Sacred Object of the Yiye People, the debut LP from England’s The Hunter Gracchus, is a cacophony of improvisation, acoustic noise, and obscure literary and cultural references. The odd charm of the album emerges through an interplay between unconventional rhythm and hypnotic melody. Sacred Object's Bedouin influences stand out in a number of the tracks and make it traveling, richly textured, and entirely enthralling.

The album is constructed like a journey, with “elkadria priests’ ransacking of the PNAC offices—parts 1 to 3” and “for naguib mahfouz” neatly bookending the work as the departure and the arrival. In “night is our tryst when silences ring as the pause of bells,” sounds float in and out of earshot, finally culminating in a duet between accordion and drums filled with the drudgery of movement. The second half of side a, featuring “with the fire of ogun, the axe-handed one” and “the blood never dried”, is jarringly dissonant. Heavy-handed percussion overpowers the initially delicate tones, and we hear the only traditional instrumentation of the album: slightly distorted guitar riffs and the rhythm of a steam locomotive. 

Side b is more melodic, but not by much. Starting with “the pineal eye,” a sawing violin becomes an ambient metronome, and short gasps of accordion and percussion punctuate the melody. The drums are still there, but they become a melodic undertone, not like the pronounced rhythms of side a. Their musical influences are as much Bedouin street jams as contemporary noise and dream folk.

Some tracks open with the first notes of a carnivalesque accordion, only to become a repeated melody of four notes. These beginnings are like biting into a street hotdog: the bun feels artificial and misplaced, a barrier you have to get through to get to the meat inside. Once you’re in, the sound mirage is intoxicating and the improvisation becomes organic psychedelia.

After the initial opening, the listener must wait for rhythmic meditation to begin, and it’s not always evident in what direction a song is going. One exception to these misdirected openings is "naguib mahfouz,” the album’s closing track, in which ethereal voices, coupled with Hunter Gracchus’s signature heavy violin, create an interplay of surprising intensity. This is a song that I could be born / die / be buried to; it washes over you in layers and waves, evoking the water themes in The Hunter Gracchus, the Franz Kafka story from which the band takes its name.

Organically and acoustically, The Hunter Gracchus breaks musical sound into noises that don't seem to be coming from the instruments that produce them: a rhythmic clatter turns to stretched rubber; a squeak, combined with light rhythms, becomes the call of a caged chicken on a cinematic caravan of Bedouin traveling.

Many of their song titles contain clues to the band’s influences. These references range from populist political bravado ("elkadria priests’ ransacking of the PNAC offices” and  "the blood never dried" speak to the ex-subjects of the British Empire) to Arabic and Bedouin culture and literature (“with the fire of ogun, the axe-handed one” and “the greater the jibbah, the greater the blessing”). The cover art and album title are taken from artists Olga and Alexander Florensky's creation of a fictitious people, and of the ethnographer who studies them.

One problem with Sacred Object is that few of these references seem to lead anywhere; they add context but not dimension. Perhaps this is the lot of 21^stcentury music: to draw connections where there are none, in deference to the dream of universal knowledge. While the disconnect between the alien music and abstruse literary and cultural references in the titles may make The Hunter Gracchus seem like a pretentious scenester band, their music is genuinely good.

Words: Nicholas Wells

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Bethany Cosentino is one half of Los Angeles duo Pocahaunted (with Amanda Brown), known for their long, spooky, and almost meditative drone compositions. Their music is both calming and foreboding, often simultaneously, and can feel like being lullabyed into a nightmare-filled sleep. Amid war drums, lulling guitar, and howling voices, Pococaunted always seem to be beating, guiding, and gathering towards some sonic place, a place where we'll probably never arrive. But if we can't know where Pocahaunted are going, we can at least find out where they come from.

Alexander Frank: Can you tell me a little bit about your progression from more standard songwriting to the drone and noise of Pocahaunted? I know that before Pocahaunted, not so long ago, you wrote songs with lyrics and bridges and choruses and all that. So how and when did you make the transition something more discordant?

