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Send submissions (music, visuals, text, whatever) to anuncontrollableurge [at] gmail [dot] com. Some day, I will look at it. Address things to "David" because that's what my name is.
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Neeeerrrrrds!!!
Almost Funny
The Blasto Podcast
Clean Undies
Expressway to Yr Skull
End of Radio
Friendship Bracelet
Get Off the Coast
The Mummies!
Music is a Sin
The Mythical Good Part
Peace & Rhythm
Sex Sux (Amen)
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[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]SNEAKPEEK, “Walk All Over Me”
I enjoy this kind of shoegaze – the kind blended with a little bit of face-melting guitar work – but I wonder if they could pick up the pace just a tad? Maybe it’s the amount of caffeine I’ve consumed in order to stay up all night in order to write this* or something, but there’s something about each of the four songs over at SNEAKPEEK’s Bandcamp that makes me think they would rock ten thousand times harder if they snuck just one extra beat in every minute. But, hey, they rock pretty well already. It’s not my band. Jeez, get off my back already.
The above track, “Walk All Over Me” is a bit of a monster. Simple riff, vocal harmonies reminiscent of the Breeders, and, as mentioned earlier, some screamin’ hot steel (that, honestly, came out of nowhere; did Ron Asheton get lost?). Hope to hear more like it on the upcoming EP.
*Uh … and do other things. I didn’t stay up all night just for eight sentences.
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Sarah Lipstate + Lee Ranaldo, Kyle Bobby Dunn, Seaven Teares @ Roulette
Last Friday, Roulette (moving to Brooklyn in the Spring, by the way) hosted a performance by Sarah Lipstate and Lee Ranaldo, as well as Kyle Bobby Dunn and Seaven Teares. I was familiar only with Lipstate, from her solo work Noveller, and her time spent with Parts and Labor and Cold Cave, and of course Ranaldo’s work with Sonic Youth. So, my impressions on the rest of these performers are initial ones.
Seaven Teares were first of the night, four-person group consisting of Charred Lucre on guitar and vocals; Amirtha Kidambi on vocals; Robbie Lee on portative organ, woodwinds, and guitar; and Russel Greenberg on percussion. Experimental chamber folk is what I would describe their set as, often ghostly and melancholy, but they did display some high energy pieces as well, which contrasted well with the softer tone of most of their songs.
Kyle Bobby Dunn played in the second slot, using a laptop, a mixer, and a guitar and amplifier. It seemed that most of what he did was manipulate the sound of the guitar feeding back through the amplifier. At one point, he detuned it momentarily, which created a really interesting sound, but after about 20 minutes or so, I’d had my fill. This is of course just a personal opinion, but ambient music can only hold my attention for so long without something else happening. I’d have been much more appreciative, I think, if I’d had something else to do while listening. It wasn’t really the right environment for me to appreciate it.
Lipstate and Ranaldo were the closers, and they held their position well. Lipstate seemed to provide the backbone of the piece; her treatment of the guitar looked more or less traditional (though the results were anything but) and she used several effects to loop and layer the sounds. Ranaldo, on the other hand, seemed to be following the advice of the great Bruce Dickinson, exploring the space with his guitar, and utilizing a great array of extended techniques, bowing the back of the guitar’s neck, knocking on the body, and moving it around to utilize different spacial relations to the amplifier. They also projected images on the wall behind them; it seemed to be looping close-ups of some kind of fibers, and the faster the images changed, the more it started to look like a double-helix. By the end of the set, they were splattered with color. They both created a range of interesting sound, and their set fell on the more interesting side of ambient drone.
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Hey, this place is open tomorrow, and a buncha people are gonna do what looks to be a buncha cool stuff. I’m not sure I’ll be ambitious enough to actually leave the house, but that doesn’t even matter, because they’ve got cameras set up to stream the whole thing here (where you can also find a couple of other cool videos of things to be shown tomorrow. Word is some pretty cool people previously featured here will be doing some pretty cool things.
Maybe I’ll live-tweet it. That’d be cool, right? And also really annoying to anyone who doesn’t care about it, I guess, but fuck those guys.
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[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]Parker / Guy / Lytton + Peter Evans, “Scene 1 (Excerpt)”
Scenes in the House of Music (Clean Feed)
Evan Parker on tenor and soprano saxophones, Peter Evans on trumpet, Barry Guy on the upright bass, and Paul Lytton on percussion. Picked this record up after seeing Evans for the second time back in early December at the Stone (impressions from the first time, over a year ago at Amherst College, can be found here), mainly because I’ve seen Evan Parker a few times, and always leave the performance elated, so I was interested to hear how Evans and Parker would interact. I was not disappointed.
