Disco Inferno - In Debt

For my good friend Andres. Compilation of early DI works.

In Debt

Talk Talk - Spirit of Eden

An album that changed the face of music forever.

"Spirit Of Eden occupies a space outside musical genres, an area between pop and jazz that is painted vividly with the colours and textures of blues, ambient, classical, rock... The first half of the record consists of a suite of three tracks which flow organically between each other, The Rainbow starting inauspiciously with subdued strings and the rumour of trumpets, the awakening of the record heralded by squalls of over-amped harmonica and electric guitar, Friese-Green in thrall to Lamonte Young, Cage and Stockhausen while Hollis invokes his fascination with Robert Johnson and John Lee Hooker. But where Johnson’s soul was sold, Hollis finds his saved amid the fall and rise, the surging tide. The passages of neo-classical ambience belie the loose and buried structure; there are refrains here, musical and almost lyrical, muffled talk of the lawyer’s song, the jailer’s song, the unending trial, before whispered silence drifts us into Eden. Time and again the battle between temptation and redemption ushers us between chaos and bliss, the storm gathering, those gentle passages between the fray opening up the clouds to reveal regions of crystal blue away from the shredding guitar that wails with the dependency and need that hold us back from salvation.


The final section of the opening triptych washes in on cowed church organ, ruminative, reverent, before the implosion that is foreseen but irresistible, Hollis a rage against resignation, a cry of “that ain’t me babe” again and again before a confession of escaped weakness, a refusal to go under; “I’m just content to relax / than drown within myself”, anything but content, turning the ire to aid salvation. All the while the guitar is ferocity, harsh plains of bass and the biting wind of harmonica overset with clattering, broiling drums, percussive white-horses eroding the self to the point of catharsis and sublimation, unstoppable even when the rest has fallen by the wayside, Web and Harris together a source of elemental rhythm, powerful, refined, sometimes elusive and always measured to perfection." - Nick Southall

Inheritance

Homelife - Flying Wonders

Wonderful kozmigroov exotica by Paddy Steer (Biting Tongues)'s collective, with plenty of help from Biting Tongues-808 State mastermind Graham Massey. Martin Denny jams with the Mwandishi band inside Morricone's ring modulator.

Mancunealo

Grails - Burning off Impurities

Another excellent Grails offering, released in 2007.

Soft Temple

Storm & Stress - Storm & Stress

Amazingly constructed dementia courtesy of "Sturm und Drang", which consisted of Ian Williams (Don Caballero, Battles), Kevin Shea (Talibam!, Coptic Light, Mostly Other People Do the Killing) and Erich Ehm (Golan Globus). They made two albums, this is their first, second one coming soon.

"Everything here seems fleeting, improvisational, and therefore, in some way, directly from the inside of these amazing musicians (two-thirds of whom now make up the undeniably amazing Don Caballero). Guitar lines vomit and squirt from the prodigious hands of one of the greatest guitarists of our time, Ian Williams. The percussion erupts in spurts of mad ranting that is spaced and cut-throat. Incorporating foreign elements such as the breaking of bottles and the lighting of a cigarette, it often seems to be emerging from a totally different room than that which the rest of the band occupies. Sporadically, the band locks into glorious meshes of coordinated sound with deadly precise rhythm and beautifully intertwined melodies; this, however, never lasts for too long. The muttered, half-spoken, half-sung vocals of Ian Williams creep into the fabric of the music, reciting far-gone abstraction that in some way captures the essence of the band around him. Storm and Stress is doing something until now untouched, taking the logistics of everything we know about music and crushing them into spattered stains upon the walls and floor." - Blake Butler

Trenodies

Grails - Doomsdayer's Holiday

Continuing with instrumental music meant to be heard while driving down a dark road at night, I bring you the new Grails album.

"These dudes hail from grey Portland, but they have somehow perfected the art of desert-rock mystery, and if you are currently planning your spiritual pilgrimage to New Mexico, be sure to pack this album along with some of your finest entheogens (the iboga plant, perhaps, or yage) and a copy of Terence McKenna's The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens, and the I Ching. Trust me: you will enter the Rainbow Body before track three."

"Grails have embraced open-ended, free grooving, psychedelic rock, open-toned Eastern modalism, assault-worthy hard rock, spooky dub, and even folk music in this heady, stoned out brew."

Get it

Bark Psychosis - Hex

"Of all the bands branded with the nebulous "post-rock" tag, England's Bark Psychosis achieved the rarest balance between group musicality and post-production programming. Recorded with a large ensemble of musicians but pieced together with a computer and a sampler, HEX is a seamless tapestry--a miraculous album that never forfeits its supernatural aura to the sterility of digital design. Graham Sutton and Daniel Gish elaborate on such timeless models as A.R. Kane's 69, The Blue Nile's A WALK ACROSS THE ROOFTOPS, and Talk Talk's LAUGHING STOCK, filling HEX's wide-screen canvas with emotional song-craft and technological refinement.

