= REVIEWS =
= MARCH 2005 =
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Written by: |
(CD on Secret Eye)
Just when I thought that my long-lasting love affair with Finnish underground music was starting to fade a bit I’ve been fortunate enough to treat my ears with a cpl of absolutely amazing Finnish albums that would have made my top 2004 list if I just had heard them in time. One of these items is the latest in an impressive row of consistently stunning releases from psych-folk-space-drone-noise-krautrock ensemble Avarus.
When picking up your first Avarus release you’re as likely to find yourself digging motorik free rock jams as getting your head stuck in a never-ending spin of rhythmic mysticism and hypnotism. In the case of Jättiläisrotta we get a bit of both and the results are nothing short of spectacular, but what sets this one apart from previous efforts is the obvious drone rock tendencies that run though the entire disc. Avarus has never been afraid of rocking out but they’ve never really been this structured (relatively speaking) before.
Unhinged psychotic madness, wildly propulsive psych-folk and tasty Krautrock grooves move into a forested world of dream abstraction, ambience and moonlight trance and on the way there we get to see a blurry close-up of a band that’s all about freedom, intuition and passion. Beauty is placed right next to chaos; order only a stone throw away from disorder. If you ask me that’s exactly why this is one of very few bands that can take their Ash Ra Tempel, Amon Düül, Tangerine Dream, Godz and Pärson Sound influences and somehow make them sound their own. Despite investigating the eerie depths of late-'60s/early ’70s psychedelia there is something modern and demented about all this that feels especially relevant these days. A fucked-up world is inevitably the birthplace for surreal musical journeys and boarding Avarus’ vessel through historic times and into the present certainly offers a different projection of all that madness. (Mats Gustafsson)
THE LOST DOMAIN - SAILOR, HOME FROM THE SEA
(CD on Digitalis/ Broken Face. Brovagen 14 , 610 72 Vagnharad, Sweden)
eMail: thebrokenface@spray.se
Close your eyes and breathe deeply…. The sea is closer than you think, the cry of gulls overhead is merging with the rhythm of the waves, the sea-spray stains your lips with salty memories and the wind creeps and pours through the old wooden huts, sparring with the old nets within, you step forward and the pebbles rattle underfoot……….welcome home.
The lost domain hail from Brisbane and have been creating improvised, drone infested soundscapes for many years releasing them in isolation on their own shytone label. Now, thanks to The Broken Face and Digitalis records their beautiful organic textures are available to a wider audience.
Opening and closing with a cover of John Lee Hookers ‘(on) the waterfront’ this album takes us on a coastal walk through old fishing villages and across cliff tops which offer us an unbroken view of the ocean so vast that we can only stop and watch for a while, the tranquil sounds refreshing and calming us. ‘At sea, the storm’ is a haunting piece of music as though the storm has passed already leaving us glad to have survived and closer to god for the experience, before ‘Leagues’ slowly dismantles the silence with it’s muted trumpet and percussion creating a unsettling ambience. This mood is sustained for the rest of the album gently undulating and pulsing, driven by the rise and fall of the tides, the scuttling of small creatures trapped in rock pools, and the occasional meeting with another person also drawn by the oceans power.
Finally our thoughts return to other thing, the mundane and trivial tasks that define our days, we know we must leave this place and re-connect with the world we live in, but, just for a moment, we realise that there is more to life than we ever think, and we rejoice in the fact that The Lost Remains can help us find a quiet place to go. (simon Lewis)
(CD on Senzatempo – senzatempo.co.uk)
Now here’s a real little treat – an absolute joy to behold and hear. This is the Ray’s second CD release, but it has more of the feel of a compilation about it as regards the tracks – not that, that is any way a bad thing. Of the 8 tracks on offer, 2 hark back to the early 90s when Simon Haspeck was on board the first time. 2 further offerings are live cuts from the UK Terrastock back in 1999 (really that long ago ?) when Simon Burgin was on board. The remaining 4 being more recent studio forays from 2004 courtesy of their spiritual home @ Senzatempo who “let them out to play” at Ant Farm Studios in Waltham Abbey. This time with Simon “H” back in the frame. Let us not forget the tragic passing of Simon Burgin. For me the band really began to get its’ act together when he came in to underpin Richard’s work. That having been said, anyone who has caught them live over the past couple of years will know that they have continued to develop in a mighty fine manner.
