Doklands

I don't get this at all.

Paul Rudy makes sounds from amplified cacti. He places contact microphones on them, and then coaxes sound from them by brushing his hands against the spines. The range seems to be anywhere from a rustling to a momentary twang to a hollow pop. And that's it. Rudy describes the results as music, but I can't make the connection myself. The sounds themselves are fascinating, but I find it difficult to hear any musical intelligence behind his arrangement of noises.

It's fair to say that Degrees of Separation "Grandchild of Tree" doesn't really get going until the quiet undulations of Rudy's backing tape becomes audible. It's a shame, as this is a piece with a rich heritage, composed in response to John Cage's 1975 work Child of Tree, also written for amplified cactus. I think Cage was exploring randomness in music by deliberately giving the performer an unfamiliar instrument, whereas Rudy has been specialising in playing the cactus for some time now. However when he tours, he does at least buy a new cactus from a local shop, so there's that.

Perhaps one of you will have more luck with this than I do?

Paul Rudy - Degrees of Separation "Grandchild of Tree"
(alternate download)

Clean Feed continues to be one of the most reliably interesting contemporary jazz labels. Here's a track from last month's Hammered by drummer Ches Smith. He's assembled a top line-up including Tim Berne on sax and Doklands favourite Mary Halvorson on guitar. The sonic glue for the band however is the presence of Andrea Parkins whose accordion and electronics provide the harmonic launchpad for much of what makes this such a great record. This is a band who aren't afraid to rock out - and I do mean out. Not quite so much on Dead Battery, where Smith shows uncanny restraint and leads a funeral procession for his own drum kit, which has lost the ability to do anything other than swing like a grandfather clock. Will fans of his work with Xiu Xiu go for this? I don't know, you'll have to ask them.

Ches Smith and These Arches - Dead Battery
(alternate download)

A few weeks ago I was asking for recommendations for great African drumming albums. Well, I've found one. It's Bush Taxi from Bamako to Accra by Ashitey Nsotse & Kassoum Traoré. They're Ghanaian and Malian respectively, and it's a concept album of sorts, describing a hypothetical journey between the two capital cities. I think one of the problems you find with a lot of drumming albums is that they're showcases for various traditions, and in their effort to conserve and educate they lose the personal touch, the spark of musical creativity. That's absolutely not the case here: this is very much a musical conversation between two individuals. It's got a real spark to it. Spirit sees some of the densest crossover patterns of the whole record, and it's an exhilarating listen.

Ashitey Nsotse & Kassoum Traoré - Spirit
(alternate download)

One of the great things about listening to cross-cultural music is the way that it often never fits comfortably into our pre-existing genre bubbles. Here we've got Gökçen Kaynatan from (I think) 1973, and he's playing instrumental surf music as filtered through electronic psychedelia. When these are your native musical forms, you'd never do something like that. We're all too shackled by our own cultural norms. It's like the bands from behind the Iron Curtain that managed to amalgamate both punk and prog into one sound. (Seriously, seek out some Už Jsme Doma. They will not disappoint you.) Chances are you've never heard anything quite like Pencerenin Perdesini. The story goes that Kaynatan decided to make electronic music not because of the new sounds available to him, but because he found other musicians to be too unreliable. Whatever the truth of it, I doubt anyone else could have made this.

(via Turkish Psychedelic Music)

Gökçen Kaynatan - Pencerenin Perdesini
(alternate download)

Joseph Beuys was one of the foremost artists of the 20th century. He's probably best known for creating the idea of the social sculpture. Anyone who participates in social sculpture is an artist, all wilful acts are acts of artistic creation, and the medium is society itself. He wasn't just working in the situationist/performance art side of things either, he was a prolific sculptor of physical items too.

What I never knew until recently was that he also made music, and recorded with the likes of Throbbing Gristle and Nam June Paik. Here's something of his from 1971. Dilettantism No. 6 sounds as if it is made from that most unsubstantial of sounds, feedback, yet it has a weight and solidity to it, an ugly presence.