HEX favors the elegant and understated, presenting an extraordinarily filmic backdrop against which piano, guitar, and vocal phrases, wisps of instrumentation, and Mark Simnett's percussive cascades fall like December snow. The secret tensions that underscore Bark Psychosis' shimmering quiescence first manifest themselves in John Ling's sinuous, dub-modulated basslines, occasionally erupting in such rapturous displays of bittersweet beauty as "A Street Scene" and "Eyes & Smiles." Other breathtaking flourishes include ribbon-fine feedback, quenching showers of vibes, and Del Crabtree's electrifying, Miles-style trumpet. Alas, even Bark Psychosis couldn't top HEX. The group disbanded, with Sutton finding fame in the drum-and-bass arena as Boymerang."

The group for whom the term "post-rock" was coined (in a review by Simon Reynolds in 1994), the term is still entirely appropriate for describing this masterpiece.

Pendulum Shemale

Bablicon - In a Different City

"When The Melody Maker (RIP, and good riddance) describes your debut album as "certainly the the worst record ever made", you know you must be doing something right. This is precisely what the now defunct music paper said of Bablicon's 'In a Different City' album, and believe me, they are doing very much right. It's not difficult to imagine why the present breed of inkie journos might find this difficult music – it certainly isn’t for the narrow-minded! Their free, jazzy approach owes more to Robert Wyatt or Sun Ra than anything from the Rock world. But the Bablicon sound encompasses much more: there are elements of prog, echoes of Stravinsky, of krautrock and Beefheart. This might all sound like a recipe for chaos, but Bablicon manage to seamlessly blend all these elements together, often mixing several styles within the same song, and the end result, as Douglas Wolk wrote in CMJ, "comes out composed like a flower arrangement".

Bablicon are a Chicago-based trio of multi-instrumentalists with adopted Magic Band-style pseudonyms. Blue Hawaii (real name Griffin Rodriguez) plays electric bass, melodica, electronics, upright bass, voice, piano, electric piano, oisac keyboards and tape effects. Rodriguez has performed with a diverse selection of musicians, including Stereolab, The Olivia Tremor Control, Jeff Parker and Mars Williams. He is also a member of Icy Demons, another experimental Chicago/Philly outfit, and has produced both the Need New Body albums. The Diminisher (born David McDonnell) plays electric piano, clarinet, alto, soprano and C melody saxophones, oboe, small baby horns, theremin twins, friendly bird tinkles, electric ghetto duck, electronics, tape manipulation, piano, woodwinds, alien organ transmitter and voice. He graduated from DePaul University with a B.A. in composition and frequently has his works performed in Chicago. He too has collaborated with musicians from many backgrounds, also including Need New Body, The Olivia Tremor Control, Japanese pop star Kahimi Karie and jazz legend Ken Nordine, and also now plays with the Icy Demons. Marta Tennae (aka Jeremy Barnes) plays drums, accordion, electronics, piano, little drum, organ, voice and electric consultant. Barnes is a self-taught musician, who has played in more bands than would normally be considered healthy, including Neutral Milk Hotel, the Gerbils and Guignol, as well as live stints with - amongst others - Pop-Off Tuesday and Broadcast. Jeremy is also now performing and recording as a one-man-band, under the name of 'A Hawk and a Hacksaw'."

Bablicon really ripped shit up. A unholy mixture of concrète electronics, Faustian cut-up, Zapp'ed instrumental prowess, full-on Fire Music freedom and Beefhartian convoluted structures. The group is dormant now, with members pursuing other interests (specially Barnes who has gained quite a bit of notoriety with A Hawk and a Hacksaw) but let's hope they reconvene again to make awesome shit like this. The other album will follow soon.

2 birds

Stereolab - Cobra & Phases Group Play Voltage In The Milky Night

One of my favorite albums of all time. I can`t even begin to describe all the musical styles and influences this album contains. The vintage sound quality of this albums instrumentation and recording is unmatchable. No other Stereolab recording sounds like this one. The harmonies are so beautiful it makes flowers grow all around you.

come play in the milky night.

:)

Disco Inferno- DI Go Pop

"The cheeky title of D.I. Go Pop could not be more misleading. Just like the band's highly tongue-in-cheek name, this music is anything but pop, as Ian Crause, Paul Wilmott, and Rob Whatley created an album so audacious, its unique beauty still resounds strongly today. Utilizing MIDI samplers which were triggered by guitar, bass, and drums, the band was able to go beyond the limitations of a mere guitar rock group (Crause once said he had six samplers hooked up to his guitar, one per string). One would expect that the end result would wind up being nothing more than a chaotic, noisy, haphazard, cut-and-paste attempt at musical assemblage, and yeah, there is a fair bit of cacophony on this album, but like My Bloody Valentine's timeless classic Loveless, underneath the din is an album of such startling beauty, and even more surprising structure, that once you notice it, it seems like a huge revelation.