Everyone on this record holds it down and beats it senseless. Their expression is broken up into five “scenes,” each twelve to fourteen minutes in length, and each powerful in its own manner. This is definitely one of those “close your eyes and let it work on you” live performances, atmospheric and dense. I spent many an afternoon at work doing nothing but listening to this, and I plan to do so once again in the near future.
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Touchable Sound: A Collection of 7-inch Records from the USA
Part of what’s cool about records is the fact that they’re actual artifacts; not only are they a means to transmit sound, but they’re a physical art object on their own. Touchable Sound is a book celebrating and chronicling notable efforts of the past 25-ish years in record design and packaging.
It’s about 400 pages of interviews of and essays written by designers, and tons and tons of pictures of records and record covers. The book is, in itself, an interesting work of design, which you can see in the flip-through video at the top of this page, the smaller width of the essays serving in some ways to place priority on the images (and also to divide the book into sections).
The Locust’s Flight of the Wounded Locust, a four 7-inch release in which the records fit together as puzzle-pieces, shown in the book.
Some of the stories get kind of samey; lots of stories about how the designer had to figure out most of this stuff along the way, and get friends, family, and housemates to help put together packages before they could go out, but then they always manage to save it by describing some bizarre process by which a certain record was made, or simply showing the beautiful results of this work.
Man or Astro-Man?’s UFO’s and the Men Who Fly Them!, an EP that contained a cut-out of a flying saucer, also featured in the book.
There are dozens of creative design ideas in the book (one of my favorites was theHoudini release by Jessamine, which was sealed with a tiny padlock, and required the owner to pick said lock in order to open it and find the key inside), far too many for me to list here — and that would spoil things for you anyway. The whole point of the book is that the packaging can be interesting art in itself, worthy of consideration on its own merits, but I still can’t look at this book without wanting to hear the records.
Grab a copy here, or wherever.
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Alright, I guess I’ve found the only Christmas song I’ll ever listen to. Maybe also “The Night Santa Went Crazy.”
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Joey Baron, Robyn Schulkowsky, & Tyshawn Sorey Trio at the Stone
As hot and sweaty as it got at the Stone Friday night, it would have to be a great performance in order to make it bearable. But not only was it bearable, the 70-minute collaboration between three of the most dynamic percussionists out there flew by. It barely felt like any time had passed when Robyn Schulkowsky softly mentioned to Joey Baron, fellow curator of this month’s calendar at the Stone, that “it’s 11 o’clock,” an hour after the set began, implying that they should probably wrap it up. Baron replied with a “yeah,” followed by an explosion of hits. It was this pairing of gentleness and power that truly made this an engrossing night.
The trio drew upon a wide range of influences and a broad palette of technique to create their tone. From their first number, a soft, swelling, and atmospheric nod to Morton Feldman - I know there’s no sound in a vacuum, but I like to imagine that this would be what one would sound like anyway - to the more “jazzy” moments of trading solos, it would seem this performance should have been hard to grasp for someone uninitiated in the realm of the avant-garde, but the performers really had a hold on the audience, and the textures were so warm throughout most of the set that it would be hard for even the most close-minded individual not to be pulled in.
The moments of sparse notes and solo activity made it possible to easily discern the particularities of each performer. Baron has a tunefulness to his playing that few drummers can emulate. Schulkowsky seemed to easily make notes out of what would usually be just interesting noise. And Sorey, a favorite of mine, has such primal energy, particularly evident during his first solo, which began with a literal war cry - “SAAAHHH!” - and continued with Cage-esque moments harsh power erupting out of silence. When playing all at once, it was a dense, polyrhythmic experience, and at softer moments, so many new sounds were produced. Am I the only one who finds the sound of a stick scraping across the shoulder of a cymbal to be absolutely thrilling? And those floor-tom farts…
A most ordered chaos, full of oscillations and dynamics, well worth the price of admission, and the sweatiness brought on by the decision to abandon air-conditioning in favor of acoustics.
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Sonic Youth/Grass Widow/Talk Normal at Prospect Park
Urgent: Sonic Youth still awesome!
Thousands of people were packed into Park Slope’s Prospect Park just a few hours ago to see Sonic Youth perform a noiseful free concert as part of Celebrate Brooklyn. Some might even say the crowd was “totally gaying out” over the group. Idiocy aside, I would agree with that statement. People were real into what was happening at this performance, and I was one of those people.
