Monday, April 03, 2006
Music Recommendations From The PLI #2
Hello again, I'm back with this week's crop of recommended music.1) K- Space - Going Up
K-Space is a trio made up of Tuvan singer Gendos Chamzyryn, lap guitarist, Tim Hodgkinson and percussionist Ken Hyder. On paper, this project sounds horrible. Two experimental sound art types team up with a Tuvan singer to integrate a world music bend. Ewww.
However, K-Space works and works extremely well. One, they avoid the pitfalls of over-doing the whole "it's weird because it's a foreign instrument" pitfall, so common among jazz and electronic acts that integrate world music styles. Their success lies in their ability to so closely integrate familiar tones with sounds that are extemely bizarre you can barely tell who is playing what. Rather than just make something that starts to sound ritualistic, which would be comical, they push the listener into the place they are coming from and take you into the comos.
2) The Liars - Drum's Not Dead
The Liars are my favorite band from the class of 2002 Billy-burg post punk revival.
When they first appeared they were a clever recycling of PIL, The Birthday Party, and The Pop Group three of my all time favorite bands. I could hear in their approach to this music that they would not be content to be a retro act. Flash foward to 2004, their second album, They Were Wrong So We Drowned. They had trimmed down their line-up and moved into a whol new sound. Noisier, more primal, and pretty experimental for a band that was once contextualized with likes of the M2 heroes the Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs and Interpol. Though I felt this record was as strong as their first, scenesters rejected this album possibly due to the witchcraft themed conceptual baggage.
It's 2006, and the post-punk revival's gone. Brooklyn's now been taken over by tech-savvy hippies. Even their freak folk scene is starting to show signs of the end of a shelf life.
What do you do when you were the best band from two scenes ago and you've now got prove yourselves all over again? Start by moving to Germany. Make an album, trash it and make another one. Trade in your copies of The Flowers of Romance and grab a copy Sung Tongs. Hook up some drums to some guitar effects pedals. Make a record that combines your acidic darkside with your contemporaries abstract sunnyside and you end up with the new Liars sound. The Liars are cut above their contemporaries and look like they will remain that way. 2002, we hardly knew 'ya.
3) Harry Bertoia - UnfoldingWhile for most of these recomendation lists I will stick to new releases, every so often I'm sure I'll be compelled to recommend something from the back catalog. This is a record I discovered last year from a email from volcanictongue.com. They're an excellent source for hard to find music BTW. Anyway, I read the description of this record, a sculptor/interior designer, playing his sounding sculptures. Anyone out there who appreciates long drone-y work, like Nurse With Wound's Solilquy for Lilith, or Hafler Trio's work, will be interested in this.
Bertoia's drones are so full of sonic details,that it takes on a gorgeous, space filling, three dimensional quality. Electronic drone music often ends up lacking in nuance, but Bertoia's music has a wonderful organic living pulse. This drone work is full of surprises, changes in direction and texture and he didn't even have Pro Tools. It sometimes takes someone who has a strong visual art sense to make music do things like this. Bertoia's world is fascinating place, this record is trully psychedelic, it has never sounded the same twice..
I can't urge you to buy this disc enough. Or if you find any of the Sonambient series on LP, don't fret over it just get it, but since they are highly rare, and they'll set you back about 50 bucks at least, you'll have an easier time finding Unfolding (kindly priced at around 15 bucks and it coveres four of the ten records in the Sonambient series). It's the most inspiring collection of music I discovered last year.