Joseph Beuys - Dilettantism No. 6
(alternate download)

This is priceless. Kim Fowley was one of the sleaziest figures ever to be associated with the '60s psychedelia scene, and this song is the perfect illustration of that. Listen to the hideous insincerity as he introduces it with the words "Summertime's here kiddies, and it's time to take a trip." Culturally, we're a lot more savvy regarding Fowley's particular brand of creepy opportunism than we were back then. I doubt he could get away with that sort of behaviour these days without being labelled a nonce. Anyway, here he is positioning himself as your guide to the dark underworld of DRUGS. I wouldn't trust him on a trip to the corner shop, let alone to my inner self.

Kim Fowley - The Trip
(alternate download)

Travis Wammack was a session guitarist who suffered from being based in Memphis. Listening to Memphis music is enough to convince you that rock is the most turgid musical form ever created. It's a town that infects people with the virus of musicianship. There's some nebulous idea of skill, of playing well, of talent, that has nothing do with making music that is either exciting, or emotional or even interesting. Memphis is where it infects the body musical, where its sickly smooth gangrenous hold takes place.

Before Travis Wammack got infected he had already made his name as the fastest guitarist in town. But he wasn't just fast, he was crazy. He bent notes all over the place, chopped them off mid hold, and generally coaxed a profound form of musical gibberish out of his instrument. Scratchy is the thoroughly barmy 1964 instrumental track with which he made his name. Unfortunately, as far I can tell, he never used his powers for evil again. Now that's a crime.

Travis Wammack - Scratchy
(alternate download)

"Do you have O Superman by Laurie Anderson? I think it's only available on import."

The record shop guy laughed in my face, "I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about." To be fair, I heard that a lot from record shop guys. I had lost track of the number of blank looks I got while asking for Ooh Look, There Goes Concorde Again by ...And The Native Hipsters. "I think it's on Heater Volume Records," I would always add, helpfully.

So I had no reason to expect that this strange Laurie Anderson thing that John Peel had played the night before would be any different. My delight at receiving a copy four weeks later was only tempered by the fact that by then absolutely everyone else in the country had already heard it, so it didn't have so much of a cachet, and that it came in a plain white sleeve. I remember being very disappointed by that. I'd waited a month, I'd been there from day one, and I didn't even get a picture cover.

Well you all know O Superman, and if you don't stop reading and go listen to it. It's marvellous. The b-side was a rather batty piece with pitch-shifted vocals and a panoply of different sound effects called Walk The Dog. It's full of bounce and swing and black humour. There's a live version on Anderson's mammoth United States Live, but this track didn't resurface for many years, when it showed up as a bonus on the 25th anniversary reissue of Big Science. Don't miss it.

Laurie Anderson - Walk The Dog
(alternate download)

Start looking for the root of the blues and you'll eventually find yourself in some very troubled waters. The problem comes when you find yourself pondering worksongs, those tunes sung by slaves performing menial labour. Curiosity is fine, but how can this be something that you can allow yourself to enjoy?

Due to the oddities of the US penal system, those songs were given the chance to live on. To many outsiders (and presumably insiders also) the American system of punitive labour seemed a little suspect. Many pre-emancipation practices were transplanted and found fertile soil in the US prison system of the early 20th century. And the music did too.

Let Your Hammer Ring is probably the definitive chain gang song, the soundtrack to every narrative featuring prisoners breaking rocks. It's sung to the rhythmic ring of metal on stone. Big Louisiana, Willy Rafus, & Arthur Davis were recorded in Angola State prison, Louisiana in 1959. Big has one hell of a voice, and enough of a sly sense of humour to set one of the others off part way through this. You can find this on the Arhoolie Records album Angola Prison Worksongs.

Still gotta worry about the ethics of listening to this for pleasure though.

Big Louisiana, Willy Rafus, & Arthur Davis - Let Your Hammer Ring
(alternate download)

Clifford Thornton was a bit of a radical. He was once denied entry into France because of his politics. I couldn't tell you if he was actually a member of the Black Panthers or not, but the opening track of his 1967 debut album was called Free Huey, so it's easy enough to deduce where his sympathies lay.

