Random Review #4- Prince Jammy- Uhuru in Dub

CSA Records, 1982

 Among the first generation of Jamaican dub reggae engineers, King Tubby's assistant (and later rival) Prince Jammy has always been somewhat unfairly neglected. Unfortunately “Uhuru in Dub,” a 1982 collection of mixes he did for the roots band Black Uhuru, isn't the best album to make a case for that. At a time when producers like Scientist, Lee Perry, and, over in the UK, Adrian Sherwood were busy elevating remixes to something close to composition, “Uhuru in Dub” is an unremarkable by-the-numbers dub album. 

The basslines of the 10 songs here are largely unmemorable, drums are treated with the usual delay and flanger and Jammy's use of horn, guitar and vocal snippets seems fairly arbitrary. Some harsh, almost “glitchy” sounding fades on “Mystic Mix” and a catchy organ riff on “African Culture” were the only things that stood out to me. Next please.

Random Review #3- Sun City Girls- Torch of the Mystics

Majora, 1990

What we have right here, ladies and gentlemen, is one of the great overlooked masterpieces of the 90s American rock underground. A strange brew of dirty punk rock, omnivorous pan-globalism, warped folk, exploitation movie soundtrack and transcendental psychedelia, this is Music so “outside” it doesn't even fit into the “outsider music” category. The mask-wearing trio of freaks known as the Sun City Girls (all men by the way) had already been releasing documents of their bizarre (and probably hallucinogenically assisted) flights of fancy since the mid 80s, the best of which is probably the Fugs-esque anarchic vulgarity of “Horse Cock Phepner.” But I feel like “Torch of the Mystics” from 1990 is the first time (and one of the few times) Richard Bishop, Alan Bishop and Charles Gocher took a serious stab at making something like a “real album.”

The first four tracks (side A of the LP) showcase the band channeling Middle Eastern influences through the medium of lo-fi guitar/bass/drums garage punk. There's some stunning and highly original axework from Richard Bishop to be heard on here (check out his flurries of notes on “Esoterica of Abyssinia”) as well as Alan Bishop's patented faux-arabic glossolalia on “Tarmac.” But the real highlight is “Space Prophet Dogon.” Driven by an Indian-sounding guitar riff played with the kind of huge, wide open fuzz tone that can't help but conjure images of oceans and/or deserts, it's a 7-minute psychedelic journey through the nether regions of human consciousness with Alan Bishop's strange high-pitched muezzin-like vocal acting as a guide.

On the 7 shorter songs on side B the Girls largely ditch the electric instruments in favor of acoustic ones. After the cosmic of “Space Prophet Dogon,” we're treated to a surprisingly straight-faced (by SCG standards) Morricone-style cover of Bolivian folk band Los Kjarkas' hit “Llorando Se Fue,” retitled “The Shining Path.” A simple but effective of combination of acoustic guitars, wood block percussion and ghostly whistling. “The Flower” is a psych folk song with droning, incantation-ike vocals and English lyrics, “Radar 1941” is an honest-to-the-gods surf instrumental and “Papa Legba” is what the Blues would sound like if it had been invented in the streets of Bangkok rather than the Mississippi Delta. “Cafe Batik” creates more mystical moods but is slightly hurt by the jokey castrate falsetto. “Burial In The Sky” fittingly closes the album with a glimpse of the noisier improv side of the Sun City Girls.

While the acoustic side contains some excellent material, it doesn't feel quite as fresh now that “freak folk” has become an established genre in the “indie world.” It's the four electric pieces on first side, seemingly effortlessly combinations of “rocking out” and exploring uncharted territory, that continue to impress.

Random Review Week #2: Brian Eno & Harold Budd- Ambient 2: The Plateaux of Mirror

E.G. Records, 2008

 

Not sure how to feel about the fact that the second Random Review Week album is yet another ambientish collab, but alas, fate has decided and I'm not complaining.

Released in 1980, “The Plateaux of Mirror” is the second in Brian Eno's influential four-part “Ambient” series. Where “Music for Airports,” the first and most famous installment, was largely an Eno solo effort, he takes a back seat here and leaves the center stage to American composer and pianist Harold Budd whose simple but pretty keyboard melodies dominate for the most part. At that time, Eno was in a kind of transitional phase, shifting from his previous identity as a performer to his new one as a producer and curator. And it shows in his contributions to this album. He subtly processes Budd's electric and acoustic piano playing through various reverb and delay units and adds some atmospheric, sampled touches, such as quacking ducks on the title track. In fact it's not a million miles removed from what he did on Roxy Music's “Sea Breezes” in 1972.

