Venetian Snares - Songs About My Cats

Aaron Funk is the man behind Canadian breakcore act Venetian Snares. Calling it breakcore is a limited description though. His tunes and tracks often consists of programmed pianos taking atonality into new grounds, some times it's just the sound of apocalypse, and then again, some times it's almost danceable in some uncomfortable way. The real Beauty of Songs About My Cats struck me one morning after a party, there where a lot of cleaning and a lot of headache involved, when I reckoned it would be fun to piss the other writer of this blog off (he was asleep). So I put the album on, knowing that the chance of my head not exploding was mere. Funny thing happened when the album turned out to be really good music for hangovers. I wouldn't say that i danced, but strange things occurred with my limbs that morning.

Anyway, you should enjoy it too.

Released: 2001
Label: Planet Mu

(That was a new feature. Makes it look cool)

This was written while listening to Iron & Wine - The Creek And The Cradle

Orphanage - 50 Minutes Freestyle

It's not easy to find any info about this hip-hop supergroup consisting (on/off) of Slug, Eyedea, Aesop Rock, Illogic, Sage Francis and Blueprint. You would think that a group like this would get a lot of attention, however they don't. Primarily because they haven't made any official releases, so most of what I was able to find was sporadic freestyles, some co-ops with Atmosphere and some internal work on each others albums. However I did find a show in full album-length with Blueprint and Illogic freestyling and performing some of their respective songs. Throughout the show appearances from the other rappers occur, but as said, it is Blueprint and Illogic primarily. The show suffers from bad sound and some surprisingly bad mic-skills from the rappers. It is a supergroup though, and they are some rather decent freestylers, so it's worth to check out, and it's worth keeping in mind for future releases. If you wan't to listen to some of their studio-work, they appear on Blueprints The Weightroom and Atmospheres Sean Like Ugly Girls 4.

Enjoy here.

This was written under influence of Sunburned Hand Of The Man - Headdress

R.I.P Oink

The shutdown of Oink is one of the most important events in modern music history, and won't go unseen neither to this blog. There's so much to say about it, so many feelings about both the major labels, the shutdown of oink and the music business in general. I won't though. It has all been said way better and with much more power than we ever could.

If you haven't been there yet, read it now.

R.I.P.

Kaija Saariaho - L'amour De Loin

Kaija Saariaho is a Finnish composer, born in Helsinki 1952. She wrote several string quartets (e.g. Private Gardens), before she in 2002 wrote her first opera L'amour de Loin. This opera uses very few implements - often only lead vocal and piano, the piano often using clusters while the female vocal especially, can sound almost schizophrenic at times. The true beauty of this composition lies in the minimalism and the atmosphere created with such small amount of implements. You could draw lines from her piano compositions to composers such as Penderecki (also described here at the index), with the difference that Saariaho uses fewer instruments to create the atmosphere she wants. Saariaho has studied in both Helsinki, Freiburg and New York and is widely acknowledged, meaning that her latest string quartet Terra Memoria had premiere in Carnegie Hall this year. L'amour de Loin is not for the weak heartet, but if you don't happen to be one of those you will surely enjoy.

Listen right here

George Antheil - Ballet Mécanique

George Antheil was an american avant-garde composer (born 08/07/1900). With Ballet Mécanique he took the avant-garde music to new places by including, among else, 8 pianoes, several airplane propellers, an alarm, 6 bass drums, 3 xylophones and so the list carries on. Ballet Mecánique was created for a film by Dudley Murphy and Fernand Léger, but the common project was given up eventually, since the composition was too advanced to perform and record for the film. However the work was played as a concert in Paris in 1926 and later at Carnegie Hall in New York. This is one of the most fascinating avant-garde pieces ever written, and if you think that it is stupid, it is probably just because your toupee was blown of during one of the performance.

You can watch it being performed with modern technique here

Or you can watch the film with the music (rather bad sound though) here

This was written under influence of Current 93 - Black Ships Ate The Sky

Morton Subotnick - Touch

This is not a 60's sexploitation record. This is not a sampling of speeches regarding the finer ways of subtle selfpleasuring. This is in fact one of the most abstract collections of bizarre rhytmic experiments that are ever likely to emanate from a single Buchla modular synthesizer!

