#ep. when a catfish meets its match

[dustedmagazine]

Dust Volume Five, Number 8

Graham Dunning and his mechanical techno rig

Our occasional survey of records we might have missed continues with a late July edition of Dust. This time around, our hot and hazy listening spanned localities and genres from Norwegian folk to Black Dirt jam to Swedish dream pop to Ohio noise-electronics, Kashmiri war metal and well beyond, with the usual stop-over in Chicago for free-improv jazz. Writers included Bill Meyer, Justin Cober-Lake, Ian Mathers, Jennifer Kelly, Jonathan Shaw, Andrew Forell and Nate Knaebel. Stay cool.

Erlend Apneseth Trio with Frode Haltli — Salika, Molika CD (Hubro)

Salika, Molika by Erlend Apneseth Trio

This project unites two musicians who have set themselves the task of reconciling contemporary means with Norwegian folk music materials in the 21st century. Erlend Apneseth plays Hardanger fiddle, a violin variant with sympathetic strings that give it a striking resonance; his trio includes a drummer with a feel for Norway’s pre-rock popular dance grooves and an acoustic guitarist who doubles on sampler and other electronics. Frode Haltli is an accordionist who has shuttled between the worlds of folk and free improvisation. Their collaboration scrambles lucid memory, which is represented by archival field recordings of folk songs and dances, with a mildly feverish dream of a trip through ambient textures that somehow detours every now and then through beats that’d earn you an extra beer if you played them in a Nordic country dance hall. The field recordings exert a gravity that counteracts the lightness of the spacy passages, and Haltli tucks his virtuoso command of the squeezebox into hiding spots, ripe for discovery.

Bill Meyer

 Hans Chew & Garcia Peoples — NATCH 10: Hans Chew & Garcia Peoples (Black Dirt Studio)

NATCH 10 - Hans Chew & Garcia Peoples by Hans Chew & Garcia Peoples

After a few years off, Jason Meagher's Black Dirt Studio has resumed its NATCH series of releases, with volume nine (ignoring the prefatory release) coming from Wednesday Knudsen and Willie Lane in June, and the latest pairing Hans Chew and Garcia Peoples. The series offers artists the freedom to collaborate however they please to create freely available releases. Chew and Garcia Peoples make for an ideal match on paper, and the actual pairing pays off.  

Garcia Peoples started their cosmic psych just last year, with two albums out in short order. Pianist Chew has been putting in his time for longer, taking his roots-of-rock and Southern rock sound into increasingly spacey places, turning more and more toward a jam sensibility without sacrificing his songwriting. His Open Sea started taking hints from Traffic, so it's no surprise that this release includes a Dave Mason cover, “Shouldn't Have Took More Than You Gave.” Chew fits effortlessly into Garcia Peoples' jams for a couple tracks, and they meet him in his bluesy-ness for “No Time.” In the middle we have the acidic meditation of “All Boredoms Entertained,” the hinge between the two more rocking segments. The partnership works best when everybody takes off, and the 10-minute opener “Hourglass” burns as hot on record as it would at a festival.

Justin Cober-Lake

 Death & Vanilla — Are You a Dreamer? (Fire)

Are You A Dreamer? By Death & Vanilla

On their third album, this trio from Malmö, Sweden show a devotion to making the most gossamer strain of dream pop without ever losing sight of a knack for peppily compelling song structures. Two of those four earlier albums may have been live soundtracks for movies, but none of these eight deceptively sharply-written songs fade into the background for a second. Singer Marleen Nilsson may be swathed in gauzy atmospherics throughout, but whether on the swooning opener “A Flaw in the Iris,” the foreboding thrum of “Mercier” or the orchestral surges of “Nothing Is Real,” she effortlessly commands center stage here. The music deserves the obvious comparisons to Stereolab and early Broadcast, but Death & Vanilla manage to put their own spin on the influences they share with those earlier acts, and the result is a good reminder that there more than enough room on that territory for multiple bands.

