nickneyland

[nickneyland]

2018, in no particular order.

Julia Holter - Aviary

Grouper - Grid of Points

U.S. Girls - In a Poem Unlimited

Tim Hecker - Konoyo

Pram - Across the Meridian

Oneida - Romance

Low - Double Negative

Jóhann Jóhannsson - Mandy Soundtrack

Vessel - Queen of the Golden Dogs

Colin Self - Siblings

Autechre - NTS Sessions

Beak - >>>

Lotic - Power

Goat Girl - Goat Girl

Dustin Wong - Fluid World Building 101

Aphex Twin - Collapse

Oliver Coates - Shelly's on Zenn-la

Tirzah - Devotion

Yves Tumor - Safe in the Hands of Love

Papa M - A Broke Moon Rises

Jlin - Autobiography

Laurel Halo - Raw Silk Uncut Wood

M Geddes Gengras - Hawaiki Tapes

Kate NV - для FoOR

Body/Head - The Switch

Gang Gang Dance - Kazuashita

Peaking Lights - Sea of Sand

Sophie - Oil of Every Pearl's Un-Insides

Cavern of Anti-Matter - Hormone Lemonade

The Breeders - All Nerve

Mouse On Mars - Dimensional People

[nickneyland]

2017, in no particular order.

Visible Cloaks - Reassemblage

Jlin - Black Origami

Bing & Ruth - No Home of the Mind

Various - Mono No Aware

Ryuichi Sakamoto - async

Pauline Anna Strom - Trans-Millenia Music

Children of Alice - Children of Alice

Dean Hurley - Anthology Resource 1

Alice Coltrane - World Spirituality Classics 1

Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith - The Kid

Various - Outro Tempo: Electronic And Contemporary Music From Brazil 1978-1992

Circuit Des Yeux - Reaching for Indigo

Man Forever - Play What They Want

Horse Lords - Mixtape IV

Bitchin Bajas - Baja Fresh

Eric Copeland - Goofballs

Actress - AZD

Equiknoxx - Colón Man

Dustin Wong & Takako Minekawa - Are Euphoria

Lee Gamble - Mnestic Pressure

Colin Stetson - All This I Do For Glory

Yoko Ono - Fly

Various - Sensate Silk

Laurel Halo - Dust

James Holden - The Animal Spirits

The Focus Group - Stop-Motion Happening

Peaking Lights - The Fifth State of Consciousness

Neil Young - Hitchhiker

Flying Saucer Attack - New Lands

Fever Ray - Plunge

Look Blue Go Purple - Still Bewitched

Sparks - Hippopotamus

Four Tet - New Energy

LCD Soundsystem - american dream

EMA - Exile In The Outer Ring

Björk - Utopia

Oneohtrix Point Never - Good Time OST

Kendrick Lamar - DAMN

Can - The Singles

Delia Gonzalez - Horse Follows Darkness

Ben Frost - The Centre Cannot Hold

Tod Dockstader - Eight Electronic Pieces

[nickneyland]

“I’ll come back later and pick up my stuff when the flipping place don’t stink so bad.” 

Heard the radio edit version of Dinosaur Jr’s “Freak Scene” this morning (”don’t let me freak now will you”) and it got me thinking about the crazy art of over-dubbing in music and films. To make them, y’know, more family friendly. Alex Cox was even generous enough to add a few deleted scenes to the TV cut of Repo Man, including this one with the now-classic replacement of “motherfucker” with “melon farmer”:

The line “I’m going indie” caused a lot of confusion in my indie-rock addled, mostly (at the time) un-Americanized brain when I first saw it. 

D12′s “Purple Hills,” their heavily altered version of “Purple Pills,” is kind of a masterpiece of this genre, if it can be called that. It’s actually pretty inventive. Favorite line: “He’s upstairs wrestling with Elton John” (changed from: “He’s upstairs naked with a weapon drawn”). 

[nickneyland]

With google translate working as an unreliable narrator of sorts, this appears to be a Japanese commercial for Jim O’Rourke branded sake. Made by the “music vibration aging process” [via McKuw]. Of course, Simple Songs makes a whole lot more sense now the air has finally turned crisp outside. I couldn’t quite get back to the right head space when I first heard it, but now it’s a lovely soundtrack when crushing leaves underfoot. 

[nickneyland]

Great footage, coming off like a group of krautrock legends mistakenly turning up on the set of Mike Leigh’s Nuts in May. At one point there seems to be a mildly disgruntled bloke leaving in a huff, his beige colored afternoon perfectly ruined by this group of longhairs. And they’re playing under a fucking garden umbrella. Priceless.

Teaser for new Harmonia collection showing pastoral garden performance footage. 

