My favourite albums of the decade #4

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#4 Stars of the Lid - The tired sounds of Stars of the Lid (2001)

Bonus points duly awarded for sublimely beautiful album art.

And so, once again, the compost heap is faced with that question that has oft perplex'd many a music journalist - how the fuck do you write about ambient music without sounding like a big purple knob (that is, if big purple knobs could write)? I have tried and failed many times. The classic trap is to try and describe what the music sounds like, which is a gift that only this man seems to possess. Writing in detailed metaphor about ambient music is a bit like describing your dreams to other people (something that I do a lot, woops). It is boring, and the main reason it is boring is because it is an act of describing something of perceived personal significance that means sweet fuck all to those around you. It indulges the notion that the random picture show in your mind's eye amounts to more than a few synapses misfiring while you sleep. With all that in mind, I'm going to leave my dictionary of adjectives on the high shelf for this album and briefly try to describe its significance to me with no mention of benign whales mating at the edge of the universe or other such rubbish.

Pitchfork's writers made a list of the best music of the decade and this album just about made the grade, sneaking in at about 187th place or something, which is probably a fair reflection of where it stands in the grand scheme of things, objectively speaking. When all is said and done about a decade that contains Daft Punk, The Strokes and Beyonce, 'The Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid' will be noted as just an uncommonly good album of ambient music. And ambient music is always going to be a niche genre. The genre is overrepresented on this blog because I love it so much, and I think Stars of the Lid make some of the most beautiful ambient music a person could ever wish to hear.

Due to my dumb rule of one album per band, it was a close call as to which Stars of the Lid album would come so high on this list. Their more minimal 2007 release 'And the Refinement of their Decline' is hewed from the same stuff of genius as this album (slow classical compositions, drones and musique concréte), and if I was writing this on a Tuesday morning instead of a Saturday afternoon it would have made the grade. There's no point in trying to quantify this stuff, is there?

'The Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid' is very long. It was released as a triple CD album and contains a number of suites of music (according to the titles at least) and in-betweeny compositions. The music is beautiful in an indescribable music-of-the-spheres kind of way, but unlike, say, Brian Eno's classic 'Music for Airports', it is not emotionally neutral. Even if the songs were shorn of their evocative titles, there would be no doubting the bottomless sense of lament that animates the 'Requiem for Dying Mothers' compositions at the start of the album. Their lament is not showy though, not in the way that Max Richter's music can lay it on and perhaps manipulate the listener. The music seems to come from somewhere more foreign; more real? 

And now for the bit where I sort of break my rule. I was in hospital for a long stretch recently, and I had my second tilt at Joyce's Ulysses while I was in there. In an unpremeditated fluke of a moment that set the hairs standing on the back of my neck, I ended up listening to this album while reading the Hades chapter - where Leopold Bloom comprehends death in Glasnevin cemetery and the Joycean prose rattles wildly through the sort of spooked revelations that might occur to a man standing separated from hundreds of corpses by a few foot of clay. He imagines gramophones under the ground, one for each corpse, transmitting crumbly sounds of the person's life back to earth so they are not forgotten. I then remembered me as a teenager sitting on the bus to Kells from Dublin and realising, properly, for the first time, as the bus passed Dunshaughlin cemetery that I was passing a place full of the dead, and I remembered also my uncle's funeral and the faces of people who I had never seen cry a tear in their life, how heartbreakingly unusual they looked in wet mournful ribbons around the grave on a blustery day. 

MP3: Stars of the Lid-Requiem for Dying Mothers Part 2

À la recherche du temps perdu (via MP3s)

Tweet First off, I'm sad to report that Nick Thinks, a really great Irish music blog, is winding down. If you have never read it, get straight over to the archives and enjoy reading. The blog is based on the concept that Ruan (a big music fan and musician himself) and his father Nick (a real groover of a Dad who knows what he likes) review a series of albums in an often hilarious two-way dialogue. It is witty, different, and a cut above most Irish blogs. It will continue for two more special weeks where Nick gets to share some of his favourite albums with Ruan for a change. Don't miss it.

