My favourite albums of 2011 (#19 KWJAZ - KWJAZ)

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Last week found me hating on stuff. This week, I'm barely functioning. I somehow buttoned my duffle coat into the back of a seat on the bus the other morning and tore it as I stumbled from the seat in a malignant morning fug. Two days prior to that, I drooled on a man during the return commute. Worse still, I barked some creepy dissociated mumbo jumbo at him because I didn't fully snap out of it post drool. I don't know what I said exactly, only that it contained the word "Iran". The look of silent panic on his face suggested that it was something unhinged, and considering that my dreams are typically filled with wheeling spectres, evil intelligent birds and sentient objects, he had every right to shit himself. Miraculously, my notorious myoclonic kung fu kick hasn't hurt anybody yet, but it's only a matter of time. 

I'm a jerky babbling half-mad disaster when it comes to falling asleep. In another century I would have been coated in holy water and garlic paste, prayed over, and burnt to death in a holy fire.

#19 KWJAZ - KWJAZ

this KWJAZ colour scheme was brought to you by your granny's wallpaper and the drug LSD

I'm still not entirely sure what this weird shit is. I discovered it on the excellent blog, No Fear of Pop (who subsequently selected it as their favourite album of 2011). It's a murky mystery of an album that will not be to everybody's taste. Indeed, a hilairiously brilliant bullshit-calling comment on No Fear of Pop probably speaks for many...

The best release of the year two thousand eleven consists of two side-long tracks, named “Once in Babylon” and “Frighteous Wane”, both roughly twenty-two minutes in length

twenty-two minutes in length!
once in babylon
Frighteous Wane
Joey, Dee Dee, Johnny, please come back !!!

If that smart and seductive comment hasn't put you off KWJAZ, then prepare to go full weird. On the band's (I'm not sure if there is more than one person involved in this) last.fm page, instead of the usual extended artist description, there is the single sentence "shit's mysterious y'all". I love that sentence. It works as a manifesto for all the leaky, seepy, mangled music (from electronica to rap to, well, this shit) that's falling out over the top of the web right now, as the internet's engine and the generation at the controls take us into genuinely new and peculiar cultural territory.

A recent cokemachineglow review of Grimes' new LP tried to nail what is going on in music at the moment, and called Grimes the poster child of the "new weird". They are sort of on to something (like Grimes is great and all, but come on, she's not that weird, especially not on Visions which is practically a pop album). But they are right about there being a "new weird"; it manifests in its full glory on KWJAZ's couple of tracks, emerging from a rhythmic jazzy soup full of embryonic musical patterns and phrases, twitching, incubating, and growing freakish under the unnatural heat light of the internet.

MP3: KWJAZ-Once in Babylon (Excerpt)

My favourite albums of 2011 (#20 Mist - House)

Tweet I'm beat. Completely exhausted. I know this because I am hating on things like a lunatic.

Today I hated on freesheet newspapers; a man's voice on the bus; the braying self-important baloney peddled by self-styled opinion merchants on twitter (this type tend to have some variation of "all opinions my own" in their twitter biographies to aid the feeble illusion that they are employed by some important media organisation that actually gives a fuck about whether they are towing some official line with their inconsequential brain farts about Crackbird and Vincent Brown)*; cryptic passive aggression on twitter (I see too many glum riddles directed at unnamed people in order to a: piss the unnamed person off and b: elicit sympathy from one's emotionally manipulated and increasingly exasperated followers); the fact that all the grass verges on my road are mangled by cars parked in the slovenly manner of those who value getting in their door a couple of seconds sooner over maintaining a housing estate; people (clutching freesheets of course) who steam onto the DART like panicky farm animals before anyone has a chance to get off it; some dumbo ad for Lynx for women I saw in Connolly train station; and that old favourite of mine, myself (because I stayed up late last night listening to a podcast about computer games in the full knowledge that I would spend today tired and cranking impotently at the abyss of modern Irish life).

Um...time for some serenity.

#20 Mist - House

I always get the feeling that there are clearly distinct forces at work within Emeralds, pulling the group in different directions at once and thereby lending their music the dynamism, synthesis, and complexity you often find in groups where strong individual talents are just about held in check by the greater effect of their combined efforts (see also: Animal Collective). In the flux of such groups, it's often the case that the distinctive style of one member will win out on a given album. Like you can clearly hear Mark McGuire's exploring guitar style as the element that most informs 2009's 'What Happened', and after listening to Mist's 'House' I get the feeling that John Elliott's compositional style played the larger part in 'Does it Look Like I'm Here?' (my favourite album of 2010 by the way, and I remain smitten with its beautifully poised compositions).