First, Brooklyn’s Talk Normal opened up the evening with thirty minutes of droning, reverbed guitar and bass distortion; Lydia Lunch-y yelping vocals; and fierce, tribal drums. I’ve seen them perform a few times before this, and they’re definitely still improving, which is fantastic, because they were good to begin with. Their record Sugarland was one of my favorites of last year, so check that out if you’ve not done so already. And since I’m without any visuals from the show itself (I was way too far away to get anything but worthless crowd shots), here’s a video of “In a Strangeland,” which they played tonight, fast.
I was unfamiliar with San Francisco’s Grass Widow, who played a forty-minute set of a music that sounded like they should be on Slumberland Records. It was very heavily influenced by Black Tambourine, but, hey, I’m cool with that. Black Tambourine rocked. What was really interesting to me, however, was the several different styles the trio worked in to their music. At times, it would sound angular and math-y, at other times, heavy noise. And still other times, the drummer would be playing a surf rock beat, or dabbling in improvisational beats. They’ve got a record coming out in late August, I believe, so I’ll be lookin’ out for that one.
Now, Sonic Youth. Their set tonight was heavy on material from Daydream Nation, with very little from their last few records. I saw them last summer while they were touring to support their most recent album, The Eternal, and, while I loved that record, I was happy to see them performing a vastly different set than that one. They were performing without Mark Ibold (who’s off touring with some other band) so it was a four piece, but they were even noisier this time than the last, and there were plenty of moments throughout the show where I would say to myself “man Sonic Youth kills it so hard” or “Steve Shelley is really nailing it tonight” or, and this one especially, “Kim Gordon’s voice is one of the greatest sounds ever.” Everyone was bringin’ it, for the entirety of the ninety minutes they were on stage. This set also came with a healthier portion of avant-noise material than last summer’s, including Lee Ranaldo bowing his guitar, Thurston Moore working some sort of audio recordings, and Shelley just throwing shit at his drums during their last number, “Expressway to Yr Skull.” Just another reminder that Sonic Youth owns all sound.
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T.P. Orchestre Poly-Rythmo de Cotonou Dahomey at Lynch Theater
The Lynch Theater might not be the best venue for the all powerful Orchestre Poly-Rythmo, but even with the fixed-seating, nobody really had a choice but to get with the groove at last night’s performance. The band, active for more than forty years, combines elements of Latin and African music with American psychedelic rock, funk, and soul sounds with an ease you just don’t see that often. Last night, they hit each of those areas, and they hit them hard. That’s part of what’s so great about the group; they can not only hang with the best in all those styles, but they can teach a thing or two about how to really own that stuff.
Led by Clement Melome, the last surviving founding member and awesome fat man, the group went through around fifteen songs last night in their 90-minute set, and every one of them crushed. With members old enough to be my friends’ dads, it was great to see the group play so tightly and so masterfully. Particularly impressive were the drummer and the horn section, and, of course, singer Vincent Ahehehinnou’s kickin’ James Brown style. Other highlights included percussionist Celestin Honfo’s hat, which, form where I was sitting, made him look like Mr. Slave, and the fact that guitarist Fifi LePrince’s name is Fifi.
This was their North American debut performance, and I was really expecting every single white guy in the audience to have a ponytail, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that only several of them did. They’re hitting Chicago this Thursday and Quebec on Saturday, before they head over to Europe for shows in France, Spain, Ireland, and England. And after that, they’ve got a new record coming out featuring members of Franz Ferdinand(?). I’m not sure if that’s coming out in the states, but let’s hope some awesome label like Soundway or Analog Africa picks it up and distributes that to wherever I happen to be at that time.
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[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]Dth with Chris Rehm - Honesty is God
Songs to Sleep Next to
While listening to the new record from Dth, Songs to Sleep Next to, I had one of those pleasant space-outs where you’re not really paying attention to what’s happening around you, but everything around you seems to come together somehow. I thought someone was driving back and forth by my house, blasting the Whisper Song with the bass turned all the way up, but then I realized it worked too well to actually be environmental sound. This low frequency sound, heard first on the song “You Are in the Grass” and multiple times later on as the record progresses, is just an important piece of the collage of Songs to Sleep Next to. This is one of those records that you should be checking out on a real nice pair of headphones.
The thang’s streaming online at Bandcamp, so head over there after you check out the track above, “Honesty is God,” featuring Chris Rehm, an artist who, like Dth, was also previously featured on An Uncontrollable Urge.
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