Today's post is merely about a song that caught my attention a couple of weeks ago. I had intended to write some lengthy observational stuff about other things going on in life, but my brain is stuck in an uncomfortable groove and won't give up any prose, even after that good talking-to I gave it when I was sitting on a full bus the other day. I could write turgidly about the Kells dogshit situation, because that's bugging me a lot - but I doubt I could write anything funny or worth reading, apart from a few apoplectic insults aimed at the crafty shit enablers who use their dogs as power-walking accessories. If you are in anyway interested in food you can read some of my displacement writing activity on my tumblr feed here. I can always write about food, it seems; as easily and (probably as messily) as I can eat it.



I like the cut of this guy's jib


MP3: Nightlands-300 clouds

When The Velvet Underground recorded songs like 'All Tomorrows Parties' they were playing with a powerful droning sound that plumbed depths way beyond the pop/rock palette. The drones in those songs lent a mystical heaviness to them; it was a sound that tugged at thoughts, promising to pull away mental veils, revealing distant inner horizons previously obscured to the mind's eye. Psychogeography. I think I read someone somewhere (I forget who) describe 'All Tomorrows Parties' as a musical evocation of a sun rising endlessly in some strange perpetual dawn - or something along those lines.

From the song I posted above, you can join dots through Spaceman 3 and Spiritualized and back to the Velvets where so much begins. 300 clouds is best described as a mantra, I suppose. It reminds me a lot of the Erol Alken remix of Spaceman 3's 'Big City' (a humdinger). The vocal melody is near-spoken and quasi-religious in its lyrical content. The music arrangements are vast, melodic and beautiful, opening and reopening around the chanted lyrics like floral forms or a changing patterned sky. It comes from an album called 'Forgot the Mantra', which was all written by one dude called Dave, a guy who, no doubt, has licked the odd toad in his time. Psych-tastic.

My favourite albums of the decade #5

Tweet The 'Heap is back on Hype Machine. "Good Times!" as that annoying beardy channel 4 bloke who is obsessed with 80s pop-cultural flotsam might say in a blend of chummy Cornish patter conducive to smashed faces. I'll have to keep a few MP3s ticking over freshly now, because it seems that the Hype Machine bot can automatically de-list a blog if it is inactive for a few weeks. And God forbid, I'd hate to lose any of that locust-like onslaught of North Americans who rattle through these pages on a daily basis, to click on links that are dead, before disappearing into the ether, probably muttering to themselves that this site is a bucket of 'ass-cookies'. I know you are mostly not reading these words my Hype Machine chums, 'cos your average site visit is 2.1 seconds, but I like you all anyway - for pushing me up the google rankings. Godspeed to you, you prose allergic, sticky fingered, MP3 monkeys. Godspeed.

#5 Squarepusher - Go Plastic (2001)

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I always thought of this record cover as being like a Rorschach print. Or maybe Tom Jenkins dropped his pink 'pancakes' on the photocopier during the Warp Xmas party. Either way, it's a shite cover. 

Go Plastic, like Aphex Twin's Drukqs (no.13 on this list), was one of my slow learner albums. If I were now the age I was when I invested in both of these challenging albums on CD the respective days they came out, and had, instead, downloaded them for free, I'd put good money on them lying in my recycle bin; next to my review copy of the new We are Scientists album and a couple of decrepit paunchy photos I took of myself while trying out a camera's timer function in the back garden last week. But I bought them. And I persevered with them, even though both were harsh mistresses. Aphex's effort was a tougher slog than Jenkins' (which more readily reveals entry points into its controlled chaos through some astutely placed jazzy breakdowns). 

I was young in my musical tastes then, and more used to the choppy ambient hip hop of Boards of Canada, Godfathers of chillwave. (That was my friend, that music - a vaguely disquieting but often soothing nightly companion, channeling a universally remembered past for kids who grew up watching 4 learning.) And although I loved the filthy fucktronica of 'Windowlicker' (a definite track of the '90s contender), nothing I heard before really prepared me for the relentless, initially confusing, driller-killer approach to drum and bass espoused by both albums. Were these beardy geeks fucking with me? 

