my favourite albums of 2011 (#15 Future Islands - On the Water)

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I'm out of lame jokes or excuses as to why I'm still doing this shit in late Spring, practically the middle of the year - it's beyond me. But I'll tell ye one thing that might be relevant: I clearly remember Mr Landers standing over my shoulder in third class, watching me blunderingly try to lace a football boot, and him saying "why must you do everything arseways?".

#15 Future Islands - On the Water

On the Water isn't typical of the sort of stuff I mostly listened to last year but, while listening to the review copy I had from state magazine, I became absorbed by it and by its earnest theatrics. 

I like Sam Herring's weird voice (which is the huge deal-breaker around this band, I've noticed). He sings in a variety of strange registers, with his vocals quickly oozing up a couple of octaves (as if squeezed) into these strangulated, almost character-inhabiting yelps of exaggerated emotion; not unlike Morrisey in technique. It adds to what Future Islands are all about - magnified, almost operatic, heartbreak.

And the subject matter is the other thing I like about On the Water. There's a sort of toxic core notion to it, namely that there's some desperate worth in clinging to a lost past. He sings this sentiment ("look back, look back/hold on to the last") over a supple web of synthesized chords in 'Where I Found You', On the Water's central song, and it sounds more-or-less like the album's (indeed Future Islands') manifesto. I'm sure most therapists these days would tell you that Herring is giving pretty questionable life advice here - cling to the past, don't let shit go, desperately rake over the dead ashes of some busted up romance... It's counter intuitive to received wisdom, which is all about letting go, so there is a sad romanticism to it. Great Gatsby shit. 

What else? Umm the album is very pristine sounding, all transparent clinky synths and clean'n'robust Peter Hook bass shapes, with the odd exhaled accordion chord thrown in for added poignancy (trademark: Twilight Sad). Which is a pretty suitable backdrop for Herring's past-obsessed, shattered lover persona. 

Also: I never knew how big Future Islands were in Dublin until I noticed via twitter how desperately people were looking for tickets for their latest gig. Wow, they strike a chord eh? Anyway, like many, I'm re-reading Dubliners at the moment for One City One Book, and the famous last story The Dead is about, among lots of other stuff, how the Irish are preoccupied with their dead past. 

With that tenuous link between James Joyce and Future Islands' appeal in Ireland, I'll pretentiously prance off.

MP3: Future Islands-Where I Found You

On repeat

Tweet I am now on the sixth (or maybe seventh?) crappy MP3 player I've bought in four years; the last one fell from my shirt pocket into a toilet as I stooped to flush it. Here are some of the songs that are on repeat on my newest generic plastic rectangle of cheap circuitry.

welcome to my world

MP3: Julia Holter-Marienbad

This song is the opening track and thematic stage-setter for Julia Holter's coolly gorgeous new album Ekstasis. It is a song in three movements - reminding me tangentially of other little compressed symphonies like 'Good Vibrations' and 'Bohemian Rhapsody'. Each successive movement in its sequence is a bit more ornate than the one previous, culminating in the breathtaking final part of the song which coasts along on a combination of celestial drum rattles and a vocal counter-melody that sounds, and I say this sincerely, not of earth. Float on.

MP3: Traxman-Callin all Freaks

I've noticed that more and more people are becoming aware of 'footwork', which is a variation on Chicago Juke or ghetto house, a sample-based music genre which has the function of providing super fast musical patterns for break dancing competitions. I only discovered Juke music last year through stuff like Machinedrum and particularly through Ramadanman's absolute wopper 'Work Them'. Traxman is one of the original ghetto house producers, hard at it since the 1990s, and Planet Mu have just put out a full length album of his productions called Da Mind of Traxman. In keeping with the music's function, many of the tracks are tightly wound little systems of rising energy that seem to spin, then stop. In saying that, the music does stretch out a bit in places, incorporating less purist elements from techno, R&B, and the like.

