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dustedmagazine · 8 years ago

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Listening Post, March 2017

It’s been a while since the Dusted staff has gone over the things we’ve been listening to (besides what we’re reviewing) of course, and a (relatively) new year and some new faces seemed like as good an occasion as any. Some witchcraft-based Liars reminiscing starts us off for a conversation that covers everything from the powerful emotions of the new Mount Eerie to a percussion record you can’t get digitally to the blues, and much, much more...

Ian Mathers

I guess one of the things about getting older as a music fan is that there's more chances with every year and every crop of new acts/albums to have a band you love but haven't played or thought about in a while pop into your head apropos of basically nothing. I still remember being back home some holiday weekend in my first year of university, idly flipping on MuchMusic, and seeing Ladytron's video for "Playgirl". It was shockingly out of step with what people were doing in 2001 (or at least what I was paying attention to), and I simultaneously loved it and felt vaguely marginal for doing so. Remembering "Playgirl" had me going back to their old albums, and slightly to my surprise I found that while I love them all (including 604, the most overtly throwback-y) the one that's aged the best is actually their slightly atypical synthpop/shoegaze (synthgaze? shoepop?) Witching Hour, from 2005.

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My wife saw The Witch (or, I guess, The VVitch) when it played as part of the Toronto International Film Festival two years ago, and had been after me to watch it with her ever since, but I only felt in the right mood for it recently. Sure enough I loved it, but while I did think the score/sound design were great, ultimately it mostly had me reaching for my favourite Liars album (and, I suspect more and more, one of my favourite albums full stop), They Were Wrong, So We Drowned. It is, uh, not an optimistic record when it comes to human nature, politics, empathy, xenophobia, etc. I wish this didn't feel like such an apposite historical moment to brace ourselves and remember that sometimes there's just no avoiding the steamroller (cf. "Hold Hands and it Will Happen Anyways”). That the album tries anyways, if for nothing else than at least to leave a record of the injustice, feels important.

Damien Jurado, who has some fans here at Dusted, is a guy who's work I always respect but oddly enough generally can't get into that much; the exception is his 2006 album And Now That I'm in Your Shadow. I found myself listening to it late one night recently, which really is the perfect time for the record. I'd hesitate to call it a narrative, let alone anything like a concept album, but conceptually and emotionally it feels very much of a piece; whether or not these are the same people or even the same places the songs are suffused with desolation, infidelity, murder, loneliness. I've given his more recent work a listen or two and it's always been good but I think it's that for me And Now That I'm in Your Shadow is so singular in effect that Jurado's other work in the Catch 22 of me wanting it both to be exactly the same and somehow not just a retread. I do like one earlier (and creepier) song I heard somewhere, "Amateur Night", so maybe I should just find the album that's on and go from there. But maybe someone here has guidance for me.

Jennifer Kelly

Oh, Ian, you have just brought up two bands I LOVE, and, god dammit, we like different albums.

Per Liars, I am a dyed-in-the-wood They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top fan. It was my gateway, for one thing, to ESG. I am also partial to a split they did early on with Oneida, one of those you-cover-mine-and-I'll-cover-yours deals, so here they are revisiting "Rose and Licorice."

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One of the top live experiences of my entire life was a show with Yeah Yeah Yeahs opening (after the first EP, before the first album), Liars (just off Trench) and Sonic Youth (I'm thinking maybe Murray Street?), where I just kept saying, this cannot get any better, the next band will be a let-down, and then the next band ratcheted it up and obliterated everything before it.

I also like that Jurado album, which was, I believe, the last one before he hooked up with Richard Swift and went less acoustic folk, more psychedelic, but my favorite ever of his is Mariqopa. I feel like he kinda flattened out the mythology by explaining it (circa Brothers and Sisters of the Eternal Sun), but in this album it's just sort of luminously, weirdly there, like a spaceship in the middle of a cornfield. You have no idea what it's about, and that makes it about everything.