Clearly they weren't. Both albums have grown in stature over the decade, looming large as yard-sticks by which I measure much other experimental electronica - for example, Vadislav Delay's free-floating hymns to industrial decay on last year's Tummaa, an album that sometimes sounded like bits of ancient Soviet farm machinery falling apart as the entire history of techno peters into entropy across Europe. Of the two, it's Go Plastic I revere the most. In spite of its radical reshaping of the form, the album has a more consistently intuitive grasp of drum and bass than Aphex Twin's more patchy repertoire, thanks to Jenkins' jazz background. Moreover, at no point does it feel like he is playing a joke on the listener, which James is likely to do even at his most sublime. That's not to say he doesn't have a sense of humour. I mean, the most impenetrable thing on the album, a trip through barely connected moments of sepulchral discordance, which laps at the heels of Stockhausen, is gleefully called 'my fucking sound'.

Squarepusher's influences bleed from every corner; drum and bass, two-step, dancehall, hip hop, acid house and, the biggest shaping influence of all, his own restless, experimental playfulness. According to the Aphex-scribed liner notes to his first album, Feed me Weird Things, Jenkins used to hold a Dictaphone to his sand pit as a child to try record the sound of ants footsteps as they walked over the sand. This is the sort of thing that appeals to me, a man who as a boy was known to sit on eggs from the super market to find out if they might hatch. Indeed, the scutter of tiny ant exoskeletons might be found in this spazzy, fucked up, by times beautiful and haunted record, but fuck knows where, such is the density of sound. 

And now, the prettiness. 'Cos it's there in plenty of places. Just check out 'Tommib', the supernaturally delicate ambient interlude used at one magical point in the movie Lost in Translation, and then spin 'I wish you could talk', a production that seems to try, try, and try again, via it's descending explosions of desperate melody, to communicate the saddest most heartbreaking thing Jenkins must know - in the language he knows best, musical form and manipulated rhythm. 

MP3: Squarepusher-go! spastic
(this MP3 can be removed at the owner's request - buy the album on iTunes if you like it. It's a classic)

P.S. What's the lowdown on Soundcloud folks? Do any of the readers who come here think I should give it a shot? I personally don't like its big widget. 

the spooked radio dial

Tweet Album number five in my decade list has been postponed for twenty four hours as I sulkily try to come to terms with the mysterious removal of Asleep on The Compost Heap from the hype machine's listings. Sniff. Meanwhile, I recently interviewed Ariel Pink for July's AU magazine, which is fab and can be found for free in many places north and south of the border. He was doing promo for 'Ariel Pink Before Today'; a stunning album which channels his weirdness into songs that are less wayward than his previous work but no less brilliant. You can read the review below.

“Indie labels suck. Major labels suck. Everything sucks.” Cult underground mainstay Ariel Pink, of Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti, is on the phone to AU from LA and he is not mincing his words about his experiences within the record industry. To say the topic is a bugbear for the ‘colourful’ (as in downright, gloriously, bonkers) musician is an understatement, recurring as it does time and time throughout a discussion that touches on his new album, the perils of playing live unprepared, and the experience of working with a full band. While his experiences with industry machinations thus far have been fraught, something of which we will hear more later on, there is no doubt that, with his recent signing to 4AD (gleefully described as a “big push that’s gonna help [new album Ariel Pink Before Today] go off like a stink bomb”), Ariel’s doldrum days might finally be over.

Squint your eyes and it looks like Ariel is in the nip. Swoon.

Pink has existed at the fringes of experimental American music since the turn of the decade, a figure at first revered locally, then in subsequently increasingly wider circles, for his series of enigmatic cassette albums (three were later released on Animal Collective’s ‘Paw Tracks’ imprint) which buried the tricks obtained from a lifelong love affair with AM Radio (think Michael Jackson, The Police and Hall and Oates) in a wayward, deeply mysterious, fug of reverb and tape hiss voodoo. When you add to this his lyrical preoccupation with existentialism and sadness, his deep register vocals, his love of Goth music (he cites the Cure as his favourite band), and his provocative art-literate image, the figure who emerges is one of the most singular artists recording today. Yet for an artist so influential - for example, any number of the current crop of so-called ‘chillwave’ bands would be unashamed to cite him as being key in shaping their zonked aesthetic – the modest level of label recognition and financial success he desires, “enough to fucking live somewhere and record music”, has so far eluded Ariel.