Ian Mathers

 Graham Dunning — Tentation LP (White Denim)

Walk Tentation down on the turntable without foreknowledge of who made it or how it was made, and you’re likely to think that you’re hearing a bit of in sync but off-kilter techno. It sounds like some lost Kompakt release got shaken up and dubbed out with a bag half full of Lego pieces. But the truth is stranger than that. Graham Dunning plays a real time mechanical techno with a homemade, eternally changeable set-up that can simultaneously play a stack of records whilst affording him the means to fuck with individual sounds. True to his techno ambitions, this stuff bumps in ways the kids won’t question. But his willingness to get hung up on a sound and play with it, and then play with it a bit more, mark him as an experimenter with a feline sense of play. “Do I put a bit more reverb on this bit of echo,” one can imagine him musing, “or do I just knock it under this bump in the rug?”

Bill Meyer

  Erin Durant — Islands (Keeled Scales)

Islands by Erin Durant

Erin Durant has a lovely, old-fashioned country voice, flute-y with vibrato at the top-end, rich with emotive sustenance in the mid and lower ranges. It’s the kind of voice that careers are built on, yet Ms. Durant, born in New Orleans now living in Brooklyn, refuses to take the easy road of relying on in-born talents. She brings into complication, depth and contradiction into her songs with a sharp, modern writer’s pen and an idiosyncratic cast of supporting musicians. Her crew on Islands is headed by TV on the Radio’s Kyp Malone and includes percussion-centric composer Otto Hauser, the boundary pushing pedal steel artist Jon Catfish DeLorme, at least once on harmonica, the eccentric folk singer Kath Bloom, and a large ensemble of brass and reeds. So when on opener “Rising Sun,” she playfully dabs at the Animals’ blues-rock chestnut (verses begin with the phrase “There is a house in New Orleans”), it’s within a precise lattice of country guitar, of multi-tonal percussion, of flickering bits of flute and woozy surges of trombone and trumpet. It lighter and more delicately structured than the song it references, yet built out elaborately with complex layers of instruments. The title cut, likewise, lifts off in airy weightlessness from the gospel chords of piano, as tied to tradition as it needs to be for resonance, yet fundamentally self-determined. There is nothing lovelier than Durant’s massed, multi-voiced choruses here, but the prettiness isn’t everything, far from it.

Jennifer Kelly

 Four Letter Words — Pinch Point (Amalgam Music)

Pinch Point by Four Letter Words

The Chicago-based trio Four Letter Words comes full circle on its second album. Pianist Matt Piet, tenor saxophonist Jake Wark and drummer Bill Harris first convened to play a night of trios at the venue Constellation, but then pursued an investigation of written material before returning to spontaneous music making for this nicely packaged, short run disc. You can get a lot out of this music by focusing on Harris’ inventiveness and humility, or Wark’s angular impetuousness or Piet’s astonishing capacity to pick the best ideas of a half century of jazz practice and put them in just the right places. But you might get more from listening to how the trio collectively imagines musical environments, realizes them, and then pushes off to the next idea at just the right moment to leave you wishing they’d stayed a little longer.

Bill Meyer

  Jake Xerxes Fussell — Out of Sight (Paradise of Bachelors)

Guitarist Jake Xerxes Fussell has a knack for curating old music, but his first two albums were more than simple collections of reworked folk music. His sharp playing and intelligent production (give William Tyler some credit here) have turned old tunes into something a little more vibrant. For Out of Sight, he adds a proper band to his presentation, and the presence of Nathan Bowles on drums is worth noting, even if that sympatico artist largely keeps in the background. In expanding his lineup, Fussell also expands his sound; he no longer just mines particular folk traditions, but instead he inserts himself into a larger Americana conversation. 

The move, intentionally or not, puts more of Fussell himself into the album, to its benefit. If anything held back his previous releases, it was this sense at the edges of the sound that Fussell had tied his own hands, his traditionalism tending toward that curator impulse. The songs on Out of Sight come from a variety of places (though if you plotted most of them on a Seeger-Lomax axis, it would make sense), but they're put into Fussell's current vision. “Three Ravens” builds a broad frame for a singular meditation, the sort of moment his work has hinted at without maintaining. Fussell sounds like he's deep in tradition, but committed to pushing it forward in his own way know, and it's a wonderful step for a gifted artist.

