It's not a question for your head

Tweet I couldn't let an Animal Collective album go by without a longer consideration, so here are a few thoughts on Centipede Hz (pronounced "Centipede hurts" - says the middle guy in the human centipede).

Centipede Hz is a sidestep for Animal Collective after the electronic pop overtones of Merriweather Post Pavillion. It's a more prickly and weird album, and definitely contains a lot of Avey Tare who is the more aggressively experimental of their two main songwriters. Whereas Panda Bear tends to compose the band's most harmonic, conventionally pretty, and restrained songs ('Brothersport' excluded), Tare often works as the band's id, abandoning himself with yelping gusto into states that often sound ecstatic and sometimes sound anxious or fearful. On Centipede Hz he is at his most shamanic, constantly gnashing at the edges of the music.

So it's not as easy to get into this record as Merriweather. The best way to approach it is to take Tare's invitation in 'Today's Supernatural' at face value and realise it's "not a question for your head". This is classic psychedelic counsel to detach oneself, similar to "tune in, turn on and drop out". The truth is Centipede Hz is a ferociously psychedelic album. It is multiple sounding and amorphous with a busy surface (it's no wonder they named it after an arthropod which has so many legs moving at once). You can hear this multiplicity most clearly when the vocal melody begins on 'Moonjock' and the music bulges and ripples in a way that seems to threaten to change into something else entirely then back again in an instant. Listening to it, I kept thinking (pretentiously, tangentially, and subjectively, I know) of that enigmatic Captain Beefheart line that has come to sum up the possibilities of psychedelic music for me, "a squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous". 'Moonjock' sounds "fast and bulbous".

Once you detach, listen a few times, and break through the panicky and quick surface of Centipede Hz, it rewards richly. The jewel for me is the album's lead single 'Today's Supernatural' - a four minute exhortation to abandon oneself along the lines of Merriweather's now famous line "if I could just leave my body for a night". I think the song's middle eight is one of the finest things on any of their records, a short sequence that rises and falls like the edge of a teacup ride in a funfair and which resolves itself in a beautiful curl of melody.

There is more than a touch of the funfair to Centipede Hz, perhaps a touch of the circus too. As with the funfair and circus, the noise and mayhem sometimes derange and give way to darkness. Songs like 'Rosie Oh', 'Father Time' and 'Monkey Riches' have spooky undercurrents of delirium that make them first cousins of the Olivia Tremor Control's music and grandchildren of John Lennon's 'For the Benefit of Mr Kite'. Many of the songs end on discordant notes too. The maniacal-mechanical laugh at the end of 'Wide Eyes', for example, is terrifying.

The loose concept behind Centipede Hz is that it's inspired by the band members messing around with short wave radio dials as children and imagining an enormous atmosphere charged with mysterious music and possibility. In spite of its deceptively cluttered surface, it is an expansive seeker type of an album in the mode of much American psychedelia. Animal Collective are explorers on that old-as-the-hills quest to dissolve the self into the universal and (along with their equally important live shows) every album is a new step on that journey. When the last song 'Amanita' grinds to its almost cartoonish halt, the feeling is one of exhaustion but also of having participated in something bold and pure. We're one step further beyond.

(PS - Welcome back Deakin).

Centipede HZ

Tweet Animal Collective have a new album. Listen.

"Bionic Hee Haw"

Best psychedelic jam band of all time.

My Favourite Albums of 2011 (#6 Leyland Kirby - Eager to Tear Apart the Stars)

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Well what do you know, I'm still at it...

#6 Leyland Kirby - Eager to Tear Apart the Stars

shouts out to another beautiful album cover

Leyland Kirby, conceptual artist, ambient musician, unfortunate Mick Wallace lookalike, and man of many aliases, is one of the small handful of ambient producers with an identity and sound entirely of their own in a genre that tends towards pleasant anonymity. 

Kirby has a major theme - the march of time and all that goes with it, memory, ageing, sadness, and above all decay. Each one of his albums, either as himself or as The Caretaker, explores these themes from a slightly different angle. Together, they are beginning to amass into something huge and awe-inspiring, a musical analogue of Proust's In Search of Lost Time. 

Where the Caretaker's work uses samples as its base materials, Eager to Tear Apart the Stars is an album of his own compositions, piano and synth melodies mostly. They play in a thick, almost overheated, atmosphere of static and distortion. A good comparison in terms of technique might be with what Christian Fennesz does with guitars during certain overwhelming moments the Venice album where the music seem to rise up from the ground all around you like atmospheric distortion in a heat mirage. How better to explain it? Well if this music was a liquid, you would probably hang suspended in it.

