Those of you who loved Drive Like Jehu's Yank Crime which we listed a few lists back, might as well stop right here and just buy this, the finally reissued, first and only release from San Diego's Pitchfork, which features the unstoppable rock tag team of Rick Farr and John Reis, who between the two of them would go on to kick our asses with Drive Like Jehu, Rocket From The Crypt, the Hot Snakes and about a million more! And as the band that immediately preceded Drive Like Jehu, sonically, a lot of the elements that would gel so perfectly in Jehu are definitely present here, albeit in a little rougher form. Super dynamic intros, heart rending bursts of emotion smooshed between bulldozingly beefy guitar parts, and Farr's distinctive gravelly wail. Reminiscent of Fugazi in that the songs are tough and rhythmic and mean, but with hooks galore! This record was SO important to my (Sadie) development in musical discernin' and enjoyment. Hearing these songs again makes me feel so sentimental. But they stand the test of time SO well. In fact this stuff is so much more kick ass than most of the guitar-rock/post-punk/whatever-you-call-it that's come out lately. Comes with three bonus tracks from their long gone 7"!
Indie darlings Dntel's Jimmy Tamborello and Benjamin Gibbard of Death Cab For Cutie join forces in The Postal Service. Apparently these collaborations did indeed take shape via tapes mailed back and forth between the two. Each track is subtle variation of the following: bashfully boyish vocals, chiming music box melodies and soft jangly guitars that play off one another over a simple thumping or clicking programmed beat. Gibbard sings oh so sweetly in his melted ice cream voice while Tamborello delivers the delightfully pretty electronics and bounding rhythms. Just what you might expect from a project starring these two fellows. Plus there's an added aural delight here and there in the form of lovely vocals by Jen Wood and Rilo Kiley's Jenny Lewis. It's easy to draw comparisons to Kings Of Convenience vocalist Erlend Oye's new solo album which also sets a gentle male voice -- more familiarly heard with soft guitars and drums - singing atop light electronic dancey tracks. However unlike Oye's Unrest on which music and voice sound somewhat detached from each other, Postal Service's Give Up has a wonderful chemistry that swirls everything together perfectly. Recommended!
This four song introductory ep offers barely a peep of Postal Service's effervescent crushworthy tunes. Ah, such a sweet peep it is! A perfect accessory to their full length that's out now too. Definitely see the full album review for all the PS nitty gritty, but in particular regards to this ep (a current Cup fave by the way), the title track is an instantly catchy gem that's sure to find its way onto friends' mixtapes everywhere. The second half is actually PS songs performed by two other bands - fellow Sub Poppers The Shins and Iron And Wine. The brief encounter ends with Iron And Wine's drowsy acoustic rendition of "Such Great Heights". And y'know what? This lil' cd is worth picking up for that track alone. Beautiful! Each version is strong on its own and great in contract to one another. Recommended!
Birmingham-based Pram's sound has always featured the childlike voice of Rosie Cuckston fronting -- at least on their earlier albums -- a playful pop element that got them likened to Stereolab quite a bit. Now their sound has evolved into a suave cocktail lounge affair -- albeit much better done than other denizens of the space age bachelor pad. Rosie's delicate chirps are intact but the musical accompaniment is less sweet, more theatrical in a very good way. Think the noir soundtracks of Barry Adamson mixed with the female trip hop delicacy of Portishead. Think Morricone lite. Think that movie CQ. Think gritty, carnivalesque, macabre keyboard tinklings. For fans of Tipsy!
Yeah! A new Reggie And The Full Effect! Everybody here at AQ *loved* their last album "Promotional Copy" for its tongue-in-cheek emocore silliness, rampant absurdity, and seriously melodic and metallic might. One of the best joke bands ever, 'cause they kinda make you ask, is this a joke? And the music is awesome, no joke. "Under The Tray..." doesn't top "Promotional Copy" but it's pretty great too, even featuring another appearance by their parodic Euro political punk persona, Common Denominator. By the way, there's a reason why this is called "Under The Tray..." but we'll leave that for you to discover when you get a copy.