[nickneyland]

Been working furiously recently, with barely a moment to raise my head above the parapet. Somehow I’ve ended up being consumed by the Big Music in moments when things get overwhelming. I think I need that surge of big, empty energy to get through it all. 

This has probably been remarked on elsewhere--it’s hard to find much writing on the Big Music as a concept, maybe because it’s difficult to google--but to me it’s roughly akin to musical Diet Coke. A big empty buzz is still a buzz when you’re in the moment with it, you just have to deal with the creeping feelings of doubt and unfulfillment in the aftermath.

(and, y’know, I’m mostly talking about the shit end of the stick here - not Echo & the Bunnymen and the Chameleons and stuff that’s reasonably fêted. Simple Minds’ utterly vacant Sparkle in the Rain is the pinnacle of it all for me). 

Tom Ewing said it best here:

“This widescreen, broad-brush rock music repels and fascinates me simultaneously. It's repellent because I feel manipulated by it, dragged into a state of emotive groupthink I want to kick out against. And it's fascinating because the manipulation sometimes works: Every so often the Big Music gets right under my skin.”

Choice cuts:

[nickneyland]

A feature I had the pleasure of putting together on the Bristol-based Flying Saucer Attack/Third Eye Foundation/Movietone/etc scene. Must admit that Instrumentals 2015 kind of drifted over me--decent enough, but it didn’t feel like there was much to hold onto. I saw FSA at one point in the 90s, at an endearingly ramshackle show. Pearce played the entire gig through the same model of (cheap, tiny) practice amp that my parents bought for me when I was a teenager. There’s something great about seeing really crappy, unreliable gear on stage, not just for the anyone-can-do-this feel, but also because there’s a certain thrill in knowing everything could go horribly wrong at any moment.

[nickneyland]

This is the “Moog” version of Stereolab’s “Super Falling Star,” taken from a magazine/CD compilation issued at some point in the ‘90s. If the ‘lab do ever come back, and I guess that possibility is still open, I wouldn’t mind at all if it sounded something like this. Stripped down, no drums, getting closer toward the kosmische side of krautrock rather than Dinger’s metronomic precision. It’s got beauty, sadness, and a few playful tweaks of star-trailing synth, all just quietly whirling in time. 

[nickneyland]

Been on a 4AD kick lately, largely due to reading Martin Aston’s great Facing the Other Way: The Story of 4AD. The cover of Big Star’s “Holocaust” above is a particular favorite. I like how Howard Devoto, for it is he singing, wasn’t too reverent--definitely a wise move considering how hard it would be to get down to the blackness that was encircling Chilton at the time. 

Dif Juz have been a good discovery from the book that I hadn’t heard before, although they can get a little too chilly and uninvolving for my tastes. Surprised at how many ructions there were in the 4AD family, it always seemed so unified from the outside. There’s not much love lost between Ivo and Robin Guthrie, although most or all of the acrimony seems to flow from the latter toward the former. I guess that’s the problem when you attempt to stamp a brand identity across multiple artists.

[nickneyland]

Love this circa-1969 track from Brazilian psych-rock heads Os Brazões, who were essentially Gal Costa's backing band indulging in a great wall of fuzz. The signature sound that runs through it, the one that sounds like a strangulated buzzard, is surely ripe for sampling. And the album it's from, I think their only recording, is getting reissued right about now.

[nickneyland]

Here's something I wrote about the new Carter Tutti record.

[nickneyland]

My bedroom walls are papered with the stripes of Newcastle United Between which I perceive the presence of a horse-headed figure Holding aloft a flaming quiver of bramble silhouettes He is the King of Children Singing like a boiler: 'Tomorrow is on its way'

I hadn't seen the video for this until last week, which is no bad thing because I think it's best viewed in tandem with this recently published (incredible) interview with Dawson on the Quietus. Something I like about Dawson is how he sees some form of magic in the everyday--the mundanity of Newcastle United's stripes with a horse-headed figure bursting through them, like Rust Cohle parsing Alan Sillitoe through the imagined face in the water from the first volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle.

Usually I don't care to read too much about process in art, and from the Quietus piece it seems Dawson is of that mind as well. But I like how he trails a few clues about his method through the interview. The first thing I thought when I heard the lyrics above was of sleep paralysis--a condition where you're caught somewhere between sleeping and waking, your body momentarily unable to move, while vaguely terrifying hallucinations play out somewhere between your mind and the room you're in at the time.

I've only suffered one instance of sleep paralysis--I don't even know if "suffered" is the right word--where a large hole appeared to open up in the wall across from the bed I was sleeping in at the time. There was something trying to get through the hole, although what it was I don't know, and I've subsequently been torn between feeling glad I didn't find out and really wanting to know. 

