ICE music

Seefeel are one of an elite set of electronic musicians whose work seems impervious to age. This is remarkable considering not only that the 90s havent aged that gracefully as a whole, but also that electronic music per se is constantly being made obsolete due to technological advance and the frenetic pace of changing fashions. Like label mates Boards Of Canada, and friend Richard James (aka Aphex Twin) the output of this act is so innovative that it will probably sound futuristic 50 years hence.

Listened to whilst driving round the icy fields of rural Somerset on the coldest day of the year, the music was its perfect accompaniment, almost merging with the baltic weather outside in musical synaesthesia.

The best environment in which to experience Seefeel- taken in Great Elm nr Frome

 It was a compilation CD that a colleague kindly made for me, which contained 13 tracks of the band's pre Warp output. It gave the inside of the cab a woozy yet crystalline sense of calm, an almost womblike sensation- there was I, cosy and cocooned against the fierce cold outside.

The sound Seefeel make is unique; ambient music with a distinctive almost dubby emphasis on bass, which provides much of the rhythm to their music. Sometimes pensive, and brooding but more often celestial and beatific, Seefeel provide a kind of ambiance which defies its own definition: it demands the centre stage. Not through force or abrasion but via the subtlety contained in their most affecting moments -notably the song 'Industrious,' from their sensational debut Quique (pronounced 'Keek'). The use of a glitchy rhythmic sample in this song, allied to the subtle and rare use of the human voice, ensures that the track reaches for the stratosphere.

They are a band well worth exploring even if ambient/ drone isn't usually your thing, as none of the tracks on Quique are, to my mind at least, inaccessible.

For fans of Loveless and wintry days.

Thought Vs Boogie

Lately I have been listening to a lot of music that makes you dance. I also like music that stirs the grey matter a bit too. Nicolas Jaar produces tunes which do both of the above.

Say what you like about the young German, he certainly has his own style. His records are mystical, filled with well judged film dialogue, spatterings of philosophy, and enough musical space to swing a cat named Dub around in. Jaar's compositions are not BPM high, or floor fillers; they are mind fillers, head nodders.

While many contemporaries are content to keep the tempos high and the production crisp, Jaar carved out a niche for himself last year with the stunning, Space Is Only Noise LP. Whilst some contended that he took minimal a bit too far (i.e 'unfinished'), Jaar looks at the bigger picture; the songs buried beneath his at times fuggy production, are some of the most inventive I heard all last year. Forever shifting key and time, his use of instrumental sampling is sublime. See 'Keep Me There' (below) for the best cut and pasted sax solo you've heard all day.

And this gem I discovered recently (a remix of deep house giant Maceo Plex) just shows how inimitable Jaar's melodic stamp is. He turns a club leviathan into a textured piece of cerebral euro disco.

Hipster house, downtempo, minimal techno call him what you will, this guy is one to keep tabs on as he matures.

Grouper

The Tube doors close. A thousand thoughts and personalities crammed into a carriage. Happiness anger stress and despair, no doubt, squeezed in stifled juxtaposition. Each soul immersed in their own predicament, paper, or reverie. The woman next to me peremptorily apologises for imperceptibly nudging my arm. Each man an island of  ignorance and indifference to each other. Bodies tossed temporarily together through necessity.

As the crowd settles, the one familiar feature of this landscape-my girlfriend's face-disappears. Now obscured by the multitudes she's a thousand miles away. In the midst of all these persons and their anonymous corporeality I am confronted by a startling fact. A thought like light bursting from an open door into a dark room. We are all alone. Alone despite our jobs, comforting rhythms of existence and co habitation. Alone despite our vast hurrying number.Alone despite our phones and technology. Alone despite our closeness. Alone inside our heads. Alone.

This existential crisis, however, provokes no internal wail of despond, just a serene acceptance. An acknowledgement that this is really obvious once we take away all our distractions. My phelgmatic attitude is perhaps aided through the choral tones of Grouper's 'Moon Is Sharp' circling round my head, lifting me away from the humdrum of public transport.

Grouper is the solo ambient project of Liz Harris. Transportive, ethereal, somnambulant, yes, it's easy to sound like a tit when describing her beautiful sounds. Yet there is something so wonderful about it that I find restraint impossible. In short, this is music that could make clearing landfill seem poetic. Let alone tube journeys.

On 2011's double album, A I A, -one half older recordings (Dream Loss) the other newer songs (Alien Observer)- Harris confirms herself as a leading figure in the ambient scene today. These two works orbit each other like twin sides of Harris' psyche which she invites us to sleepwalk into.