As I mentioned, I think Kirby is trying to tell a distinct story about time and all that ties in with it on each of his albums. Here, the song titles, beginning with 'The Arrow of Time' and ending with 'My Dream Contained a Star', read like a tangential variation on the Tibetan Book of the Dead. The musical narrative seems to accept death's trajectory before seeking spiritual solace beyond that acceptance. While the album starts off with a frighteningly final and symbolic piano chord, it then moves into a death dream of great beauty. By the time 'They are all Dead, There are No Skip at all' rolls around with a twinkling music box melody played over a churning ocean of melodic distortion that sounds vaguely like 'Silent Night', you might be forgiven for thinking you were approaching The Light. This is potent stuff.

On the final track, 'My Dream Contained a Star', the atmosphere abates somewhat and what is left is a very pure and stark melodic pattern. It feels consoling, though perhaps also a little acquiescent, sad, and dwindling. Listening to it reminds me not just of the trajectory of all human life but possibly of the universe itself. Everything ends.

MP3: Leyland Kirby-They are all Dead, There are No Skip at all

taste the rainbow

Tweet Let's take a moment to reflect on how we don't think that much about the names of things. Like, how names originate and the meanings embodied in them? Well, I don't, or didn't, that much. Unless it carried a dead obvious meaning, my default way to consider the name of a thing would be to think of it as something arbitrary. Since I've started reading poetry seriously again a few years ago, I feel that one of the gifts with which it has provided me is the renewed ability to think about the names of things. For example: (and bear with me this is a kind of weird example, but we'll go on) the rainbow-coloured fruit sweet, skittles.

I genuinely never thought about why they might be called skittles until about a week ago when I was sat in that geographical focal point of my geographically limited adult life, Bus Áras. A corpulent ould fella was sat across from me. He was the sort of man you'd fancy you can smell, even though the scientific implications of his distance from you mean the smell is likely a figment of your mind. He was eating a bag of skittles in an unusual and disgusting way. He'd remove a few sweets from the bag at a time then place them in his mouth. After that, he'd suck very slowly and deliberately on them for a while, stripping them of colour, then spit...no, not spit, slickly eject them from between his lips like little white eggs, and watch with detached eyes as they moved across the tiled floor. The sound the sweets made? It was a skittering sound, of course. Then I thought of the sweets in the bag and how they all move and click together, and it hit me, AHA, so that is why they are called skittles.

Thanks corpulent gross old man with no sense of self-respect, you gave me a little moment of insight. But mostly, thanks poetry, for helping me think about words again.

Stately, plump, Buck Mulligan also enjoyed Arctic dips

Today's music is real asleep on the compost heap stuff, the sort of rich ambient music that used to be the blog's bread and butter (and still is, I guess). It's the first track from Novaya Zemlya which is concept album by Thomas Koner that he based around the physical place of the same name. Novaya Zemlya, the place, is an almost barren archipelago in the Arctic that sounds from descriptions like the place at the end of the world. It was used as a test site by the Soviets, where they detonated the largest nuclear bomb in human history. Additionally, the place lends its name to a strange mirage, the Novaya Zemlya effect, where the sun not only appears to rise before it technically should, but where it is shaped like a rectangle instead of a circle.

Pretty good place on which to base a concept album, no? Koner's drone constructed music clearly imagines the place as a sort of eerie metaphor for post nuclear humanity - the album starts off with sounds which might be construed as underwater explosions. As the work progresses the music moves through compositions that are spacious while not entirely as minimalist as some of his other droning work. There is an aquatic feel to some of the music - everything sounds lurking, submerged or semi-submerged. You might think at times of those spiny naval mines bobbing in an empty sea, or wind blowing over a rusting hull. Human voices enter the stereo field every now and again, but they sound distant and staccatto. I am sure they are military radio transmissions. The drones are constant and truly frigid. There is no warmth to be found here, but the record's stark strangeness is bracing and implies a horrible beauty of sorts. Do listen.

MP3: Thomas Koner-Novaya Zemlya 1

a scrawny cry from outside...

Tweet I wonder what Ireland's grimmest small town is? I spent part of this morning discussing this with my mate Gary. We decided that we probably don't even know the name of it, using Clonmellon (a desperate little place near Kells) as evidence - i.e. that we probably only know Clonmellon exists due to its proximity to Kells.

