#we are starting regular scrimming at the end of practices now too like come ON

[haojun]

Had to message the groupchat that i cant go to practice bc ive felt sick all goddamn day

[dustedmagazine]

Dust Volume 4, Number 5

Hot Snakes

It’s time for another edition of Dust, our semi-regular short form exploration of music we might not otherwise get to.  This time Bill Meyer, Jonathan Shaw, Marc Medwin, Justin Cober-Lake,  Jennifer Kelly and Michael Rosenstein ponder basement jazz and large ensemble improvisation, French horror movie synths, Charlottesville-inspired protest and one much loved garage punk band returning to the fray after 14 years.  Enjoy.

Aalberg / Kullhammar / Zetterberg / Santos—Basement Sessions Vol. 4 (The Bali Sessions) (Clean Feed)

This combo may have started out in a basement, but at this point the recording circumstances are a matter of have governmental support. Saxophonist Jonas Kullhammar, bassist Torbjörn Zetterberg and drummer/composer Espen Aalberg first convened to play their version of traditional jazz, which is to say music rooted in the examples of Sonny Rollins in the late 1950s and John Coltrane in the early 1960s. Those elements are still evident; “Pontiac,” for example, is built around a bass line that Jimmy Garrison could have fed Coltrane at the Village Vanguard in 1962. But it seems that Aalberg’s looking farther afield for inspiration these days. On that same tune, Kullhammar and guest trumpeter Susana Santos Silva play harmonies that have more to do with 1970s-vintage Ethiopian jazz. And the session took place not in a Scandinavian basement, but in an Indonesian garden, with full access to a Balian gamelan. Those resonant, metallic sonorities give the music a shimmering quality, as though you’re hearing it through a humid heat haze.

Bill Meyer

 Carpenter Brut — Leather Teeth (No Quarter)

LEATHER TEETH by Carpenter Brut

French dark synth act Carpenter Brut announces a key influence in its name: the minimalist, evocative, synthesizer-driven soundtracks that John Carpenter scored for many of his films, including Assault on Precinct 13, Halloween, Escape from New York and They Live. As the “Brut” bit suggests, Franck Hueso, the creative force behind the project, amps up the volume and the pace of that source material. He endows the music with an intensity that reflects the affect and the themes of the films — a perverse joy in aestheticized violence, the gut-plunge one can feel when watching highly manipulated filmic experiences. And this digital LP further collapses the distinctions between media: Leather Teeth is offered as the soundtrack to an imaginary horror film, complete with plot synopsis, promo poster and the oddly spectral suggestion of the seamy, grainy, VHS-quality vibe of 1980s horror cinema. You can just about feel the voluptuous joy of the bright orange fake blood and the fluorescent glow of the final girl’s wardrobe, especially in the title track and in “Inferno Galore.” It’s a sort of feat, making music this processed and slick feel raw and dirty.

Jonathan Shaw

  Thanos Chrysakis/Chris Cundy/Peer Schlechta/Ove Volquartz — Music for Two Organs and Two Bass Clarinets (Aural Terrains)

This is one for headphone listening. Organists Thanos Chrysakis and Peer Schlechta, in collaboration with clarinetists Chris Cundy and Ove Volquartz, have created an album of morphing space and shifting textural planes. The album’s opening and closing moments are magical, as a landscape haunted by nearly recognizable shades unfolds in reverb-drenched murk. The opening of the fifth section dwells in similar half-light; organ and clarinet tones almost match, floating around each other in rhythms too wet to grasp. The recording itself is a study in contrast pitting a dead-center clarinet against one off to the side, living in a semi-spectral world where pitch relations are as fluid as pulse and meter. Each instrument has a shadow self that headphone listening renders apparent. If the motivic material itself is slightly lacking in contrast, volume, register and timbre make up for that. Chamber organ and clarinet both add layers of percussion against the lines interwoven by the other two instruments. The music justifies the label’s name.

Marc Medwin

 Elephant9 — Greatest Show on Earth (Rune Grammofon)

When your hired-gun psychedelic jazz guitarist goes missing, what do you do? In Elephant9’s case, the answer is — go maximal. There may be one fewer musicians and the tunes may be shorter, but there are a lot of notes packed into each of Greatest Show on Earth’s 36 minutes. There’s also a lot of chutzpah; what else can you call it when an organ-bass-drums trio cops an Emerson, Lake & Palmer line for the name of its record? Fortunately, they subscribe to a heavier but less bombastic lineage. If you plotted this record on graph paper, one axis would be Tony Williams’ Lifetime and the other would be late 1960s Soft Machine. The organ seethes, the mellotron freezes, the bass sprints and feints and the drums pummel hard but elaborate on themes that, if you excised the solos and added some brass, would be more than serviceable cop show tunes for the age of leaded gasoline.