I won't even try to describe this beast step by step. Positioned somewhere between the ambient sonic craftings of later times and the musique concrète of the very earliest electronic music, Subotnick manages to hypnotize the listener and leave him (or her) in an altered state. The different outputs range from grinding, formless pads to strangely complex yet attractive percussive arrangements that flicker in and out of the definition of a "beat" with the precision of a drunken tape-recorder in a convulsive tap-dance routine. Covering the entire LP with just two side-long tracks, Touch is an avant-garde mammoth, worthy of attention from anybody who doesn't think music was invented by Van Halen!

R-tards!

Listen here

Pearls Before Swine - Balaklava

Pearls Before Swine was an american psych-folk band that released several records in the late sixties/early seventies. They have a very blurred sound, common to i.e. Bobb Trimble. Balaklava and One Nation Underground is considered as their main works.

The cover is by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, a dutch renaissance artist, picturing a great battle, just as the title of the album indicates. The battle of Balaklava was fought during the Crimean war in 1854. The opening tune "Trumpeter Landfrey" is in fact a recording of one of the surviving soldiers from this battle playing his trumpet. The whole album has, as Tom Rapp stated himself, an anti-war-theme making the lyrics more sombre. You don't get the feeling of listening to a protest-record though (thank god). I thought i had a lot of clever things to say about this record, but i will cut it down to: Good record, listen, now.

If you like war more than this record you're an ignorant and should be dumped in the ocean.

Listen Here.

Jedi Mind Tricks - Visions Of Gandhi

So here's the deal. Being a DJ you hear a lot of crap, but this one time beat them all. Some black guys comes up to me, telling me they wan't to hear some hip-hop, so i think to myself; well fine, let's have some hip-hop, since I love hip-hop. So first off i play some of the crap they wanted - 2pac and some mainstream snoopdogg. Then i start playing killer hip-hop like Jedi Mind Tricks, Jurassic 5 and others. While On The Eve Of War is on the player, this guy from before comes back. He asks me to play some hip-hop. I merely couldn't believe this. I considered the fact that he was deaf, but after threatening to kill my mom and dad if I wouldn't play more hip-hop, i had to draw the conclusion that he was a fucking moron.
I got nothing against black people and i got nothing against hip-hop, but i got something against some poser, believing he is true, because he once saw a Snoop Dogg comercial on MTV. I wanted to kick this guy in the face. Not for saying that he would kill my mom and dad, but for being such a fucking moron, not knowing what good hip-hop is. Today people think that they can slip in a pair of baggy jeans and a gold necklace, and suddenly know what hip-hop is. My anger towards this is guy and other people alike him can't be described in words. If he would lie down and die today, fine.

Visions Of Gandhi is one of the best hip-hop records ever made. Vinnie Paz rapping over Stoupe The Enemy Of Mandkinds beats are absolutely stunning. This record was somewhat their mainstream breakthrough, though a lot of people still consider the former Violent By Design as their main piece of work (it's not though). If you listen to Visions Of Gandhi and still think that Snoop Doggs new album is "actually okay" you are not even worthy reading this and will be IP-banned.

Now go listen

...

The Antarcticans - Teach Children: Fear All Teachings Of Eternity

So The Antarcticans. The chances that you've heard about them are small, though they released this album as late as 2006. They are a post-rock band basically. On the other hand they got a lot more to offer than just plain post-rock. Picture yourself Dick Dale playing Godspeed You! Black Emperor, while listening to Sonic Youth Records. The harsh mix between Post-Rock, Noise-Rock, Surf, Psych (the list carries on) makes this album one of the greatest released last year.

There is nothing to discuss. If you don't listen to this and/or don't like it, you're an ignorant. Enough has been said, now;

Listen here.

Enon - Lost Marbles And Exploded Evidence

Listening to this record for the first time, you sit and think to yourself: "Hmm, I wonder what that was?!" Listening to it again will make you go: "Hmm, electronics, semi-distorted vocals, not bad at all!" Listening to it for the third time will leave you astonished and overwhelmed: "Just how do they manage to put all those exciting, spine-tingling sounds on a single CD?"

Such is the nature of Lost Marbles And Exploded Evidence. It's not an easy listen. But then again, it is all too facile to just put it on the stereo, groove away to the playful bass-line of the first track, and slowly forget about the whole thing. Until you reach the sixth track, and these minimal, pumped-to-the-verge-of-overdriven drums hit you up side the head and make you go right back to the start and give it a closer inspection. Or you could show the album some repect and give it your full attention right from the beginning!