BTW lads, you should see me footwork to Da Mind of Traxman. That's me; I love like I've never been hurt, and I dance at 155bpm like nobody's watching.

MP3: Actress-Shadow from Tartarus

The ambient techno producer Actress put out his latest album R.I.P on the 20th of April, a date significant to, erm, many of the sort of people to which such extremely zoned out music appeals. The above observation is backed up by the Resident Advisor forum which is full of comments along the lines of "Out on 4/20 - sweeeeeeet dude".

I'm still not entirely sure if I can connect with the album which plays out as if each track is a discrete room the listener visits, evoking a particular strand of the crawling gloom that permeates the entire project. I'll give it one thing, though; it fairly conjures an atmosphere.

Hah hah, I'm not exactly selling this am I? It'll probably end up my favourite album of the year.

spending warm summer days indoors (internet culture generation gap)

Tweet I am clearly on the other side of a generation gap and the internet has a lot to do with it. I'm part of a generation who sort of get the 'internet' (in the sense of internet culture as opposed to a practical understanding of the ways in which the web is functionally useful) but who also remember what life was like before it. The ways in which my teenage self differed from today's tumblr-teen are profound. Almost unimaginably different, I'd say. Like if I were to transplant a modern adolescent's brain into my teenage body, it would probably crackle violently then melt like one of the Nazi grave robbers at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

This is probably a very obvious observation, but it is one that only hit me recently. It occurred to me when I was thinking about pen pals of all things. When I was young I had a pen pal because tangibly knowing some other human from somewhere else on the planet was such an exotic and exciting thing. Every couple of weeks, I'd write a painfully dull and conventional letter (I was a reserved adolescent and stingy with any sort of revealing personal information) to Kevin, a twelve-year-old from Michigan, then wait for up to a month later for his response, a letter that stuck equally rigidly to pen pal convention but which sometimes contained such added wonders as; a crappy drawing of two stick men throwing a frisbee in front of a lake, Operation Desert Storm trading cards, a passport photo of Kevin, a Hershey wrapper, and a cinema stub (with the word 'awesome' scribbled on it in red biro) for a film that was to open in Ireland a few weeks later. 

"do you have Dairy Queen in Ireland? It's awesome, a store that only sells ice-cream"

The amount of life I invested into the few scraps which that young lad sent to me of his daily existence in America is remarkable in retrospect. I'd do this by moving beyond the more obvious evidence and into more roundabout territory. I'd scrutinize the stamps and postmarks, check if the writing paper was similar to Irish writing paper (it wasn't, he wrote on squared paper for some reason), and pour over the background details of a family photo he sent me (a wooden slatted house! a barbeque!). I remember once even smelling the envelope of a letter in the hope of discovering what an American shop or cupboard or post office or wherever it came from smelled like. And I'd look at Kevin himself, with his goofy windswept head, replete, in a yearbook-style shot in front of artificial clouds, with a mouth full of teeth that looked like the show shelf at a bathroom tile sale, and I'd marvel at just how different this American kid was from me. Quick aside: just in case all this makes me sound like an absolute weirdo I should clarify that, unlike Morrisey who spent "long summer days indoors/ writing frightful verse/ to a bucktooth girl in Luxembourg", my reasons for having a penpal were entirely devoid of romantic intent (at this age anyway. A later female pen pal from Germany was all about that slightly desperate Mozzer buzz).

Now, let's think of a smart teenager who has grown up online. They'll more than likely be friends with an international spiderweb of dozens of others who share their interests, and who communicate with them in real time in chat rooms and on message boards through a continually evolving and complex language of animated .gifs, hashtags, and memes referencing a mind-boggling amount of fragments of global culture (albeit with a western bias). Instead of having one goofy yearbook photo of an American to invest personality into, they can instead spend weeks, if they so wished, clicking through countless galleries of real (not TV) young people doing things anywhere on earth. That this was literally impossible for someone of my generation to do at that age is probably hugely significant, even though we don't yet know how.