I was really kind of bored with traditional songwriting, and when Amanda approached me and asked me to start a band with her, we had no real concept in mind of what the music would sound like. Coming from a strong musical background, I figured I would go in there and attempt to construct something, but when the two of us came together, the Pocahaunted sound just happened. And we never questioned it or tried to throw a label on it, we just played the music that came to us, and came out of us. It was only later that people started to call us a "drone" band.

AF: Does genre mean anything to Pocahaunted? What would you label yourselves if you had to?

Well, like I said before, I think we play the music we play because it's just what kind of comes out. Amanda and I have completely different tastes in music, and neither one of us really even listens to “drone” bands, so I wouldn't necessarily say it's important to us to be categorized as a drone band. We make the music we make because it is somehow inspired by our varying tastes, and it just so happens that the mash-up of all these cross genres creates this droney, blissed-out music.

AF: Can you talk a little bit about those influences? The drone and noise influences are obvious, but I also hear the 20th century diva. Your voice is Buffy-Saint Marie, Elizabeth Fraser, and Mariah Carey rolled into one! Can you talk about some divas that inspire Pocahaunted? I hear Patsy Cline, too. Am I crazy?

Well obviously, I am all about the Diva. Amanda and I kind of joke around that we are both divas, but honestly, it's not a joke. We are loud, and demanding, and we require a lot of attention. But we are also really, really inspired by a lot of female musicians, and I think it's pretty clear in our music. I think there is a real feminine quality to the songs, and I think even without the layers of female vocals, the music itself portrays a very feminine vibe. I am really inspired by Elizabeth Fraser, which I think is pretty obvious. I also love, love, love Patsy Cline, so the comparison is amazing. I'm inspired by a lot of female soul singers from the 60s and 70s like Irma Thomas, Doris Duke, and, of course, Aretha Franklin. We're both also really into Nina Simone, and other women of jazz.

AF: Just knowing you as a friend, your personality seems so divergent from the sounds on your records. You're so talkative and verbal and present in person, but on record you sound sort of distant, far away, nonverbal, in a sense. Do you become someone different when you're recording and performing?

I don't think I act any different when recording or performing. Amanda has a hard time getting me to act “seriously” on stage. I think she takes it more seriously than I do from a performance standpoint. I mean, don't get me wrong, I am into it—but for me it's harder, because I'm the one playing the guitar, and carrying the song, so I get a little nervous and I try to concentrate a lot. We recently started playing with a more basic band, so it's easier for me now to ease up and put the guitar down at some point. And when I do that, I feel like I have more room to get into the performance.

AF: What's the process of writing and creating a Pocahaunted song or album? How much do you have planned out and how much just happens during the recording process?

Basically what happens is Amanda and I will brainstorm ideas, meaning, we will say “we want this album to sound like...”, and then we throw out some insane jargon like "Talking Heads meets Cocteau Twins thrown into a blender after smoking a lot of weed”. We basically don't write songs. I come up with a pretty simple guitar riff, and then we add on top of that. Most of our albums have concepts behind them though, and we go into them hoping that we will come across a certain way for a particular album. We have really tried to grow and change with each release, and I think our personal influences show through a lot more in the later albums than in any of the earlier stuff we released.

AF: One last question. What's the best time of day to listen to a Pocahaunted album? Morning? Afternoon? Night, after a long day of work? Right before you go to bed?

At night, I guess...Yeah, at night. When it's most spooky out. And kinda foggy. And close to some mountains, or maybe the ocean. Yeah: listen to us at night in nature.

Interview by Alex Geoffrey Frank

Photo: Clare Kelly

Cool Tunes:

Pocahaunted, Island Diamonds, Not Not Fun, 2008
Pocahaunted, Chains, Teardrops, 2008
Pocahaunted/Robedoor, Hunted Gathering, Digitalis Industries, 2007
Pocahaunted, Mirror Mics, Weird Forest, 2008.

Continuing Education:
Pocahaunted on Not Not Fun website




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The prolific Adam Kriney is perhaps best known as a drummer, hammering it out freestyle for a handful of Brooklyn-based psychedelic and improv outfits on the Colour Sounds Recordings label (Dragonfrynd, Owl Xounds, La Otracina), which he himself runs.