Double tracked vocals create a phantom choir of Harris' spiralling within an echoing cathedral of reverb and numbing dissonance. Harris buries her melodies, which are as delicate as dandelion seeds, beneath tape hiss. Treading just the right side betwixt prettiness and atonality, this is music for 2am. For stillness and solitude. Gentle cloistered reflection.

While she works with oft used tools: voice, keys, guitar and ample hiss, Harris' success is her singularity. Her unique blend of silence / noise, of aloofness and emotion. It is only through the insidious interplay of these elements that Grouper gains its force. The way her vocals mesh into each other, and how her vocals constantly struggle against being consumed by their murky accompaniments. Her music posses a painterly quality whereby each component part bleeds into each other and in doing so creating something vaster than its parts. Some stepping back to appreciate the whole is required. To extricate melody from discord, or lyrics from unintelligible fug. The track 'Alien Observer' is an illustration of this, of what a simple keyboard line and multi tracked vocals can do in Harris' hands. Meditative and spellbinding,befitting of someone who has produced music (literally) for people to go to sleep to in art installations based around 'the sleep cycle', the track has a grace.

Also, there is just enough of the avant garde here to separate her from the leaden singer songwriter genre. In the latter form lyrics are integral, yet here sound itself takes the fore, the music thus becomes a notch more abstract. Which makes sense in light of her impeccable art school credentials.

Music is about moments. The 'where were you when you heard this?'. It's the soundtrack for often banal and meaningless lives, imbuing memories with an often unwarranted profundity. Liz Harris' music is like this. While on the surface it feels like very little is happening, an immersion in its balm like drone reveals a detail much like the unknowable thoughts and worries written on the faces of those Tube passengers: concerns that seem absent or banal to a casual observer, yet mean the world to their hosts, literally. Just because these vicissitudes of emotion aren't obvious doesn't make them less real.

'The space between these albums,' Harris notes, 'is about the space between us.... (and our) layers of folding worlds.' It is lucky that we have Harris around to help close the distance. For she takes this solitude and transmutes it into beautiful music with which we can enrich our own hermetic bubbles.

File Next To: Juliana Barwick

The Soft Bulletin

"Like opening the gates of heaven and dancing with God". That's how one contemporary reviewer described The Flaming Lips' The Soft Bulletin. Big words for a truly vast work. One which contemplates life's big questions without ever descending into self pity. As Coyne put it recently, the album 'is about despair, but there is none in it'.


Written after the death of Coyne's father and during multi instrumentalist wizard Stephen Drozd's heroin addiction, the album documented a period of personal tumult. It catapulted them from unsuccessful, weird, druggy experimentalists to very successful, weird, druggy experimentalists. Though, arguably as experimental as anything in the Lips' oeuvre, Bulletin was a smash hit. Perhaps because this was where Coyne stopped singing about giraffes and started singing about, well, life and stuff. The resultant album is one of the most powerful, cathartic, sad, joyous and plain beautiful I've ever heard.


Disillusioned with 'rock', and shunning guitars, Coyne and his herd of musical alchemists descended into the realm of disneyesque opera. Creating effects such as the loop of opener 'Race For The Prize' by, to put it simply, fucking with a tape machine. The accompanying visuals for this track of sped up marathon runners and big bang style explosions is a good entry into the thematic tenor of the record. Coyne takes the small facts of our own everyday lives-its tragedies and joys- and wraps them in music and images so grandiose and bombastic that it elevates them to the stratosphere. It could've so easily descended into farce but the carnivalesque feel to the album actually makes it more profound.


It becomes a celebration of life despite it's utter futility. The album exalts the human. The frailty and weakness implicit in simply being alive. Bulletin is that rare beast: a psychedelic album that is completely devoid of pretension and filler. It is concerned with rendering the quotidian in the iridescent beams of the ether. Death, love all the intractable problems of existence are raised and tackled with both the shimmering beauty of the arrangements and the earnest but never po-faced creak of Wayne Coyne's vocal chords. Instead of offering answers or strafing the issue through clever linguistic ploys, Coyne simply tells it like it is.
The tragic figure of superman in the song of the same name who is overwhelmed by 'heavy'ness, is as good an example as any of the child like simplicity of Coyne's compositions. Typical of the cartoony grandeur of the characters who populate Coyne's world- Superman is a bathetic conflation of lost hope, frailty and lack of belief in God- and the only consolation offered is a kind of communality- we're all in it together, so let's go down with a shout. As testified by the tendency of hardened Lips fans to break down during live versions of the song, Coyne stumbled upon a potent formula to connect with people. So much so that he tried to resurrect the song in the more obvious 'Do You Realize' a couple of years later. It's also easy to see the influence of Coyne's teary yet glass half full persona on later works such as Arcade Fire's  Funeral . 