Bill Meyer

I can't contribute much to discussion of the Liars or Jurado; neither exerts much attraction upon me. Two records that have ben drawing me back are Jon Mueller's DHRAANWDN (aka Hand Drawn) (Rhythmplex) and Eli Keszler's Last Signs Of Speed (Empty Edition). Both are limited edition double LPs by drummers, and both transcend whatever expectations you might have of a drummer's record. Beyond that they are very different. Mueller's comprises four sides of solo performance drawn from a six hour session he recorded in a Shaker meeting house. The drum kit plays the room's acoustics, resulting in waves of surging, polyrythmic sound. The sleeve, which varies a lot of white space with die-cut cut-outs that reveal a text about transformative experience and images of human-free environments, expresses the album's titular concept, as does the fact that you can only buy the physical object - there aren't even any digital promos.

Keszler's album, on the other hand, is a response to his performances over the past couple years at electronic music and dance venues. The extravagant bass presence counterbalances the precisely choreographed blizzard of discrete sounds that he generates with the rest of his kit, creating an impression of multi-dimensional space. Keszler creates a virtual space in part through physical effort, while Mueller inhabits a space that is physical but devoted to the spiritual. Both records are beyond solid.

Derek Taylor

I can’t really speak to any of Ian’s musical selections so I’ll speak to his filmic one instead. I too loved the The VVitch for its exacting verisimilitude and expertly wrought and rising dread. Lots of great themes to unpack therein and Robert Eggers decision to go all in on a “what if there was actual veracity to events presaging to the Salem hysteria” scenario is a bold one as is the “damned if they do, damned if they don’t” plot arc of the film. Great casting too and a hair-raisingly satisfying denouement in the primeval (or is that prime evil?) woods that still sticks with me.

As to listening it’s been the usual juggle of new releases with older favorites. On the former front there’s, Deuce, tenorist Stephen Riley’s latest duo with pianist Peter Zak. The pair has a previous encounter and two more with Zak as a member of Riley’s quartet. It’s the usual amalgam of ancient standards this time with three interstitial “Interludes” by Riley interspersed and a gorgeous rendering of Joe Henderson’s “Tetragon”. They also tackle my favorite standard “Everything Happens to Me”, Riley pulling apart and contorting the melody like fluffy cotton candy with his inimitable hardened-reed rasp and without losing sight of the gentle fatalism at the tune’s core.

In terms of classics, it’s been the series of bootlegs documenting the Charles Mingus Sextet/Quintet's 1964 American/European tour (Cornell, Town Hall, Amsterdam, Oslo, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Bremen, Paris x2, Wuppertal, and Stuttgart). Every date has its ample charms, but the Cornell University hit released on Blue Note back in ’07 is the one I go back to most frequently, both for the quality of the concert and its capture on tape. Trumpeter Johnny Coles had yet to fall ill and is featured splendidly alongside Eric Dolphy and Clifford Jordan and calling Jaki Byard and Dannie Richmond a rhythm section is like reductively referring to James Baldwin as an African American author, it barely scratches the surface.

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Bill Meyer: Peak Mingus!

Jennifer Kelly: Have any of you been listening to Mount Eerie's A Crow Looked at Me? So powerful, so beautiful, absolutely harrowing...but I can't imagine how you could possibly review it.

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Bill Meyer: I've never listened to Mount Eerie much, but this one is in my inbox and I didn't delete it because of the story attached to it. I think I need to check it out.

Ian Mathers: I need to get my hands on that Mount Eerie and listen, but I'll admit to being a bit daunted... my mother-in-law died in 2015 and it made (for example) the Sufjan Stevens album from last year a simultaneously important and really challenging listen. My wife is still dealing with a lot of the emotional fallout, and we are both Microphones fans from back in the day, so I might give it some solo listens first, so she has some idea of how tough it might be.

Jenny, I absolutely adore They Threw Us All in a Trench... too, I wish I'd had the chance to see them around then! I'm sure they're still good in concert, but there's something about that record that seems like it would be ferocious live. And your cornfield spaceship description honestly makes me really excited to check out Mariqopa—honestly the fact that Jurado did extend the mythology made me a bit wary, but as a standalone maybe I can approach it.

Bill, that Kezsler sample is pretty damn interesting.

Mason Jones

I'm a fan of Liars' They Threw Us... as well, and saw them around that time here in SF playing with Animal Collective if I recall correctly. They put on an entertaining show. That album and They Were Wrong... were both pretty powerful at the time, and then they lost steam somehow and became more predictable. Interestingly I thought their most recent album, Mess, was an improvement. Though slicker than it needed to be, there were good ideas percolating through it.

