Journal sielwolf's Journal: Kill Sound Before Sound Kills You 5
It's been difficult to write about music recently. Busy busy busy. That's the way things are and there's only so much headspace to dispense. If I could, I'd write more, or on different things, but that's not what I have. Conferences, moving, finalizations, etc, etc. The horrible life is one that is static except for moments of extreme panic. It's all treacherous highs or abysmal salt-flat lows. You notice then only when the last of it passes you.
I'd like to think I'd do more if I was better rested, recuperated and at ease. But how do I know? Travel travel travel. The traveling salesman you knew as a father is dead. Left on the line is a vagabond class of autonomous youth, iron-cast and impenetrable.
So then it might make sense as to why it's taken me so long to review the last few albums I bought. Nothing really filled me with enthusiasm. I've listened to them enough (evidenced by their surprising high listenings in my last.fm account) but deep parts of them remain inscrutable. As radiation carved out of a prism of ocean water.
Take this Detalles release, Detalles - Shapes of Summer. I got this because Andres Bucci was involved. Andres did a fantastic deep house track as jog "jog - Dial". All big gravy basslines and mournful tuba. I've been on a lookout ever since for some more of his work and so picking up Detalles from Forced Exposure seemed like a natural act. Though Andres fingers can be found all over the release, co-conspirator Kate Simko is the driver. None of it stands out as powerfully as "Detalles - Rhodes Relejadas". I forget who (KshGoddess?) once said that the last era in music has been empty of its own defining instrumentation. There are so many alternatives that can be brought up, as being definitely post-modern in this electronic borrowing era. The 1200, the MPC, the 808 handclap, the Amen break.
But if there was one sound that is unmistakable it's the Fender Rhodes. Anyone can place it. It's the backbone of the modern electrified sound. Jazz, funk, hip-hop all revolve around its warm tremolo. The effect of Boards of Canada could be summarized as capturing the Rhodes sound and extrapolating it out into a whole world of music. "Rhodes Relejadas" does just that. The song is three major parts. A soft warm intro, swift cut, then a progression with a harmonizing part coming in later, a reprise. It's that sound. The one water makes when it hits a strand of wire and you listen closely enough.
Only if the rest of the album stood up to that. "Split", "Solm", and "Slowe" show the sort of Chilean aptitude at deep house but nothing jumps out at you. Its warm synths, soft angelic insectoid chirps. That half of Shapes of Summer's length is eaten up by little homework interludes doesn't say much. And nothing really approaches the classic deep house club track length. So the resulting product is more thesis than finished novel. Listening again I also find the lack of the driving propulsive beat that separated deep house from the more ethereal ambient genres. Interesting, yet incomplete.
I'd've been happier had the album taken the approach Ricardo Villalobos did with Ricardo Villalobos - AchSo: 4 song EP, 38 minutes. It's the long elegant strokes we've all come to expect. "Sieso" begins with an enthusiastic two-step high snare and a soft guitar. After two minutes the big thick bass drum kicks in. The guitar is a searching solo interspersed with ahuman punctuation (hey? Yeah?). The instruments come and go, laser claps, throughout the twelve minutes. It succeeds at being both fascinating without dominating your mind. You could ignore this, feel it under your toes but when you turn to it, there's something profound happening. "Erso" is a similar product. There's now a vibrato filter thrown on the solo. The beat has an effect where it seems to bleed out over a small speaker, giving it that telltale cheap radio *pop*. Achso is an exploration of a specific mood. While it doesn't have a single thrust out from its crotch it is complete as any album should be. It is mythical and accessible, avoiding all the chin-stroking that craters the electronic music high-brow scene. Shit, in time I might finally get our boy mekkab to rock this out. He's a tough nut. The jams work the best for his five minute commute. So when I gave him [track artist=Ricardo Villalobos]808 The Bassqueen he found it absent of what music meant driving 90 mph in the right hand lane of Shady Grove. Me? Most of my work is done at the PC or on a long trip. So throwing down an 8... 12... 50 minute track works if you give me something to sink the canines in. Jesu, Cabaret Voltaire... whatever man. Rock and roll.
I still kept up Tha Wurk and finally dropping some mid-era Neurosis got our man to give some credit to the artists who work in long form. *muahahahah!* All according to the plan... ever closer to the poisoned donut.
But that doesn't mean I can't go for the hard short power jam. When The Bug and The Rootsman decided to team up on "The Bug - Killer" and talked about doing a full album together as razor x productions I was stacked. Kevin Martin works in a one of a kind doom ragga. The sound worships at the altar of bass but throws around noises of the harshest square waves. Where most of dancehall is going for the accessible R&B/hip-hop style hybrid, K-Mart is pulling it off into a noisecore realm. Fuck yes, it is. [album artist=Razor X Productions]Killing Sound is just that. More. More bombs out of the sky, more waves of sharp wire, more out of their head deejays. The whole family is here. Warrior Queen and Mexican from The Bug - Aktion Pak. Wayne Lonesome. The old masters Cutty Ranks and Daddy Freddy.