He played free jazz, and much of his music was drawn from a big band well. It could often be expansive and sprawling, even when he was only playing with his quintet. "O.C.T." comes from that same debut album, Freedom & Unity, but it's a much tighter affair. It was written by the (then) young saxophonist Joe McPhee, on what was his recorded debut. A bit of an overlooked gem, this one. It's easy to imagine a lot of bands having a blast with this piece.

Clifford Thornton - "O.C.T."
(alternate download)

What an enigmatic album Mercurial Balm is. It's a 2012 release by the Anglo/Norwegian new jazz outfit Food, now reduced to a core duo of Iain Bellamy on sax and percussionist Thomas Strønen. To compensate for their diminished numbers, they've recruited a number of special guests, notably Christian Fennesz. You can hear them all on the moody Galactic Roll, and I love the way that Fennesz's cosmic background radiation mixes with the flutters of Strønen's drums. Bellamy is serene, and very very distant, like the slow pulse of a red supergiant. Very mysterious stuff.

Food - Galactic Roll
(alternate download)

Let me tell you everything I know about Bill Lindsey.

There we go. Now you know as much as I do. Mad Mad World was the b-side to Who Untied The Knot, a single released in 1965 on Ambertone Records. It may have been the first record to be released on Ambertone. It may even have been the only one. Bill was a bit of a crooner, with a wobbly and emotional but rather appealing baritone voice. If it wasn't for the naive religiosity this wouldn't really count as outsider music. But it's got that, and it's got a string section and it's got a female choir giving it the ooo-oo-ooohs and with all of those together it couldn't be anything but. Mortifyingly nice, like a sad puppy.

I'd probably feel a lot better about myself if only I was able to dislike this.

Bill Lindsey - Mad Mad World
(alternate download)

Now there's a name for you. If you want a good bad name, you're not going to improve much on DJ Female Convict Scorpion. It's the moniker of San Franciscan Josh Pollock, under which he's made a dozen or so self-released albums. You know how turntablists actually have quite a limited selection of records? For all their crate-digging nerdiness, there are only a small handful of "accepted" genres. Josh Pollock is having none of that. With the ear of the modern eclectic, he spins stuff from all over the place. Clarinette is the opening track of his 2012 release Clash-Ups III and it mixes self-improvement techniques with film music with frenetic experimental guitar. Imagine DJ Spooky with a penchant for musical puns and no appetite for copyright clearance. Killer stuff.

DJ Female Convict Scorpion - Clarinette
(alternate download)

It's back to that space rock that I love so much but write about so badly. I mean, what is there to say: it's got some top psychedelic sounds and it goes whoosh a bit. Yeah, very good. Very insightful. I'm sure I could write more entertainingly about the music if it was a bit shit, but then what would be the point of recommending it in the first place?

Anyway, Good Posture vs. Bad Posture is a bit on the tumultuous side and builds to a splendid crescendo of noise. Is that your sort of thing? It is mine. It's from Mugstar's 2006 eponymous debut album, and it's, um, good.

Mugstar - Good Posture vs. Bad Posture
(alternate download)

Gkfoes vjgoaf was the moniker of Sean Conrad, under which he produced dreamlike psychedelia for several years. It was frustrating for all the wrong reasons. Reason one was the name, an unpronounceable bit of attention-seeking. Thankfully he's changed it, and now goes by Ashan. Reason two was the sonic palette, heavy on the bells and flutes as a lazy shorthand for spiritual awareness. Psychedelia has always been prone to orientalism, so we can maybe overlook that as a genre rather than a specific fault. Reason three was the miasma of new age enfuddlement that hangs over the whole thing.

But once you get past the surface, there's some top composition going on here. Conrad almost seems to use a glitch aesthetic, and I love the way he crunches his sounds together and isn't afraid to let the abrasive edges come out when necessary. It's really not the treatment you'd expect those sounds to have, and I admire the ingenuity of his approach. Hellocean comes from his 2009 release Magic Days.