Elliott and his partner in Mist, Sam Goldberg of Radio People, make music that plays like 'Does it Look Like I'm Here?' purified, completely stripped of McGuire's space-tentacles-towards-infinity guitar lines. 'House' is animated by steady pulses that glow like smeared LED lights and beatific synth pads that can deliver literal physical chills through the sense of cosmic, quasi-religious bliss they communicate, music for the escalator journey to heaven in Powell and Pressburger's 'A Matter of Life and Death'. The album's key track, 'I can still hear your voice', is the most euphoric of the lot, drifting completely free of any worldly reference points at all, consisting of wave after wave of hovering chords supplicant to some aural pleasure principle. 

Listening to 'House' I wonder if this is what joining certain cults might feel like? This zonked, never ending drift into happy land? It can be a bit much; it's not as complex or meaty as Emeralds, but as a serenity bath it takes some beating.

MP3: Mist-I Can Still Hear Your Voice

*before you comment about this, I realise that everything I say about twitter is laughably hypocritical. Also, today's hatin' is temporary.

The groove is in the heart

Tweet In case you haven't already read Ian Maleney's lengthy response to Una Mullally's now well-disseminated Irish Times piece questioning the health of the Dublin club scene, do check it out. As I live in Kells, I wouldn't have any more than an armchair view of what is going on in the clubs in Dublin at the moment. Yet, Tripod closure notwithstanding, going on the evidence of facebook event invites and reports from friends in the know, many of whom are a lot younger than me, things do seem to be in as fine a fettle as Ian says they are, and I know that Ian is well placed to take the pulse of the scene.

woop woop

A thing about cities is that they are onion-like. They have layers, cities within cities so to speak, and as any reader of Ulysses knows (hey it's a good year to indulgently reference Joyce), Dublin contains multitudes of Dublins that only reveal themselves through different perspectives. One clubber's dead Dublin is another's thriving underground hub. And that is why it is contentious to declaim, as Una did, on a scene without gathering some other perspectives.

I'm glad therefore that Ian wrote his article. It goes to show that because his Dublin is different to Una's Dublin, and both their Dublin's are different to, say, a metal fan's Dublin, there might surely be more than a bit of life in the old city yet.

Finally, a few things I've observed (as an occasional raver) about the dance community in Dublin. Its health is not dependent on whether a certain club venue is open or closed, nor indeed can it be gauged by the popularity of hip bedroom producers of the month such as Mmoths (not to question his talent, but you'd swear he was the first ever Irish electronic music producer. We tend to forget so many other fine producers like Donnacha Costello but that's another debate). Its health is also not dependent on stuff like shazam or the availability of digital downloads. The scene is not that simple to parse. It is a fraternity of sorts, built around a long tradition of successful promoters such as Bodytonic, shared experiences, friendships, and a sense of belonging. All of these things would have to take some sustained battering before Dublin, to rob a phrase, loses its groove.

MP3: Westbam Featuring Nena-Oldschool Baby (Piano Mix)

Asleep on the podcast heap #5

Tweet "Hello", as Gary Glitter once said, "it's good to be back". On this week's episode I'm back to flying solo and getting a little too excited about tape loops and a small Italian restaurant in Dublin. But, then again, if things like tape loops and small Italian restaurants aren't worth getting excited about, I ask you what is the point of anything at all really? Hmm?

And on that philosophical note, I'll shut up and leave you to download the podcast.

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This cool thing called iTunes where the podcast downloads automatically into a 'media library' every time I record a new episode. I know, right? It's like the future or something.

riveted by a dark exhausted eye/ a dry downturning mouth

Tweet I wonder if a poet has ever thought to write a meditation on mortality and ageing inspired by their teeth? That's what I thought while I sat in a Cavan dentist's chair as he jammed a giant flubbery lump of some kind of gel around my banjaxed upper teeth last week. He had made a mould of them to begin the process of rebuilding them from the sorry translucent shards they are today, a cross between the teeth of a deep sea angler fish and "the retarded hyena from the lion king" (as I was once gloriously called on twitter).