So things open up with a neat offering by the name of “Swain’s Green” which displays an almost pseudo country swing with Ken delivering the little tale. Come the 2nd track and we’re off into a vast landscape “Really” where the Whaley Boys provide a wonderful canvas over which Richard recaptures all that warmth of yore. A medium paced slow burn of majestic wonder – the runs just keep pouring down, with enough space to create such a sonic expanse. If you needed proof alone of just what a one-off guitar artiste Richard Treece remains just let this wash over you. Hard on its’ heels comes a racy little run-through entitled “So Much More” then we’re back to the “big music” – “Barking” is another workout from the early 90s with perhaps a shade more menace and jazzy feel to Richard’s work.
The title track has been in their live set for sometime but has matured / distilled into quite a different beast from that of its’ infancy, well paced, neat time changes and a chorus to die for. “Dr. Love” is another of the fruits from last year’s labours and finds the band in a jazzy vibe – but they take to that like the proverbial “canard a l’eau”. The closing tracks are the live Terrastock cuts of “Alice” and the “rock-classic” of “Float”. The former slowly builds into a fine blues based workout. There’s little left to be said when you hear just how fine the band were at that stage in their development. As for the aforementioned “Float” – for anyone yet to hear the grace that this instrumental possesses – just marvel at the way it spirals and slides.
All in all you’d be hard pressed to be too critical for what is a great little record. It’s great to think that as 2005 moves among us that Messrs Whaley, Whaley, Treece and Haspeck can produce something of this calibre. Here’s to the next release whenever that may be. In the meantime if you get the merest hint of catching them live around old London Town do so. They’d be glad of your company and you’ll be all the better for whiling away a couple of hours in their presence. (Richard R. Gould)
POREST- PRUDE JUICE FOR THE HERITAGE SWINGER
(CD on Electro motive Records PO Box 1154, El Cerrito, CA, 94530 – 1154 www.electromotiverecords.com)
Like a strange surrealist play on late-night radio, this album weaves itself around your mind conjuring up half recognised characters and sinister lies. Full of cut-ups, samples, studio trickery, field recordings and live instruments, a surprise is never far away. Sheep (which turn out to be plastic) drift in and out of the mix, a dog retches, aliens learn the language and a peasant tells tales of his wife’s cookery and deception.
First track ‘Fought for ME’ starts like an eastern funeral march before turning itself inside out to finish as an embittered country and western war veterans lament. ‘Skin bitch’ follows, a short and jagged song with cut up lyrics distorted and compressed into the rhythms behind. Try dancing to this!
‘Fist dumplings’ is a simple tale of love, betrayal and dumpling making, with a soft folk backing acting as a foil to the lyrics, which are cut up and repeated, into a twisted finale. ‘Life sentences’ is a brief lesson in paranoia, which has rattled through your brain before you have a chance to react to it, and the brevity continues with ‘Larynx king’ where, weird vocal noises “sing” their way through the soundtrack of a late night eastern European animation. ‘Composition of sheep’ begins with a Dadaist travelogue before decaying into quiz show hell for the insane.
‘Pasture pressure’ is a jaunty instrumental, which acts as a brief moment of sanity before ‘Kumer Meridian’ kicks us back to the world of Porest, this time masquerading as a Russian electro acoustic composer. ‘Millennial smoothie’ is sped-up Casio keyboards blended with a bizarre sample of a Nazi loving lady, whilst ‘Flip for tomorrow’ is as annoying as an early morning alarm call but still makes me smile.
A brief coffee break is provided by the drone of ‘Switchgrass’ which is as brief and mysterious as a Raymond Carver story. The theme continued by ‘Mind the servant’ although this time the atmosphere is far more unsettling.