Now let's turn this review over to our Professor Jim for his weighty thoughts on Reggie's latest opus:
While most emo bands render heartbreak with fervor and intensity, Reggie & The Full Effect is the only one to map out a broad cross section of the hormonally dysfunctional emotions that emerge as the illogical displays of teen angst, giddiness, impossible desires, and raw mania. Pretty much the solo project of James DeWees (keyboardist for the emo-punk band The Get Up Kids and drummer for metalcore legends Coalesce), Reggie & The Full Effect previously succeeded on the "Promotional Copy" album by applying a metalcore chug to emo's earnest sentiment and bracketing this in silly (but strikingly accurate) renditions of new wave theatricality.
"Under The Tray..." picks up exactly where "Promotional Copy" left off, with the wholesale appropriation of musical signifiers geared to console teen angst including the current run of earnest power pop bands tinged with pop (i.e. Get Up Kids, Weezer, etc.), morose, black-lipstick staples (i.e. Depeche Mode and the "Pretty In Pink" soundtrack), and adolescent male aggression (i.e. Andrew W.K. and crusty skate-punk). Instead of mocking these stereotypes, Reggie adopts them as a legitimate language; and I don't even think Reggie's albums can be qualified as irony, considering how 'authentic' most of this sounds. But "Under The Tray..." doesn't concern itself with any of art school crap about irony, mimesis, or post-modernity; after all, this band knows its audience very well, and succeeds as a great, corn-ball pop record.
AQ's favorite mumble-mouthed rapper, the oft-surreal Sensational, is back, and back on his original label Wordsound after releases on Matador and Mike Patton's Ipecac.
Wordsound is also the home of another AQ-fave, Spectre, and Sensational shares Spectre's style of rumbling, murky, deep, gritty home-brewed production (the Ill Saint twists the knobs on track 11, "Super Styling"). Sensational's lazy drawl is nicely matched by the dubby echo effects of the music and his doubled-up vocal track. It's the aural equivalent of the clouds of pot smoke swirling around the studio. Sensational's stoned stream of unconciousness lyrics are sometimes retardedly brilliant, and he never lets a nonsensically silly non sequitur get in the way of his flow -- it's all about the flow, the repetition, the layering. He doesn't have to be rhyming -- he often isn't really -- a Sensational track still makes you nod your head and go, huh. As Evil Nice says on track two, Sensational is "hotter than a fucking...missile". Huh.
Please note this is not a new Shipping News album! Although it does include three new songs, it's mainly a compilation of their three fairly recent yet now out-of-print RMSN series eps ("Carrier", "Variegated" and "Sickening Bridge"). With the releases (some subtly retitled) strung together in this fashion, the group's musical diversity is revealed over the course of the fourteen songs, making for a rather strangely intriguing journey. And it's a lengthy one too with a running time of 69 minutes. While the songs have all the earmarks of post-rock - stop-starts, loud-quiets, multiple time signatures and tempo shifts - there are also plenty more experimental excursions. FYI: the new songs are "Variegated", "Wax Museum", "The Architect In Hell" and "Everglade".
Another marvelous album from Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson, one of the founding members of the Icelandic experimental / electronica ensemble Stilluppsteypa. Generally speaking, the themes of contradiction and tension that run through Stilluppsteypa's recordings also appear in the solo work of Sigmarsson, although he spends much more time allowing all of his ideas to unravel, slowly articulating each sound before offering semiotic and / or acoustical counterpoints. "A Little Lost" opens with a fluttering drone from a digitally enhanced church organ sounding quite similar to the sounds heard on "Ship" his sublime debut for Trente Oiseaux. Flicking in and out of audibility, these drone hamonics subtly couple with a quiet smoldering of static to offer an expanse of lulling sound. Throughout the album, Sigmarsson slowly dismantles the hypnotic atmosphere, first with pronounced lapses of the drones in favor of delicate textural sounds, then through a series of repeated chunks of elemental grit sliding backwards and forwards against the grain of the drone, and climaxing with a tumultous blast of digital noise shaped into offkilter metal riffs which abruptly cut to some drunk yokel barking the alarm call from a German U-boat. Sigmarsson's genius becomes apparant in how he has moved from the calm beginning of the album to this abrasive pinnacle with a self-contained intelligence and sly continuity in sound construction. The album returns to a sense of calm through the final track, a lengthy remix of mutant minimalism provided by Irr.App.Ext, the sorely under-represented project of Santa Cruz artist Matt Waldron. Very, very nice!