Just listen to that sample of dripping water in the opening seconds of "In Sharky Water"; at first, it sounds like the kind of white noise you'd find easy to ignore, but it doesn't take long before you notice that there's a mellifluousness and a rhythm to it; on this album, the band clearly has a John Cage-like knack for hearing music coming from what would be normally perceived as non-musical sources. You hear examples like that throughout the album, ranging from crashes, glass breaking, and whistling, to samples of camera shutters clicking and a frenetically-repeated sample of children singing on "Starbound: All Burnt Out and Nowhere to Go". Aside from "In Sharky Water", actual drums take a backseat on this album, as rhythms are provided by various samples, and most notably, the bass playing of Paul Wilmott. "New Clothes For the New World" alternates from crashing sounds and chiming samples, anchored by a smooth bassline that sounds swiped from the Happy Mondays catalogue, while the more sinister, intense "A Crash at Every Speed" is driven by a low, rumbling bass vamp. "Next Year" features a melodic, upper-register bassline that's very similar to Peter Hook's work with New Order.

Vocalist/guitarist Crause, an admitted misanthrope, often served up a very bleak, Morrissey-esque worldview in his lyrics on the band's early singles, and though you do hear bits and pieces of a similar sentiment on this album ("Chameleon skin/Is what you need to be in/When nothing's as it appears/Why should you be?"), his vocals are buried so deeply in the mix, it's impossible to tell just exactly what he's singing most of the time. The plaintive, melancholy "Even the Sea Sides Against Us", one of the more instantly accessible songs on the album, revisits the Joy Division/Echo & the Bunnymen sound of their earlier material, as Crause's lyrics sound as charmingly morose as ever ("We're waiting for a future to come and sweep us away").

The album comes to a gorgeous climax on the final two tracks. "A Whole Wide World Ahead" sounds like a Nick Drake song recorded outside in a raging thunderstorm, nothing but acoustic guitar, Crause's spoken lyrics (which are almost understandable... almost), and a swirling, siren-like harmony in the background, all underscored by various whooshes, rumblings, and crashes. "Footprints in Snow", on the other hand, sounds gloriously innocent and optimistic, as you hear little crunchy-sounding samples that actually do evoke images of someone running in the snow, with a gentle bassline provided by Wilmott, more chiming samples that sound like glockenspiel, and Crause's oddly affecting vocals. Then, just like that, after 33 fleeting minutes, it's all over, save for the bizarre insertion of a recording of the band being told to be quiet by their landlady.

D.I. Go Pop sounds even more interesting when heard in context with the band's five great EPs, released between 1992 and 1994. You hear Disco Inferno evolve from the straightforward post punk of "Summer's Last Sound", to the all-out post rock of D.I. Go Pop, as the band gets more and more daring. It's also fascinating to hear the band's two EPs that followed D.I. Go Pop, Second Language and It's a Kid's World. Hearing the absolutely gorgeous guitar work on "Second Language" (arguably the band's best song) echoing The Durutti Column's Vini Reilly, and "It's a Kid's World"'s brilliant combination of the drum track from Iggy Pop's "Lust For Life" and samples of various children's TV show themes, you hear the band focus more on melody, while utilizing sampling technology, and still creating some stunning pieces of work. If there's any justice in this world, the band's pivotal EPs they recorded for Rough Trade will be compiled on one CD someday.

Still, it's the band's irreverent genius and the meticulous arrangements on D.I. Go Pop that stick in your mind the longest. As current artists like Manitoba and Four Tet have the technology to assemble albums much more easily these days, the painstaking lengths that Disco Inferno went to perfect their sound in those pre-folktronica days is only occasionally duplicated today. Disco Inferno has long since departed, and were sadly overlooked by most people (including yours truly) a decade ago, but now, with this new re-release, it's high time we all gave this most innovative band the recognition they so dearly deserve. And unlike that grouchy landlady, you'll be wanting to turn this music up, not down."

-Adrian Begrand

One of the most important records ever made. Cherish it. I'll throw in the EPs and "Technicolour", if you behave nicely ;-)

Snow Laughs

The Eternals

First album from this wildly inventive dub/funk outfit featuring members of the mighty, lamented Trenchmouth (the band Fred Armisen used to play drums at) and Tortoise. Worthy successors to Sherwood's On-U Sound.

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