To dwell on the lyrics unduly is to ignore that this is essentially an instrument led work. By that I mean that Coyne's euphoria and despair would be ridiculous separated from their majestic, lush orchestral background. Indeed, the guitar solo (yes, they sneaked them in occasionally) on Feeling yourself Discintegrate says as much about mortality as any words could do. Throughout the album Drozd's compositions are bold enough to grace a Broadway stage and melodic enough to be a smash hit. Whilst all the time the words and music compliment each other to almost preternatural degree. It was revealing to watch the Pitchfork documentary and hear how Drozd was dreading giving Coyne the music to Superman. Being afraid the dude would write a lyric about candy-floss eating robots or something. But no Coyne honoured the gravitas of the melody, and beautifully so.


"They're just humans with wives and children", Coyne declares with gusto during Race For The Prize, relishing the flawed in the perfection striving scientists. Extolling the Icarus like ambition not the achievement. 
Sometimes a piece of art has to be larger than life to do justice to the farcical magnitude of life itself. Instead of a call to arms or a howl of despair The Lips offer another way out of the life problem: to sing with arms aloft and lungs aloud despite it all. Never has failure sounded so triumphant.

Can't Buy A Thrill

Which 70s band are named after a dildo and have sold over 30 million records? Which group (arguably) never penned a sincere love song and were such studio tinkerers that they used over forty musicians for a seven track album? The answer to both of the above is that most antithetical and least 'rocky' of all seventies rock bands - Steely Dan.


The Dan were an alien proposition to me until I recently acquired Can't Buy A Thrill, their 1972 debut.  This, as with any of their strong 70s LPs, plays like a cerebral smoke ring of erudition and lyrical obfuscation. A highbrow and highly danceable celebration of musicianship and general smart arsery. 


Formed at the prestigious upstate NY Bard College in the late sixties by Donald Fagen (keyboard, vocals) and Walter Becker (guitar/ bass), Steely Dan was the result of a shared love of jazz and, for Fagen at least, an immersion in all things 'Beat'; both its literature and lifestyle. The product, as one co-ed put it, of 'absolutely no activity, chain smoking - dope and Lucky Strike(s).'


Musically, The Dan were perfectionists whose precise jazz influenced compositions lent themselves to endless studio trickery. Renowned for distinctive time signature/ key changes, and their preference for jazz style 'major mu' chords, their sound was dynamic in the extreme. Somewhat unpredictably, the result of these multi faceted parts were strong, hooky melodies and seriously catchy choruses.


 'Reeling Back The Years' was their first major radio hit, and, possessing a chorus with an uncanny ability to adhere itself to even the most unwilling of brains, it's easy to see why. Catchy, yes, but it's certainly more interesting than today's FM fodder. For one thing,  its verses seem to be an exercise in how many syllables Fagen can humanly manage to squeeze in to his allotted space. It's also an extremely lean specimen, not one second wasted in pursuit of pop perfection. Containing a cracking Thin Lizzy style solo it is also atypically rocky, yet its hook is built around the above mentioned 'mu' chords on Fagen's keyboards which give a jazzy 'whole tone dissonance' characteristic of their sound. In short, it possesses enough ideas for a whole album let alone a meagre four minutes of streamlined FM rock; it's also typical of their experimentation within a deceptively conventional framework.


Convention is a word that naysayers use to refute The Dan's brilliance, viewing them somehow as the musical Ancien Regime of the 70s. Representing, so the argument goes, all that was bad about this decade: the pomposity, musical excess (eg complex solos), and turgid resistance to change. They are one of the beacons for the 'everything was shit before 76' school of thought, prior to the bloody punk revolution. While the Dan are, admittedly, not the most protean of groups (as a Pitchfork review of their 2000 'comeback' album witheringly observes) the nub of the argument, for me, concerns competence. They are just too good, too measured and methodical.


This is offensive to those of a punk predilection who value intensity of feeling over execution. The first take is the best take crew. While this approach can give a thrilling immediacy and lend itself to raw emotion (the B Side of Neil Young's On The Beach is, to my mind, the apotheosis of this method) it can just as often excuse sloppiness, laziness and an attitude of anti intellectual simplicity. It was also, evidently, just not how Steely Dan rolled.


Not every band can be innovators of the Can variety, coining new genres decades before anyone else via mind bending jams in abandoned Bavarian castles. Nor, indeed, can everyone be Iggy Pop or the Sex Pistols whose theatricality would have been anathema to Steely Dan. This band hated the stage so much that not only did they recruit an additional singer, James Palmer, to shield the spotlight from the reticent Fagen, but after the third album gave up touring completely. A live setting would never fulfil a band of this exactitude. They were more like scientists than rock stars: retreating to the studio to alchemize another slick masterpiece into existence.