I admit I'm not familiar with any of Harold Budd's other recorded output, but the pieces on “The Plateaux” give me a strong Erik Satie vibe, maybe with a bit of Arvo Pärt (minus the religion stuff) thrown in. The mood is warm and melancholy throughout, occasionally slipping into the sentimental. The individual tracks sort of start to blur together, which I suppose is the intended effect. Like so much Ambient music, it often borders on New Age without ever fully embracing it. A pleasant album and the perfect soundtrack to lying on your couch reading a book on a rainy afternoon.

Random Review Week #1- Carl Craig & Moritz von Oswald- ReComposed

Deutsche Grammophon, 2008

 

We kick off Random Review Week with a risky concept: Take two techno icons from Detroit and Berlin respectively and let them remix Ravel's “Bolero” and Mussorgsky's “Pictures at an Exhibition,” two classical works ubiquitous enough to have become cliches. With a premise like that, it's easy to make a lame novelty record where a couple string themes you've probably heard in at least 5 car commercials get the four-on-the-floor bassdrum treatment.

Thankfully, that's not what “ReComposed” is, but despite the general tastefulness and musical competence on display, it's all a bit on the safe side. The name of the game here is ambient-leaning techno more geared towards home listening than club use. It's almost exactly what you'd expect from a Moritz von Oswald / Carl Craig collab too. Both the former's trademark use of delay and reverb and the latter's taste for warm melodies are in full effect, but the use of the source material is often a bit superfluous, particularly on the “Bolero” half of the album which lasts from tracks 1 to 5.

Over the course of 32 minutes the music slowly moves from warm synth drones reminiscent of krautrockers like Cluster and Harmonia to dubbed-out horn samples and marching snare drums. And then, just when things are about to get interesting, it turns into something that appears to contain no samples at all and sounds like a track from Moritz von Oswald's 90s dub techno duo Basic Channel, complete with wavering, synthscapes and filtered kickdrums. The remaining 3 tracks focus on “Pictures at an Exhibition.” “Movement 5” unfortunately sounds a kinda “strings plus techno beat” thing talked about earlier in places, but the closing 14-minute “Movement 6” is the album's strongest point. A reggae-like shaker-and-bongo rhythm(!) is enveloped in a gauze of manipulated samples and spacy synthetic swooshes. It's an odd combination, but it works well and uses the source material in an unexpected way instead of casting it aside

“ReComposed” is a well-crafted and enjoyable album from two towering figures in electronic dance music, but as a techno-meets-classical experiment, it's kind of a disappointment.

Random Review Week!

I'll just get straight to the point here: I haven't used this blog nearly as much as I'd have liked to in the past few months. So to motivate myself to write more, I've decided to experiment with a new format: The Random Review Week. Starting today, I'm going review a random album, EP, single or compilation from my collection everyday until next Sunday.

Selection is done by shuffling through my iTunes library which currently contains around 500 hours of mostly music I've been listening to in the past 2 years or so. I'm going to try to rip some older CDs to my computer in the next few days to hopefully shake things up a bit.

Have fun reading and listening,

C.A.S.

Heldon- Un Rêve Sans Conséquence Spéciale (1976)

1976 Cobra, re 1995 Cuneiform Records

New Age Guerilla

Founded by guitarist and former philosophy student Richard Pinhas in 1974, self-described “elctronic rock” band Heldon are one of the most influential and idiosyncratic groups to emerge from the 70s French progressive underground. Pinhas, an admirer of Robert Fripp's ambient work with Brian Eno, recorded the first three Heldon albums in impromptu sessions with a varying cast of musician friends, processing his axe through a maze of effects devices. The result is trippy, droning “cosmic” synth music in the vein of contemporary work by Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze. Album #4, entitled Agneta Nilsson, added dark Moog bass arpeggios to the mix, but it wasn't until 1976 and their 5^th full-length release that Heldon broke free from the ambient template and really came into their own.
  