We're always been interested in the work of Japanese improvisor Taku Sugimoto. There's no one else quite like him, though one could draw some parallels to the work of sometime collaborator Kevin Drumm, the solo guitar work of David Grubbs, and certainly several of Sugimoto's peers in the Tokyo "onkyo" improv scene like Toshimaru Nakamura, Tetuzi Akiyama, and Otomo Yoshihide -- three gents who, not surprisingly, constitute Sugimoto's Guitar Quartet on this disc along with Sugimoto himself, some playing acoustic, and some playing electric guitars. Now, usually we prefer to hear Sugimoto just by himself, because recordings with collaborators usually get cluttered up with other people's playing, which tends to detract from the beauty of Sugimoto's restrained, minimal aesthetic. But this guitar quartet doesn't suffer from that at all -- indeed, it's really hard to imagine that there's actually four guys playing on this, as the results sound like they were barely there at all! Over these two half-hour plus tracks, the ratio of sheer silence to notes actually played is quite high, as we of course expect from Taku Sugimoto & co., whose careful placement of sound in silence leads to active, anticipatory listening from the audience. This leads us to wonder about their working practice in recording this -- it's over an hour long, but maybe there's actually ten minutes, if that, of audible "music" spread out over that hour. So, did they just play ten minutes worth and then "stretch it out" in ProTools? Or did they play for hours and hours and then edit the recording down to cd-length, picking the best stuff, silence included? Even if this is simply the entirety of a live performance (which it probably is), it's interesting to imagine the silent interaction of non-verbal gestures and delayed musical cues between the musicians, to say who was going to play something and when, with everybody most of the time just sitting there. All that's not to imply that this isn't worthwhile, you just have to be ready for what goes to a particular extreme of "difficult" listening. I personally enjoy it very much. Patience, and anticipation, and concentration, are required of the listener -- it's a meditative experience of sorts, and its beauty is in part your heightened awareness of your own environment.
... on which they do their best T-Rex (not to mention their best Beatles on a song or two)! Seriously though, the vocals do bear a remarkable Bolan resemblance (especially on "Seen The Light"), and the Supergrass lads have never shied away from wearing their influences on their sleeves (Elton John, and David Bowie to name a couple more). However on each of their four albums including this one, they have managed to create a sound of their own. That is, all-out quality bombastic pop-rockin' with some pretty fab crafty, catchy songwriting. Steeped in '70s glammy exuberance, there's heaps o' hammerin' piano lines, gleeful high pitched backing vocals, and anthemic choruses. Ultra tight, rambunctious fun. Recommended.
Longtime AQ fave Nobukazu Takemura -- ex-Mo'Wax-style club DJ, Steve Reich remixer, Tortoise collaborator, Powerbook maestro -- offers a new full length of bubbly electronica / pop with attention to texture, whether it is bass like a quiet heartbeat, or chiming bell-like electronic tones cavorting in the background like Raymond Scott gone minimalist techno, or glitchy clicks goodnaturedly jockeying for position.
On 10th, Takemura also really gets into the frankly-fake casio-filtered vocals that have made occasional appearances in his past work. This time the vocals, often sung in English, are cut up into delightful little snippets, sounding like a happily hiccupping big sister of the sad Mac guy on OK Computer. Fans of Mouse on Mars and other burbly bloopy fun electronica, take note!
Tangerine Dream's third album, originally released as a double LP in 1972. Zeit is probably the most subdued album of Tangerine Dream's early career. Apparently Edgar Froese canned bandmate Steve Schroyder after the release of Alpha Centauri, citing one too many "freak outs" which apparently rubbed the mellow Froese's fur the wrong direction (according to the liner notes here, Schroyder ended up joining the much more freak out friendly Ash Ra Temple upon his departure from Tangerine Dream.) Not surprisingly, Zeit is a much MELLOWER album than the band's previous two releases -- and even mellower than their fourth album, Atem. The album begins with the slowly morphing droning of a cello quartet, augmented by Froese on moog. It's probably the single most non-God Speed You Black Emperor recording that we get people asking "Is this God Speed You Black Emperor?" when we play it. It just goes to show how, almost thirty years after its initial release, Zeit still sounds fresh as the day it was recorded. Even the bubbling moog synth centered "Origin Of Supernatural Probabilities" has none of the cheesy proto-nuage trappings of Tangerine Dream's later works. Heavy on atmosphere and almost devoid of melody, the four album side songs that make up Zeit are some of the darkest -- and arguably, best -- material recorded by Tangerine Dream. And, like all the others in thise reissue series, this one comes remastered with a handsome slip cover and liner notes (which mostly consist of a blow by blow account of the album's contents that you can read along to as you listen and either agree, disagree, or agree to disagree with the author over their accuracy) by Paul Russell.