Justin Cober-Lake

 Halshug — Drøm (Southern Lord)

Drøm by Halshug

“Kæmper Imod,” the first track on Halshug’s new LP Drøm, could easily fit onto the second side of Black Flag’s The First Four Years, which chronicles the singles and EPs the Flag released during Dez Cadena’s tenure as front man. The Danish hardcore band hits all the necessary notes, channeling Greg Ginn’s ugly guitar tone and the vicious, overdriven quality of Southern Cali hardcore, c. 1981. The song might be a love letter, but the first side of Drøm doesn’t move far beyond the established sounds of a style now nearly 40 years old. On second side of the record, Halshug does some more varied stuff. “Tænk På Dig Selv” shifts in and out of competing rhythms and makes a winning ruckus. Most interesting are the industrial racket of “02.47” and the extended instrumental “Illusion,” which moves from hard rocking groove, to thunderously exuberant crusty riffing, to arcing drone, and then back again. It’s a hugely fun, sonically engaging song, which makes you wish Halshug would ditch the Hermosa Beach vibe that dominates much of the record.          

Jonathan Shaw

 DJ HARAM — Grace (Hyperdub)

Grace by dj haram

Philly based producer DJ Haram (Zubeyda Muzeyyen) builds the tracks on her Hyperdub debut Grace on darbuka rhythms in homage to her Middle Eastern roots. The album also reflects her involvement in the experimental scene as a DJ and half of noise/rap duo 700 Bliss (with Moor Mother). Over the delicate percussion she layers flutes, big slabs of synth, heavier beats and disruptive stabs of noise. “Candle Light (700 Bliss Remix)” introduces vocals with an impressionistic poetic rap over a purely percussive backing. There is an urgency here driven by the restless, relentless rhythms which makes Grace is a disquieting and claustrophic listening experience. Fans of Muslimgauze and Badawi will find much to admire. DJ Haram uses a limited palette to full and focused effect building atmosphere and impressively drawing a line between middle eastern and western electronic music.

Andrew Forell

 Tim Hecker — Anoyo (Kranky)

Anoyo by Tim Hecker

Tim Hecker may make music that envelops the listener with beatless, thickly textured sound, but don’t call it ambient. For while ambient music holds at least the possibility that you can get lost in its drift, Hecker likes to short-circuit comfort. Soft sounds turn grainy, plush clouds disappear and if you catch him in concert you’ll feel the music as much as you hear it because it’s that loud. Anoyo is a companion to last year’s Kanoyo, and like its predecessor originated with some collaborative sessions between Hecker and an ensemble of gagaku (Japanese traditional ceremonial) musicians. He mixes their sounds up with warped and reversed strings and squelchy synthetic bass, and shapes the resulting amalgam into aural vignettes that are less extravagantly mobile than the tracks on Kanoyo but equally dislocating as national traditions and diverse equipment collections swirl and meet on uncommon ground.

Bill Meyer

 Kapala — Termination Apex (Dunkelheit Produktionen)

Termination Apex by KAPALA

By its very nature, war metal is retrograde stuff. The fact that the bands most strongly associated with the subgenre (Proclamation and — yes, seriously — Bestial Warlust) hailed from nations that haven’t experienced much by way of war-related trauma for decades doesn’t help. Does it make a difference that Kapala live and record in Kolkata, and that India and Pakistan have effectively been at war in Kashmir since Partition, and have been in a U.N.-mediated ceasefire (sort of) since 1965? And that both nations are nuclear powers? And that India is led by a fiery Hindu nationalist? And that the cover art for Termination Apex features a stylized mushroom cloud? Yikes. Aesthetically, war metal has its appeal. It features simplistic riffing, technical primitivism and hammering percussion, all taken to sonic extremes. But its romanticization of industrially scaled destruction and nihilism is repugnant and culturally corrosive. Kapala will attract some attention just through exoticism — metal from India? Sure, I’ll check it out. But a reactionary artwork is a reactionary artwork, wherever it comes from.

