During its early American renaissance, folk was considered a weapon to combat war and political bull honky: folk was, in many places, considered a sort of gun of ideas. The initial idea of American folk seemed to be a celebration of simplicity, directness, and grassroots independence: the idea that you can take your guitar and speak anywhere/anytime. With the evolution of tech (where simplicity does not necessarily mean “acoustic guitar”) and the massive expansion of the cultural conversation towards a global community (particularly in the US) to encompass a much wider social sphere, listeners can look to style and intention rather than instrument set-up. Folk is at once psychological and simple. It is conversational and personal, and in that sense, it is political and cerebral.
This mix is not made to lay a groundwork for a new definition of folk, rather, I wanted to create a vein here of musicians that use the power of speech, a conversation implied between musician and listener, to convey force and emotion in music. In the case of From Monuments to Masses and The Books, this conversation is crafted using sound clips, creating a more psychological effect. In Britain’s Protein Window and San Francisco's Enablers, the verse is an elegant, semi-narrative free form rich with undertones, and the chorus is a shimmering wall of distortion that the listener fills with her own thoughts and verse. In This Will Destroy You, the notable lack of lyrics creates a wide headspace and pacing towards a personal conversation for the listener (leading to perhaps the ultimate and incidental goal of these great musicians: listener revelation.)
Bill Callahan and Leonard Cohen have a consuming, immediate lyrical style that is stripped down so that the delivery and quantity of verse unfold layer after layer of subtext, a style mirrored in PW and the Enablers but with a post-modern buzz.
In Washington D.C.’s Weird War, lead singer Ian Svenonius playfully wields a powerful vocal style that is more speaking than singing. It’s engaging and slightly atonal, but also filled with jokey, sometimes throwaway lyrics that give listeners space to shout over, to drink over, to talk over. Perhaps this is the gift and evolution of past folk, not to be a gun of ideas and to sharpen the political opinion of groups as it once did, but to be a disarming space for individual expansion of identity and interpersonal armistice.
Rhythm, tone, and nuance are natural to vocals, so much so that, for many musical aspirants looking to trap beauty between verse and chorus, there is a strong belief that the pop dream of creating lucid powerful music can be idiot savant short wired vis-a-vis Jim Morrison with the right mix of booze, noise, and brain candy (which sometimes it sort of can). So, what happens when you take the vox out of the equation? In the hands of less dynamic musicians, you get chakra meditation drones and music suited for the beflowered Target listening station.
Not so for Brooklyn's Ensemble, Et Al. whose compositions march with patient strength, and thrum with firm, deliberate insistence. The resonant, tonal pallette of chimes, bells, and percussive ringing instruments (like vibes, marimba, and Indian Cowbells) effectively drum across the tightwire between post-punk textures, airport spaces, and the endless grass fields of the mind. Clearly these gents listen to a lot of music because there is a pop sensibility in their work that keeps their tunes engaging throughout, bobbing bouyantly on the ocean limn of awareness and sometimes submerging briefly and, sometimes, bringing you with them. Their commanding compositions are balanced perfectly to weave in and out of consciousness, which reminds me:
When Andrew Kenny of Amanset discovered Explosions in the Sky, he sent the tape to their label, on it scrawling the words, "This fucking destroys." What a thing to say about instrumental music.
Counterintuitively perhaps, instrumental music can be so powerful and raw, so emotive, edgy, ripped, mean and real, so punk rock. I'm not just talking about metal drone walls either and classical symphonies, (which are more "metal" perhaps...:P).
There's two reasons for instrumental music's punk power: One, it can be demanding to listen to. It's not part of our natural FM pop programming where vox are mixed like Sinatra and everything else is compressed to kazoo hum in the background. Two, I think it reminds us that music has so much power to speak more than just what the words are expressly describing, and instrumental music (particularly saavy intrumental post-rock) reminds otherwise pop listeners how much there is in the composition and how much there is to experience outside of our usual array.