With Vorg Vessel (Cut Hands), his first solo outing, this Boston expat sets down his sticks and sinks his claws into a classic Lowrey organ and a keyboard, presumably cheap and battery-powered. A disclaimer in the liner booklet informs us that “The Queen of Fish Mountain” (5”) and “Illuminated by Stripes” (3”) are 100% synthesizer and sequencer free. Whether Kriney is trying to paint himself as a purist or making some kind of sweeping statement about the current state of electronic music is irrelevant: rarely has the sound of two droning instruments grinding against one another been so varied and beautiful.

“The Queen of Fish Mountain” and “Illuminated by Stripes” share an old, almost archival feel, like the sleepy krautrock soundtrack to a German expressionist film played back over a warped VHS tape. Like Kriney’s other projects, Vorg Vessel pulls off fine balancing act the ad-lib and the scripted: Kriney is constantly churning out minimal melodic ideas, but they keep getting bogged down in a swamp of delay and oversaturation. Cyclical circus melodies bend into jarring two-note intervals before opening out into the air, reminding us of the power of simple combinations of notes to return us to the peace of the womb or make our hair bristle.

More than anything else, however, the two Vorg Vessel discs allow us to lose ourselves for a time in the pure, throbbing frequencies of the Lowrey. Organ sounds we’ve all heard a thousand times before magically reconnect with the feelings we attached to them as children: the Gothic menace of a bass tone, the astral visitation of a high tremolo. This offering is elegantly packaged in a slimline DVD case, with art by Peter Friel and two lovingly spray-painted flying saucers—perhaps the perfect metaphor for the music inside.

Limited edition of 50. Organ help by Tracy Hatch.

Words: Emilie Friedlander

Originally published on Foxy Digitalis in December, 2008.




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Last month at the SOY festival, over a hundred concert hoppers packed into a tiny neighborhood bar to witness an ecstatic free-for-all by New England drum prodigy Chris Corsano and British drone guru Mick Flower. Perhaps we can leave up it to the good people of Nantes to turn out in droves for the kind of show that might ordinarily attract a small circle of improv and experimental music obsessives. Or we can leave it to Corsano and Flower themselves, who, with The Radiant Mirror, their first joint lp, just might have cooked up something verging on a cross-over record. Their set-up is simple: a drum kit, a bag full of odds and ends (singing bowls, a few twigs, some pieces of cloth, a guitar string and bridge), and a rare Indian instrument that sounds like a sitar on electronic steroids. And yet somehow, almost magically, Corsano and Flower manage to condense the full spectrum of human exaltation into a single, protracted, endlessly beating soundwave. Clearly, Visitation Rites couldn’t pass up the opportunity to ask a few questions.

Emilie Friedlander: How, and when, did you guys start playing together? Was it with Vibracathedral Orchestra (Mick’s main project) or does your musical friendship pre-date those collaborations? What other types of configurations have you appeared together in?

Chris Corsano: The duo started in June of 2005 at a show Mick had been asked to do in Leeds. So he’s the mastermind. We had played together a couple of times in 2004 in a much larger group when myself and Paul Flaherty collaborated with Vibracathedral Orchestra. Later on in 2005, I guested in Vibracathedral a few times (a show here, a jam there), but I’ve never been a card-carrying member.

EF: What in the world is a Japan banjo, and how do you play it?

Mick Flower: It's an Indian instrument, a cross between a dulcimer and autoharp - it has 17 strings. The one I play is an electric version with pick-ups and a sunburst finish.

EF: When we listen to The Radiant Mirror, are we hearing just Japan Banjo and a drum kit, or do you guys work other instruments (or objects) into the equation?

MF: Yes, just Japan Banjo and Drum Kit. There's also an electronic tampura going all the time, often it can only be heard when we play quietly.

EF: Were you guys listening to a lot of Indian music around the time you recorded The Radiant Mirror? If so, what kind of stuff were you listening to? Was there a conscious effort to play off of these influences?