Finally, a song-poem collection that might have a chance of staying in print for more than a month. And finally, a collection that -- while by no means definitive -- collects the best of all those that came before it: Beat of The Traps, Makers of Smooth Music, Human Breakdown of Absurdity, I'm Just the Other Woman and I Died Today. For those who missed out on these wonderful and screwed up collections, song-poems were vanity recordings (from the sixties and seventies) where any schmo with the dough could send in their original poems/lyrics and have them made into SONGS! Small advertisements in the back of music and entertainment magazines urged would-be songwriters that the music industry was in dire need of their inspired lyrics. For anywhere between $75 and $400, one could have their words set to music (all genres were covered) by professional studio musicians. Meanwhile, back at the recording studio, said musicians had to busy themselves on an economy of scale in order to make the venture profitable. Lyrics were given a cursory look, and snap judgements were made concerning tempo, meter, key, chords and melody. Apparently the musicians had but one take to get the song, and if a mistake was made it was just as likely to be left in. Considering what these musicians were up against, it's really impressive what they came up with -- quickly fitting awkwardly (to put it nicely and terribly, to be more accurate) written lyrics into a reasonable meter and still come up with some cool arrangements to boot. Since the companies recording the songs of these terrible lyricists were only concerned with the bottom line (i.e. getting paid), anything could happen. John Trubee's legendary "Blind Man's Penis" is a case in point. And while his words of wisdom were penned in jest, the other 27 tracks included with it on this disc were not. Written in all earnestness, subjects ranging from Richard Nixon to Jimmy Carter, duck eggs to Argentinian cowboys to green fingernails, these tracks are weirder and even funnier than Trubee's track. These singles have been the dreams of collectors for years and until the difficult to track down MSR collections came out several years back, to the rest us they were the stuff of legend. For those of you who have already picked up those MSR collections this one may be a bit redundant, but for all the rest this is certainly the best collection of song-poems to come on one disc. Highly recommended, and sure to be a hit when the upcoming PBS documentary on the Song-Poem industry airs! One wonders what the original "poets" would think of the unexpected popularity of their songs? Probably the person who wrote "Jimmy Carter Says Yes" was sure it would be a hit all along...
Gamelan Semar Pegulingan is one of the many now rare gamelan of the island of Bali; displaced by the fall of the Balinese court and the subsequent explosion of gong kebyar. The repertoire of this gamelan, which is named after the god of love (Semar Pegulingan), was specific to two distinct occasions. The most common time in which Semar Pegulingan was used was outside the King's bed chamber in the evenings, but it also played the musical accompaniment for the Legong dance which was performed exclusively by pre-pubescent girls. The set on which the material on this CD was performed was one which had been spared the crucible through the efforts of the Canadian composer/ethnomusicologist Colin McPhee in the 1930's who commissioned a group of musicians to continue the gamelan's repertoire. These recordings were made in 1972 by Robert Brown after the gamelan had been carefully restored to its original condition (it had come into disarray after McPhee's departure from the island and had been decomposing for some 30 years.) It is a particularly beautiful gamelan and hearing it can give on a bit more perspective on the popular gong kebyar. Because of its relatively slower pace, it's much easier to grasp how the instruments interlock within the gamelan.
We just got the first batch of the Indonesia / South Pacific installment of Nonesuch's Explorer reissues, which total 12 in number. Ten of the discs are from either Java or Bali and just about each one features an entirely different form of gamelan. A Gamelan, as a cursory way of introduction, is an orchestra of primarily bronze (though bamboo gamelan are also common) percussion instruments -- metallophones, gongs, gong-chimes -- and drums. Quite often a gamelan will have a specific repertoire that it is exclusively built for the performance of, and certain ceremonial gamelan are limited to the performance of a single piece. On top of this, throughout Java and Bali there is an ever changing world of both village and court traditions which continue to defy definitions. These discs just in from Bali and Central & Western Java just scratch the surface of gamelan throughout Indonesia, but they're a fine introduction anyway.