Jonathan Shaw

 Khaki Blazer—Optikk (Hausu Mountain)

Optikk by Khaki Blazer

“Mothafucker ain’t nobody playing grooves in 13. You can’t get paid for playing grooves in 13. Ain’t nobody gonna shake their booty. That’s why you’re fucking broke,” observes an uncredited voice in the spikily difficult “4/4,” a typically intricate rhythmic concoction of electronic squeaks, blurts and rattles for this Kent, Ohio-based outfit. Pat Modugno who heads up Khaki Blazer, as well as Mothcock and Fairchild Tapes, constructs giddy, multilayered rhythms. In “Conga Line” sampled, altered voices do battle with rackety bursts of drumming and urgent, antic whistle of a melody. The parts work every which way, throwing elbows, stepping on toes, in furious conflict that somehow resolves itself into slinky rhythm. Whether in four, in six, in seven or in thirteen, Khaki Blazer cuts never take the easy way, but they are grooves all the same.

Jennifer Kelly

 Lambchop — This (Is What I Wanted to Tell You) (City Slang/Merge)

Fourteen albums in and Nashville’s increasingly sui generis Lambchop, led as always by Kurt Wagner, is doing something that feels unusual, at least for them. 2016’s digitally-enhanced FLOTUS was a sprawling statement of a record, and given the restlessness that led to the processing Lambchop used there it wouldn’t be a surprise if their new record went off in a totally new direction. Instead the focused, somewhat more straightforward This (Is What I Wanted to Tell You) could almost be a hefty postscript to FLOTUS. It doesn’t boast anything with the majesty of the two ten-plus minute tracks on the previous album, but all the songs here sound even more comfortable in their own hybrid skins, and as always Wagner is in fine lyrical form. It remains to be seen if this constitutes as Lambchop settling down, but if so it’s in a richer and more bracing way than most bands half their age can manage.  

Ian Mathers  

 Régis Renouard Larivière — Contrée (Recollection GRM)

Régis Renouard Larrivière was born in 1959. But if Discogs is a reliable reporter, despite having been involved in music as a student, instructor, and composer of musique concrete, this is only his second album. Presumably his works are intended more for the multi-speaker listening environments available to the Groupe de Recherches Musicales; certainly it’s not hard to imagine this LP’s three pieces caroming from speaker to speaker, elevating the listener into a mind-altered state induced more by unfamiliarity than sensate distortion. The way they leap off the vinyl of this 45-rpm LP is a trip in itself. No substance, prescribed or otherwise scored, will get you where this stuff takes you. Even when a sound seems familiar — there’s some identifiable drumming amidst the synthetic twitter and boom — it behaves in ways that are unconcerned with the laws of music. Despite its unnatural sound content, Larivière’s music moves more like some force of nature. “Esquive,” for example, evokes leaves in an updraft, circling and dispersing. Like those leaves, each sound has tactile identity that invites you to deal with his compositions at the atomic as well as meteorological level. Strap in, enjoy the ride.

Bill Meyer

  Gabriele Mitelli / Rob Mazurek — Star Splitter (Clean Feed)

The recurrent astronomical imagery in Rob Mazurek's music makes this much clear; his horizons are farther off than most. A restless multi-media artist (his work includes sound and light installations, painting, and composed and improvised music performed with various brass and electronic instruments in the company of musicians from at least three continents), he nonetheless has certain modes that he revisits. In Gabriele Mitelli, he has found an astute companion to follow him into the realm of ritual. In 2018, the two men stepped into the Mediterranean and blew their horns in the direction of the African refugees trying to cross the sea in untrustworthy vessels. No one showed up while they played, but the energy they projected took wind and you can still get a taste of it on Youtube. On Star Splitter, which was recorded on dry land in Florence, they add electronics, voices, and unidentified objects to their brass (Mitelli: cornet, soprano sax, alto flugelhorn; Mazurek: piccolo trumpet) to stir up four sonic maelstroms in celebration of planets from our solar system. Direct our ears in their direction and see how far your own horizons recede.

