ATTN: unintentional hiatus.

Or: I will not have much opportunity for internet-related anything for the next month, but would love if any of you friendly charitable readers / friends / good samaratins could help keep me up to date on great music still being released in the late hours of this year.

So please, leave a comment here and let me know what you’re into, the triumphs and sure shots and surprise masterpieces I’m missing out on.  I promise to get myself caught up in due time and come roaring back with a vengeance.  This is a time of patience and focus for me, and the words are building up.

For now, I leave you with one of the greatest pieces of music ever recorded: After The Flood, by Talk Talk.

I once said “This song is a sentient being,” and I still stand by that statement.

Jimmy Scott – Sycamore Trees

One of my favorite jazz vocalists ever, “Little” Jimmy Scott possesses an unusually high and beautiful voice due to a rare genetic disorder which stunted his growth and prevented the occurrance of puberty and the vocal changes that accompany it.  Starting out in the 1940s singing for bands led by Lionel Hampton and Charlie Parker, he had a career often obscured by credit slights and contractual shenanigans until fading back into civilian life in the late 60s.. only to resurface in 1991 after his performance at the funeral of friend rendered listeners speechless and raised his name in important circles.  His first comeback album earned Grammy nominations and he’s been steadily recording and touring to this day at the age of 86.  My introduction personal introduction was thanks to the impeccable taste and foresight of David Lynch.  Performing a song written by Lynch and composer Angelo Badalamenti, Jimmy Scott appears in the bizzarre and wonderful climax of the singularly brilliant Twin Peaks.

I’m in a time crunch on route to a long day at work so I will have to edit and elaborate tonight.  I need to get this out and have you hear it so I’m hitting Publish now.  I’ll also share one of my favorite Jimmy Scott releases in the near future.  For now, enjoy.

Koyaanisqatsi

So I discovered that the entire groundbreaking, timeless, brilliant film is free on youtube.

Instructions for those who have not seen Koyaanisqatsi:

1. Stop what you are doing immediately.

2. Turn volume up high.

3. Watch Koyaanisqatsi.

4. Bask in silent astonishment.

5. Thank me.

Honestly, this is one of those life-changing works of art which you will simply and honestly never forget.  I fondly recall my first viewing, laying prone in front of a laptop in a cabin on a mountain at night and feeling my astonishment overtaking all physical sensation.  This truly begs for the big screen, or at least a reasonably large one, with a reasonable sound system accompanying the visuals.  Yet its artistry thrives in any time, place, or size.  Which is exactly why I am sharing the profound discovery that it is free to anyone willing to pay only time and curiosity.  Hell, if you have firefox with adblock plus, you won’t even see the ads (and honestly, get it – I couldn’t imagine this seamless dream interrupted by commercials) and the only thing you’re missing is the absolute clarity of the original high fidelity print.  You’ll undoubtedly recognize certain elements within this time travelling all-encompassing slice of Life Itself, both stylistically and culturally.  From the frenzied time-lapse shots of nature and city life contrasting with assembly lines and traffic patterns to the impossibly slow motion glimpses of astonishment and banality, the style and content of this film has influenced more than a generation of visual art and storytelling.

The best part is that I haven’t even gotten to the music; the reason this stands 30 years on as the timeless accomplishment it is:  Philip Glass‘ score is the 10 ton monolith blocking out the sun, the elephant in the room, the absolute gravitational pull of this work.  If you are at all familiar with 20th century minimalism via Charlemagne Palestine, Steve Reich, Terry Riley or their contemporaries, or especially Glass’ emotive, often romantic take on the sound, you are likely already familiar with some or all of these sounds; if not you are in for a warm embrace of what will likely become a hermetic world you’ll find easily inhabited and unequivocally addicting.  Call it lazy, but having the film here and ready to watch makes me reluctant to begin ascribing descriptors to the music.  It must be experienced to be grasped.  The marriage of sound and picture is essential for direct, uninhibited understanding, for knowing the intrinsic appeal of minimalism itself, for laying bare the nature of conceptual ourboros, the cyclical existence we’re evolved to respond to.  This score is meant to evoke the cosmic design of life itself from violent beginning to violent end and all of the impossibly close and personal yet gigantic moments in between.

Note: Do not listen before viewing.  Although entirely gorgeous, worthy, and entrancing on its own…  divorced from the imagery at birth, Glass’ score will never reach the same affection and thus should be saved for after-film experience.

Tuck In With… The Natural Yogurt Band

Living within minutes of the most exquisite record shop around – the fabled aQuarius Records – lends a handful of advantages to my evergreen quest for new music.  Each time I step inside, I hear something infectious on the PA; more often than not it is truly new to me.  Last time, The Natural Yogurt Band set the stage for intrigue.

“Authentic, psychedelic library vibes from the golden era meticulously recreated in the new millennium.” – the label’s tagline.  This points in the right direction but does no justice to the experience of what they actually sound like.  I can’t adequately do that either but I can describe what I feel.