With a title like Un Rêve Sans Consequence Spéciale (“A Dream Without Special Consequence”), you'd expect the space-age baroque escapism of Jean-Michel Jarre et al, but the cover art, a kind of surrealist/futurist rendering of a steel mill, comes closer to visually representing the sounds contained herein. The 11-minute opener “Marie Virginie C.” greets you not with swelling, bombastic keyboard chords but with dystopian landscape of reverbed, arrhythmic metal percussion, broken synth bleeps and Pinhas's buzzsaw guitar noise assault. And when Patrick Gauthier's filthy Minimoog bass sets in at approx. the 2-minute mark and drummer François Auger settles into a nervous, steady groove, it starts dawning on you that this isn't really “prog.” It sounds like noisy post-punk with a heavy industrial bent as filtered through a 60s/70s freeform rock jamming mentality. That's right, ladies and gentlemen, the “rock” part of Heldon's “electronic rock” self-labelling ain't no joke! Pinhas unleashes some heavily treated bluesy guitar solos throughout the second half of the track, sort of like Manuel Göttsching with balls.

Synth 'n' Roll: Richard Pinhas of Heldon


The following “Elephanta” is just as interesting. A percussion-driven piece composed and mostly performed by Auger (Pinhas only contributes some synth), it starts out a bit like Herbie Hancock's Headhunters reimagining of “Watermelon Man,” with some African percussion. But instead of morphing into groovy jazz-funk, it piles on more and cymbals, drums, kalimbas and other things you can hit over its 8:30 duration, some of which run counter to the rhythm, culminating in a a dense, ethno-industrial cacophony.

“Perspective IV Ter Muco” (a bonus track on the Cuneiform reissue) really pushes the bluesy-rock-with-electronics angle to its absolute limit but doesn't seem to fit with the mood of the rest of Un Rêve... and “MVC II” is a slower, funkier, creepier postlude to “Marie Virginie C.” These two shorter tracks are entertaining enough but they are merely the hors d'oeuvre to the album's second centerpiece, “Toward the Red Line,” a 15-minute exploration for synths, drums and electric cello (played by Magma bassist Jannick Top). This one is much closer to Schulze and T. Dream than the preceding music, but done in Heldon's trademark bleak cyberpunk style. It opens with tidal waves of low-end Moog arpeggios that clash violently and occasionally coalesce into temporary grooves. Auger's drums fight to break out from beneath the molasses but never quite manage to. This is anti-ambient. Where other electronic cosmonauts of the 70s dreamt of glitzy high-tech space stations, Heldon's future is a hellish, inhuman wasteland.

The reissue on the Cuneiform label reviewed here adds two bonus tracks, the aforementioned “Perspective IV Ter Muco” and a live rendition of “Marie Virginie C.” that ditches most of the lengthy atmospheric intro and jumps right into the action but feels, interestingly, less aggressive than the studio version.

A young person's guide to Les Rallizes Dénudés

In a rock'n'roll school of thinking that identifies structural simplicity, loudness, spontaneity and grit as its core principles, Japanese psychedelic gods Les Rallizes Dénudés represent an ultimate of sorts. Founded in 1967 during the Kyoto student protests by enigmatic guitarist/vocalist Takashi Mizutani, the band's left-wing politics were as extreme as their music. Their first bass player participated in the 1970 Yodogo plane hijacking. That in addition to Mizutani's ghostlike elusiveness and uncompromising musical vision helped cement their status as the most cultishly worshipped proponents of the Japanese psych underground.

Inspired by Blue Cheer and The Velvet Underground, Rallizes sound is as simple as it is absorbing: A repeating three-note bassline and a boneheaded 4/4 drumbeat get sucked into a black hole of REALLY DAMN LOUD hallucinogenic guitar noise for anywhere up to 40 minutes, occasionally broken up by thin, echoed vocals. Mizutani monomaniacally pursued this formula for nearly 30 years, backed by a revolving cast of interchangeable henchmen, before vanishing sometime in the mid 90s. Even though Les Rallizes were primarily a live band and never released any official albums, their influence is keenly felt in the music of Japanese underground acts ranging from Fushitsusha to Merzbow to Boris.

Because most if not all Les Rallizes Dénudés recordings are bootlegs or semi-bootlegs, their sizable discography can be a bit daunting to get to grips with. So without further ado, here's a list of  5  Rallizes releases (ralleases?) worth checking out!