‘Midstride sensitive poised ‘ seems to capture a moment in time and freezes in your memory until the very end when the last few seconds of sound erase the rest of the track from your memory. The next two tracks ‘Wrong raelty’ and ‘Bug duczka’ take us underground to listen to the creatures below the earth sounding as if someone is tuning a radio with their eyes closed. ‘Soothing Louise’ is anything but, creating the authentic of desperation and loss whilst ‘Mini stroke’ cuts up radio chat shows to create a piece of dark humour, a technique which is repeated by the penultimate track ‘Following laws’. At six minutes, forty-three seconds the last track ‘Happening’ is by far the longest and offers a drifting meditation to aid our withdrawal from the sonic landscape we have been witnessing.
This extraordinary album is the work of Bay area composer Mark Gergis. Mark was a founding member of both Monopause and The Twelve Steppes and has composed for dance, film and theatre.
This is an album that you will either love or hate, whilst it is playing it is impossible to ignore and equally impossible to categorise. More surreal than psychedelic it is, in fact, an excellent day out for your head. (Simon Lewis)
After a lengthy spell of wandering, it was Donovan who convinced Softley to record again in 1970, introducing him to producer Terry Cox who had by that time already worked with Sandy Denny, the Fairports, Yes and (the today sadly overlooked) Allan Taylor. Cox assembled a truly phenomenal cast of musicians to back the singer, including Trees’ guitarist Barry Clark, Fotheringay’s Jerry Donahue, Pat Donaldson and Gerry Conway, plus Lyn Dobson, Richard Thompson and Doris Troy, and together they recorded three albums – including the two reissues to hand now. Times had changed, folk was no longer fashionable and although this was the era of “progressive rock”, it was also the heyday of the singer/songwriter with artists like Cat Stevens, Jackson Browne and James Taylor dominating the US, and in Britain home-grown acts such as Roy Harper, John Martyn and Nick Drake all rising to prominence. Mick Softley’s incredible singing voice plus the fact that he had matured as a songwriter meant that his music was now easily as good as any of his contemporaries, and Tony Cox’s lush arrangements and production was quite simply the icing on the cake.
‘Sunrise’, the debut LP for CBS released in 1970, arrived in a full-colour gatefold sleeve and was filled with songs about earth, nature and the universe, Softley’s concerns by now being more environmental (and bodily!) than social. The stand-out track is arguably ‘Time Machine’, a song about reincarnation which became Mick’s best known song, thanks largely to it being included on the ‘Rock Buster’ double compilation LP from CBS which also featured tracks by Dylan, Soft Machine, Spirit, the Byrds, It’s a Beautiful Day, Johnny & Edgar Winter, Santana, Trees, Robert Wyatt and Poco. That sold a few copies! I well remember it being a regular in almost every second-hand shop “record bin” well into the 1980s. Another cut from the album, the exquisite ‘Waterfall’, also appeared on the CBS ‘Together’ sampler. ‘Ship’s another personal favourite, with a stunning lead guitar line from Barry Clarke and a synthesiser adding a suitably spaceward-bound rumble to the proceedings as the ship in question blasts into orbit; and the long closing track ‘Love Colours’ has an eastern feel thanks to some sitar from reedsman Lyn Dobson.
‘Street Singer’ followed in 1971 and, despite (or maybe because of?) featuring even richer and more expansive production values to ‘Sunrise’, it’s a patchy album in comparison – helped in no small part to my mind by the inclusion of some good-timey jazz and ragtime pieces, enormously clever and probably hilarious in the studio when performed by the musos present but not really bearing repeated listenings. There’s a few nice moments of Softley uplugged though, particularly ‘Gypsy’ which features some tasty harmonica playing from Steve Hayton (of Daddy Longlegs!) and the Donovon-esque ‘Water Sister Water Brother’. The closing ‘New Day, New Way’ gives the album a rousing climax – one of my own favourite pieces on here with some striking backing vocals from Doris Troy.
After one more album, ‘Any Mother Doesn’t Grumble’, Softley once again drifted away from the scene for ten years or so – eventually recording three now extremely hard to find solo acoustic albums for Doll Records of Switzerland, and subsequently retiring to Ireland.
We very nearly managed to interview him for the Terrascope back in 2002 following a brief exchange of emails:
Hello Phil!