Rather than view this slickness as a political gesture - an aristocratic musical competence which aligned itself in scornful opposition to the democratic thrust of punk- I see it as more of a personality trait: some people like to build pretty castles. Some like to rip shit up.


So while this may not be music to stir the soul in that wildly visceral way that only punk knows how, it is still rocks in its own chin stroking way. And, paradoxically, there is something unmistakeably punk about their ostrich like indifference to punk's anarchic ululations. They carried on jamming like it was 1970 late in the decade while all around them the musical landscape was erupting; becoming even more virtuosic, recruiting dozens of seasoned jazz/classical musicians for '77's Aja.


Regardless of context, Cant Buy A Thrill is a great album. Containing tracks such as 'Do It Again' with its samba beat and fine fizzing solos from Jeff 'Skunk' Baxter, and 'Turn That Heartbeat Over Again' a song that manages to turn an ironic philosophical conversation between Jesus and an angel into a snappy chorus. Gems abound, with influences ranging from jazz ('Fire In The Hole'), doo wop ('Dirty Work') and, of course, rock (small r).


This record captures a band brimming with ideas and musical verve. It's slightly rockier than the rest of their oeuvre, which I prefer. And, though jazzy and elegant, it is defiantly NOT PROG, which should surely be the true target for punk's wrecking ball. These are taut, honed songs befitting of both rigorous lyrical/ musical analysis and the dancefloor. Few bands have forged such success by sticking to their guns whilst retaining integrity.


So, dim the lights, maybe pour a cool drink (make it a 'double, sam'), bite the end off a Cuban cigar and enter the detached demi monde of The Dan. Sometimes, it's cool to be competent.

Running with Nick Drake

Okay, so this post is kinda about running. And its (tangential at best) connection to music.
When I run I usually listen to electronic music. Something uptempo with propulsive, head nodding beats to help me forget about the lengthy gap between this and my previous outing (not to mention the many ruinous cigarettes smoked between then and now). I use music much as an athlete uses energy drinks: to patch over my physical deficiencies.
I am lucky enough to live right next to Bath's glorious Kennet & Avon Canal, which despite being adjacent to a great chugging over polluted highway (The London Road), feels a million miles away.

Anyway, listening to my default running album, John Talabot's magnificent recent LP, Fin , I realised how incongruous these beats were given my surroundings. Despite making some of the most organic, and life affirming dance music of recent times its tempo felt totally out of sync with the gently undulating river, the ducks, and heady scent of wild garlic as I hurtled past them. So I switched to something with a slightly lower BPM- Nicolas Jaar and his only LP, last year's Space Is Only Noise. Yes, this was more attuned, but still the dark warped voices, and twisted beauty of this precocious producer's compositions felt awry. They would be more in harmony with a sweat soaked disco or a purposeful walk across some bustling metropolis. But here amid the swallows, and the narrow-boat dwellers basking in the evening sun it was just wrong.

So, scrolling up from Nicolas Jaar I find Nick Drake. A perfect match! I opt for 1969's Five Leaves Left, Drake's debut aged just 21 (incidentally, the same as Jaar is now). There is something ineffably English about Drake's gently melancholy output, and amid the last dying rays of sunshine, 'Thoughts of Mary Jane' sounds as natural as the birdsong around me. His breathy voice and warm acoustic style embellished beautifully by Joe Boyd's lush folky arrangements. It's as English as a pint of ale and as mysterious as the scent of wild garlic or hedgerow on a sleepy Sunday morning.
As I settle into a post five mile stupor (I like to push myself) this bucolic folk music helps me take it easy and take in my surroundings. I stop and survey the Avon valley at the Dundas aqueduct.

The view from atop the Dundas aqueduct

Drake, who succumbed to an overdose of antidepressants aged just 26, has a reputation for being forlorn. Yet I find his meditative and hypnotic guitar style relaxing not despairing. It is the sound of late English summer afternoons not a yelp of desperation as would be easy to suggest. The sadness is implied rather than demonstrated, he was not a self pitier.
'Fruit Tree', for example, is a melancholy rumination on fame -'fame is but a fruit tree, so very unsung/ It can never flourish until its stock is in the ground' and is an eerily prescient observation from Drake, who though respected was largely unknown while alive. His three records hardly sold during his brief lifetime, yet his LPs now routinely go for three hundred plus on discogs and such like.  His 'stock' grew steadily after his demise into a fully fledged cult, and contemporary opinion would surely place him in the highest echelon of singer songwriters that ever lived. I certainly would. Yet Drake hated performing live, crippled by doubt and depression, he lived the life of a loner, only adding to the mythology surrounding him, making him into a kind of Romantic poet.

