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Of Montreal: Skeletal Lamping (o lo que pudo ser y no fue)

October 21, 2008 in 2008, Electronic, Experimental, Indie, Neopsychedelia, Pop, United States/Estados Unidos/USA by Jorge Salinas | No comments

Skeletal Lamping - Cover

Of Montreal
Skeletal Lamping (Polyvinyl Record Co)
21 Oct 2008
[pop (rock)]
Prod: Kevin Barnes
Site: http://www.ofmontreal.net
Tracks @ MySpace: http://myspace.com/ofmontreal
Eval: 1.5/5
Art(e): Peter Saville + Brett Wickens (photo: Trevor Key)

Tracks

  1. Nonpareil Of Favor (5:48)
  2. Wicked Wisdom (5:00)
  3. For Our Elegant Caste (2:35)
  4. Touched Something’s Hollow (1:26)
  5. An Eluardian Instance (4:35)
  6. Gallery Piece (3:48)
  7. Women’s Studies Victims (2:59)
  8. St. Exquisite’s Confessions (4:35)
  9. Triphallus, To Punctuate! (3:23)
  10. And I’ve Seen a Bloody Shadow (2:23)
  11. Plastis Wafer (7:11)
  12. Death Is Not A Parallel Move (3:01)
  13. Beware Our Nubile Miscreants (4:52)
  14. Mingusings (3:01)
  15. Id Engager (3:24)

Reseña

Acabo de terminar de escuchar el nuevo album de Of Montreal. Decepción. Lo estaba esperando con algo de gusto. La verdad hacía tiempo que no esperaba el release de ningún grupo o músico, normalmente acostumbrado a las descepciones. Esta vez no fue la excepción. Esto viene de un fan de la banda. Completamente fan.

Al menos mi primera impresión es muy pobre, tal vez tenga que regresar a editar esta reseña pero dudo mucho que esto vaya a cambiar. El album, tal y como lo reseñan en allmusic (y vaya que a veces exageran en ese site), es una mezcla de viñetas musicales a veces sin sentido. Si efectivamente encuentro la referencia a Prince, lamentablemente no a la parte virtuosa del músico sino a la perturbada visión del genio.

No hay una sola canción. Y eso es lo más deprimente del asunto. Siempre había encontrado una particular atracción por Of Montreal que en este mundo de pretención Kevin Barnes estaba haciendo algo original, especial a pesar de ser claramente retro y sobre todo, empujando la construcción tradicional de “canciones” en direcciones interesantes y en otras ocasiones los paradigmas musicales de un genero (psicodelia) a lugares con más valor referencial para le gente viva en este milenio. Todo esto se perdió en esta última producción.

Hay que reconocer que a pese a la pobre oferta musical esta es una labor de producción considerable, inclusive debería de llamarla titánica y se nota en la calidad del sonido, el audio, la música, la voz, pero nuevamente, no hay canciones en este album.

Bueno ya verémos que vendrá después.

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K. Leimer: The Useless Lesson

January 25, 2008 in 2007, Ambient, Experimental, United States/Estados Unidos/USA by Jorge Salinas | 1 comment

kleimer theuselesslesson

K. Leimer
The Useless Lesson (Palace of Light)
2007 [04]
[ambient]
Prod: Dorothy Cross
Site: http://www.palaceoflights.com/kleimer/index.html
Eval: 3/5
Art(e): Tyler Boley

Tracks

  1. The Force Closed Our Eyes (5:38)
  2. Declining Need Of More (13:55)
  3. Music That Conceives Itself As Music (3:48)
  4. Anosognosia (12:51)
  5. Trio (Sentimental music) (5:25)
  6. Long After Dowland (16:20)
  7. Declension Of Need (7:26)

Músicos/musicians

  • Kerry Leimer - teclados + sonidos

con/with

  • Leo Abrahams – guitar (6)
  • Anode – field recordings (2)
  • Dwight Ashley – (4)

Reseña/Review

It is always difficult to review an ambient album. There are very few musical constructions to point at for reference, hence most articles I’ve read fall somewhere along the lines of a wine review, describing color, texture, aroma and flavor notes. Also there is an inclination to compare to other works, Eno, Namlook, et al., and that, while it can be effective to reach the genre lovers, a new listener of ambient can be dumbfounded or even deterred from exploring these works. So, in that spirit I shall try to review the album and for the casual hardcore ambient fan, I shall wrap it up with some comparisons to booth.

