Clay’s posting of this A.I.R., (and his direct mention of the French Band) got me thinking about when I first listened to Air. If you take one of Chicago’s Green Line el trains west out of downtown in the early evening in spring, right as things start to thaw, you’ll see a bunch of old watertowers on the tops of warehouses silhouetted in a huge, wide blue sky, and they look like trees about to bud out and bloom in the warmth you’ve been waiting for and know is coming. That’s what they looked like to me, at least. And if you listen to Moon Safari, Air’s 1998 release, for the first time while admiring the watertowers, “La Femme D’Argent,” the first track, will sound cool and fresh and full of hope. In fact, it will sound that way forever, in my experience. Ever since, I’ve enjoyed the pretty, soothing grooves offered up by this French duo; “Once Upon a Time” apprears on their latest release, Pocket Symphony, due out in about a week.
radicalfashion
My six year old says she doesn’t like this music “because it’s scary.” She finds the ticking clock sound disconcerting. “It sounds like someone’s gonna get me.” Hirohito Ihara, founder of Kobe-based radicalfashion, admits that he can’t escape from the subconscious influence of his surroundings. The resulting abstract compositions will seep right back into your subconscious. Unlike my daughter, I find the rhythmic found sounds soothing, and as radicalfashion intersperses his dreamy piano playing throughout the track it triggers a reassuring nostalgia. I don’t promise the same reaction for you. On his debut, Odori, Ihara lets his subconscious take the lead and stays back, out of the way, leaving the listener plenty of open space between notes to create their own meaning from his work.
Lost in the Trees
Part of the reason I’m dropping a Saturday two-fer on your ears is the overwhelming guilt of having missed the last two Saturdays. I mean, I used to be good for two posts a week and then some…take a look at me now. The other part of the reason is Ari Picker, singer/songwriter/pianist extraordinaire. His latest release as Lost in the Trees is the cinematic (in the Danny Elfman sense of the word) Time Taunts Me. It’s big and orchestral and at the same time intimate and folksy. The big and orchestral part can be attributed to the cast of fellow Berklee School of Music classical music students he convinced to breathe life into his arrangements. The intimate and folksy part is all Ari whose his whispered delivery and careful sentimentality give the whole thing a nice, soft underbelly. Big and orchestral blend with intimate and folksy to create a compelling and vaguely menacing landscape — like dark thunder clouds rolling over meticulous fields of wheat. The concept album bug seems to be spreading across everything Ari touches, when you look at where his indie pop/rock group The Never went with their latest—which leads me to Part Two of the two-fer…
Corwin Trails
So Rob M. suggested this one because his cousin’s roommate’s best friend’s brother is in the band, or something like that; I coudn’t keep it straight. What I do get is the ambient beats and noise laid down by Corwin Trails. Pleasant melodies, event bouncy at times, coexist among fractured and warped samples and scratches. Walls are built and crumble, time stops and starts — it all reminds me of this paper I wrote in college about how, in his poem The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot subverted the Second Law of Thermodynamics. (Sure he did!) Providers of the soundtrack to the film version of this epic battle between physics and literature: Corwin Trails.
WJ Kington
WJ Kington spends lots of time around his house recording found sounds, tapping on walls and household appliances and recording the results. Sometimes he just sits at the piano and records his improvisations. Rather than “perfecting” the recordings he’ll leave in sounds of passing trains and the crows scratching at his roof. What’s left are highly engaging compositions. I found these tracks via boingboing.net (if they’re not already a habit don’t start!) which linked to “I’m Talin,” a track made from samples of his young son ripping apart a cardboard box which he’d strung with rubber bands. Be sure to stop by his site for stories on each of the songs.
Menomena
Menomena is one of those bands who are truly making music for the sake of making music. These are not the songs that rock stars and groping groupies are made of. Unless you’re living in an alternate universe maybe. Menomena compose slightly skewed music and on their new album, Friend or Foe, it frequently sounds like a meeting of Morphine and XTC. It’s easy to get lost in Menomena’s world as you explore the album artwork, beautifully illustrated by cartoonist and graphic novelist, Craig Thompson, a weird, dense mix of flesh and blood, life and death, animals and machines. To dig in deeper, aurally and visually, pop open the ecard. It’s not an easy listen, nor will it be easily forgotten.