That image of adolescent me, absorbed in deep imaginings about what it would be like to live in Michigan, suddenly seems so quaint. 

why take the bus to work when you can take the internet?

I wonder how this generation gap will shape culture? It will probably be a while before we see it in novels (if zany online fan-fic or whatever doesn't replace them), and I am no expert on visual art, but what I definitely do notice is an internet-driven sea change in music, especially in rap mixtapes and in certain strands of electronica. That people's antennae are attuned to such a change is evident in how eagerly a throwaway comment made by the musician Grimes about her music being 'post internet' has been leaped on and parsed by many. I guess, like any generation gap or cultural movement, it can't really be viewed from the inside, but it feels pretty big, doesn't it? And when you think of how significantly the advent of photography, radio, and cinema fed into modernism, you might only marvel at what art will come out of this flux. Of course, you might be cynical, and suggest that such information overload might compromise people's capacity to wonder at things or notice them, and compromise their subsequent ability to generate art. But whatever camp you belong to (and late at night, when I stumble into a particularly weird, anime-literate, .gif-infested corner of tumblr, I could belong to either), you can't deny that having a pen pal will never mean the same thing again; in other words, that things have changed entirely.

MP3: Soulja Boy (with Clams Casino)-All I Need

MP3: Grimes-Oblivion

MP3: James Ferraro-Global Lunch

Asleep on the podcast heap #7

Tweet I think the new mike I bought is a bit of a swizz. The quality just isn't great. I feel like a chump to be honest. If anybody can recommend a decent mike for this sort of thing please let me know in the comments. Or, indeed, if there some simple trick to all this, let me know that too. I'd be indebted and I'd buy you Aldi confectionery.

This episode is a croaky late night transmission that takes in The KLFs Chill Out (a genre classic ambient album), an English indie-dance group from the 1990s called Disco Inferno, and an arty farty documentary called Ways of Seeing. 

Listening back, I think I sound a bit world weary. I've spent practically all of my current break from work indoors, like a pale human-shaped bag of gelatine passively gripping an Xbox controller, and that might come through in my voice. But HEY don't let that put you off. No, seriously, come back, it's worth a listen...promise.

This is the art documentary I talked about: Ways of Seeing. The ubuweb version (which I watched) was black and white, but youtube has it in colour.

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Nah und Fern

Tweet If you were a child who lived near a forest, even a small one, it probably loomed large in your imagination. I lived (and still do) near a pathetically small forest called Headfort forest. Tiny as it was, however, it didn't stop us from making up all sorts of mad stories about it. Older kids, swept along by the great Kells ouija board craze of 1991 would head out there in the evenings and end up spooked, pale, and blethering about a dead fisherman with hooves who spoke to them and continued to do so until the school called in a priest. So we told each other. And it was frightening. At one point, in the depths of the ouija board craze, I was afraid even to go to school, because every day played out like an episode of Most Haunted. Week in and week out, we'd hear about some wacked-out teenager from over the town doing something nuts, like pulling clumps from their hair after spending half the night being goaded by an eyeless nun.

Later on, it dawned on me that the early 90s were Acid-House time. There was a lot of LSD doing the rounds (not to mention those tiny mushrooms on the pitch and putt course), and this might go go some way towards explaining all those shades going billy-o about the town. You might ask what sort of mental kids mix psychotropic drugs with games for communicating with the dead? But I guess that was Kells at the start of the 90s. Regular children were wearing heat sensitive orange tie-dye and watching the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air; we were snaffling magic mushrooms in graveyards and getting exorcised by the town priest (true story: a certain priest did one or two things along these lines at the time). But, I digress. Let's get back to forests.

Forests. Such sensory places. The acrid smell of bruised elderflower leaves. The soft leaf mulch under my doc martins. Half-sunken orange frisbees of fungus on tree barks. Rooks picked out against a corroded silver sky. It is one easy skip from this heady mix of sensory stimulants to creepy flights of fancy. Grasping woody hands, witchy cackles, and puppety demons flitting through the gaps ahead. All this, from a tiny forest. Imagine what it would be like to grow up on the edge of a proper forest? Like the German Black Forest or, as they know it, Die Schwarzwald?

