music reviews 2k8
Original text translated by Claude
"Wrong Meeting" is another wonderfully hazy, thoroughly independent album from the duo Two Lone Swordsmen — Andrew Weatherall and Keith Tenniswood — who, with every new release, keep proving to listeners just how allergic they are to staying inside any one genre. They actually started out in gnarly IDM territory, which is how they ended up in a long, stormy love affair with Warp Records — one that cooled off a couple of years back once the pair had fully outgrown the label's format. On 2004's "Double Gone Chapel," they opened a new chapter in their sound: a basement-level thing, all wide dirty indie bass, dusty drum programming, and live, brooding rockabilly riffs. Now comes their long-awaited eighth full-length, "Wrong Meeting," about which Weatherall himself says: this is a direct continuation of our 2004 sound — an album full of the pleasure of doing our own thing, except now it's far more structured than anything we've done before. Order above all, apparently.
Место встречи изменить можно
Two lone Swordsmen
"Wrong meeting"
2008
"Wrong meeting"
2008
"The fate of the world is safe in the Crystal Castle" — "the Crystal Castle is a source of power," as the old ad for She-Ra's toy castle used to promise. Those exact slogans apply, fully, to the uncompromising work of Crystal Castles, a band that's been impossible to avoid over the past couple of years unless you were being deliberately deaf. Alice and Ethan met back in 2004 at an uncharacteristically peaceful charity reading event for the blind, striking up a conversation on the ever-popular topic of how thin the pickings were in new music. From that point on, driven by a hunger for change, they set about paranoidly redrawing the musical map, just so their own work could sit at the intersection of its newly invented axes.
What lets Crystal Castles claim to be doing something new? First, isolation from outside influence — they've admitted the only act they'd even consider collaborating with is The Stooges and Joy Division, circa 1969 and 1976 respectively. Second, digging for source material entirely within themselves — and it's fair to say Alice and Ethan are drawing on considerably more than the average person's supposed "10% of the brain" to do it. Since 2005, Crystal Castles have preferred to tease fans with small-format releases: two EPs (Alice Practice and Crystal Castles) and four singles sit in the band's catalog so far.
The Toronto noise merchants have also made a name remixing trendy tracks by other young bands like Bloc Party, GoodBooks, and Klaxons — turning each song inside out and mercilessly injecting it with their signature 8-bit punk. Pitchfork has described their sound as vocal samples pitched artificially high, ricocheting like pinball balls around an 8-bit synth line.
That run of short, sharp thrillers finally broke on March 18, 2008, when Last Gang Records released their first full-length album — packed with electronic chaos, feral vocals, and breathless plot twists. Even though Crystal Castles can no longer dodge the spotlight, the band has resisted media help from the very start, which is why fans learned about their earliest shows purely by word of mouth. Anyone who's set foot in the Crystal Castle and made it out alive will tell you: it's not for the faint of heart. But you're not one of those, are you?
What lets Crystal Castles claim to be doing something new? First, isolation from outside influence — they've admitted the only act they'd even consider collaborating with is The Stooges and Joy Division, circa 1969 and 1976 respectively. Second, digging for source material entirely within themselves — and it's fair to say Alice and Ethan are drawing on considerably more than the average person's supposed "10% of the brain" to do it. Since 2005, Crystal Castles have preferred to tease fans with small-format releases: two EPs (Alice Practice and Crystal Castles) and four singles sit in the band's catalog so far.
The Toronto noise merchants have also made a name remixing trendy tracks by other young bands like Bloc Party, GoodBooks, and Klaxons — turning each song inside out and mercilessly injecting it with their signature 8-bit punk. Pitchfork has described their sound as vocal samples pitched artificially high, ricocheting like pinball balls around an 8-bit synth line.