(Note: for a briefer description of the album jump the next seven paragraphs.)

The opener is a oscillating string arrangement, with bright notes and slightly uplifting. A few drops of piano here and there sort of gives it a few steps to hold on to, but pretty much the track keeps moving from one side to the other holding chords at different intervals. It might be a low key intro to a quiet drama movie, it feels tense somehow.

Failing Need Of More, is a bit more sophisticated, there are more acoustical elements that can be heard throughout the development of the track. Again, there is a cyclical quality to all the notes that conform the body of the music but now there are overlapping cycles with different timetables, which makes it sound richer. The feeling it evokes, especially while it nears the end, takes me to a cold rocky beach front, where the ever moving city is behind me, mixing its noises into a mutating hum, while the crisp gray sea expands forever in front of me; there are cars, and people around, but there is no discernible sound coming from them, they just add tones to the buzzing humanity around me. It is as if there is nothing more that I need to be there, there is no requirement for me to be happy, but to enjoy the moment, in its simplicity and grandiosity.

The strings return playfully in the third track, Music That Conceives Itself As Music, but now they come with fiends, percussions, and they want to play around with rhythm. Perhaps the least ambient track of the album, while being interesting, it hardly gets going anywhere before it dies.

Anosognosia makes its debut with force, it wants you to treat it seriously. The deep percussion generates a tension and creates a vast container, these are not airy sounds, this has purpose, it has a frame, there is meaning for the agony. There are shrill voices that sing something not easily told, and they appear constantly, from all sides, sometimes feeling so desperate that they bounce of the walls, the walls of that deep percussion has made to encase all of this. Half way through there is an indication that there may be a solace to those cries, they seem to implore now, to beg, but the walls are building themselves again, slowly but surely, but now they want to present themselves not as captors but as companions, they are not really there.

The fourth track is as its title suggests, Sentimental Music. The strings play a melody and create a pad as background for it. It is mainly melancholic and is interrupted continuously as if to let the newly formed idea to sink in. Nearing its end, a booming force begins to appear and the sentimentality gives way to passion.

Long hallways and perhaps a total immersion observatory are in store for whoever listens to Long After Dowland. Completely atmospheric, its best suited for pondering hard ontological conundrums.

A church bell tolls behind a hill while you walk on a misty green meadow, perhaps some inspiration will arrive to help you overcome some of life’s obstacles. The music from Declension Of Need tells you, there is nothing more than being and whatever else is just superfluous, enjoy the moment.

OK, so enough corniness. Now, first advice, don’t read whatever the author has to say about this record. It’s a lesson alright, but a lesson to not over-conceptualize your music. Yes, as Leimer says, the album is a study in cyclical construction and deconstruction of musical cannon, and therein lies the album’s strong and weak points altogether.

Redundancy and looping has always been a part of ambient music, but it can be boring as it certainly gets to be at some parts of this album, especially at its start and its finish. Steve Reich did it masterfully thirty years ago, thank you very much, so the attempt to do something similar in the third track comes way short. The played out notes sound more elegant coming from Eno, and I would rather listen to Gorecki for string atmospheres; wich leads me to note that the strings here are desperately misused and I feel tempted to say that perhaps it would have been better to forgo the use of conventional instrumentation and just rest on synthetic pads as in the most relevant tracks 2 and 6.

The sampling could have been better and the percussions seem too conventional somehow. Again, perhaps it wasn’t the intention of the author to create another ambient album, it may as well be the musical musings tat Leimer want them to be, but it feels conventional in the end. It’s not a bad record I should say, but hailing it as something it’s not is counterproductive in any case.