It's a great word, Schwarzwald, weighty, ominous and expressive of the how the forest must have seemed in long-gone times. A mossy mystery as big as a small country. An impenetrable place, full of thick shadows as alive as the moss they fall on; full too of toadstools, tangled briars, pagan secrets...


I'm thinking of the Schwarzwald a lot because it's a key reference point for a collection of music I've gotten into recently. It is by Gas and it is called 'Nah und Fern' - a collection of four albums re-released as a box set. Gas was the ambient electronic side project of Wolfgang Voigt who co-founded Cologne's renowned Kompakt label. The minimal aesthetic of many of the acts on that label owe a debt to his production work and his various early releases under different monikers. The Gas records, however, were his collective masterwork, and were, until now, a sort of holy grail for techno lovers prepared to trade silly bucks on Ebay.

The music made by Gas is ridiculously hard to convey in prose, which is why a sample MP3 is provided below. It's techno in the barest sense, in that you will often hear 4/4 beats, sometimes close, but mostly far, far away in the thick mix. They beat dully like faint signals through a soupy fog, either anchoring you or tricking you into following them ever deeper into and over Voigt's horizon-less sonic terrain.

Voigt was inspired both by Germany's forests (the 3rd record Konigsforst translates as King's Forest) and German composers whose music he sampled from old vinyl recordings. He layered, treated, and distended these samples into billowing drones and textures which, on headphones, convey the largest sense of 'space' I've experienced in music. Voigt called the project Gas because he wanted the sounds to be vaporous, airy and everywhere at once, and throughout the records, the timeless life of the forest is tangible; its mulchy darkness, its gnarled depths, and from time to time its clearings full of light and heat. The record works as a prayer to the forest, or as a sort of communion with it.

What you are reading here is about as excited as I get about a new musical discovery. I want to share it. Even if you are into music with more conventional structure, give it a go and with patience you may find yourself drawn into these albums' great depths. If you live near a forest, why not take them with you on headphones? Just don't stop to talk to the cloven hoofed fisherman. He's bad news.

MP3: Gas-Konigsforst 1

Sorry if this blog post seems familiar. Most of it is taken from something I wrote here a couple of years ago. 

DIY Days in Dublin

Tweet On Saturday night I broke my abstinence from live music events by going to No Monster Club's launch of their new indie-pop album Dublin. They were supported by a google-proof band called "the #1s" who I missed, and the fine Big Monster Love (no relation, named before them) who played some of his intimate songs that contemplate life from a sideways, slightly wonder-struck perspective.

The gig, like so many these days, was not in a licensed venue, but one of those artists' 'spaces' that might have been an old shop premises or, in this case, as my friend Fergal noticed, an alleyway that had simply been partitioned into a vague, irregularly-shaped house with a roof thrown over it. I spent a lot of the night marveling at the quirks of this space, which had the brilliantly incongruous name of 'The Supafast Building'. Upstairs there was something like a living room, replete with recliners and a coffee table, but only if you imagine a living room furnished down the far end of an alleyway. Further upstairs still, was the temporary men's loo, which was basically an industrial ceramic sink with a person-sized plywood board placed alongside it for privacy. If you looked up on your journey to this extraordinary toilet, you would have noticed what is presumably the Supafast Building's conversation piece of interior decorating, a giant mock viking sword, about four foot in length, hanging from the ceiling like the sword of Damocles. Early in the night, I clownishly jumped and tipped the bottom of the dangling weapon to see if it was made of metal. Frighteningly, it was. Later in the night, I looked towards it with worry more than once as a group of No Monster Club fans (who I know) disco-danced their potential last beneath its swaying menace.