Back in 1967 when this record hit the shelves it blew people's minds, and even today it remains one of the most unique and amazing things you're likely to hear. "Golden Rain" is the historic recording that started it all. Recorded by David Lewiston in 1966, Golden Rain was not only the first recording to be released in the Explorer series, but is touted as the first commercial release of "International" music (a claim that some might argue with.)
The first two tracks are recordings of Gamelan Gong Kebyar. The 20-minute third track is Lewiston's recording of kecak, the almost universally loved monkey chant. Kecak has an interesting history in that its creation in the 1930s is due at least in part to German artist Walter Spies, a cultural outsider. The performance is entirely a cappella, with a male chorus of 60+ men chanting in an interlocking fashion derived from gamelan composition. The origins of the chant come from a ritual exorcism dance that's centuries old. The thing about Balinese performance, at least up until later this century, is that it was all inseparably tied to ritual, be it a wedding ceremony, funerals, and other various life cycle ceremonies. Bali's increasing popularity as a tourist destination for middle class and wealthy Europeans in this century was coupled with these same tourists wanting to be entertained by their exotic hosts. Unfortunately for them, there was not only no concept of performance merely for entertainment's sake and not being Balinese, their presence at any such ritual event was violation of its sacrosanctity. Spies' work in encouraging his Balinese friends to create a completely new performance from older traditions, whatever his intentions may have been, allowed for the Balinese to keep the purity of their rituals intact and for the occidentals to get their kicks.
Published as the catalogue for an exhibition at the respected Max Protectch gallery in NYC, this is an enhanced CD that features a well crafted slide show of Brian Alfred's slick illustrative paintings that offer irony clad observations of corporate culture in paint-by-numbers graphic displays, and a soundtrack (playable on all CD players) collected from a number of electro-glitch artists including Nabukazu Takemura, E*Vax, Pulseprogramming, E*Rock, Ultra Living, Opiate, Lulltone, Loscil, Static, Jeremy Boyle, and Pan American. To the best of our knowledge, all of the music is previously unreleased.
New, nicely packaged compilation of afro-beat from Ghana's golden era. Sound Way boasts that the 14 tracks included here from the 1970's are all extremely rare and previously unreleased outside of Africa. So if the Fela reissues and various Strut collections aren't enough, here's a nice addition to the collection. Includes a 16 page booklet detailing the history of Ghana's music industry.
The tracks on this disc were all recorded at the Paku Alaman palace in Yogyakarta under the direction of K.R.T. Wasitodipuro, who is the single most important musician/composer in Java and a veritable cultural treasure. The first thing those already familiar with Balinese gamelan will notice different in Javanese court gamelan is that it is much, for lack of a better word, mellower. Unlike the kinetic, explosive Gong Kebyar of Bali, Javanese court gamelan tends to move along at a much slower, even stately, pace. It is, in fact, at its slowest that a pieces opens up to its most complex and beautiful. The stratified layers of melodies can be absolutely stunning; each instrument, while performing its own unique part, is also completely subservient to the whole.
The album, originally released as "Javanese Court Gamelan", was recorded in 1971 by Robert Brown. An added aesthetic importance to central Javanese gamelan is the need for the sound from the various instruments to blend together in the performance space. The gamelan is located in a building called a Pendopo. The structure is basically a pyramid shaped vaulted ceiling with no walls, the architecture of which causes the sounds to be reflected back upon the gamelan like a parabolic dish. On this recording, which was recorded in the Pendopo at Paku Alaman, you can not only hear the blending of the instruments as they're meant to be heard, but also the sounds of birds chirping in the courtyard just outside. Nice.