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All India Radio – Permanent Evolutions

December 5, 2006 in 2005, Australia, Electronic by Jorge Salinas | 2 comments

All India Radio - Permanent Evolutions

All India Radio
Permanent Evolutions (Minty Fresh)
2005
[ambient electronica]
Site: http://www.allindiaradio.com.au
Eval: 3/5

Tracks

  1. Open Sky Experiment (St-244 Remix) (3:31)
  2. Permanent Revolutions (Don Meers Remix) (4:29)
  3. Little Mexico (0:49)
  4. How Many, For How Long (Morphodic Bliss Mix) (3:24)
  5. Dark Ambient (Am Remix) (1:21)
  6. Life And How To Do It (3:37)
  7. For Angel (All India Radio Vs Don Meers Mix) (4:19)
  8. Lo Fi Groovy (3:12)
  9. Walking On A.I.R. (3:32)
  10. Delhi Dub (1:40)
  11. Pray To The Tv Funk (Left Brain Mix) (4:43)
  12. A Moment (Tv Mix) (1:20)
  13. Old India (4:02)
  14. The Long Goodbye (16:49)

Review / Reseña

In the first track, Open Sky Experiment, All India Radio ( I wanted to abbreviate but AIR may be misleading) starts with the good foot, it unravels a good atmospheric track with an almost spaghetti western movie flavour. The beats really start to get rolling on Permanent Revolutions the “almost” title track, a few good controlled breaks and sound percussion programming that sometimes feel like good Enigma pieces seem to say that this is not a simple “ambienty” record to be cast aside with the rest of the ill conceived ambient samplers on the market. Permanent Evolutions cannot be classified alongside Eno’s ambient pioneering work, it is a more rhythm based ambient excursion like The Orb’s early ambient dub records but less heavy on the samples.

I was rather surprised at how non-paradigmatic the fleeting Little Mexico insert sounded, and by itself a refreshing decision, it was something noisy and oneiric as the best pieces in Aphex Twins’s SAW II (a jewel of an album); it gives way to a bigger sounding jazzy piece, How Many, For How Long, that honoring the mix title it is blissful in a lazy summer afternoon sort of way. Here the spacey radio frequency-like effects complement the loungey rhythm. It merges at the end with Dark Ambient, a long synth pad, I’m so fond of those.

Life and How to Do It, a track that alas, did not contain what its name confers, to my own personal disillusionment, is quite nice a piece with a simple melody leaning on the left chanel delaying delightfully to the right channel and a driving percussion in the foreground. I would have added a few more samples here á la Future Sound of London (oh how nostalgic I am).

Suddenly a voice breaks the voiceless realm of ambient music, a nice female voice slightly modified at times that reminds me of someone I cannot put a finger on. A bit too sentimental for my taste as it nears the end, but it goes well with the style. An almost pop-rock ballad that will surely be a good companion on a road trip with your girl or chap, For Angel is a strong moment for the album and for those Ivy lovers, as myself a forgivable intrusion in an ambient recording.

Lo Fi Groovy, is, I believe named for the low bass synth line heard at the end, it is all about a dreamy guitar walking along side you most of the way trough the song as you admire the simple yet rich tapestries of atmospheric sounds and effects surrounding the construction of the tune, all the while lead on by a non intrusive, well devised bass line and percussion. This track smells like MOX, albeit an old collaboration work, something I would like Ciro let me play on their show one day.

On Walking on A.I.R. (see they also thought of it), a detuned sine wave carries you to a lazy rhythm where we make an effort to understand what the voice at the end of that tunnel is saying to no avail. Delhi Dub, cements my earlier The Orb reference quite well. The rhythm is released in waves that sometimes come accompanied with agreeable white noise in Pray to the TV Funk, more atmospheric than funky, a good track although definitely not the best one.

In a resolute inspiring TV-pad fashion A Moment gives way to Old India, a melancholic track that would be best suited with a Boards of Canada ultra slow motion hip-hop signature rhythm because it clearly leaves one feeling that one has just heard a subdued light version of a piece from Music Has the Right to Children or Twoism.

The Long Goodbye is exactly that, with what appear to be a rather unnecessary long string of delayed hi hats and scratches and yes the well expected piano and acoustic guitar with heavy room chorus (complete with finger slides and all), the all familiar elements to appease the audience with a wide variety of tastes. If you can get past the delayed scratches that at some point may become annoying, the later half of the piece is a pleasantly long and unobtrusive fade out.