Bill Meyer

  Tony Molina—Songs from San Mateo County (Smoking Room/650 Records)

Songs From San Mateo County by Tony Molina

Tony Molina is a master of concision. No sooner have his songs stated their killer riff or indelible melody than they’re over, and damned if you wouldn’t like to hear them again. His blistery guitar and way with tunefulness evokes Teenaged Fanclub, and here, on a collection of unreleased and unfinished material from 2009 to 2015, it becomes clear that he doesn’t have to work that hard to hit that sweet spot. The odds and sods are as fetching as anything on his last three albums. Sure he plays fast and loose with some baroque guitar licks on “Intro” and “Been Here Before,” and maybe that’s a little bit off center for power pop genre. But he weaves them in, at least in “Been Here Before” in a way that reinforces the doomed romantic vibe. He rocks a little harder than usual, too, on cuts like “Hard to Know,” with a sidewinding guitar break worthy of Brian May in his prime, but as usual, any hint of rock star excess is limited: the cut is less than a minute long. “Separate Ways” layers sublime dream pop hooks over an incendiary racket, like J. Mascis stepped in to a Raspberries session. The whole collection is so catchy and so satisfying that you have to wonder what else Molina has languishing in his hard drive. Let the songs out, man. We can always use more of these.

Jennifer Kelly

 Mark Morgan — Department of Heraldry (Open Mouth)

The rise and fall of the guitar in popular and critical esteem relates directly to the fact that a lot of people play the thing, and a lot of them sound like lesser imitations of someone doing something that you never wanted to hear done with the thing. If this is your problem with the guitar, Mark Morgan is not part of your problem. The former member of Sightings makes a case for the instrument as a vehicle for creative sound manipulation that cannot be refuted by lazy reference to the dozens of records in your collection, or memory, or once-clicked, never closed browser pages. This music sounds like it is being chewed and digested during the passage from his amplifier to your eardrum. Molars indent twangs, incisors gnash chunks of fuzz, and acids strip off the crusty coating and lay bare the jagged bones of sounds that you really, really shouldn’t be swallowing, but that you really need to hear.

Bill Meyer

Private Anarchy — Central Planning (Round Bale)

Central Planning by Private Anarchy

Titular intimations of both anarchy and planning suggest internal tension that is born out by the music on this album, which is the inaugural vinyl release by hitherto cassette-oriented Round Bale Recordings. Private Anarchy has a bit of an identity crisis; shall one emulate the petulant, gotta get this off my chest delivery of David Thomas c. 1979 or the twangy stride that the Fall hit around the same time? Since the combo is really one man who is acquainted enough with the 21st century to put a laptop computer on the LP’s cover, Clay Kolbinger has taken the time to figure out how to do both at once. The admittedly derivative sounds are well executed, with enough apprehension to suggest that he is similarly motivated by a discomfort that cannot be assuaged.

Bill Meyer

  Rodent Kontrol — Live (Fuzzy Warbles Casettes)

Rodent Kontrol Live (FW13) by Fuzzy Warbles Cassettes

Delivering post-Meatmen teenage punk knuckleheadedness at its explosively deranged best, the short-lived Ann Arbor high-school band Rodent Kontrol played this impromptu live set on the University of Michigan's WCBN in 1987 following a performance by the Laughing Hyenas. The latter were one of the toughest acts to follow, but Rodent Kontrol's calamitous, search-and-destroy assault is so gleefully unhinged, and full of the kind of ill-defined yet apoplectic animosity that can only be mustered by the young and the reckless, they truly give Brannon and co. a run for their money. While Live is on the one hand an amusing artifact, it is on the other a true gem of a release in our current era of archival overabundance. Make no mistake, this is rough, sloppy, perhaps offensive stuff, and Rodent Kontrol didn't break any new ground musically or aesthetically. But the nearly sublime agitation exuded by these guys here is truly something to behold, creating a genuinely unnerving sense that something very bad about is about to happen, and when it does it will feel absolutely good. If that's not the point of this kind of thing, I don't know what is. In addition to the 1987 live performance, this cassette release (also available as a download) adds a 2012 reunion show featuring a slightly tighter, slightly more "mature" version of the band, but certainly no less nihilistic. 