CC: I was/am listening to E Gayathri, Shruti Sadolikar, Nikhil Banerjee, Bismillah Khan, Debashish Bhattacharya, Veena Sahasrabuddhe, Alla Rakha, Zakir Hussain, and some Pakistani music as well (Nusrat Fateh, Ali Khan, and Aziz Mian, specifically). I wouldn’t say there was a conscious effort to emulate or adapt these influences, but we weren’t denying them either.

EF: About how much of a “game plan” did you guys have when you set out to record the album? Were there any structural or stylistic elements that were decided upon beforehand, or you were you just kind of riding the creative flow? I guess I’m just asking you guys to describe your joint working process a little bit…

CC: I think the plan was to hit record, play for a while, and worry about editing later. What we do is always improvised, though the instruments and tunings we use have more or less stayed the same. There’s still a lot of room to move within that set up.

EF: When you guys play this stuff live, how much does the project transform from venue to venue, crowd to crowd, or mind-state to mind-state? Are there any constants that carry over to each Corsano-Flower performance, asides, of course, from Corsano and Flower themselves?

CC: I’d say things vary a good deal. Just thinking about the shows we recently did (Aalst, Nantes, Paris), there were a lot of differences in the three sets’ lengths, structure, dynamics, etc.

EF: What were some challenges that came up when you guys recorded the album? In what ways has this collaboration been a learning experience for the both of you, or a departure from your “usual” working styles?

CC: It doesn’t feel like a there’s a difference in how I approach playing with Mick vs. playing with other people. I’m basically reacting to what he’s doing while at the same time trying to put my two cents in. If the music sounds different than other things I do, then I’d say that’s down to Mick’s sound being unique.

EF: This question might seem either too obtuse, or too much of a no-brainer, but I thought I’d give it a go anyway: What does freedom, in music, mean for you guys? I’m not talking about the “Land of the free, home of the brave” kind of freedom, or even necessarily about “freedom” as in “free jazz” (which the French affectionately call “le free,” funnily enough), but just about the kinds of open-ness you guys strive for when going about the business of playing and recording together? “Free” is word that’s definitely thrown around quite a bit in music journalism, but it’s ultimately just as ambiguous within a musical context as it is within the sphere of politics. So I’m interested to hear what you two have to say, especially since you’ve been tagged with this word quite a bit.

CC: You’re right, it’s totally ambiguous. You could look at it as being free from some constraints such as preconceived structures/scores (which we are) and/or a constant pulse (which we sometimes are and sometimes aren’t) and/or having an open mind to what shape the music can take. Truthfully, “free” and other genre tags are just shorthand, and I don’t get too hung up on them.

Interview by Emilie Friedlander, November 2008

Photo: Hrvoje Go

Concert on November 2nd at the Grimault (Nantes) as part of the Soy Festival.

Cool Toons:
Chris Corsano/Mick Flower Duo, The Radiant Mirror, Textile Records, 2008.



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This month, Breaking World Records releases a limited edition 7 inch by Ducktails, a.k.a. Brooklyn-based musician Matt Mondanile, marking the onset of fall with a prayer for eternal summer. Though he proudly identifies suburban New Jersey as his heart’s true home, Mondanile’s sound is equally the product of four years on the Western Massachussetts noise scene, a prolonged stay in an immigrant neighborhood in Berlin and a thriving re-issue culture that brings psychedelic and world music gems back from the dead.

‘Beach Point Pleasant,” the album’s first track and centerpiece, is built on a 2-second instrumental loop from Gétatchèwe Kassa’s “Tezeta Slow,” featured on Buda Musique’s celebrated Ethiopiques series. “Tezeta,” Matt Mondanile explains, “means memory or nostalgia, and the song is kind of an ode to past beach times.” Repeated ad infinitum, the passage abstracts into a kind of indeterminate, “oriental” refrain, like the generic soundtrack of a Mondo Cane-style travel log. As yellowed, Technicolor images of virgin beaches, unfurling palm fronds and coconut milk straight out of the nut begin to take shape in our mind, we are lulled deeper into our post-colonial fantasy with the introduction of new voices. A meandering pentatonic guitar line bubbles leisurely upwards to the surface of the mix like a 1960’s Cambodian pop recording passed through an underwater chamber—wah wah in the fullest sense of the term. Meanwhile, ambient casiotones layer gently into the space between loop and guitar melody like small gusts of ocean wind. The word horizontal is key here; for all his vertical layering of sounds, Ducktails’ ode to lost time is closer to a plateau of sun-dappled bliss than an emotional riptide.