'77 Live / Heavier Than A Death In The Family
1977, Rivista / Phoenix Records

The most well-known Rallizes bootleg and the one you should get first. It 's a well-recorded (by crappy live bootleg standards) document of LRD at the height of their powers: Trippy, heavy and deeply immersive. Mizutani's fuzzed-out, phaseshifted and delay-riddled guitar miasma and his piercing feedback howls burrow right into your subconscious with thick bass and pounding drums acting as a beacon of orientation in the sea of reverb and delay. One of my personal highlights here is a throbbing “Sister Ray-”esque version of Rallizes staple “Night of the Assassins,” a song that steals its bassline from Little Peggy March's “I Will Follow Him” and perverts its bubblegum naivety into a bad acid trip. Other faves include the feedback purgatory of “Flames of Ice” and the laid-back, crooned Velvets-go-to-San-Francisco balladry of “Enter the Mirror.”

See that's what's so cool about Mizutani: he doesn't make a racket on his guitar because he can't play, the guy can lay down some beautiful melodic noodling if he so desires and usually peppers even his harshest excursions into pure sound with little licks and chords that hint at conventional musicality but get swallowed up by his effects pedals fairly soon.

Anyway, there are two main versions of this: A 2-disc set called simply “'77 Live” and a single disc with the very fitting title “Heavier Than a Death in the Family.” The latter is probably going to be easier to find a “legitimate” (depending on your definition of legitimacy) copy of because it's recently been reissued by infamous British bootlegger label Phoenix Records. You can even download it from iTunes if you're into that. It has better sound quality than “'77 Live” too, probably because it's been copied from the original master. The drawback is of course that it doesn't include the full gig. “A Memory is Far” and a hellish version of traditional LRD set closer “The Last One” are omitted and the rest of the tracks are ordered differently.

“Heavier Than A Death...” tries to make up for the loss of material by including a great rare version of “Field of Artificial Flowers” (wrongly billed as “People Can Choose”) from 1973, 10 minutes of proto-punky guitar whiteout. Which one of these you'll want to get ultimately depends on whether you want to hear a Rallizes show in full or are satisfied with a qualitatively superior but incomplete version.




Yodo-Go-A-Go-Go (Flightless Bird Needs Water Wings)
2006, 10th Avenue Freeze Out 

This CD, which cheekily references the Yodogo incident that made LRD notorious in its title and cover art, is an unknown bootlegger's attempt at putting together a single-disc Rallizes retrospective of sorts. Even though that endeavor was doomed to failure from the start, “Flightless Bird” is still worth a purchase because it's, at the time of writing, obtainable at a reasonable price and contains some excellent material not readily available elsewhere.

The collection opens with two of Rallizes' earliest demos from 1967, “Otherwise My Conviction” and “Vaille de L'eau.” Apparently these songs were supposed to be released as a single, but listening to them it's easy to see why that went nowhere. The first sounds like standard American mid-60s rock'n'roll with Japanese lyrics and the second is pure pop(!). Competently executed (aside from Mizutani's insecure vocals), but severely lacking in charm and character.

The later material is generally pretty boss though, “Enter The Mirror” doesn't quite live up to the “'77 Live” version but is great nonetheless. “Flames of Ice” sounds like the Rallizes version of surf music with Mizutani taking a step back from his total sensory assault approach for the first half and hammering out some cool, ringing, spring-reverbed chords. An unexpected treat. “Flightless Bird” also contains the same killer 1973 version of “Field of Artificial Flowers” as “Heavier Than A Death...” and a short but ultra-sweet rendition of “Deeper Than the Night,” another LRD standard.

But what you REALLY want this compilation for is another early rack, “Smoking Cigarette Blues.” One of Japan's first recorded countercultural freakouts, it's a 19-minute freeform marathon of clattering drums and droning fuzz guitar. Occasionally, the band gets a sort of groove going and the first glimpses of the “classic” Rallizes sound begin to show through.



Blind Baby Has it's Mothers Eyes
2010, Phoenix Records 

A release of mysterious origin, The three lengthy tracks contained on “Blind Baby Has its Mother's Eyes,”  are most likely the loudest, heaviest and harshest Les Rallizes Dénudés have ever sounded on record. You can put this on your shelf right next to your Merzbow, Masonna and Hijokaidan records, should you own any.