Nate Knaebel

 Sail into Night — Distill (self released)

In the three years since this Dubai-based Pakistani duo’s very promising debut, it feels like if anything they’ve pared down their already elementally satisfying, nocturnal variety of post-punk slowcore to its simple, direct, powerful essence. Zara Mahmood’s harmonium, Nabil Qizilbash’s guitar, a drum machine and their vocals continue to be enough to generate surprisingly heavy music; although you’d be hard pressed to fit the music stylistically anywhere in the heavy metal realm, emotionally and tonally it exists somewhere between the “stonegaze” of a band like True Widow and the stark grandeur of early Low. From the chiming “Lighthouse” to the closing grind of “Apart,” Distill packs a lot of dark energy into a compact 30-minute run time.  

Ian Mathers

  The Schramms—Omnidirectional (Bar/None)

You might know Dave Schramm as an original member of Yo La Tengo or for his guitar work for a whole slew of artists ranging from The Replacements to Freedy Johnston. You might even remember a string of clever, understated country-pop albums from the early 1990s through the turn of this century under the nom de guerre The Schramms — though it’s been a long time. But this seventh Schramms album, the first since 2000, will take you right back to all that’s wonderful about Dave Schramm: quiet intelligence, unshowy but impressive skills, an alchemical way of slipping abrasive rock sounds into soft pop melodies, quality over flash, but still a bit of flash. Take, for instance, the way that “Faith is a Dusty Word” opens up from a rambling piano ballad into swoon-y Pet Sounds-worthy vocal counterpoints, or how contemplative “New England” blossoms from wispy indie pop into a bitter sweet rock anthem, a la American Music Club. Schramm plays with long-time drummer Ron Metz (their partnership dates back to the 1970s Ohio cult band The Human Switchboard) and bassist Al Greller, an original Schramm, so it’s all very burned in, with the easy, unstruggled-for precision of people know what will happen next. Subdued, well-thought-out guitar pop is definitely not the flavor of the month these days, but who cares about fashion when it’s this good?

Jennifer Kelly

 Slow Summits — Languid Belles (Hundreds and Thousands Records)

Slow Summits come jangling out of Linköping, Sweden like the keychain on a building supervisor’s belt. Their debut EP Languid Belles presents four tracks of perfectly rendered, chiming and literate indie pop. The foursome of Anders Nyberg (vocals, rhythm guitar), Karl Sunnermalm (lead guitar, harmonica, keyboards, glockenspiel), Mattias Holmqvist Larsson(bass, keyboards, percussion) and Fredrik Svensson (Drums) enlists Amelia Fletcher (Tender Trap, Talulah Gosh, Heavenly) on backing vocals on two tracks. If these guys worship at the altar of Postcard-era Scotland their songs pay more than just homage to Orange Juice, The Pastels and international contemporaries The Go-Betweens, Beat Happening and Felt. Sunny melodies and kindly sarcastic lyrics driven by a tight and swinging rhythm section hit every serotonin and dopamine center of the musical brain. Slow Summits are the latest Scandinavian band to keep on your radar; Languid Belles is irresistible and will leave you “simply thrilled honey”  

Andrew Forell   

 The Way Ahead — Bells, Ghosts and other Saints (Clean Feed)

Peel back one layer of the Scandinavian jazz scene and you’ll find another layer. If you’ve spent much time paying attention to Cortex, Friends & Neighbors or Paal Nilssen-Love’s Large Unit, you’ll recognize most of the members of this horn-heavy, piano-free octet. André Rolighten (tenor saxophone, clarinet) and Tollef Østvang (drums) write the tunes, and as you’d surmise from a band that finds three ways to pay homage to Albert Ayler in the album name, those tunes owe a lot to his ecstatic/anguished sentimentality. But they aren’t locked into Ayler’s modes; there are also passages that have a distinctly European brass band feel, and some brusque, almost boppish moments. The band might seem ironically named if you take the title literally; this music is rooted in the 1960s, a time before most of the band’s members were born But if you recognize that name comes from an Archie Shepp session with a similar line-up, their sincerity comes into focus. These guys are just trying to blow some life into music much like the stuff that first made them want to play the kind of jazz they’re playing, and they’ve got the wind power to do it.

Bill Meyer