Or perhaps Clonmellon is Ireland's grimmest small town? I passed through it many times on the way to Mayo when I was younger, and used to think so. In fact, my brother, my sister and I used to play a prediction game in the back seat of the car where we'd guess the amount of people we'd see in Clonmellon, selecting our guesses from along a scale of zero to three. On the run up to Christmas it was the only place we'd pass through without a single Christmas light over its street or, indeed, in many of its dark watchful windows. And, as mentioned, the town would often be suspiciously deserted, save for a solitary soul walking down its wide single street, an old man perhaps with the dead look of the midlands in his eyes, or a child in shit stained wellies wheeling a bike towards a grey afternoon of playing vaguely dangerous games near a slurry pit.

the street may be empty...but you are being watched

Now that we're moving west, let's drive on towards Delvin which is the next town over from Clonmellon. Delvin is another half grey place of tight-lipped people and a traction effect that sucks at your soul, like a Higgs Boson field of dread, even as your car passes through it as close as possible to the speed limit. The town was made famous by Brinsley MacNamara's book The Valley of the Squinting Windows which describes a small community where the primary shared values are smiling duplicity and suspicion of one's neighbours. The novelist's father was run out of town because of the book and apparently even a mutter about the affair in Delvin today will earn a dirty look or two. The book was published in 1918, and the fact that it is still remembered acutely long after all involved passed away says something interesting about the collective memories of small places. It's almost as if the town itself is a person, the ould fella who remarks with a phlegmy spit on which family fought for what side in the Irish Civil War.

Delvin, however, escapes being named Ireland's grimmest small town on account of the cool Norman castle that sits whap-bang in the middle of it and which now provides a spectacular home to some lucky barn owls and bats.

bet your town doesn't have one of these (unless umm it is Kilkenny, or Trim, or Bunratty, or etc...)

I'll share some music from my Summer listening.

MP3: Recondite-Tie In

MP3: Tin Man-Manifesto Acid

There's a pretty sweet little acid house revival going on at the moment thanks to lads like Recondite, Tin Man and Donato Dozzy. I love that rolling 303 sound. It's so iconic and still sounds otherworldly. All three artists are messing around with the template enough to side-step the sonic clichés that come with the narrow range of sounds created by the 303 synth, but adhering to genre convention in other comforting ways (by having the word 'acid' in every other track title for instance). Both Tin Man and Recondite have new albums which I've had on repeat all Summer.

Tin Man's Neo Neo Acid is the more locomotive of the two albums and the more likely to be heard in clubs. Recondite's On Acid, on the other hand, is a bit more reflective and chill, creating careful monochromatic patterns of melody that ring out simple, sad and plain, like some of Aphex Twin's earlier stuff made with similar equipment. Both albums are extraordinarily complimentary and I would recommend them to anyone with an interest in techno of a more meditative hue.

tadpoles

Tweet There was a small patch of green at the corner of my housing estate called "the log". I'm not sure why. The place was completely non-nondescript and I don't remember there ever being a log there, just long grass and a concrete shed where the man from the Fás scheme kept his equipment. Children from the estate played football and chasing games there, but for me and Ciarán it was just some place we ran through to get to the larger fields beyond.

One March morning the sun split through the clouds after such a length of blustery weather that it felt like a miracle. We put our wellies on and headed out for the fields for the first time since a hard frost in February.  By the time we reached "the log" it was mid-morning and so warm that vapour was visibly rising off the grass. Heavy machinery had passed through since we were last there. A digger's treads had left two tracks about half a foot deep and metres long. From a distance the stagnant water in them looked peculiar, dark and viscous.

Frogs had spawned and the pools were alive with tadpoles. There were so many tadpoles that, instead of being flat, the surfaces of the pools bulged in squirming black clots of living material. The edges were a crust of grey death that was only going to grow inwards with the heat of the day.

We were soft children and all we could think about was how to save those creatures. The nearest large pond was a quarter of a mile away. We'd have to shuttle the tadpoles over to it in the best containers we could find, plastic buckets from sets we bought at the Bettystown beach the previous Summer. I remember that weird Sisyphean task so clearly, filling a bucket up to the brim with tadpoles and trudging across a muddy field to release them into a pond as the day drew in. We did this until our mother came looking for us for dinner. We normally wouldn't be allowed out again afterwards but our mother felt so sorry for us that she let us at the tadpoles for another hour. When we finally came home to bed we were distraught at having to leave the job unfinished. Inconsolable. That night was horrible. I couldn't sleep for panicky dreams of evaporating water and crows picking at whatever was left alive on the baking clay.

The next day was fine again. We didn't go to "the log" because we were afraid of what we'd see. We kept away from it for weeks and by the time we next passed through it the nightmare pools were nothing more than a warm breeze blowing through ridges in the thick grass.

MP3: Alexander Tucker-A Dried Seahorse