On the opening title track, actually a performance of “Flames of Ice,” the rhythm section immediately locks into the kind of tight, minimal funk groove that would do early Can justice. Mizutani plays his axe through what sounds like two phase shifter pedals, causing his bluesy soloing to waft disorientingly across the stereo field (this is especially great on headphones) and eventually disintegrate into a mess of quavering noise. The second track “An Awful Eternity” has one of the oddest mixes I've ever heard. After a short bass intro, the rhythm guitarist plays a strangely out-of-tune sounding minor key riff enveloped in pure guitar scuzz. Mizutani has abandoned any last semblance of melody, harmony or rhythm in his playing and his vocal mic is turned up so loud that even the smallest utterance almost drowns out the other instruments and unleashes barbs of piercing feedback unto the listener's ears. “The Last One” closes the set in a similarly noisy vein but retains the same rhythmic rigidness as the title track, turning it into a grim psychedelic death march.

“Blind Baby...” is out for a decent price on Phoenix Records.

Cradle Saloon '78 

2006, Univive

This expensive 4CD set, featuring two sources of the same concert, is one of the best Rallizes offerings from their late 70s period, right next to the legendary “Live '77.” Sound quality is pretty good here. Discs 3 and 4 are muddier, 1 and 2 are clearer but with a stranger and less balanced mix.

The music here deviates from the band's normal modus operandi in a few ways. Mizutani has the rhythm section on a looser leash than usual (the bassist is allowed to play a solo of sorts on the opening “Flames of Ice”) and has apparently turned the low and middle knobs on his amp all the way down, transforming his guitar work from the usual full-spectrum power drone into a thin, trebly buzz saw attack. As a result the drums and bass take on a more central role instead of being drowned out. There are some definite similarities to the post-punk that cropped up around the same time in the UK (PiL, Joy Division, The Pop Group etc), especially on the version contained on the first two discs.

The comparison doesn't just extend to the sonic properties of the music though, the aforementioned “Flames of Ice” gets a stiff, skeletal funk groove going, and “Night of the Assassins” rides on a syncopated reggae(!) beat for 16 minutes. It still sounds rather trippy of course, and features some of Mizutani's most beautiful melodic soloing on the aforementioned “Assassins” and “Deeper than the Night” which concludes discs one and three, respectively. But the real star of the show is a 24-minute track simply called “Blues” on the second and fourth CDs. The bass plays a rollicking boogie riff over a linear Hawkwind-ish rhythm while Mizutani intones the verses in something close to classic 12-bar form, reminding us that for all their avantgarde shenanigans, Rallizes were a simple 60s rock'n'roll band at heart. At around the 5-minute mark, Mizutani catapults the spaceship into orbit with some phaseshifted power drill guitar. Curiously I've never heard them perform this great song in any other recorded gig, even though the fact that it has lyrics and a fixed vocal melody rules out the possibility that it's just an impromptu jam.

“Cradle Saloon '78” is out on Univive, a French label dedicated to Rallizes reissues.



Double Heads
2005, Univive/ 2011, Phoenix Records

 

The year of 1980 A.D. saw the most (some would say only) significant lineup change in Rallizes history. For a scant few months, guitarist Fujio Yamaguchi of underground glam rockers Murahachibu joined the band on stage as a second lead guitarist. Yes you got that right, this is an incarnation of Les Rallizes Dénudés where the “other” members aren't just faceless lackeys and Mizutani has an equal sparring partner who actively participates in the band's live jams. It's a shame their alliance did not last (for whatever reason) because Fujio does an excellent job playing the more melodic, conventionally “musical” yin to Mizutani's noisy avantgarde yang.

The 6CD box “Double Heads” (originally on Univive, very recently reissued by Phoenix) documents three gigs from the Fujio period and contains some of Rallizes' mellowest output. They almost sound like a gothic, noisy Japanese version of The Quicksilver Messenger Service (before White Heaven came along and filled that niche for good) here. Even the traditionally “heavy” rockers in their repertoire, like “Field of Artificial Flowers” and “Flames of Ice” sound much softer and more contemplative.

Some fans of the louder proto-Japanoise side of the band might sneer at Fujio's dramatically drawn out notes and minor-key noodling but the four(!) wonderfully cavernous, introverted, dreamy versions of “Deeper than the Night” should be enough to win over even the most stubborn of doubters. The Rallizes box to chill to.