On the newer side, I've been surprised by how much I'm enjoying the newest Grails album, Chalice Hymnal. It's a pretty great combination of heaviness, stonedness, and kosmische rock. I also stumbled on the self-titled album by Helén, which is intriguing. Some is reminiscent of early Circle given the strong rhythmic foundation, but it gets into some rock-epic portions and, I don't know, prog-opera-something? Hard to describe and I haven't made up my mind whether it all works or not. But it's a worthy listen.

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Bill Meyer: All right, I'm going to check out Mount Eerie.

I'll mention one other thing I've been playing lately. Having spent a bit of time with the Bruce Langhorne tribute album The Hired Hands this past month and the excellent Robbie Basho tribute Basket Full Of Dragons last fall, I'm ready to turn down my disdain for tribute records - at least when they involve very strong acoustic musicians honoring a great guitar player. So I dug out the first Basho Tribute, We Are All One, In The Sun, which was released by Important Records in 2010. I've been playing it over and over. Like Dragons, it was assembled by Buck Curran , who sure knows how to pick people who know their Basho. It begins and ends with Steffen Basho-Junghans playing variations on a couple of his namesake's tunes on a 12-string, and his lyric extrapolations make me really wish he would put out another record and finally tour the USA. But that's not to slight the excellent contributions by Meg Baird, Helena Espvall, and several others.

Brett Marion

I was witness to that same fantastic Liars/Yeah Yeah Yeahs tour leg too, caught them upstairs at the Magic Stick in Detroit. I was pretty smitten with Karen O at the time—from the cover of that first ep, and the range of her vocals—sometimes country accent, sometimes speak-sing, sometimes fragile, like on that “Crimson & Clover”-esque last song, “Our Time,” and then how she impossibly strangles the title to “aaaaaaaarrrrrrt staaaaaarrrr.” And Liars’ Angus Andrews seemed like seven feet tall. He might be. Great stage presence, both bands—exuding lots of confidence and attitude—but naïve, friendly, and approachable. I liked Trench a lot but thought They Were Wrong, So We Drowned was even better—it just nailed an overall Halloween feel.

Lately, I’ve had a hard time digging too deep in any one direction. The last half year or so I’ve been doing okay keeping up with Stephan Mathieu’s ambitious 12 CD release, Radiance, issued one month at a time, I think he’s through about ten so far. The last two, To Have Elements Exist In Space and Feldman have been one-track near hour-long pieces, so I haven’t made it all the way through those yet. The newest Six Organs of Admittance, Taylor Deupree, and PAN label stuff have been on, but not absorbed entirely. I also find myself getting sidetracked with making compilations that I occasionally post on Mixcloud (sort of the whole ‘80s-‘90s ‘mixtape’ thingy I’m sure we’ve all done for people), my latest—not completed—mixes/drafts being a ‘beginner’s guide to Alice Coltrane’ and ‘GAS,’ but it’s always a long process and I only ever get around to completing one or two a year, tops.

Bill Meyer: What does Mathieu sound like these days? I'm a bit out of the loop, although I have enjoyed some of his records immensely in the past.

Brett Marion: He sounds quite a bit like he always has—that grainy, shifting textural drone. Some tracks hit where it hurts so good, while others… meh. The last few year’s it seems he’s been into exploring more long-form pieces. One release, Nachtstucke, from 2015, featured a one hour piece, a piece over two hours, then two more around the half an hour mark. I wonder how many have made it through that over two hour piece more than once.

Bill Meyer: Well, I did just buy an LP he made with Kassel Jaeger and Akira Rabelai, I'll see how that one goes. Can't get everything.

Matt Wuethrich

I assume you mean Zauberberg on Shelter Press, Bill? Excellent LP. It's very diffuse in structure but still feels like there's a lot to take in. It's kind of a marvel how they embed they approaches within each other and shapeshift through different sonic spaces (Mathieu's manipulations of mechanical/acoustic historical recordings, Jaeger's field recordings, Rabelai’s digital treatments).

In my own listening I've been pretty deep into the official reissue of Giusto Pio's Motore immobile on Soave, sublime minimalism from Italy that first probably appeared on most people's radar through Alan Licht's minimalism lists (specifically Minimalism Top Ten III). Just organ/piano, voice and violin. Rich and hypnotic.