Because the gel took five minutes to harden, I had a bit of time to think about poetic metaphors. Teeth can't regenerate or grow back once they are gone, you see (in saying this, my brother once lived with a woman who confidently assured a mutual friend that his front teeth, which fell out when he drunkenly tripped over his own shadow in the NUI Galway bar one afternoon, would "grow back". This same lady remarked, on another occasion, that Bulmers cider is different from other ciders because "it's made from apples", so maybe her claims need to be taken with a pinch of salt).

a filling or two should do the trick

Where was I?  ...teeth...inability to regenerate...permanent reminder of the ageing process...got it. I spend much of my down time obsessively running my tongue over my front teeth, checking for new chips and cracks. I do this so much now, that I don't realise I am doing it unless I stop to think of it or unless my tongue discovers something new. For my tongue knows every microscopic crevice, from the chip that sprang from an incisor when I tried to slide down a bannister on my arse aged 13, to the ugly fracture in the upper right molar that was foolishly used as a bottle opener during the Electric Picnic four or five years ago. There's a whole tiny geography in there, a coastline of dental attrition.

Of course, I have those dreams about my teeth falling out. Standing weeping in a dole queue holding a palmful of teeth as big as dominoes, spitting hundreds of them all over a higher level leaving cert Irish exam that I am doing in the nude under Garda supervision, or feeling them crumble to chalk dust as I pathetically mouth the words "be with me" to Christina Hendricks. That sort of thing.

Hmmm, maybe it's not the dentist I need to see?

MP3: Mark Van Hoen-Where Were You
(I will write about his brilliant album soon)

Podcast news: the podcast returns on Friday.

My Favourite Albums of 2011 (#21 Deadbeat - Drawn and Quartered)

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#21 Deadbeat-Drawn and Quartered

Whither dub techno? A bit like black metal, it's a niche style of music that is not particularly trendy, not known for progression, fiercely protected by pedantic purists, and arguably exhausted in what the form can do. To the outsider, the differences between certain dub techno tracks undoubtedly seem infinitesimal. I remember evangelising Basic Channel to a friend a few years ago and giving him a CD of their mysterious stripped down productions (music which has burrowed deep into me in a way that little else has). A few weeks later, when I excitedly asked him what he thought, he told me that after listening to it five or six times he would feel hard pressed to distinguish any one track from another. Also, he wasn't too keen on it.

So what is it that fascinates me about this music which can sound alienating and boring to others? I've thought about it a good bit and can only come up with vague notions. One is its sense of space. The music on Deadbeat's Drawn and Quartered (2011's finest dub techno album, I think) plays within an invisible vaulting architecture. There is a sense of grandeur, almost of sacred chambers, and like many sacred places, these chambers are conducive to reflection, echoing and amplifying the slowly unfurling music and allowing for serene contemplation. Of course this sense of space can be tampered with (for example through tempo or the use of reverb) and at the other end of the slider you'll find productions that are claustrophobic and tense, but as a general rule Drawn and Quartered's cavernous space is typical of the genre.

Another notion is the sense of the music being positioned somewhere along a continuum that runs from hot to cold. Because of the crackling tape-looped ambience it shares with Jamaican dub, dub techno can communicate an incomparably comforting sense of warmth (or freezing cold). On Drawn and Quartered's 'Third Quarter' a gorgeous distended synthesiser drone materialises about two and a half minutes in, so feathery light and boundless that it's like a futuristic meadow that rolls towards a distant heat haze. It's a moment of sublimity. Yet it is only one of many such moments on this reluctant album that gifts itself slowly to the patient and mindful listener.

MP3: Deadbeat-Third Quarter (The Vampire of Mumbai)

the night of Pan

Tweet Bradley emails and asks why the blog is called Asleep on the Compost Heap. Good question Bradley, and I'll be fucked if I can give you a decent answer. I'll try though. When I started writing the blog, I noticed that many music blogs had vague and pretentious names that relied on forced surrealist juxtaposition (for example, Gorrila versus Bear). So I jumped on that bandwagon and played word association games with myself for ten minutes until I came up with the satisfyingly nonsensical yet visually rich expression 'Asleep on the Compost Heap'.

I intended the blog's title to be nonsense. However, if we take the psychoanalytical approach to word association, we might argue that the name carries a deeper significance and communicates something about me. This might well be true, as I have, indeed, pathetically fallen asleep on a compost heap (well, a pile of lawnmower clippings) on more than one occasion.

Hope that answers your question Bradley and thanks for asking.

There hasn't been enough weirdness here recently. Let's have some weirdness. Set the weird-o-meter to debigulation mark 5, press the yellow button, and secure the velcro snaps on your foam helmets folks. We're going in.