Permanent Evolutions is a good album to complement a collection where Zero 7, Esthero and Air: a French band, are preferred to accompany late night discussions, the occasional glass of wine with friends and when it is required to turn it down a notch or two and let the moment sink in.

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Ozone Player – Frozen Paint on Boiling Canvas

December 5, 2006 in 2005, Electronic, Finland/Finlandia by Jorge Salinas | No comments

Ozone Player - Frozen Paint on Boiling Canvas

Ozone Player
Frozen Paint on Boiling Canvas (ncb Teosto)
2005
[electronica]
Prod: Otso Pakarinen
Site: http://www.ozoneplayer.com
Eval: 2/5

Tracks

  1. The Sprawl (4:06)
  2. We Are All Carrying The Burden Of Our Future (6:01)
  3. Limping Alien (3:23)
  4. Freudian Sleep (3:20)
  5. They Are Finally Starting To Come (4:52)
  6. Edgewood (6:15)
  7. Spring Theory (6:54)
  8. From A To B (4:26)
  9. Sometimes It Is Not As Always (6:05)
  10. Whatever Happened To The Emperor’s Old Clothes? (6:59)

Músicos/Musicians

  • Otso Pakarinen – Synthesizers, percussion and found sounds
  • Tim Walters – Recorder, dulcimer and percussion on “Edgwood”, “Spring Theory” and “Sometimes is Not as Always”
  • Esa Hyvönen – Percussions in “Sometimes is Not as Always”

Review/Reseña

To describe Ozone Player’s album, Frozen Paint On Boiling Canvas, we must start by mentioning that this album has almost nothing to do with current electronica’s offerings. Its style is clearly purist, if one may say so about such a genre, mainly because it adheres to the conventions followed by the pioneers of electronic music in what may be mistakenly called the golden age of electronic music, an age of geniuses with strong academic, musical and engineering credentials.

In this slow starting album, it really doesn’t pick up but until at the sixth piece, after a somewhat insipid first track, We are all carrying the burden of future tries to pick up the pace as expected of a second track but we get lost in what turns out to be a repetitive track but maybe what makes it seem lackluster is the fact that it gives off the feeling of listening to something dated, considering it is a 2004 recording. The first reminiscence of the greats comes early in the fourth track, Freudian Sleep, it vaguely resembles Vangelis’s Blade Runner Soundtrack, but be wary, I have to stress the vaguely part.

In Edgewood the album steers into a whole different realm with something that across the middle section of the track reminded me of Mike Oldfield’s Ommadawn. The song starts with a tacky pan flute, hence the world music reference, then it actually becomes enjoyable as it drifts to the end and the tribal sounding pan flute reappears, and it is great in the pure spirit of world music and late period new age.

Spring Theory, the album’s greatest moment we listen to nice synthesizer voices at the beginning and some simple yet pleasant piano loops. I specially enjoyed the loop arrangements behind the piano as they transcend to tubular bells, then the pan flute rears its ugly head again and we’re back at Mike Oldfield’s territory, but almost not there, in a refreshing way, and this may be the greatest achievement of the record, to carry in the tradition of Oldfield or Jarre but to drift from their current offerings by remaining essentially on the same territory without bringing the “rave scene” elements that both of these artists have tainted their work with, and this coming from a fan of both musical styles. Spring theory could be the jewel of the record. A somewhat marauding sort of creation, but with a good balance of electronic as well as traditional music elements to appease the mature electronica audience and those with an affinity for world or new age music.

From A to B seems an exercise in delay management, I wonder if it was digital or analog. And then Sometimes is not always, this is the more Jarresque of the tracks. With clever twists in the melody and a rhapsody of bells, bells cling-clanging in the most pure style of the French author. The last track is Tangerine Dream from the softer side of their new age phase in the eighties but with Indian or eastern tinges instead of native American infatuation the Germans displayed at the time.

I have to apologize for all the references to other bands and musicians in order to describe this Finnish work, but as I stated earlier, if one decides to delve in a classical style one runs the risk of being compared to the classics, perhaps something that can be spared for electronica’s experimentalists.

Overall it is a good album for the old electronica fans but not for those looking for something different or revolutionary.

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