I saw Explosions in the Sky at a small spot in Tucson and I remember thinking how loud they were, then a moment later, I heard the crisp snap of someone in front of me opening a beer: the music wasn't loud, it just felt loud.
My acid test for killer instrumental music is if I realize suddenly during the middle of the song that my mind is off somewhere else; good instrumental music lubricates thoughts, it unlocks corridors to the less traveled pathways of the mind. It goes it's own way. That's pretty fucking punk rock. If I had to classify Ensemble, Et Al, that's how I would do it: pretty, fucking punk rock.
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Here's a school of tasty tracks flapping their fins in similar eddies and currents of EEA...
The Six Parts Seven - Stolen Moments
Appleseed Cast - Last In Line
Unwed Sailor - Cuckoo Clocks. The Call of the Windmill
I love it when bands decide to rock. Is it a decision decided via pow-wow over peace pipe? Is it democratic, taken to a vote? Perhaps it is more transcendental than that, the guitar speaking to the hands through the amp or some other ghosts of rock and roll spiriting through the windy corridors of the city. These are all Chicago bands, so I have to think there must be some back room politics, palm greasing, and ubiquitous eye winking.
The Halamays were formally Katie & Pat. This incarnation sees them rocking harder and beefing up their multi-instrumental sound with more thumping rock drums and gushing synth rivers. The theme of the two songs on the Zombies EP is, well, surviving a zombie apocalypse. It frames the understated, direct lyrics of the band in a post-apocalyptic world, making their emotive verse playful and sometimes a little funny.
The Halamays - Zombies
Another Chicago band getting their feet wet in the making-waves pool. Sleek and richly tonal Chicago rock, I've got more on 'em here in my full review.
The Pear Traps - The Pear Traps EP
Guitarist Jay Ziegler unloads tasty licks galore in this bar filth 80's blues inspired party rock album to add a razor edge to Neil Turk's punk laments and gritty heartbreak ballads. Bassist Matt Cushing's torpedo rides and thick train rail lines glue these tracks to the back of your mind. Several songs feature School of Rock drummer Kevin Clark saddling the kit.
Top Shelf Lickers - Head First
Another great Chicago band who just rocked the Do Division fest which is reknowned for its hula hoop crazies and tattooed hotties stripping off sweaty layers near the free cigarette booth. This is the newest single from California Wives. For their EP review and tracks, there's more here.
Writing music certainly is not always glamorous work. Still, there’s something to the process that sometimes begets spectacular results. The most inspirational composition clip I've seen is the classic Dylan documentary scene from Don’t Look Back where Joan Baez is singing for the camera from the back of her throat while Bob Dylan is rocking back and forth to his own rhythm, trying to punch out a new song of his own on a typewriter. Whenever I feel overwhelmed with distractions, I just think of Bob and Joan.
One of the great excitements of a live band is seeing a work come together. This is particularly of note for electronic bands in an era where Apple's Garage Band program (which comes installed) has made beat programming as simple as selecting adjectives. Finding out that killer music has a killer composition process can amplify the effect. There's a resonance psychedelic electric indie group Cloud Cult taps into at their shows by having painters on each side of the stage concocting murals Bob Ross style while the band spins their tunes.
I’ve always liked electronic music where the human element shines through. I crown Vangelis the king of this postand perhaps my heart, at least for the duration of his Love Theme. While he may not be the earliest synth composer (that title goes to Wendy Carlos Williams), he exhibited to the masses the full power of strong synth voice in classic soundtracks like Blade Runner and Chariots of Fire.
I used to have a Blade Runner tape that I’d listen to in my car, and it was, in fact, the last cassette to work in it. The tape deck slowly gave up as the tape itself wore thin. Still, even as conditions degraded, somehow the music sounded good with the rhythm in the wear and the gradual warp as the circuits slowed. The tones morphed so that my tape deck’s swan songs were surprisingly sweet, unique performances.