Bill Meyer

 Hot Snakes — Jericho Sirens (Sub Pop)

It’s been 14 years since the last Hot Snakes album, Audit in Progress, and eight since the convergence of two post-break-up outfits, Obits and Night Marches, spawned a one-song reunion at San Diego’s Casbah. Much has shifted since the early aughts rock revival that Hot Snakes always sat at the louder, rougher, closer-to-hardcore end of, and neither Obits nor Night Marchers, for all their positive attributes matched the fire-spitting intensity of their predecessor. You might, then, look askance on this latter day revival, coming conveniently just as Sub Pop reissues the entire Hot Snakes catalogue, and yet you could only do that before you hear the songs, which are just as raw, just as spittle flecked, just as full-throttle enraged as ever. The disc’s starts in flames, with the Wipers-slashing guitar attack of “Call the Doctor,” Rick Froberg’s yowl rising in rage over a hailstorm of crashing rock propulsion. Short, manic “Why Don’t It Sink In?” bangs the hardest at Hot Snakes’ hardcore punk beginnings, while “Six Wave Hold Down,” brings in an expansive So. Cal. surfiness into the mix. “Death Camp Fantasy” ramps up a whiplash punk garage assault, with a ragged group chorus to carry it home, while “Death of a Sportsman,” finishes things off in windmilling, power-chording style. Holds barred?  I’d say none. Score one for the old(er) guys.

Jennifer Kelly

  Joy Ike — Bigger Than Your Box (self-released)

The title Bigger Than Your Box makes a statement about pianist/singer Joy Ike's personality as well as her art. The artistic angle is clear: Ike hits that sweet spot between soul, jazz and pop, and if she doesn't fit cleanly into a genre, she's fine with that. These tracks — full of bouncy piano, a few lush arrangements, and a startling amount of verve — are also about self-definition. Ike refuses to be put into any box, and her music encourages listeners to step out of their own boxes, to “stand up and walk” as she says on “You Betta'.” Across these 11 tracks, Ike rallies anyone in need of rallying. The radio-ready anthem “Hold On” reiterates that “your hope is coming.” Ike walks close to the edge of cheese; when she sings, “You will find your song” or “You are not your fear,” it could tip into eye-rolling territory, but Ike's drive carries the sentiment. She knows there are people who need this sort of song right now, and she's going to make sure they get it. The tunes are infectious, but it's Ike's heart that resonates.

Justin Cober-Lake

 Insub Meta Orchestra — Choices & Melodies (Insub)

Choices & Melodies by Insub Meta Orchestra

It’s impressive to keep a large ensemble with 50 permanent members going for eight years and running. It is particularly impressive when that ensemble focusses on the collective intersection of composition, improvisation and electro-acoustic practice. Founded by Swiss musicians Cyril Bondi and d’incise on the ideas the two describe as “experimentation, of immoderation, of exploring and pushing the limits,” somehow this group of international collaborators has not only managed to keep this project a going concern, they have managed to get together on a regular basis to perform and record. Choices & Melodies is their fifth release, recorded at the same session as their Another Timbre CD from last year (reviewed here by Justin Cober-Lake) and like that one, this LP/digital download is comprised of two pieces credited as “direction and compositions by Cyril Bondi and d'incise.” This iteration of the group is 32-strong, with eight woodwinds, five string players, three guitarists, six utilizing electronics, laptops, and synths, three percussionists, four vocalists, along with hurdy gurdy, viola da gamba and harmonium, forming a rich timbral depth.  

First up is “two choices” using the simple instructions of producing two noises per person and the possibility of a change every five seconds. What transpires over the course of the 16-and-a-half-minute piece is a beguiling, dynamic mix of subtly shifting hiss, abrasions, quavers, crackles and low-end rumbles. Eschewing any sense of tonality, the immersive layers of frictive textures engulf the listener, with constantly evolving fields of subtle nuanced vacillations and densities. One gets the sense of listening in the midst of a giant engine or the groaning hull of a ship and the recording does a great job of capturing the spatial distribution of sounds across the ensemble. The second piece, “autonomous melodies,” takes a quite different tack, utilizing kernels of three or four note free melodies which are distributed across the orchestra. Over the course of 16 minutes, it relies on a relatively loud volume to let the various threads accrue in to mercurially morphing chords and drones. Here, the music benefits from the intrinsic underpinnings of woodwinds, strings, electronics, percussion and elusive scrims of vocalizations which commingle and fragment into changeable pulses and currents. In both pieces, the collective, considered intensity of the full ensemble comes through with gripping results.  