The album's start is probably its biggest mistake: it repeats "Killer" in its entirety, unaltered. Um... WTF? Could you at least give us an alternative dub under it? Especially since Warrior Queen does a killer interpolation on the beat as the closer "Killer Queen". She takes the chorus opener and then goes off on a slackness turn that's coy, seductive, and merciless. So that move doesn't make any sense at all.
There are definite bangers here. "Child Molester" is one of those tracks you wonder if it's just a battle track. Mexican goes totally off on this angle of vengeance death squading child molesters. Not your usual approach to a track. The song is slow as molasses. The chorus is spat in a sneer and has the genius of doing tweaked faux harmonizing vocals that sound like the souls of departed children. It hits on a creep-level all its own.
After a bit though, the harshness seems to become expected and a bit of sameness seems to crawl in. One of the worst things about Grime is the flat BPM, the flat effect set, the flat delivery. If it was one man's game, that'd be a unique vision. But as a whole big tent it doesn't work. The Razor X family seems to suffer a similar fate here. Of course that's a bit of a minor gripe. In addition to the those already mentioned, the album also has some wonderful conscious/sung deejayed parts. "Yard Man" seems to be an ode to the island with a nice uplifting keys with a bit of squawk. And just when you think you've got where the beat is going to come in, K-Mart drops in some next-gear Amen jungle beat. The sort of harsh beatdown that you'd expect from kid606. Shit, if I had to draw a line to what it reminds me most of, I'd say the very remix of "WWW" by Kid 606. The original is here too (it shatters canopies and sends cars off the cliff). The whole palette fills up with a sound that can only be described as righteous. It's badass.
Still, I gotta say the track that has me obsessed is "I Don't Know" with Tony Tuff. It's the kind of war conscious anthem that seems to pop out of Jamaica every five years. The approach is like a grandfather on a porch. It's aged and worldly. It turns the parable of racial strife and civil war in as wide and true vision. The chorus then pulls up to the bar as a rhetorical question that sounds painful. Not in the way that scrapes the vines of the throat but that which only breaks against the heart and permanently destroys something there. The Bug drops this big didgeridoo motherfucker in the middle of it. It's all snap and loud skin drum but skips into handclaps that could either be the raucous noise of parade or gunfire through alleys and favelas. You find sun washed collar bones there. At the end of that.
I guess my gripes with Killing Sound is the same I had with The Bug - Pressure: it's stuck on eleven. That's good and bad. Sometimes you want that. But your boy needs oxygen at sometime. I'm probably rating it lower here than I should. I'll probably be banging this fucker for the next eight months and it might make my best of '06. But that's the problem with reviews. When do you finally say you have your final read on something as multimodal as music? Appreciation has a delta over time.
Detalles Shapes of Summer ***
Ricardo Villalobos Achso ****
Razor X Productions Killing Sound ****
don't look at me like that, ki-ki... (Score:1)
Still, I gotta say the track that has me obsessed is "I Don't Know" with Tony Tuff. It's the kind of war conscious anthem that seems to pop out of Jamaica every five years.
Don't forget about that fwiggin awesome "crack" of a clave clap during the verse.... yum.
I'm about to step up to the treadmill and I've got a wad of scorn on my mp3 player. Most of it is pretty good, too!
And is this the same Murder Inc.? make the whole thing mandatory take the whole thing cut it in two...?
Re:don't look at me like that, ki-ki... (Score:2)
What I love about Mick Harris is that he can go for this sort of subdermal ambient. It's all really low register bass effects and then he can throw out just some explosive tracks. "Nut", "Do the Geek", "Flap", "Boss". The guy's a genius.
And is this the same Murder Inc.? Oui. Martin Atkins (Pigface, PiL), Chris Connelly (Pigface, RevCo, Ministry), and a few of the cats from Killing Joke. I
Re:don't look at me like that, ki-ki... (Score:1)
I've got a theory on that. Its like, perhaps youse-guys need to be constantly releasing stuff. Partly to mix more wheat with the chaff (so we don't notice how much we're choking on chaff) and partly because all that expectation and build up causes you to make all the wrong decisions for all the right reasons. Like the whiskey song is GREAT with headphones, because of the panned drums. Its like the drums repr
Re:don't look at me like that, ki-ki... (Score:2)
I cosign this. We'll do some demo isht. Do a myspace page but with with some incognito name so it'll take real fans and word of mouth to get the sound out. Do a run of shows from a van, you know, get back that vibe of when we where first out of the garage? Go with a minimal kit. None of this forty guitars and a 128 channel board. Some 4 track type noise. Maybe drop some EPs or ITunes exclusives.
Re:don't look at me like that, ki-ki... (Score:1)