Spanning 1969 to 1978, the newest volume of Love, Peace & Poetry brings to light totally rare gems from the Brazilian psychedelic rock movement. While we may all be relatively familiar with the giants of the Tropicalia scene -- Os Mutantes (Windy's favorite band ever), Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa, Caetano Veloso, etc -- this comp features far more obscure groups whose albums are sought-after treasures in the underground psych LP collecting community (you know who you are!). But less obsessive folk now too have the opportunity to enjoy these obscurities! Springing from the creatively fertile ground of an at the time politically oppressive society, this is a fantastic collection of songs ranging from sunny Beatles-esque, Byrds-y jangle pop to other harder stuff more explicitly influenced by the Doors, Hendrix, and other fuzzed out acidheads. Highlights include the latter type of thing from Modulo 1000, a track from Brazilian psych crown jewel Lula Cortes e Ze Ramalho, the Zep-worthy hard rock groove (with a touch of proto-new wave in one guitar break) of Terco, and a track by Spectrum (whose utterly brilliant film soundtrack album "Geracao Bendita" album has been reissued in its entirety, due for review soon in an upcoming New Arrivals list, although you can come buy it now if you want!). Some tracks pay allegiance to Tropicalia, others are straight-up freak rock, and all are pretty cool.
As with all the Love, Peace and Poetry comps, this is highly recommended not only because it's good listening, but also because it's damn hard to find full lengths from most of these groups, not 'til someone reissues 'em! The liner notes are again by our pal Stan Denski, cover art is again a cheesecake blond go go girl courtesy famed photog Bunny Yeager.
An explicit warning on the back cover admonishes us not to expect to hear any "Hawaiian guitars, ukuleles and the Hula" on this disc. Which is all fine and dandy, because in its stead we're treated to some exceptionally rare recordings that span the wide pacific ocean. In 1978 David Fanshawe flew from island to island, seeking out the music of the people who lived there and -- if the local governments allowed it -- recorded them. Fanshawe travelled to the Cook Islands, Tonga, Fiji, the Solomon Islands, the Gilbert Islands, Western Samoa and Tahiti. From his travels he culled together twenty eight varied tracks, from the frenetic high speed drumming of the Cook Islands to the soft melodies of the Fangufangu Nose Flute. But most cherished on this collection are the beautiful choruses, both religious and secular, which sound like eerie inverted versions of an American Baptist gospel choir. In one love song, sung by a group of men gathered at a drinking club, the chorus is accompanied by the sounds of a woman pouring kava. Originally released in 1987 as "Island Music of the South Pacific".
After the giggles subsided over the cover art (which features a photo of a shadowy warrior figure with a drawn-in red rose in his teeth), we settled in for the no-wave and electro action. This is the real deal from the late '70s and early '80s, folks. None of that watered down replication that's been tagged 'electro' these days. However, the catch of Teutonik Disaster is that this music was not coming from the New York scene back in the day, but instead from the depths of Germany. Much of this may sound silly and absurd today, and taken in their historical context many are... absurd and silly! But many are also so far ahead of the pack, groundbreaking even. It's a fun'n'eclectic mix of tracks scattered with funky basslines, saxophone skronk, gluey detuned analog synth lines, programmed beats, plus spoken, barked, grunted and moaned vocals. Some tracks are clunky and strange like "Je t'air" by Reifenstahl which is punctuated by a "La Bamba" guitar lick. Others like Schwarze Bewegung's Traumfrau" are like a ska-tinged herky jerky comrade of Von Lmo and James Chance (psst, no-wave fans! be sure to check out the brand new James Chance box set too!). And others like Carmen's "Schlaraffenland" are just a real good time. Very entertaining!
Jaipongan and the other styles included on this disc are quite possibly some of the most interesting forms of popular music to develop in Indonesia or the world in recent times. Sunda (not to be confused by the geographically dyslexic with the Sudan) lies in Western Java and, as it seems holds true throughout Indonesia, has its own unique music, dance and dramatic arts exclusive to the relatively small geographic region in which it's contained. The story of Jaipongan's creation is almost as interesting as the music itself. And while it is thoroughly written about in the accompanying liner notes by none other than Philip Yampolsky (the man what brought us the 20 volume "Music of Indonesia" series on Smithsonian Folkways), I'll try to paraphrase as briefly as possible to pique your interest here.