Though, while not entirely off mark, I think this is imposing an imagined 'life' upon the music too much. An excessive privileging of biography from which the music stands wonderfully separate from. To put it another way, I couldn't run to Elliott Smith, Leonard Cohen or any of the downer troubadours with which Drake is often paired. He is such an accomplished guitarist that his songs don't need any embellishments. And his style is not slow like the Cohens of this world, it's brisk, swirling and hypnotic. Beautiful melodies simply pour from his instrument which often sounds like several playing at once. See 'Which Will' for a case in point.
This is why my favourite Drake album by far is 1972's Pink Moon. Often thought to be a document of despair, I beg to differ. Though emanating no doubt from a troubled soul, to me this is the sound of someone finding their metier or niche, and being completely 'one' with their instrument and message. Whatever ailed Drake, he rose above it on Pink Moon, an album that is solely (his) voice and guitar (save for a few sparse notes from Boyd on piano). However, far from feeling sparse it is almost opulent, and very earthy; a perfect accompaniment to the English countryside. Not at all depressing, the melodies are too strong- his voice too composed. Nowhere a trace of melodrama. Just beautifully intricate playing- even dark moments such as 'Things Behind The Sun' feel merely contemplative not depressing.
Pink Moon  is one of those few works which I regard as timeless. Unencumbered by ego, style or excess it is a work that I believe will still sound as good 100 years hence. While today's innovators such as Jaar turn to richly sampled tapestries of sound to evoke similar feelings of alienation and introspection to that of Drake, Pink Moon is a reminder that this need not be so complicated. Moreover, a reminder of just how powerful that tired old dog of genres, that of the 'singer songwriter' can be, given the correct personnel. Indeed, are today's electronic producers not much like a modern day equivalent of the acoustic troubadours of yore? Anyway, I digress.  Fashions and mediums may change but Pink Moon is timeless, transportive and a surprisingly good running companion.

Youth Lagoon - Year Of Hibernation

The itunes 'plays' function can be an embarrassing thing . But also a good barometer of just how much one does actually like the music they posses. The only way, surely, of accurately doing the latter is to see how many times any given track is played. On this basis, Youth Lagoon's 'Cannons' is my favourite song. I have played it 36 times since late last summer when I first obtained Year Of Hibernation. This is the work of Trevor Powers, a young English student from Boise ID, who uses synths in much the same way as a troubled troubadour of yore may have taken to his room with a battered guitar.

Maybe the reason it has outdone everything from Astral Weeks to Daydream Nation in the play stakes is that, while ambitious, YL's music does so in such a self effacing and quietly magnificent manner. While aiming for the stars YL's compositions stay firmly rooted in the bedroom. Reverbed vocals and DIY keyboards mask the human frailty and emotion depicted in the songs like a teenager's mop of hair over an acne ridden face. Though anthemic these songs never veer into the bombastic.
 
The indie gimmick du jour - reverbed vocals- suits YL perfectly. The vocals, in 'July' for instance, depict a sense of distance, of one stepping back and looking at themselves. Illustrating the disconnect between memories and recollection perhaps. Or more likely, reflecting a kind of alienation or anxiety about growing older: an unsureness of ones own voice, and hence identity, too.

This may sound like a trite observation, yet to me this album sounds like a coming of age work. Put together, the unifying theme of this meagre eight track album, is one of becoming. Akin to an uneasy young adult stepping gingerly into a vast and scary world. Eager to cherish the memories and love of youth but resigned to change. There is also a tenderness and alluring vulnerability to YL's take on things.

'Seventeen' is perhaps the song that most typifies the album, and positioned at its end gains an added resonance. The retrospective narrator, guides us through an idyllic sounding tale of hunting for snakes, 'having fun' whilst conceding that he's now 'alone in my room'. The sense of time slipping away is rendered simply and poignantly. As is the very awkwardness of simply being 'Seventeen'. The fragile, effeminate moan that precedes the beats towards the tail of the track are as eloquent as any of the literal images chosen.

Thoughts of his mother are immortalised here as  recounts how she implored the teen to never "stop imagining. The day that you do is the day that you die." Its this kind of irony free recollection that endears me to this album. It is very easy to dismiss such whimsical notions as twee or pretentious. Yet this is what being young, naive and a teenager is about.

To be overly critical seems callous, especially when these reflections are brought to life with such slow melodic grace.