He says, “when my stuff was coming out on Paw Tracks my goal was to land on a real label. You know I was expecting to have like major indies to come knocking the door, trying to get me on their label like straight away. It didn’t happen. And I was like fuck, what am I doing wrong? When is someone gonna come and get me off this fucking label? And nobody ever did.” His dissatisfaction with Paw Tracks resulted not only from how his finances were being handled, but also in how they ordered the release of his older albums. The ‘Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti’ project was conceptualized as a coherent series, and Paw Tracks mixed the order in which the material was released. “They’ve been totally jumbled out of order in how they were released”, he explains, “like there is no harmony to them. I can’t do anything about it though, it’s a lost cause. It’s a mad caper. I liken it to the Matthew Barney collection. The Cremaster series” [an absolute freak-fest of a video installation by the avant garde artist and erstwhile lover of Bjork, consisting of five surreal films based on the muscle that lowers and raises the testicles].

Great song. The picture, on the other hand, reminds me of a guy who wanked a dog into a Tayto packet when I was in second year. Can't shake the feeling that Ariel or someone he knows actually tongued a dog. 

Ariel accepts some responsibility as to why those larger indie labels never came knocking, admitting that it might have had something to do with his somewhat patchy reputation for being able to translate his recorded efforts into a satisfying live experience. He says, “I need to get a band together. I need to tour and get a really good live situation going, where we have an impact on an audience. There is no substitute for that, being able to leave good impressions. We don’t need people second guessing their initial ideas of the band from me not taking it seriously as a live enterprise. I need to be professional. I need to have an engaging quality.” These statements are a far cry from the Ariel of old, a man who used to confront hostile audiences with a surliness and hostility of his own.

It seems, however, that that situation was more complex, and he was, according to himself, putting up a front to hide his shortcomings as a live performer. As he puts it, “It was awful. What people saw some nights, was a guy, me, us, toiling with a reality, with the knowledge, in real time, that we were unprepared. For a lot of people it was oh Gawd that was the most awful thing ever, fuck that guy. So ultimately I didn’t mind scowling and making everyone feel like it was an episode of The Office.”

It’s hard to react to his reference to The Office without imagining how cringe-worthy some of those shows must have been for both the audience and him alike. Thankfully, Ariel 2.0 is not short of self-awareness (in fact, he is quite long on it and a brief phone conversation with the man leaves the impression of someone continually revaluating himself), and he again returns to his need for a band to get the current album to work. He describes this recruitment as a difficult, self-financed task that he had to undertake without any label support. Evoking the spectre of Mark E. Smith, he talks about a process of “hiring and firing” band members to get to the current bunch of musicians who he is happy to tour with. This impression is lent further weight by Ariel’s description of how he works with the current line-up. “I tell my band that they have to be my dream band, and that’s the challenge”, he says. “I mean they hate it when I say it but it’s the truth. If you want to bring music into this operation, I tell them you have to bring music that you envision that I would be making in my head. It sounds egotistical, I know, in that they are really just fulfilling my dream.”

Yet it’s not all orders from the top. Ariel, while obviously giving the impression of a controlling lead man, speaks fondly of his charges. He maintains that “there is nobody else who can do what they do” and he is relying on them “more and more to do other stuff too. It’s not all me anymore, a lot of it is just playing my stuff note for note, but they are starting to help me in other ways. I don’t have that burning urge I used to have to make such a raw document of myself and they help me just to take my time to come out with something a little different, something good.” (As an aside, when Ariel speaks of writing a ‘raw document’ it is worth returning to an earlier part of the interview where he describes the raison d’être of his earlier work. “when i started making music years ago, I wanted to make the most saddest music. The most saddest thing. I mean that was my goal. I wanted to express my perspective. I wanted people to hear the darkness in my soul").