The venue was a good fit for No Monster Club. Like the Libertines (in this way only, mind you) and Dan Deacon, they are a band quite visibly fueled by a sense of camaraderie with their fans, a back-and-forth live experience that feeds off the room and often feels as much house-party as gig. The fact that they played in a place that loosely resembled a house simply emphasized this thing about the band. In naming his band a 'club' where the only requirement for admission is that you are not a monster, Bobby Ahern draws our attention to a welcoming sense of inclusiveness contained in his ongoing project. By specializing in songs to which it is easy to sing and dance, yet which often fall apart in a shambles to be reconstructed from the ground up using the help of a delirious call-and-response with the audience, he celebrates this inclusiveness again and again. No Monster Club is not just Bobby, Mark, and Paddy. It is practically everyone Bobby knows. In other words, everyone who has fun at these gigs contributes in a meaningful way to the No Monster Club story (on Saturday night, ways to do this included: dancing on the spot, crowd surfing over the front dozen people, hanging from the ceiling fittings like a monkey, and chanting "Bobby's Ma" for the benefit of the woman in question who may or may not have been there). It all adds material to a feedback loop that will eventually and undoubtedly produce further songs referencing these shared experiences.

No Monster Club's new album, beautiful vinyl copies of which were handed out at the door, remains a mystery to me at present as I do not have a record player. However, the fact that it is called Dublin already speaks to me, and makes sense in light of Saturday's gig. Ahern has a feel for the pulse of a DIY scene that is alive and kicking in the city at present (if not exactly rolling in money) and, in a way, he has become its bounding, puppyish, mascot. His mission on Saturday night was to get as many people (not monsters, of course) involved as possible. Get on board.

MP3: No Monster Club-Electric Picnic

The band's page is here.

My favourite albums of 2011 (#16 Sandwell District - Feed Forward)

Tweet I'm on an Easter break from work, so might get a few more of these things done... Speaking of Easter, has anybody else noticed something sly going on with chocolate eggs? They weigh less, and often come with one rather than two pieces of confectionery. Of course, there isn't the tiniest clue on the packaging that this is going on. It strikes me as an extension of the stealthy changes the chocolate companies brought about in their Christmas tins over the past couple of years (reducing weight, altering the individual sweets etc). It also reminds me of when the milk companies changed the amount of milk to half a litre instead of a pint, thereby increasing the price without obviously appearing to do this.

If it was the other way around, and Easter eggs got bigger, there'd be huge yellow stripes on their boxes screaming X% extra free. Amirite? Be egg-aware this Easter kids. Shop around.

#16 Sandwell District - Feed Forward

Feed Forward is an album of very high-minded techno in the honourable tradition that values anonymity and a 'machine-music' ethos over name recognition and any sort of crossover appeal (I've seen this album described time and time again as 'purist'). Sandwell District is not one producer, but rather a collective that has released a bunch of highly prized singles over the past decade or so. These singles were white-label jobs with no press or artwork, just catalogue numbers and the music itself, tunneling cosmic techno that subjugates the producer's human touch to the extent that you might wonder whether the continually unfurling sound is generated instead by a complex system of logarithms.

Over its nine tracks, Feed Forward operates at two speeds. It switches gears more than once between sections of ambient drift and powerful propulsion, lending a dichotomous harmony to the listening experience. The inexorable forward trajectories of so many of these tracks end in places of nebulous calm, where synths as beautiful as any I've heard on a techno album ripple outwards towards the dark rim of space.

Feed Forward (also, was an album ever more appropriately named than this?) is not the sort of album that will ever appeal broadly. The high and uncompromising style that I've already mentioned is not going to endear itself to a wide audience. It is machine-music, an end point of the future-utopia mindset associated with Detroit techno and, latterly, the Berghain nightclub in Berlin. However, if you step up to it with an understanding and acceptance of what it is (an exhilarating functional conduit to sensory places where the ego means little), you might well be astonished by the depth it contains.

MP3: Sandwell District-Speed + Sound (Endless)