Being unable to move in that instance was far more terrifying than the actual hallucination, it was like my entire body was a dead weight, pinning me down, becoming as one with the bed underneath. It's rare that you get a real sense of how much human body parts weigh. I once lost feeling in one of my feet after working in construction on a film set, a problem that eventually got solved via acupuncture. But the most remarkable aspect of it was just how heavy the weight was down there once it became dead meat I was temporarily schlepping around.

This ties into something else I like about "The Vile Stuff"; the frailty of the human body, through an inability to process alcohol, or heads cracking open, or fractured cheekbones, or a Philips-head screwdriver piercing through young flesh. It doesn't surprise me that Dawson spends so long on his lyrics. There's so much detail strung across a few words, and he can easily turn specificity into suggestion in a heartbeat, which is no mean feat. Fingers crossed he makes it to these United States in the not-too distant future. 

[nickneyland]

I wrote about this great track by Lotic here. 

Basically, “The Ha Dance” is to ballroom what “Sing Sing” is to Baltimore club or “Pulse X” is to UK grime: a song that’s been hacked to pieces and turned inside out by thousands of versions and bootleg remixes.

Quote from this RBMA feature. Somehow, as this track demonstrates, there's still more mileage in there. 

[nickneyland]

Let's get this day started off right.

[nickneyland]

#2014

Here’s a long list of my favorite albums of 2014. It’s interesting that we’re about half way through the decade and it feels a little rudderless so far, although defining qualities are usually easier to ascribe after the fact. Lots of tiny micro scenes, but not a whole lot that adds up to an over-arching narrative. 

For me, the highlights of 2014 came through extremely specific talents—the pointed observations of Sleaford Mods, the scissor-sharp methodology of Richard Dawson. If something does tie together the music coming out of the UK at present, it’s in a strong end-of-things vibe: the brick wall electronics of Actress, Fat White Family partying in the face of calamity, Girl Band pulling out (of all things) the tendrils of arsequake.

My favorite writing of my own from this year, what little of it there was, is here, here, here, here, and here.

01 Todd Terje: It’s Album Time 02 Ariel Pink: pom pom 03 Swans: To Be Kind 04 Aphex Twin: Syro 05 The Body: I Shall Die Here 06 Actress: Ghettoville 07 Sleaford Mods: Divide and Exit 08 Ben Frost: A U R O R A 09 Richard Dawson: Nothing Important 10 Flying Lotus: You’re Dead!

11 Shellac: Dude Incredible 12 Grouper: Ruins 13 Perfect Pussy: Say Yes to Love 14 Brian Eno, Karl Hyde: High Life 15 Sunn O))), Scott Walker: Soused 16 OOIOO: Gamel 17 Pharmakon: Bestial Burden 18 Fatima Al Qadiri: Asiatisch 19 Roman Flügel: Happiness Is Happening 20 Sculpture: Membrane Pop

21 Kassem Mosse: Workshop 19 22 Bitchin Bajas: Bitchin Bajas 23 Nils Frahm: Spaces 24 Andy Stott: Faith in Strangers 25 Container: Adhesive 26 Perc: The Power and the Glory 27 FKA twigs: LP1 28 Blank Realm: Grassed Inn 29 Viet Cong: “Cassette” EP 30 Klara Lewis: Ett

31 M. Geddes Gengras: Ishi 32 Objekt: Flatland 33 EMA: The Future’s Void 34 Real Estate: Atlas 35 These New Puritans: Expanded (Live at the Barbican) 36 Torn Hawk: Through Force of Will 37 Ought: More Than Any Other Day 38 Oren Ambarchi, Stephen O’Malley, Randall Dunn: Shade Themes From Kairos 39 Sun Kil Moon: Benji 40 Clark: Clark

41 Sun Araw: Belomancie 42 Pan Sonic: Oksastus 43 Tinariwen: Emmaar 44 Mr Twin Sister: Mr Twin Sister 45 Marissa Nadler: July 46 Lee Gamble: KOCH 47 Leyland Kirby: Breaks My Heart Each Time 48 Copeland: Because I’m Worth It 49 Fennesz: Bécs 50 Bing & Ruth: Tomorrow Was the Golden Age

[nickneyland]

Here is a history of Boredoms I was invited to write by Red Bull Music Academy. This was a lot of fun to do. One of my favorite things I stumbled across while researching it was this last.fm shoutbox for "Acid Police", in which people offer their interpretations of what EYE is singing. "I said, polish shed" being a particular favorite. 

[nickneyland]

Really enjoying the astringent Body/Head cover art, it feels like a lot of thought goes into it. Also, it's by far the most impactful post-Sonic Youth project to my mind.