As a catalyst for the creation of Jaipongan, a great deal is owed to Indonesian President Sukarno who, in the early 1960's, impressed upon Indonesians to cherish their traditional arts. In 1974, an inspired rennaissance man of an artist/entrepreneur by the name of Gugum Gumbira Tirasondajaja took Sukarno up on his challenge and put together a new genre of popular music that drew from traditional Sundanese music for its ingredients. What Sukarno probably wasn't looking for was a new popular genre built out of a dance genre in which a professional dancer -- often a prostitute -- invites men to dance with her. Gugum replaced the dance's accompaniment (limited to 3 small gongs) with a stripped down Degung gamelan common to Sunda. But most impressive was his addition to all this an impressive battery of drums played in a suitably flamboyant fashion -- much of the patterns taken from Wayang Golek (shadowless puppet theater which uses 3 dimensional puppets.) When you consider that the drummer in this ensemble, despite the expanded drums at his disposal, is still limited to a handful of two-headed barrel drums, it's enough to make Neil Peart blush at the way he plays them. Using pressure applied by the heel of the foot, or the forearm, the drummer can eke out glissandi or melodic fragments -- and they do so constantly. The ensemble wouldn't be complete, of course, without a singer. And the singer for this ensemble -- Gugum's Jugala Group -- is Idjah Hadidjah, probably the most famous in Sunda. Married to a famous dalang (puppeteer), she became somewhat famous herself singing during his Wayang Golek performances. Her silky and sensuous singing makes the perfect counterpoint to the frenetic drumming and is probably the single biggest reason why this album sold so well. Which reminds me... A lot of you have already probably noticed the nice new cover art these Explorer reissues are getting. As nice as the cover art is, it has already caused a little confusion here at Aquarius with customers who already own the previous CD issues of the discs in the Indonesian part of the series. This album, originally released under Idjah Hadidjah's name as "Tonggeret", was only just fairly recently released for the first time in the west in 1987. So just a warning to check your collections and make sure you don't have "Tonggeret" in there already. Unless, of course, you want this nicely remastered version with the cool Magnum cover photo.
Best known as half of the minimalist techno duo Pan Sonic with Ilpo Vaisainen, Mika Vainio has crafted a variety of electro-acoustic techniques that bare little resemblance to his contemporaries in glitched electronica. Marked as much by his use of space as by the quality of his abstraction of sound, Vainio's recordings under his given name even stand apart from his solo projects such as �, Tekonivel, and Philus. As Vainio, he has shed all of the intertwining rhythmic assualts found elsewhere, but continues to pursue a crystalline frigidity in his investigations of sound. "Sokeiden Maassa Yksisilmainen On Kuningas" (which translated from the Finnish as "In the Land of the Blind One-Eyed Is King") opens with a harsh blast of digitized noise that settles down into a ominous soundscape punctuated by a flanging bass pulse and distant isolationist drones. Smatterings of prolonged silence take up a considerable amount of time within Vainio's album, and provide parallels to the French attitudes of musique concrete (i.e. Lionel Marchetti, Luc Ferrari, etc.) But it's drones that give Vainio's work such dynamism and expressivity, at times standing in as sustained chords from a grimy organ and others as creepy swells of "Forbidden Planet" style electronics.
Sick electric funk and smoove jazz coexist on this new reissue on local label 4 Men With Beards. It comes chock full of fuzzed out guitar and chunky organ grooves along with slower romantic numbers that veer a bit close to cocktail lounge territory for our liking. Young-Holt Unlimited had hits like "Soulful Strut" for Atlantic and featured members of the Ramsey Lewis Trio. "Oh Girl" was produced by Michael Cuscuna, who produced the Art Ensemble's Bap-tizm (also reissued on 4 Men With Beards), and has string aranngements by Eumir Deodato, the guy who made a disco version of "Also Sprach Zarathustra (2001)" and produced Kool and the Gang. A very slick, jazzy instrumental rare groove classic. ----* ----* Nonesuch Explorer Titles! : ----* We just got the first batch of the Indonesia / South Pacific installment of Nonesuch's Explorer reissues, which total 12 in number. Ten of the discs are from either Java or Bali and just about each one features an entirely different form of gamelan. A Gamelan, as a cursory way of introduction, is an orchestra of primarily bronze (though bamboo gamelan are also common) percussion instruments -- metallophones, gongs, gong-chimes -- and drums. Quite often a gamelan will have a specific repertoire that it is exclusively built for the performance of, and certain ceremonial gamelan are limited to the performance of a single piece. On top of this, throughout Java and Bali there is an ever changing world of both village and court traditions which continue to defy definitions. These discs just in from Bali and Central & Western Java just scratch the surface of gamelan throughout Indonesia, but they're a fine introduction anyway.
