Label: Now-Again Records
Catalog#: NA 5060
Released: 04 May 2010
Genre: Electronic, Experimental, Glitch
Catalog#: NA 5060
Released: 04 May 2010
Genre: Electronic, Experimental, Glitch
Canada's Babe Rainbow makes a bold debut entrance on Warp with the apocalyptic mine-steppin' sound of the 'Shaved EP'. It would appear that the reverberations of dubstep have reached the shores of British Columbia as a muffled clang, rusted with industrial detritus and encrypted with ritualistic tribal percussion. The first shock of Cameron Reed aka Babe Rainbow's sound comes on the sludgy 'Popcommon' sounding like the Substance remix of Monolake's 'Alaska' mixed with Russell Haswell in warm-up mode. 'Screwby' follows, circulating tribal steppers rhythms around marshy subs and banshee screaming atmospherics and 'Combed' lulls us with music box melodies and ghostly string sashays, something like the Caretaker doing a dubstep waltz with Zoviet*France. With 'Care' we're strongly reminded of Shackleton's overcast temperament and rhythmic contours while the final title track evokes images of Scorn-like doom-dub dystopia. Really Strong 12"!!!!
This eight-CD set is a sleek affair, packaged in a plain-Jane, silver-ribbed box with just a peephole in the center. The peephole, though, looks in on the fluorescent jewel cases, each of which faithfully reproduces fantastic Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald sets from July 1966 at France's Cote d'Azur. The Ellington tunes show his orchestra in long form, taking multiple sets (with some tune repetition across the CDs) and thriving in Ellington and Billy Strayhorn's tightly scripted ensemble sections. This is some fairly standard Ellington for the era, with hard-flying solos from Paul Gonsalves and myriad others. What's great is the ability to really dig in to the band, hear it work, set after set, on the tunes and the polyphonic interplay of the ensemble's sections. And then there's the eighth CD, which presents a band rehearsal with Ellington doing what drove some mad: humming sections to instruct the band, calling out key changes quickly and sounding altogether like a practitioner of an oral tradition in musical pedagogy. It's awesome to hear him and the band, banter and all. Then there are the Ella Fitzgerald sets, which are possibly the better portion here. Fitzgerald sounds mightily driven, sometimes almost boundary breaking in her execution. Vocally, she's both tight and loose, brimming with turns of phrase and belting lyrics with popping exactness. The dates caught on this box aren't regarded as the greatest for either of the marquee artists, but in terms of the sheer quality of music and their fullness of vision, Fitzgerald's tunes vie with anything else she did in her career. Sure, many of the tunes are fast and jumping, but their propulsion is largely thanks to Fitzgerald's heightened sense of play. The spiral-bound booklet accompanying this box set is a treat, with all its pop-art slyness and off-the-cuff frankness.© Andrew Bartlett
The span of this 12-CD box set is generally acknowledged as the best Bill Evans material available. That's saying a lot, considering the high quality of The Complete Fantasy Recordings and The Complete Bill Evans on Verve. What the Riverside recordings display is a young Evans discovering his revolutionary harmonic depth and improvisational genius with bursts of energy that, by his second session, had established a kind of moody intensity that seemed to deepen the music while making it at once more complex and easier to absorb. Evans's Riverside years encompass his early dynamos: Everybody Digs Bill Evans is resplendently here, as is the material from Sunday at the Village Vanguard and Waltz for Debby. So, too, are sessions with Cannonball Adderley, Jim Hall, and Zoot Sims. Through it all, Evans remains firmly planted in a winding style that's creatively unstoppable and visceral in its intensity. One could write hundreds of pages about these 12 CDs. Instead, you should indulge their dozen-plus hours.© Andrew Bartlett
Billie Holiday often stated that she styled her vocal phrasing to echo the sound of a jazz horn, so it should be no surprise that she found the perfect duet partner in tenor sax player Lester Young. Lady Day and Pres (they bestowed the nicknames on each other) recorded some 60 sides together between 1937 and 1946, many if not all of which have to be considered classics. This three-disc set collects everything the pair did, including alternate takes, and the best tracks are truly revelatory. Given the obvious musical connection on display in these sides, it is telling that both Holiday and Young died only four months apart in 1959. Apparently the world just couldn't handle one without the other.© Steve Leggett, AMG
Marc Richter (aka Black to Comm) is no newcomer to the experimental music scene. As the figurehead of the Hamburg-based Dekorder label, the musician and designer has brought countless oddities to the attention of rabid music fans in the last few years, but it is with his own compositions that he has made the biggest splash. Releasing for a plethora of labels including Digitalis, Trensmat and of course his own imprint, he has pioneered a new, organic drone sub-genre using tape loops, vintage organs and an inexhaustible swamp of found sounds. With this latest album however, it was Richter’s intention to move away from the epic drones he had made his own and into something more ‘classic’.
The mission statement for ‘Alphabet 1968’ was to write an album of ‘songs’ for want of a better word. Short tracks which represented genre points, the milestones which stuck in Richter’s mind when he thought back to his favourite records. What we arrive at is an breathtaking ten track album which, over the course of forty-five minutes, explores world music, techno, noise, avant-garde, ambient music and even exotica. Each track is linked with a loose thread of radio static or environmental sound, dragging you through the album as if tuning in to a stray broadcast or a particularly adventurous mix.
Richter has pieced the album together from hours of recordings made at his studio with home made gamelan, small instruments and loops gathered from a collection of ancient vinyl and 78 records. The scope of the album is admirable but ignoring this it is simply a shockingly arresting collection of experimental oddities, with references ranging from Moondog to Basic Channel by way of Bernard Herrmann. It’s not hard to fall in love with ‘Alphabet 1968’, far harder would be to place exactly where the record should fit into your collection.
Using samples, loops, found sounds, household appliances, and a highly developed sense of childlike joy and wonder, High Places create some magic on their debut full-length album. The duo of Mary Pearson and Robert Barber take a get-in-where-you-fit-in approach to their sound, splicing in elements of indie pop, electronica, world music, dub, and outer space kids music and ending up with a sound that isn't miles away from what fellow sonic adventurers like Panda Bear or El Guincho are doing, but retains more than enough individuality and invention to be totally unique and original. Credit Barber's amazing ability to weave bits and bobs of noise and sound into a blipping, jerky music that soothes the ears and makes your feet want to move. It could have easily ended up a jumbled mess or a corny gimmick, instead it sounds like a thoroughly modern update on the kind of primitive music humans have been making all along. Pearson's vocals too deserve all kinds of praise. They are unfailingly sweet without being sugary, sometimes treated and trippy but always directed straight for the heart. She gives the whirlwind of sound a stable and very human center. Within the group's hermetically sealed and unified world of sound there is enough variation to keep things very interesting, whether it's stuttering dance beats on "Gold Coin," the heavenly clouds of what sounds like bells and strings but could be anything on "Papaya Yeah," the almost Chinese guitars on "The Storm," or the clattering steel drums on "The Tree with the Lights On It," Barber and Pearson show a mastery of atmosphere and dynamics without sacrificing the beauty of the melodies and the impact of the songs. High Places' debut lives up to the promise of their singles (and then some) and is hopefully the first of many impressive and inspiring records to come from the duo.