This UK jazz duo ply an alien sea triangulated somewhere between vibraphone and flute laden chillout, exotic trance jam workouts a la ROVO, and the funk & soul rich sampledelia of J Dilla.  To put it another (more fun) way, this is like Miles Davis‘ On The Corner band jamming inside a broken time machine, forever oscillating between 1972 and 2012.  There’s an embryonic hiphop pulse beating inside this streetwise astral flight.  The duo’s kinetic performances on live instrumentation breathe in a living space while delivering a kaleidoscopic beatscape fathomable only to a post-Donuts world.

The mention of Dilla’s hiphop concrète masterpiece is not without direct intention:  the CD and LP editions of this album come equipped with nearly 20 “Biscuits” – bite sized riff- and beat-centric tracks created expressly for sampling.  Interesting on their own and reeking of the promise of future albums by other musicians, these tracks expand the value of one of the best albums 2011 has yet delivered.

Check out Eastern Promise here for a tasty (though not wholly representative) slice of Tuck In With… and seriously peep the lavish 2 x 10″ edition.  If you touch it, you will buy it.

[purchase direct from Stones Throw or head to your nearest record shop - the album is exquisite in digital form but the immaculate packaging demands to be seen and held and smelled]

Albums I Missed: 2010, part 2

Here’s another set of essential 2010 albums unfortunately left by the wayside.  Witness their excellence.

• Mark Van Hoen – Where Is The Truth

Beauty.  Just, pure fragile beauty.  Floating like a spiderweb made of static, hung with fragments of shattered dreampop.  Van Hoen, who started out in Seefeel and ferried the shoegaze & idm Locust through the next decade, knows a thing or two about prismatic blissouts.  Being unfamiliar with his past solo work, I won’t remark on how this is a more personal statement or not; I will simply say that, as a *huge* fan of Seefeel, a longtime admirer of Locust (especially Truth Is Born of Arguments – an essential document), and an eternal seeker of alluring disintegration, this album hits the spot.

• Solar Bears – She Was Coloured In

Being taken in by the line that their name is inspired by a certain Tarkovsky film and the fact that they employed old school synths in a more pop-friendly framework than Oneohtrix Point Never or Emeralds, I nevertheless held this one at arm’s length upon first listen.  The tones grabbed me, the melodies held me, the sheer variety kept my attention from wandering, but I was stopping short of truly absorbing it.  Second go-round, I realized it’s not made to dissect the individual tracks or feel around for a signature invention, something groundbreaking to hang its hat on.  This album is one to sit back (or walk or ride or whatever) and take in all at once.  Much like Teebs’ utopian fever dream Ardour, this 50 minute excursion is built carefully out of vignettes highlighting different facets of the sound until a wholly rounded picture is formed by the end.  I can hear Blade Runner and The Neverending Story and even the Terminator at times, but I can also sense the instructive warmth of Boards of Canada, fellow Scots with a penchant for playfully distracted, unpretentious psych explorations.  Where else would we find songs titled Head Supernova,  Primary Colours at the Back of my Mind, and Neon Colony?

• Girls – Broken Dreams Club EP

Well this one snuck up on me.  I was never a fan of the debut LP, which swam in a torrent of praise in 2009.  Some songs caught my ear but the band simply didn’t hit those pleasure centers I need to truly enjoy an album.  Playing this lengthy EP on a blizzard bound morning while making pancakes turned out to be a shining revelation, and an arresting listen.  Moving beyond their Velvet Underground, jangly garage sound into the realm of earnest, intelligent, well written pop infused with more than a little  grit and gravitas, the band has officially released one of a literal handful of rock albums which I can admire, adore, and really sink my teeth into.  Biggest highlights are the title track, a stoned lament for the fractured state of our world today, and Caroline – a tune which steps out of any boundaries the band previously ruled, into pure psychedelic wanderlust.  It reveals itself slowly (at first echoing The Smashing Pumpkins‘ deep album cut Porcelina of the Vast Oceans), unwinding like a scarf caught on a fence, until it’s stretched to the point of abstraction and hanging in the air around you.  A cloud of a hazy rock dream, tugging upward.  A great way to end an album and point to an even brighter future for this duo.

Black To Comm – Alphabet 1968

Black To Comm came to my attention in a single instant:  walking with my girlfriend into her favorite Manhattan record shop – named Other Music – and spotting the below artwork on the new release rack.  I was drawn in, picking it up, staring into its depths.  I had absolutely no idea who the artist was, but I wanted to know how it sounded.  Unfortunately, at the time I was short on cash and wanted a known quantity – an album sure to justify my purchase.  Fortunately, my good friend Samuel at Bubblegum Cage III highlighted the error in distrusting my gut instincts that day.