LMAEE (or LAMEE if you're an ignorant) is a multi-faceted collection of relatively short musical explorations, and though it is not avant-garde or definable as traditional experimental music, its mix of primal rhytmic body-manipulation (parts of it even makes you wanna bop your head!), slacker-like vocals of both female and male persuasion (sometimes even in harmony, lo and behold!), weird tremulating sounds and semi-noisy soundscapes all adds up to quite a worthwhile experience. This is electrorock/pop as it always should be. Definitely lives up to its title!

Listen here.

Cornershop is as rare a thing as a good Indian indie band. Actually they are not pure Indian, but was formed in the English city of Leicester in 1992. There are several Indian members in the band though - and so the music has roots in different Indian music. Hold On It Hurts was their debut from 1994 and is impossible to put in one of those boxes, which are very popular these days. A mix of Indie, Psych, Rock'n'Roll, Surf and much more goes hand in hand on this album.

If you only know them through the hit-album When I Was Borned For The 7th time, there is no excuse not listening to this, since this is indescribably musch better.

Listen right here

The Index

It's about time to give some credit to the band, who gave this blog it's name. The Index was a californian band in the sixties. They recorded their debut album in a cellar and so it was later released on DC Recordings. Later on two of the members met again and recorded another album.

A lot of feedback on about every instrument ensures that this album has an amazing dreaming sound. Truly ´67 psych.

Listen Here.

Nick Drake - Pink Moon

Recommending Nick Drake, shouldn't really be necessary these days. We’ll do it anyway in case that someone should have missed him. Nick Drake was an English singer/songwriter born in 1948 and died in 1974 – only two years after releasing his third album; Pink Moon.

During his lifetime he never managed to reach commercial succes, and none of his works sold more than five thousand copies. Despite this fact, he is, today, considered to be one of the most important artists in English singer/songwriting tradition.

Drake was signed to Island Records, who after the lack of succes related to the first releases – Five Leaves Left (1969) and Bryter Layter (1970) – didn’t showed much interest in releasing another album. However the founder of Island Records; Chris Blackwell, liked Nick Drakes music and believed that Pink Moon could reach commerciel succes, and thus the album was released in the end.

Pink Moon is a very stark and bare recording, mainly because Drake had been really dissapointed with the sound on his previous releases. It is approximately 28 minutes, with Drakes voice and guitar – only accompanied by a piano once (on the title track). This record should be in every record collection really, and there is no reason to make further comments to the music itself, just enjoy this fantastic piece of musical art.

Listen here

Jim O'Rourke - I'm Happy And I'm Singing, And a 1,2,3,4

Jim O'Rourke er født i 1969, og associeres ofte med Chicagos Tidlige experimental scene. På de seneste år vil mange dog nok forbinde ham med Sonic Youth, som han blev medlem af i 2000. Siden (2005) er han dog stoppet som fuldtidsmedlem for at fokusere på sin filmkunst.

Udover at have udgivet en god portion soloalbums har han også produceret for en lang række artister. Af de mest kendte kan man nævne bl.a. Wilco, Smog, Faust og Beth Orton. Han er meget alsidig både som musiker og producer, hvilket vel også fremgår ret åbenlyst af ovenstående navne.

I'm Happy And I'm Singing, And a 1,2,3,4 består af tre numre, der hedder henholdsvist I'm Happy, And I'm Singing og And a 1,2,3,4. Åbningsnummeret er relativt syret/dronet electronica, man vil kunne drage sammenligninger med bl.a. engelske Orbital. Et langt trancendentalt stykke, der langsomt bygger op omkring aggressive panorerede lyde, for til sidst at gå ned i det dybere register og blive mere meditativt.

And I'm Singing Har nogenlunde samme princip, men er dog, umiddelbart mere lettilgængeligt, hvis man kan bruge et sådant ord i sammenhæng med denne plade. Rent faktisk har dette nummer også en stortromme der giver noget der kan minde om tempofeeling.

Tredje nummer er den 21 min. lange And a 1,2,3,4, der er min personlige favorit. Den er langfra ligeså aggressiv som de to foregående, men bygger langsomt op med synths og rolige guitarklangflader. Det er meditativt, roligt, behageligt og en masse andre dejlige ting.

Man bør høre denne plade.

Myspace (dog ikke indeholdende nogen tracks fra omtalte plade)