My name is Michael F.P. Softley, the very same as the Mick Softley of ‘Songs for Swinging Survivors’, and other disks…some year or two back I was given an e-mail address for Nigel Cross, to which I responded, for as long as it was still valid. But then he changed his work residency and was bereft of machine!
He did however write to me offering to do an interview longhand, but I declined and still have his card here in the room somewhere. And that's as far as it all got. The interview was 'destined' for the pages of Terrascope; but you are probably as aware of all this as am I…
But, sadly it never came to pass. At least Nigel managed to pen some exemplary sleeve-notes for this reissue. Reading about it can never come close to experiencing the music though, so search this re-release out with all undue haste and enjoy! (Phil McMullen)
BOOK OF SHADOWS - INDIGOM/HANGED MAN
(CD on whirling rainbow records st37@ev1.net )
More like a field recording of spirits than conventional music is the dense and drone filled work of Book Of Shadows, whose two albums manage to display a consistent atmosphere throughout, although structurally they are very different Featuring one long track, ‘Indigom’ is a drifting unsettling piece of music which ebbs and flows with a spectral beauty, seemingly blown in by the wind. Throughout the piece time becomes meaningless and reality seems more fragile as though our very existence could disintegrate at any moment. On ‘Hanged Man’ the band adopt a more structured style with the songs being more grounded in approach, although they still convey the ghostly atmosphere that the band do so well, with the echoed vocals adding more pictures to the fractured half-remembered whole. Opening track ‘The Beach’ sets the tone with an ethereal guitar motif slowly being engulfed by the liquid vocals and other effected guitars and keyboards. Track titles such as ‘Sacred Grove’, ‘Woman is the Altar’, and ‘Samhain’ suggest a link to the growing wyrd-folk scene and the content of the lyrics and the musical style could certainly be placed there, but the music has a more psychedelic heart and seems to move through the room like an early morning mist trapped in an alien landscape, reminding me of recent albums by in the Summer of the Mushroom Honey or the Serpents. Overall both albums have much to recommend them although 'Indigom' requires a more concentrated listen to fully appreciate its depth. (Simon Lewis)
(Transubstans Records/Record Heaven www.recordheaven.net)
Opening with the Farfisa and fuzz laden ‘free ride’ the Skyron Orchestra have created a wonderful album full of psych-pop tunes that pay homage to the summer of love without sounding like a pastiche of the real thing. Sure, you can hear echoes of the strawberry alarm-clock, country joe , the doors and others, but the music sounds fresh and alive and the addition of some excellent and sexy vocals by veronica lostjarna give the band an identity of their own. Standout tracks include the brooding and sultry ‘call it love’ a tale of bitterness and abuse with some fine guitar work adding a menace of it’s own , ‘nobody’s diary’ which rides a swell of organ across a beautiful psychedelic sea, with the guitar/ keyboard interplay finding room to dance on the waves, and ‘exploding mind ‘ which is driven by a twisted riff and some rock solid rhythm work .Featuring members of pangolin ( peter scions prog-rock electric band, who released one excellent album ) the whole band play with passion and precision and have created an album full of vitality and quality song-writing which proves that psychedelic music can still have plenty of melody without sounding dated or dull. (Simon Lewis)
Some years ago I came upon a record that upon seeing it immediately captured my imagination. The touch of this record in that dusty bin seemed to burn my hand. It had nothing but a drawing of a distorted face and EXUMA scrawled across it in red like the last word scratched from a dying hand. My mind raced with expectation as I hurried home to put this enigmatic disc on the player, yet nothing could have prepared me for the raw intensity and power contained in those dust filled grooves. With the first sound of the howling wolves I was only further intrigued and sucked in by this mysterious record. And as it coiled in upon itself the music that filled me was like a possession, chills swept my body on top of each other like a city built upon a razed city built upon a razed city built upon yet another razed city. I had found a precious and wonderful thing, a record that made all my other records seem intentless and without meaning and I became very afraid of this record. I was afraid to over play it, to learn it’s cryptic lyrics, to wear out its sacred grooves. I was afraid to play it at times in which I might be interrupted from my listening. I was afraid most of all of listening to it too much and becoming too familiar with it and in some way diminishing the effect it had on me, I was afraid that I might some day hear it and not shutter and cower at its intensity, afraid that I might not dance my head and body along with it’s primitive rhythms. I began to covet this record of mine, only playing this beautiful record for the closest of friends and only at the loudest volumes possible. “Don’t stay unless you can listen with respect, if you want to talk we can put on another record, if you don’t want to take a chance on transcendence then just tell me now and we’ll listen to something else, but if you want to hear this record, you have to be wholly here (hear) and nowhere else, until this record takes you somewhere else and then tell me what you see when you reach that other place.” Now that I am actually committing this words and ideas in type, it sounds hokey; but man, when I had this record in my hands these sorts of things came out of my mouth.
