really, really great. One of the smartest punk bands, the ‘Men were almost completely bullshit-free and had an innate sense of what just plain works in rock music. This is music that is totally human and encourages humanity; its genius improv and deep in the pocket grooves make me want to make art instead sitting on my ass whining about X, Y, and Z. The “three prole dudes jammin’ econo” mythology kept up by Watt is alternately cheesy and embarrassing and totally inspirational. The Minutemen, to paraphrase Kafka, are three axes for the frozen sea within us. I’m going to start tearing up if I write any more; instead, I’ll put the Minutemen on at full blast and rock the hell out.

Buy the Minutemen

Posted by Glenn

“Shine in/Shine on”

Boredoms – “Super Going” from Super Ae [1998]

Here is some mind-expanding minimalist drone punk to laze away a summer Sunday with. Boredoms at 2006 Intonation Festival (pictured above) blew me away with volume and rhythmic attack, but they lacked the tunefulness (albeit in the loosest sense of “tune”) this song soars with. Enjoy.

Can’t buy me Boredom

Posted by Glenn

“For the sake of future days”

CAN – “Future Days” from Future Days (1973)

Imagine sitting in on a jam session with Can in the early 1970s. That must have been something to witness. Even their studio recordings attest to their unCANny unity as a group. They sound like one, highly coordinated machine. Yet what separated Can from Deutschen contemporaries like Kraftwerk was their ability to sound eminently human. Borrowing from jazz, they took German precision to groovy depths that put their music in stark contrast to the intentional alienation of more automated, electronic artists.

For CAN beginners, I recommend Tago Mago (which contains “Halleluhwah,” the single greatest jam of all time, I shit you not) or Ege Bamyasi.

Can you dig it?

Posted by Jordy

An Exceptionally Brief Primer on Some Ambient Music

Brian Eno – “1/1” from Ambient #1 Music for Airports [1978]

Stars of the Lid – “Even If You’re Never Awake (Deuxieme)” from And Their Refinement of the Decline [2007]

If you have never heard “1/1,” then what the hell is your problem. This is the eponymous and seminal work of ambient music, a genre now flooded with dreck not nearly as thought-out as Eno’s work. Just reading the liner notes to records like “Music for Airports” and “Discreet Music,” you can see how much thought Eno put into the process of making ambient music. It’s not just keyboard drones, you see. It’s the method, and this is what makes Brian Eno more interesting to me than John Cage. Cage was all about ideas while Eno focused on means. Cage’s ideas were (are still) of the utmost importance to modern conceptions of music and what it should be, but Eno always had the engineer’s mindset. He would wrap loops of tape around the steel legs of office chairs to sync up the tape differently. He would set up a soundsystem to virtually run itself until external stimuli interceded. And I suppose that he and Cage were never that much different. It’s just that Eno’s creations were so much more accessible, so much less cerebral, that some dumb college junior could hear this and be instantly devastated. I’m telling you, most people who hear John Cage just get angry. People hear Brian Eno and they melt.

But all this is not to pet the already velvet ego of Brian Eno. He gets enough praise, some of it undeserved (Paul Simon’s Surprise, anyone?). What I would like to contend is that Eno never gave his idea of ambient music enough weight. From the liner notes to Music for Airports:

Whereas conventional background music [ed: he refers to Muzak] is produced by stripping away all sense of doubt and uncertainty (and thus all genuine interest) from the music, Ambient Music retains these qualities. And whereas their intention is to “brighten” the environment by adding stimulus to it (thus supposedly alleviating the tedium of routine tasks and levelling out the natural ups and downs of the body rhythms) Ambient Music is intended to induce calm and a space to think.

Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.

See? He’s very much onto something, with the importance of ambient music to create space, both external and internal, but he ends with that dilly of a quote. Ignorable? Sure, it’s noble to become smaller, to shy away from attention. But the weight of “1/1″ is undeniable.

And it is this very weight that has been explored, spelunked, and mapped by Stars of the Lid. This is music that demands your attention, even in its minimalism. Because so little is happening at such a slow speed, the payoffs are three times as good. Trust me. A trailing synth wash followed by…wait! Wait! No! Wait! ANOTHER SYNTH WASH. Aah. There it is. And it sounds really boring on paper, but it just isn’t, in large part because their instrumental diction is impeccable, and nowhere is it more apparent than on this song, particularly at 3:36, 5:25, and 6:04. It isn’t just loop-based or long for the sake of being long. It’s a real, written-out song, with movement and parts and feeling. Everything has an important part to play, and they all come together, a dozen undeniable parts, and form something beautiful, compelling, and interesting.

One quick example: Listen to the piano in “1/1,” and you will be sweetly lulled into contemplation as the theme gets repeated throughout the whole song. But listen for the piano in “Even if You’re Never Awake” and it’s instantly clear, the whole song stops for this one tiny bit of what sounds like an upright played in the room next to yours underwater. And that’s why Stars of the Lid trump Eno: they make no grand statements about the nature of music or the place of ambient sound in this our modern world. They have simply created an unignorable soundscape. While their methods may not be as novel as Eno’s, they rightly bypassed the ignorable qualities of Eno’s methodology and went straight for the heart of the interesting. And then they flew away with it, light speed.

Ignore it here

Get interested here

Posted by Phil