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Bill Meyer: Yes, that's the one. I haven't scratched the surface but I am glad to hear that you find it deep. Gotta check out the Pio.

Justin Cober-Lake

I've been digging into a somewhat random cross-section of blues recently, connected to a project looking at possible points of connection between that genre and psalms of lamentation and maybe the book of Lamentations (though that may have a different focus). I don't have much to say on the subject yet, but I've been thinking about how the hill country artists really dig into an issue and stick there until it's worked out (or until the tape runs out or whatever). Charles Caldwell is the guy standing out to me right now, particularly his confused complaint on "Hadn't I Been Good to You." The Junior Kimbrough I grabbed this morning, All Night Long, was a sort of comical comparison, since it's largely a sex album.

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There's something about the groove that makes this connection more noticeable, though I'm not sure how much it will translate to trance-blues acts like Otis Taylor (or even R.L. Burnside) who often use repetition more to set up storytelling or to do other things.

Derek Taylor: That’s an area of music near & dear to me, Justin. I coincidentally spun that Caldwell album this weekend too after re-opening a rabbit hole with the George Mitchell Collection box set. Such a shame it was Caldwell's first & last. Kimbrough (and really nearly all of those hill country guys from Burnside on down to T Model Ford) had copulation on the brain much of the time and its more misogynistic manifestations ("You Better Run") more often that I'd like.

I remember catching Burnside prior to & during the self-parody phases of his career and being pretty demoralized by the latter seeing him run through the tropes (“Well, well, well…”), and take copious swigs off a decapitated kewpie doll filled to the severed neck w/ whiskey. T-Model Ford was like that too (“It’s Jack Daniel’s Time!!!”, apparently between EVERY song). Fat Possum did a lot of arguable good in getting those guys gigs/tours/etc., but they did a fair share of bad too in enabling/reinforcing a lot of their worst tendencies.

Guessing you‘re familiar w/ Mitchell & the box, but if not I can’t recommend it highly enough. Mitchell did work similar to the Lomaxes, but with a level of candor & self-awareness that they often lacked. The accompanying booklet is nearly as priceless as the music as it’s filled with anecdotes of Mitchell’s travels & encounters, often hilariously so. This missive about Big Joe Williams is one of my favorites as it really captures the essence of the guy: "At one point, we drove with him down to St. Louis to find Walter Davis and Henry Townsend. On the way down, Big Joe announced that he had to take a shit, and I told him we'd pull into the next service station. And he said, "No, I like country shits. Just pull over to the side of the road—I want to take me a good old country shit."

Matt Wuethrich: A big, big second on that George Mitchell set...it seems to be rather low profile considering the wealth of material on it. Every time I spin it I discover some new gem. (For five discs, it's relatively inexpensive, too.)

Jennifer Kelly: Anyone else (besides Bill Meyer, who’s reviewed it) into that new Tinariwen? And, quick question, if anyone has access to liners, is that Mark Lanegan?

Also really, really digging that the Bug Vs. Earth collaboration, so dark and clanky and post-atom-bomb-ish, exactly what I need at this point.

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Bill Meyer: That’s Lanegan.

Ian Mathers: I've heard you and others praise the Bug Vs. Earth album, Jenny, and honestly the two make for such weirdly fitting collaborators I'd want to check it out just based on the combination. "Dark and clanky and post-atom-bomb-ish" sounds about perfect for 2017. Would you mind uploading it to the drive at some point?

The blues are one of those genres where I know I like at least some of it, but something's kept me from going much deeper with it. My dad got the (de rigeur, I assume) Robert Johnson box set when I was a kid and I love a lot of that, and I've gotten the odd album or comp I've loved from Son House or Howlin' Wolf or Buddy Guy (in the latter case, specifically Sweet Tea) but that itch feels mostly scratched at this point?

Bill Meyer: I just listened to a bit of it, Ian. Yeah, it's dark and clanky all right. I think the sounds are cool, and I'm intrigued that the Bug has cottoned to Earth's restraint. I expected an attempt to lure Earth into less measured venting of darkness.