Contestants you will go on my first whistle. Gladiators, you will go on my second whistle

MP3: Lee Noble-Your Privilege

Lee Noble is a lad from Los Angeles whose album Horrorism comes from a point of agonised stasis inside a darkly luminous mental pit of some depth. His music is very home-made in that creaky bedroom way that belies the intimate nature of the recording process even when Lee musically spelunks into the bathyspheric trenches of consciousness. Much of the time his droning experimental folk sounds delicate and tender, yet other times it sounds churning and overwhelming, a gathering storm of dreadful thoughts, the wraiths of insecurity that haunt a certain type of psychedelically turned-on self. Horrosim comes highly recommended if you enjoyed Patrick Kelleher's You Look Cold.

MP3: Pete Swanson-Misery Beat

Listen to this gnarled squeaking mess. It's like some mutilated monstrosity pulling itself across a school basketball court in a late night teen horror flick. Man with Potential is Pete Swanson's (formerly of Yellow Swans) new album of swarming, damaged electronica, deliberately engineered to unsettle the listener. Remember how Richard D.James once managed on his Come to Daddy EP to simultaneously spook and exhilarate? Swanson pulls off something close to that here. In interviews, he has spoken about using a virtual reality machine that supposedly replicates the sensations associated with schizophrenia, and the corrosive power of the record certainly communicates a fractured sensory system, if not outright madness.

MP3: Kevin Hufnagel-Sunshower

Once again the mighty cokemachineglow introduces me to an album that's set to fascinate me for months to come. Kevin Hufnagel is a French Canadian drone artist with a background in death metal. His album Transparencies is a grandiose effort, earnest as fuck in its intention to create music of weighty sculptural beauty. You can almost picture the sort of guy he is - the serious fella in a long coat who reads philosophy books in pubs during the day, and moonlights in a dozen musical collectives associated with the local art school (the less trendy one) by night. Tumblr is something he sips his whiskey out of. Never change Kevin! Transparencies is a colossal album.

Asleep on the podcast heap #4

Tweet Special guest alert! Sean McTiernan of top dollar podcast Them's the Vagaries and the No Chorus blog joined me this week to share and chat about some cool stuff that interests him. Instead of pretending I had even an iota of knowledge about the majority of Sean's enthusiasms I let him do the explaining for a variety of stuff that includes K pop, DMX prayers set to ambient music and power violence music. Don't know what any of that stuff is...?....(don't lie, you don't!)...?...then download this week's episode and receive an education in esoterica from Sean.

DMX prayers set to ambient music.

K Pop.

Power Violence.

Check out No Chorus for a full list of links relating to the subject matter in this week's podcast.

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My favourite albums of 2011 (#22 Hype Williams - One Nation)

Tweet Any art lovers in the audience? Sure there are. Go check out 'The Shock of the New', Robert Hughes' classic BBC documentary on modern art. You can watch the entire series starting here, which is what I did last weekend. When finished, if you fancy more old skool mind food (and who doesn't?), you should try out the entire series of Jacob Bronowski's 'The Ascent of Man' starting here. You can use the acquired skills to beat Civilisation IV or something. My twitter acquaintance @leahycoo alerted me to this stuff being on youtube a while back. They sure don't make 'em like that anymore.

#22 Hype Williams - One Nation

Do you remember Boards of Canada's Geogaddi? It was their cracked monument, an overlong, sort of sinister, maximalist lug of an album that, while harder to love than the more refined Music Has the Right to Children, arguably contained stretches of their best music. Hype Williams's One Nation is more or less Geogaddi on steroids, or Geogaddi gone to fuck, or #fuckyeahgeogaddi on Tumblr, or Geogaddi after snorting something cheap from a headshop. 

I did not fall in love with 'One Nation' easily. I first listened to it while Christmas (Eve) shopping in Navan Shopping centre, and its slightly caustic mix of whining pitch-bent noise, samples and break beats made me feel uneasy and flustered. Of course, the animatronic santa clauses and sweat-drenched Navan farmers who jostled past me to get at the Family Guy Christmas slippers in Dunnes Stores did not help the overall listening experience. But something about the album stuck with me; I think it was the all that mumbo jumbo about peregrine falcons, erect penises (I think?) and reincarnation that played out at the end. Whatever it was, I gave One Nation a second chance. 

And then I listened to it incessantly. It cast a spell of sorts. It has a kind of Dadaist power to fascinate. You feel that Hype Williams (there are two of them) squat grinning at the centre of the whole chaotic 'One Nation' experience, protecting what might either be secrets of great profundity or just nothing - a bit like the KLF once did in their music. An image comes to mind: all these huge metal discs spinning so fast that a musical wind whistles over them, and on their glowing surfaces you can see dim projections of youtube stoner junk and pulsing gifs. It's like the soundtrack to the internet's never ending secret picture show. It's very of the moment.

MP3: Hype Williams-Jah