Final Fantasy
You can call me a philistine, but the term “experimental†scares me a little bit. Maybe y’all agree with me? More often than I am comfortable with “experimental†becomes some sort of catch-all term for… well, for lots of things that wouldn’t be nice to say here in this my first post of the new year. Alas, Canadian violinist Owen Pallet AKA Final Fantasy, who notably arranged the strings for Arcade Fire’s “Funeral†amongst other past musical endeavors, is unequivocally “experimenting†with his solo musical offerings and I can’t find a single unkind word for him, nor would I want to. These songs are non-linear, funny, offbeat, complex and unexpectedly beautiful. Pallet maintains all of the musicality of his classical training while successfully maintaining a lovely pop sensibility. Now don’t get me wrong, there are absolutely traces of some of the oft-loathed hallmarks of “the independent sensibility†(i.e. utilizing the word poo in the album title, naming oneself after something random like a video game, writing an album that is apparently “an eight-song cycle about the eight schools of magic in Dungeons & Dragons,†etc.) but he’s smart. Really, really smart. So Pallet gets away with all his geeky wit and irony like a bandit. All things said, I’m really shy about dropping the L-word, folks, but let me say here, loud and proud: I love this. Don’t dig it? Then just listen one more time, for me, and then decide. Okay?
The Red Faced Laughter
I think I can safely speak for all of us here when I say we’re suckers for a great pop song. We’ll even settle for a relatively good pop song. By pop I mean a song that begs to be sung along to. Occassionally, however, it’s good to drop in and turn up music that you can crash a car to. Enter The Red Faced Laughter. A Texas trio that excels at mangling things up a bit. This is a complete EP, Brokenear #4, released on the German net label Broken Ear Records. They remind me a lot of Sunny Day Real Estate, the vocals mostly, but with a more noisy, improvisational style of playing. This one’s for everyone who likes their coffee black—no cream, no sugar, no fluffy latte—this is the stuff that Will Farrell’s character in Elf was so excited to share as “The World’s Greatest Coffee.”
Kama Aina
I like to think, mainly because it makes me feel less pathetic, that everyone who went to college and studied something other than business administration had some kind of youthfully pretentious obsession. Mine was Marshall McLuhan, the new media oracle from the Great White North who looked like a professorial Salvador Dali, had a cameo in a Woody Allen movie (nay, the best. cameo. ever.) and was an astoundingly salient bullshitter. I ain’t saying I don’t still love the man, just that nearly a decade after graduation it’s funny to look back and think of taking my dog-eared copy of War and Peace in the Global Village to my bartending gig at Benihana and intensely and conspicuously reading it between mixing Mai-Tais—as if any of my Japanese coworkers gave a damn. We were so cool once, weren’t we? Anyhow, I think of McLuhan’s fabled “global village†now because two of my favorite Japanese acts (the other one is Cacoy) this year have come to me from the Danish label Rumraket, which is doing for non-European music in Europe what Minty Fresh has been doing for European music in the U.S. of late—namely, rockin’ it. Kama Aina, whose name is Hawaiian and whose sole member is Takuji Aoyagi, doesn’t rock it, per se, he soothes it with loopy little lullabies built around clean, undistorted percussion, guitar and other sweet, naturalistic sounds. “Hotaru†is prettiest on headphones, where you can nearly see each bang and pluck. But if you’re just not that visual, check out the video for “Glasgow Sky,†which is as inventive as Bjork and twice as contemplative.
Kunek
Tim Ortopan is back for another guest DJ session. About 9 months ago he brought us Joseph Arthur. Now we have Kunek. O:
I went to high school with a kid named Kunec and at first I wondered if there could be any connection to the band Kunek. They sound like they could have been the socially awkward students sitting alone at lunch reading computer magazines that I remember. Could he have produced these beautiful songs of loneliness and sadness? It seems unlikely as I did not go to high school in Oklahoma nor could the student that I remember ever be described as “a delicate intersection of science and emotion—at times organic, dynamic, buoyant or ethereal.†I hope things are going well for the Kunec that I remember, but I know you will enjoy this Kunek straight from the flowering Oklahoma art-rock scene.