Nine years on from Greendale, I’m excited at the prospect of a new Neil Young & Crazy Horse album scheduled for release on June 5th 2012 even though the track listing looks very weird.
It’s entitled Americana and consists solely of cover versions, mainly of old folk tunes that are so familiar that are usually regarded with contempt.
Songs like Oh Susanna,Tom Dula, Clementine and She’ll Be Comin’ Round The Mountain’ which as been renamed Jesus’ Chariot. Continue reading
Who can resist artists who call themselves Part Wild Horses Mane On Both Sides? The performers in question are a flute and drum improv duo from Lyon, namely Kelly Jones and Pascal Nichols.
Nichols is in the same mould as inspired Free Folk drummers Chris Corsano and Alex Neilsen and together with Jones the sound they make has been dubbed as ‘flute skronk’ and ‘avant-primitivism’ but is actually less abrasive than these labels imply.
There are elements of Japanese minimalism, Krautrock and tribal freakiness in the same league as No Neck Blues Band or Sunburned Hand Of The Man. Pretty great, in other words.
PWHMOBS have been championed by David Keenan of Volcanic Tongue and The Wire magazine which is is fine if you can stand his stoked out style from the Julian Cope school of rock journalism. In pondering whether Punk Jazz might be the best label for the French pair, Keenan writes : “she [Kelly Jones] works revenant echoes of ethnic motifs into the mix without ever falling into the shamen-in-tie-dyed-pyjamas schtick of so many would-be jazz ’mystics”.
As their chosen moniker suggests, Part Wild Horses Mane On Both Sides ( aTai-Chi move) are not setting out for mass accessibility and they have a thing about wood it seems. A 2009 CD-R was charmingly entitled ‘Anus Carved Into Wood’ and their latest (All Cows Are Sacred) comes in a hand-numbered edition of 123 complete with the disc (in a felt pocket) affixed to a 6″ x 6″ plank.
You can hear the duo with some online digging. Physical copies are, needless to say, harder to come by, but digital versions are floating in Cyberspace. Poisson I found here .
With their latest release, A on Thurston Moore’s Ecstatic Peace label, Sunburned Hand Of The Man from the outer limits of Massachusetts seem intent on remaining as a moving target and show no sign of slowing up on their prolific output.
Their mammoth back catalogue exists on small imprints, CDRs and cassette and on most there is no obvious attempt to smooth down the rough edges. Quite the reverse, in fact, the ragged randomness of their sound is a large part of their appeal.
The band are fully cognisant of the fact that what is praised as spontaneous artistry by some is dismissed as amateurish noodling by others and they don’t care too much which camp you fall into.
You either get what they are about or you don’t..
Kieren Hebden gets it. Continue reading
I like the letter to this month’s Wire magazine by Vivien Priestley of Walsington, UK who wrote in response to David Keenan’s provocative (and, I have to say, confusing) article on what he calls Hypnagogic pop. This is the name he gives to the strand of (mostly) American music which blends together elements of the nation’s old weird past and more recent pop culture. (It has already been nominated by some as the ‘worst genre created by a journalist’)
The letter points out that musicians like The Skaters, Pocahaunted & Ariel Pink are “wrestling with various versions of the past and trying to get beyond a merely nostalgic revivalism”. The writer asks “……has there ever been a moment in music before now where sound has been so completely soaked in traces of the past without actually sounding like anything other than the present, or the future?”
This question ties in well with a book I’ve been reading by Gene Bluestein on folk and pop in American culture called ‘Poplore’ (University of Massachusetts Press, 1994).
It’s a study which looks at what we mean by these catchall terms ‘Folk’ and ‘Pop’ and, in part, also seeks to lay to rest the myth that the US has no authentic Folk tradition.
Continue readingFinding the sounds on a cassette more interesting after it has been sucked into a vacuum cleaner gives an indication that there is something peculiar about the musical ear of Bram Devens. He apparently likes to work directly to tape, preferring the analogue qualities to the more pristine, yet colder digitalised sound. Seemingly, the more mangled and addled the sound the more likely it is to find its way onto one of his releases.
Devens operates mainly under the alter ego of Ignatz, a name taken from the antagonist of Krazy Kat in George Herriman’s pre-war cartoon strip. Ignatz mouse’s main means of attack was to hurl bricks at the unfortunate cat. Deven’s music is less overtly aggressive but just as hard to ignore.
I stumbled across him not through his Ignatz releases but via a limited edition cassette called ‘Atlantic Woman’ (confusingly credited to Miles Deven). I downloaded this from the ever dependable ‘Microphones In The Trees’ blogspot on the strength of a glowing review form the equally reliable David Keenan of Volcanic Tongue. What I discovered was a bizarre mix of muddy blues, mangled drones and strange acoustics that made me immediately want to hear more.
So arresting is his lo-fi reworking of folk music that I can’t for the life of me understand how it’s taken me so long to catch up with him. His first full length album, called simply Ignatz, came out in 2005 followed in successive years by the imaginatively titled Ignatz II and Ignatz III. In between there are equally impressive and more interestingly named eps: Addiction For Slumber and I Will Soothe My Eye to Feast it with a Sight of Beauty.
In Devens’ musical kingdom there are long rambling instrumental passages broken intermittently by incoherent vocal groans and whispers. There’s a modernity about the fuzzy mass of drones, loops and effects he creates but at the same time it frequently sounds like a badly tuned radio station beaming in from the beginning of the last century.
Although Devens hails from Brussels, I strongly suspect that he has fully immersed himself in the America’s mythical musical heritage – absorbing every holler and moan of those outsider voices and lonesome bluesmen who crop up on Harry Smith’s Anthologies or as part John Fahey’s American Primitive collections.
Ignatz made me think of two other quirky individuals operating outside the United States – Stefan Neville (Pumice) and Alistair Galbraith. Both those artists are from New Zealand and somehow the backwater folk-blues they produce is more understandable considering the terrain of that country. The fact that you can sound just as new and weird in Belgium only goes to show that you don’t need to be holed up in a shotgun shack on the banks the Mississippi to sound authentic – you just need to conjure up the right imaginary landscape.
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