How the new line-up works out live remains to be seen, but on the new record the input of the extra musicians is palpable. The album is being touted as potential breakthrough for Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti, and it is easy to see why. A muscular intent runs through it, most notably on the thrilling lead single ‘Round and Round’, a tremendously melodic enigma of a song that channels VH1 Classic through dirty bong water by way of a wish to return to the womb. It’s less foggy than the earlier stuff, sure, but no less intriguing; in fact, it might be even more so. The label is behind him, the hype wheels are in motion, now all that remains to be seen is whether the world embraces this wonderfully peculiar keeper of the weird American west coast flame.

"What sort of a yoke is that Brian Ormond at all at all? He's useless. He can't present."

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Look at all my new doodahs, buttons and ding dongs. Now you can retweet and share my blogs so they can stink up other parts of the internet like reheated poop. You can also click little squares and let me know if my posts are good or crap. It's about time shit got interactive around here. Did you know the 90s were over a decade ago? Yeah dude, a full decade. Just think about it. No, really think about it, man. That's ten freakin' years. Freakin' heavy. It's not often I have thoughts as profound as Nathan from Wavves does; so I capitalised on my troubling revelation about the 90s being a decade ago and added all the doodahs as displacement activity to distract me from death's inevitability. I hope you like them and use them.

Sorry that I was away for long. But as vegetablehead didn't quite explain, I was ill in July and spent a lot of time getting better, reading books, and watching the second hands on clocks moving with a tempo that was inversely proportional to my desire for them to speed up. As for old vegetablehead, he isn't really all that sound is he? I wish I never hallucinated him into existence. Ah well, I can't turn back time so my conscience will have to live with him being out there, wreaking havoc on the world, raping things and doing whatever else he does for yucks.

Former Big Brother contestant Ray Shah. What's he doing here? I don't know. Go home Ray, this isn't a nightclub opening in Athlone. Stop turning up at places unannounced.

When it comes to recent music, I've had a very frugal couple of months. I went to a grand total of zero gigs and while I listened to a lot of music, it included barely a handful of new albums. But then again, that's fairly standard behaviour for me. Nialler has all the good new shit anyway. Here are some recommendations based on the few things I listened to while I was away.

Baths - Cerulean
Cerulean is faded polaroid hip hop from an embarrassingly talented young dude from California. If dance music was a pinball machine and this album was a ball it would light up all sorts of mad corners of the table. Some tracks sound like Four Tet, others like Flying Lotus and yet others like Boards of Canada. There's some singing and a few talky bits laid over what Hipster Runoff might call some chill-ass jams. Unlike the recent album from The Books, however, the talky bits aren't annoying after one or two listens. Have you heard that album? It's like they created something lovely and then splattered it with bird-shit (aka mono-joke vocal samples). Cerulean is real summer music so try and get out in the sun with it before September kicks in like a wet leaf and you reach for some Autumn-ass jams.

MP3: Baths-lovely bloodflow

Menomena - Mines
I think this is Menomena's third album. I really rate them and I believe this to be their best effort out of the three I know. Considering their gift for producing killer melodies, I can't understand why they are not more popular than they are. Lyrically, they've gone all Dylan Thomas's dad on this record - raging, raging hard against stuff. Brent Knopf, who has a very expressive singing voice, yelps about keeping leaky boats afloat, time slipping through his fingers, ghosts, and all sorts of messy personality issues while their sax player (Justin Harris, I think), keeps up with some hardcore urgent grooves. Menomena have a lot of qualities that set them apart, but for me the sax is the one that seals the deal and I'd say a lot of tepid spit was drained from it during the recording of this album. It gets worked to shit, that saxophone. Did I mention the melodies? Lead-off track Queen Black Acid has the most awesomely insistent structure I heard in a song this year, and the marriage of melody and melancholy sparked a little light in my heart that I thought went out with the demise of my onetime favourite band The Boo Radleys. I can't post it here, but compensatory MP3 TAOS is nearly as good; anyway we should all buy the album on iTunes because Menomena deserve it. Menomena should be fucking huge. They probably are in some parallel dimension.

MP3: Menomena-TAOS

Up next - Album of the decade number five. And after that, the usual drill - rambling anecdotes about Kells followed by MP3s by obscure drone bands