The woozy thrill of absorbing this miniature (and ostensibly) drone-based psychedelic epic is an incrementally rewarding sensation, ratcheting up the tension and release in equal measure with each go-round.  After opening with a city block’s worth of field samples and inclement weather, Alphabet 1968 lowers us into an underground current of Gas for a solid 10 minutes.  The dark aquatic pulse builds to a near frenzy before we surface, gasping for air along with a warped bell choir riding a flying carpet of orchestral drone.  Drifting into a piercing swarm of plucked string bees and swooping ravens straight out of a lost Fantasia segment, the album reveals its heart in the possessed-music-box of Musik Für Alle.  This gorgeous centerpiece marks an early emotional peak before we dip into the twisting-knob broadcast and monumentally lonely piano noodling of Amateur and the (Christopher Lee‘s) Dracula whiff of Traum GmbH‘s heavy organ crawl.  Beyond this overtly theatrical dirge, Black To Comm (aka Marc Richter) pulls his guiding hand free, leaving us whirling and disoriented; we’re now penniless and fucked, lost in a syrupy forest David Lynch only wishes he’d sent Laura Dern into.  Only, we’re not.

Hotel Freund swoops in at the last almost-under-the-Swamp-of-Sadness moment and carries us aloft, into sparkling white towers like tubular bells of light, suspended in the inky curtain of outer space.  It’s the warm tone of a favorite childhood film memory, colored with the affectionate sparkle of a mother’s embrace, a lover’s smile, or a fresh batch of no-bake cookies.  It’s the sort of bliss that you’d imagine accompanies a walk up that mythical stairway; one we’re incredibly privy to, thanks to what must have been some sort of pact with the devil Richter made in exchange for crafting this sweepingly transcendent work.

After all, this is only appropriate for an album named after the second short film by Mr. Lynch himself.

[pick up the album at boomkat (even on vinyl!), amazon, or other music itself]

Charles Mingus – The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady

Charles Mingus is an absolute deity of 20th century jazz…

…and this album proves it beyond any doubt.  One of the towering achievements in modern music, this is perhaps my favorite jazz album, and certainly one of the most wildly ambitious, mold-breaking pieces of music recorded in the 20th century.  Not only is the music here spasmodically orgasmic, scaling heretofore unheard-of heights with reckless abandon; it’s mind-warpingly catchy, telepathically moving hips and nodding heads.  The crescendo swells practically cry out for hands raised in ecstasy.

I could, and have, listened to Black Saint and the Sinner Lady several times in a row and could not possibly tire of it.  I love all of Mingus’ work, but this suite in particular seems to have struck some vein of godlike power, conjured through the four movements presented here as “dance” pieces.  Building organically from the first short Solo Dancer movement through the final blasted frenzy of Trio and Group Dancers, each additional layer is a natural evolution on the basic theme – expanding, soaring, dipping, roaring, and simply freaking out, Mingus never relaxes his kung fu grip on the proceedings.  Covering so much ground in such a tightly wound coil would be impossible for most musicians, but the group assembled here sets off the aural fireworks like they’re genetically engineered to do so.  The virtuosity on display here simply must be heard, over and over again, to fully grasp.

[obtain your soon to be treasured copy of this landmark at cduniverse (only $4 digital!) or amazon]

Dead Man

“Do you know how to use this weapon?” – Nobody

Neil Young‘s score for the 1995 Jim Jarmusch film is hauntingly evocative, an improvised set made with electric and acoustic guitar, organ, and piano, recorded as Young watched rough cuts of the film over just three days.

Vibrant, endless, searching, guiding, and inspiring – Young’s guitar tones ripple through through the fields, cover the mountains, and scour the lakes with their pure holy roller tones – this music feels more like the declarations of some unspeaking presence, a force buried underground, echoing from caverns and crevices, rising up to paint the clouds on occasion, then dissipate over the coast into the roiling sea.

The only frame of reference for this album, aside the film itself, is perhaps the album Hex: Or Printing in the Infernal Method, by drone pioneers Earth.  The title of that album, in fact, comes from a certain William Blake poem taken from the film and embedded in this album.

~~~~~

The ancient tradition that the world will be consumed in fire at the end of 6,000 years years is true, as I’ve heard in hell.  The whole creation will be consumed, and appear infinite, and holy, where as it now appears finite and corrupt.  This will come to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment.  But the first notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged; this I will do, by printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away and displaying the infinite which was hid.  If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.  For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks in his cavern. – William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

~~~~~

This is important to understanding the texture and aim of the music.  Powerful roaring clean, piercing guitar tones, undercut with judicious feedback and a rumbling low end, are the broad strokes with which this canvas is painted.  Warm tones and a nighttime-in-the-woods ceremonial ferver color in the edges.  Funereal organ pulse and delicate piano stabs define the lines.  The full work comes crashing together via the epic centerpiece Guitar Solo 5, a 15 minute exploration meant to drag the listener far above terra firma (and lash the film viewer’s senses to the screen) into the embryonic soup where stars are born and alchemy is real.

While experience with the film is helpful it’s in no way essential to enjoying this record.  Simply hit play and let the wild horse run free.  In time, you’ll be ready for your own journey.

[obtain this spiritual stunner at cduniverse, amazon or live nation store]

[pick up the mindblowing film itself at amazon while you're at it]

Begin. Again.

Libra Opal Commencement.

One.  Two.  Three.  Four.  Five.

Six.  Seven.  Eight.

Nine.  Ten.

BEGIN.

Again.

David Lynch told me:

“You have control over action alone, never over its fruits. Live not for the fruits of action, nor attach yourself to inaction.“