Gkfoes vjgoaf - Hellocean
(alternate download)

Do you know about Gillian McKeith, the Awful Poo Lady? She pretends to be a doctor and goes round looking at people's excrement. Strange sort of hobby if you ask me. The thing is, she believes that by carefully examining the poo she can tell a lot about the person who made it. Things such as the fact that they're very bad at flushing the toilet after them, and that they sometimes forget to lock their front door. It's madeupology of the highest order.

But what if it wasn't bonkers? And what if, rather than poo, it was music? You could listen to someone's music and it would tell you everything about that person: their background, their history, everything. You could listen to Micachu's Never and from it learn everything about Mika Levi. From the post-punk phrasing you could discover that she loved pop music but had heard too much of it and had started to get bored. From the sinuous lines you could hear someone who spent their teens absorbing the rhythmic intelligence of hiphop. And from the abrasive homemade orchestration you can hear someone with a classical ear for mavericks such as Harry Partch and Moondog. All of that crammed into 100 seconds of music. Never is the title track of her 2012 album, and it won't actually tell you any of those things.

Micachu - Never
(alternate download)

Do we all like Mogwai? You do know it's obligatory, don't you? They've been going for 16 years and they've barely put a foot wrong the entire time, which is pretty much unheard of for a band. Still, by any reckoning The Sun Smells Too Loud has to be one of their highlights. It's from the band's 6th studio album, the 2008 release The Hawk Is Howling. Exultant and cinematic, it has a guitar line suggestive of Bowie's Heroes. This is the perfect music to play before going out. It's a great world, it says, nothing will go wrong and you will have a wonderful time. Mogwai's blissful post-rock is an appetiser for life.

Mogwai - The Sun Smells Too Loud
(alternate download)

There's a subversive purity to the pop of the Dum Dum Girls. Bhang Bhang, I'm a Burnout is '60s style happy pop with lo-fi edge. It's got the cheapest drum sound possible, and the tune is carefully wrapped in a protective sheen of guitar noise. It's loaded with artifice and style, but rather mockingly. Taken at face value this demonstrates just how hip and cool casual nihilism can be. Don't take anything at face value.

From the 2010 album I Will Be.

Dum Dum Girls - Bhang Bhang, I'm a Burnout
(alternate download)

I do not know who it was who decided that the music of Syl Johnson was ripe for rediscovery, but I am glad it was done. While his greatest strength was as a soul singer, he had his roots in the Chicago blues. You can hear that on this track from his 1999 album Talkin' Bout Chicago. While it will not surprise you in the least, there is comfort to be found in music that is so instantly familiar, especially when it's done as well as this.

Syl Johnson - Come On With It
(alternate download)

Jazz has borrowed from folk music since the days of Dizzy Gillespie. It's no longer unusual to hear Latin rhythms or klezmer scales. All sorts of ethnic music has been incorporated over the years. One thing that slipped through the net was the music of the Alps, and it's not surprising. There isn't much in the way of an immediate crossover between traditional Alpine music and jazz, but German horn player Matthais Schriefl has found a way to do it.

He's had to take jazz way back to get a fit with the rhythms of the Alps, back to the days of marching bands. Der Vorarlberger Problembär pits two alpenhorns against a saxophone ensemble, and you couldn't get more Alpine unless you labelled each track on the album with the height above sea level at which it was recorded. Which Schriefl did. (1,477m, if you're interested.) What makes this such a potent musical combination is that while the saxes play the standard well-tempered chromatic scale, the alpenhorns are far less sophisticated. They're effectively just long wooden cones and the only notes they can play are their natural harmonics, many of which lie completely off the modern Western scale. There's something truly prehistoric about the sound they make, and when you get them harmonising with the saxophones it's like nothing else you've ever heard. This is a rousing number with something of the New Orleans funeral march feel about it. Schriefl is definitely one of our favourites here at Doklands, and I think this track will make him a few new friends. It's from his 2012 album 6, Alps & Jazz.

Matthias Schriefl - Der Vorarlberger Problembär
(alternate download)