I remember playing it for a good friend of mine before we went on tour and telling him that if we could achieve this sort of intensity in the music we played together, that for me we would have done something wonderful and powerful and worthwhile. I remember how the tears streamed down his face in the darkness as we listened to this record at deafening decibels.
A while later this same friend reported back to me from a very reputable source, the story of EXUMA which is not detailed in the liner notes and may not even be true but it is hard to deny it’s possibility when you listen to the desperate intensity of EXUMA’s voice.
The story went as such: that the man or the musical entity know as EXUMA was a folk musician in New York in the 60’s doing the occasional studio musician gig etc. and came home one day from playing to find his entire family slaughtered in their NY apartment. On that day he left New York and then blossoming folk scene to return to his home in the Caribbean. And that out of that unfortunate blood and necessary relocation was birthed EXUMA.
It is hard for me divorce this story from my mind because in my mind this sort of experience is one of the few things that could produce music of such intensity, music so devoid of pretext yet so richly rooted in the folklore of the past, so deeply intertwined with the sacred and the profane. So holy and yet so licked by the fires of hell. EXUMA is a music that is without parallel. You could only begin to place it in a parallel universe to the field recordings of Lomax and Livingston, and the studio voodoo of Dr. John’s 'Gris Gris Man'. It has integrity of a music that is unaware that it is being recorded like a field recording of a voodoo ritual or burial sacrifice, and the same sort of eeriness to boot. And at the same time it has all the rhythm and production of a great R&B record like Ike and Tina records, the sort from which Dr. John was born from. In this EXUMA record was born a mirror to Dr. John’s 'Gris Gris Man', a mirror that reflected back his grizzly beard and dread-bead mane and in the condensation that gathered on this looking glass from the Gris Gris Man’s conjuring you could find the finger-sketched directions to a music as real and a earth-drenched and you could ever find.
I remember that night when I played it for my friend and the tears streamed down his face, he told me that his dream was make a record and bury ever copy of this record in different places all over the world, and when you bought the record you would not obtain the actual physical record but a map to where the record was buried. What that record would contain I can only imagine, but in my mind the music contained on such a record, could only be of the quality contained on the EXUMA records a quality and intensity of music that can repel and embrace the elements and be fished from the fecund soil telling not only of it’s inception in the recording studio but also it interment in the dark ground. This is the sort of feeling related in music of Exuma, a music born from out of the ground and out of the body at the same time.
It is with great pleasure that I review these beautiful records, that for so long have been buried in the neglected soil of obscurity. The time of interment that they have suffered has not harmed them in the least, they sing as true and real as they did when I heard them years ago and as they did, I’m sure, in 1970 when they were recorded and released. I feel that these records were not ignored as much as they were hidden, because they are overwhelming and destroying. It is hard to listen to them and not consider your own life with out conviction, to listen to your own frail voice and not ask where is my true voice, where is my voice that calls the dead from their graves and the stars down from their watery skies, where is my true voice that causes the skin of others to blister and bubble when they hear it, where is my true EXUMA voice. The voice and the song with which EXUMA sang was not so much a song as it was a blood sacrifice. It is here at this point that I most highly recommend these records, because it is impossible to not sing along to these records as if the incantations are meant to loose your own tongue and it is here as you begin to sing along that you realize/release your EXUMA voice to dance around, to cry, to sing, to howl at the moon, and of course to run back to the stereo to play it again. (Jesse Poe - Tanakh)