Vangelis - Love Theme (From the Blade Runner Soundtrack)
Among the occult apocrypha that veils Boards of Canada’s heady electronic cuts in folklore mystery are backwards samples from cult leader Amo Bishop Roden. In Kid for Today, BoC builds the beat as you listen, spellbinding you into the trance of the song.
Boards of Canada - Kid for Today
Mu-ziq’s Mike Paradinas meticulously programmed the sounds and sequenced every trip beat and break. With so many ideas and explorations in his ecstatic candy modem melodies, these tracks still ring prophetic and futuristic .
Kraftwerk (German for power plant or power station) and early techno bands prided themselves on the shiny robotic throbbing metallic beats. More recent electronic groups like Flying Lotus, Baths, Talk Demonic, and Groundislava sometimes feature slightly off kilter beats, played either by hand with a beat pad or deliberately staggered with cycled rhythm loops or swaggered programming. This sound gives normally autonomous sounding beats a human hand to them, an organic texture.
Baths – Animals
Flying Lotus – Brainfeeder
Talkdemonic’s live drums and violin bring warmth to the electronic sounds and by matching the nuance in programming with their own playing achieve a heady, cerebral sound that carries powerful emotional push.
Talkdemonic – Mountain Cats
I'm following up Talkdemonicwithgroundislava, and I’m putting the whole Groundislava album here because it’s a classy ride all the way through. It’s at once electronic and organic. Jasper Patterson’s frenetic and perhaps slightly ADD composition process sounds like he jammed a Commodore 64 sound chip into a Never Ending Story VHS and recast the whole shebang on the limn of a sexy Biggie hot tub party.
The headspace this music traverses is vast, but the sounds are always immediate and visceral, so that to plug into it is to be taken on a journey. It’s great to put on if you like to listen to something while you write or while you dance or in my case, where your girlfry creams you in Doctor Mario and then while you act like it wasn’t a big deal.
When vocals come into the mix, the soundscape and the vox themselves are cleverly mixed, maintaining the continuity of the album as a whole. In Panorama featuring Weary, Patterson runs vocoder on Weary’s voice to sway his singing into the electronic realm. This effect, rather than weighing down the vox recasts the entire palette of sounds into a choir of Patterson’s own making.
Like a piñata, this album is filled with candy and suprises, still, in all its nuance, it’s cohesive and driving enough to bear heavy rotation.
Groundislava
The Fuck Buttons compose their sound on a medley of equipment featuring toy keyboards and vocals screamed into a children karaoke tape recorder.
Fuck Buttons – Bright Tomorrow
The first time I saw the Roland SPDS sampling pad, I was in smitten. Though I did procure one, it did not survive the rigors of my life. In the end, it was probably a blessing that my SPDS broke when it fell off the couch arm: My schedule opened up and I was subsequently able to get my life back in order.
The show that lit that fuse for me was Themselves. I’m including the track here where you can really hear the hip hop influenced finger beats stroked out of a sampling pad. Watching the beats form before me opened the idea of the lyrics to me, this unleashing of the id, this natural punch and flow. By seeing the process, I began to understand something more in the music. I saw that the lyrics themselves were playful, that meaning was in the act itself.
Themselves – It’s Them (1999)
Tobacco, keyboardist from Black Moth Super Rainbow, polishes the folky synth sound from BMSR to drive heavy, huge lead lines. BMSR's combination of lo-fi guitar and thick vocoder give them a sound that is seventies electronic wonderland brewed with swamp shed folk. Tobacco and BMSR have huge bodies of awesome work that reward spelunkers mining deep.
Tobacco - Hairy Candy
Black Moth Super Rainbow - Roller Disco
Casino Vs. Japan is one of my favorites. I’m always a sucker for the slow, kick-heavy beats. The big open tempos create a space where veils of synth can flutter from polyrhythms into a wash soundscape where samples unfold. Here a simple beat can become a sea of ideas.