Derek Taylor: Guy’s Sweet Tea is a curious case as it involved him jumping on the Hill Country bandwagon w/ Kimbrough & Cedell Davis covers and a Fat Possum production facsimile. Some called it a crass cash-in, others a sincere stab at homage. I don’t go back to it often & when I do just in doses, but considering Guy’s place in the music I’m inclined to go with the latter take. Guy’s been a proponent of commercially viable blues since he got his start in Chicago with Muddy Waters, so it makes sense that he would be attracted the Fat Possum aesthetic at that time although the guys there have taken pains over the years to stress just how shakey that business paradigm is in the larger music business scheme.

Speaking of Davis, he’s definitely one to delve into especially the early material released on the L+R Living Country Blues USA series, half a cd, Highway 61, on the Wolf label, and his first for Fat Possum, Feel Like Doin’ Something Wrong. Utterly unique approach to slide guitar necessitated by partial paralysis from a youthful bout with polio. Some enterprising (if largely erroneous) journalist dubbed him the “Ornette Coleman of blues guitar”, if I recall correctly, for his ability to make familiar fascinatingly foreign through tonal plasticity. He’s apparently still kicking at 89 and put a record out last year. Some vintage footage:

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Ben Donnelly

Liars’ dedication to conceptual switcheroos shows the long-term hazards of being dedicated to approaching each album as a blank slate. My fatigue has generally increased each time I try out the latest Liars, to the point that I don't check their releases out right away. I'm sure I'm missing some gems in there, and suspect it will all make more sense in the future. The ramblings of The Fall and Wire fifteen years into their careers makes more sense now. That said, that first pivot between the on-trend disco punk to graveyard junkyard percussion was landmark, one of those moments where the leading edge re-shuffles the received history. The arc from 1981 Danceteria to No Wave to Einstruzende Neubauten is pretty direct, but by 2000, all I could see was that one end resulted in "Love Shack" and the other in post-rock. Liars sent out a big signal - they were looking at history differently, felt free to jump between the connections they saw, and their revision enlivened everything. The early single "You Know I Hate Stupid Phones" goes a lot of places in two minutes, one of those gems that gets lost in their constant shuffle:

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Ladytron I like even better. Artists who are so ready for Vogue Italia will always be held in suspicion in less fashionable quarters. I liken them to Siouxsie and the Banshees: art bands who are facile with hooks and glamour to the extent that it's easy to underestimate them. Approaching both, there's the temptation to put aside the style statements and the associations with lesser goth/electro acts and try take the brilliant singles and remixes as stand-alone artifacts. But that's a mistake—the mascara is as necessary as with Bowie and Prince. When they declared "they only want you when you're seventeen, when you're twenty one you're no fun" it's impossible to tell which side of the cynicism holds their sympathies. Probably both, which is why their best tracks frequently slap me like I haven't heard them a hundred times. This high concept obscurity, Missy Elliot rethought as Japanese synth-punk, still bewilders.

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Ian Mathers: Derek, that Cedell Davis video is damn good, I'll have to track down an album.

Ben, I can't believe I forgot to mention Ladytron's "Oops" cover—literally one of one my favourite covers ever, and one where I love both it and the original about equally in a way that means I don't even know which one I'd pick if forced to (and also, incidentally, the place where Ladytron got closest to Add N to (X), if anyone remembers them). That early Liars track, though, I'd somehow never heard. I really, really love the bass sound on their early records.

Derek Taylor: Tenorist Fred Anderson’s birthday yesterday (he would’ve been 88) sparked a shelf perusal of his work. The flurry of activity in his final years leaves a pretty respectable discography. I opted for Black Horn Long Gone on Southport, a ’90 studio trio session in Chicago with Malachi Favors and the erstwhile AJ Shelton released in ’09. It’s a loose & limber date with Favors negotiating Fred’s singular horn vernacular in a sometimes akimbo manner that takes a bit of getting used to. Shelton, operating under his woke moniker Ajaramu, isn’t always entirely on the same page either, but occasional surface discombobulations don’t detract in the least from the deep reservoir of feeling feeding the music. The solo “Ode to Clifford Jordan” is the rare chance on record to hear Fred in that format for the duration of a piece.

Time spent with Anderson usually means revisiting the other two Freds that comprise my Fred triumvirate, McDowell & Wesley. Currently ears-deep in the Arhoolie collection Good Morning Little School Girl which cherry-picks from McDowell’s Janus-worthy repertoire of blues and spirituals. His wife Annie Mae & a small contingent from their Como, MS congregation join him on a couple of the latter.

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