Michael Rosenstein

  Daniel Levin/Chris Pitsiokos/Brandon Seabrook — Stomiidae (Dark Tree)

Stomiidae by Stomiidae (Daniel Levin • Chris Pitsiokos • Brandon Seabrook)

Stomiidae is a family of deep-sea fish, and each of the CD’s seven tracks is named for a genus of that family. Perhaps cellist Daniel Levin, alto saxophonist Chris Pitsiokos and guitarist Brandon Seabrook want to assert that they go deep without being too obvious about it? With their needle teeth and trailing whiskers, Stomiidae look pretty terrifying in photographs, but since they’re usually about six inches long and they prefer to live half a mile under the surface, they pose no threat. But they can handle pressure, and there are moments when this music feels like it is busting out at the seams under the influence of some great internal force. Levin is his usual adroit self, and his confident, quicksilver responsiveness exerts a powerful influence on two other musicians whom I associate more with the delivery of knockout punches than the execution of gravity-defying footwork. But the toughness of their instrumental personalities is nonetheless boiled into their playing, as each note and flinty phrase exerts the persuasiveness of a winning argument.

Bill Meyer

   Mien—Mien (Rocket Recordings)

MIEN by MIEN

Mien draws talent from an inter-continental assortment of garage psych players—Black Angels frontman Alex Maas, The Horrors’ keyboardist Tom Furse, Elephant Stone’s raga rock experimenter Rishi Dhir and The Earlies’ John-Mark Lapham — and this self-titled debut is similarly all over the map. “Earth Moon” starts with a drone-y reverie in Dhir’s sitar with sitar-psych droning (there’s more sitar on “Ropes” if that’s your thing), then picks up the kind of ramshackle propulsion and Velvet-y psych whisper that Primal Scream used to conjure. “You Dreamt” runs noisier and more electronic, layering metallic ping and clicks and rattles over abstract washes of hiss and static. “Odessey,” spelled the way the Zombies spelled it, is the sort of slanting, driving, dark-wave garage psych that you turn to Black Angels for, though leavened, a bit, by a come hither chorus. All these songs are drenched in about three coats of reverb, kludged with noise and generally smeared and obscured, so you know you’ve got a winner when “Tired of the Western Shouting” bursts through and makes a mark. Techno-ethnic Brian Jones Massacre may not sound like exactly what you were looking for, but you’d be surprised, once you get into it.

Jennifer Kelly

 Keith Morris & the Crooked Numbers — Psychopaths & Sycophants: A Message from Charlottesville (self-released)

After the 2016 US presidential election, too much of the immediate response was, “At least we'll get some good protest music out of this.” That may be small consolation to much of the population, but Charlottesville Americana musician Keith Morris turned related feelings into protest album Psychopaths & Sycophants: A Message from Charlottesville, largely guided by the work of Leonard Cohen (covers of “The Future” and “In My Secret Life” book-end the album). The title track is a reworked version of a song from a few years ago, and the changes epitomize the album. Morris's gospel and country-rock influences still come through, but he pulls the rock sound back. For the most part, Morris gives speak-sing performances that harken back to Dylan. His rage comes through regardless of tone, though. On “67%” Morris and guest vocalist Devon Sproule mix that control with rowdier backing. Some of the tracks are a little on the nose to have legs — this is protest music after all — but the album captures a certain mood from “this shattered town” quite well. With a little Randy Newman in the mix, Morris and his band make emphatic points and offer useful catharsis.

Justin Cober-Lake

 Mike Uva—Lights Coming Up (Collectible Escalator)

Everybody I knew at an online music publication that professed to “review everything” had a handful of favorites that emerged from the slush pile, artists so good and so consistently overlooked that it made made it worth while to wade, once again, into the bins of self-releases. (All the new writers complained vociferously about the taking-all-comers policy until they hit one of these; we called it the conversion experience.)  One of mine was Mike Uva, a Cleveland-based songwriter, whose 2004 album Where Have You Been sits right alongside certain GBV, The Folk Implosion and the Capstan Shafts records for smart, tuneful, lo-fi pop excellence. That was a long time ago, but every so often I get a new recording from Uva, and it’s always unassumingly excellent, and this new one Lights Coming Up[JK1]  is no exception. The clear highlight is “Waco,” a driving, slanting, amber-lit time-capsule that connects Uva’s late college years, the FBI stand-off and an acquaintance who disappeared off the grid forever (though whether to join a Waco-ish cult or farm organic vegetables is never clear). Like all of Uva’s best work, the song has an off-handed grace, as if it rhymes and scans by accident, as if he just happens to be telling you a story that fits the chords he’s playing. But of course, there’s a lot of skill behind that kind of nonchalance, a skill that shows up again in the sinuously ear-worm “Waiting to Return,” in the dreamily unhurried “Even the Highways.”  Lights Coming Up is more indie-pop and less country than Lady, Tell Me Straight, the last Mike Uva album, which came out five years ago, but just as effortless. Here’s to the guys (and girls) who do it for love, and do it well and keep at it and get better anyway, even if no one is paying much attention.

Jennifer Kelly