That run of short, sharp thrillers finally broke on March 18, 2008, when Last Gang Records released their first full-length album — packed with electronic chaos, feral vocals, and breathless plot twists. Even though Crystal Castles can no longer dodge the spotlight, the band has resisted media help from the very start, which is why fans learned about their earliest shows purely by word of mouth. Anyone who's set foot in the Crystal Castle and made it out alive will tell you: it's not for the faint of heart. But you're not one of those, are you?
Сrystal Castles
Crystal Castles "Crystal Castles"
2008
2008
Even though "Orange Apples" came out back in May, letting it slip past unmentioned for all of 2008 would be unforgivable — Ozone Player, aka Finnish instrumentalist Otso Pakarinen and his sprawling cast of musician friends, make music that inevitably reminds you how close Helsinki actually sits to St. Petersburg.
It also brings to mind the region's high humidity, its agriculture, its gnomes, its Finno-Ugric dialects, bonfires at night, and the fact that one man alone doesn't make a battle — you need at least a dozen countrymen to properly deliver the content to grateful, pointed ears. One guitarist isn't enough — there have to be three, and the same goes for bassists, vocalists, and keyboardists. And under no circumstances should sheer headcount come at the cost of quality! That, in short, is the full list of requirements for a properly run session at the Visual Power label.
Once again, the Finns prove their mastery of a certain musical-espionage mood, rooted in the country's traditionally independent approach to live sound. Ozone Player is a true lord of the gnomes, and his music is frightening in its quiet brilliance — and the whole charm of the story is how badly you want to befriend that fear.
It also brings to mind the region's high humidity, its agriculture, its gnomes, its Finno-Ugric dialects, bonfires at night, and the fact that one man alone doesn't make a battle — you need at least a dozen countrymen to properly deliver the content to grateful, pointed ears. One guitarist isn't enough — there have to be three, and the same goes for bassists, vocalists, and keyboardists. And under no circumstances should sheer headcount come at the cost of quality! That, in short, is the full list of requirements for a properly run session at the Visual Power label.
Once again, the Finns prove their mastery of a certain musical-espionage mood, rooted in the country's traditionally independent approach to live sound. Ozone Player is a true lord of the gnomes, and his music is frightening in its quiet brilliance — and the whole charm of the story is how badly you want to befriend that fear.
The Grand Glade Parade
Ozone Player
"Orange apples"
2008
"Orange apples"
2008
It's nice being Danish, living in Copenhagen, having a mailbox with a .dk domain. Among other perks, it means you could just download your countryman Mikkel Metal's new album, out on Echocord Records. This particular record slots effortlessly into the climate of a .ru-domain mid-latitude winter, and somewhere around the second track you realize just how much distant Denmark actually has in common with the world right outside your window — especially if it's already been snowing, hard, for days on end.
The artist himself, though, frames this subgenre of gridded, icy melancholy as techno-dub — apparently under the impression that it's cool to hail from the Caribbean, the way Paul St. Hilaire (Tikiman) does, and that dub is exactly what's needed to keep the pervasive sadness from freezing the Danish heart solid. The result of pairing these two polar-opposite musicians is "Pics and Throughs," where, track after track, languidly sighing Danish ambient-techno gets dubbed-up with St. Hilaire's wise, grandfatherly vocals — and every time you listen, you can't help admiring this little display of international friendship, feeling right at home at this celebration of refined European melancholy.
The artist himself, though, frames this subgenre of gridded, icy melancholy as techno-dub — apparently under the impression that it's cool to hail from the Caribbean, the way Paul St. Hilaire (Tikiman) does, and that dub is exactly what's needed to keep the pervasive sadness from freezing the Danish heart solid. The result of pairing these two polar-opposite musicians is "Pics and Throughs," where, track after track, languidly sighing Danish ambient-techno gets dubbed-up with St. Hilaire's wise, grandfatherly vocals — and every time you listen, you can't help admiring this little display of international friendship, feeling right at home at this celebration of refined European melancholy.
Mikkel Metal - Pics and Throughs
Mikkel Metal
"Pics and throughs"
2008
"Pics and throughs"
2008