The rest of the songs on the recording possess a similar horizontal quality, each with its own, unique feeling-plateau. "Pizza time," a short track following “Beach Point Pleasant,” offers us a glimpse of the beach by night, marking a moonlit ceremony in which locals armed with traditional instruments, flaming torches and portable boom boxes descend upon the shore to dance and make merry. Each of Ducktails’ songs builds upon a single repetitive, root motif; here, he forfeits the archival sample for a cheezy up-tempo Casio beat, elaborating the “world kitsch” aspect of his sound through his twangy manipulation of guitar and bass.

On side two, Ducktails switches gears yet again with an evolving series of asymmetrical bongo phrases, artificial in source (drum machine) but human in their imperfection. If “Beach Point Pleasant” marks a nostalgic moment in the album’s evolution, and the second track, a celebratory one, “Gems 1 and 2” would seem to constitute their meditative conclusion. Soaring, synthetic drones stretch out across an early morning sky as Chinese flute melodies (perhaps sample, perhaps not) float in and out of earshot. Over time, the bongos become increasingly insistent, increasingly anarchic, as though their player, electronically mediated as he is, were imploring the sun to peak its head above the ocean horizon.

While it has absolutely no pretensions to being “intellectual”, Ducktails’ project rides a fine and nuanced line between East and West, the analog and the electronic, the manual and the pre-fab. Though it lends itself to repeated home listenings, it is probably best enjoyed in the way Ducktails himself likes to enjoy his favorite records: on the road, in his parent’s car, driving through the suburbs with the windows down.

Ducktails, s/t 7", Breaking World Records, 2008. Limited edition of 300. Handmade cover art.

Words: Emilie Friedlander

More Info:
Ducktails website
Ducktails Myspace
Breaking World Records Website

More Tunes:
Ducktails II, coming out soon on Tape Tektoniks, 2008





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Composer Phill Niblock, key player in the New York minimalist scene, isn’t finished making his heady drones ring out all over the planet. On the road eight months out of the year, this composer and filmmaker will set down his suitcases next Thursday in Nantes for a landmark performance at the Musée des Beaux-Arts.

In the music world, Phill Niblock is somewhat of a renegade. Unlike his classically-trained mentors, the four founding fathers of the minimalist school (La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass), Niblock admits to never having felt much of an interest in the whole conservatory tradition. Indeed, it was photography, "something very natural for me," which provided the platform for his first creative peregrinations.

In the mid 1960s, Niblock met choreographer and experimental filmmaker Elaine Summers, who introduced him to video. Their collaboration culminated in 1968 with the creation of the Experimental Media Foundation, "an artist-run organization, […] run for artists," dedicated to promoting "Intermedia" productions--"Film, slides, dance, music, combined, as a performance event." Based out of Niblock’s loft in SoHo, the foundation quickly became one of the nervous centers of the New York art and performance scene. Nearly a thousand concerts have been produced there since its creation.

The concept of "intermedia" art" –distinguished by its proponents from the more commercial "multimedia"—is fundamental in Phill Niblock’s oeuvre. His protracted continuous shots of artisans working were never intended as films "per se," but as part of an ensemble of elements comprising an intermedia performance. "They are extremely real images. But they never have the structure of documentary films. […] Documentary people always hate […] my films. And experimental people hate the films because they are so totally photographic."

Niblock’s relative lack of success as a filmmaker prompted him to hone in on his music. Unlike most of the other composers of his generation, he accepts the label of "minimalist" because he feels it adequately describes the paring down of content and form so central to his work. "The core of what I do is to strip out various aspects of the structure of the medium that I’m working in. So with the music, for instance, there’s no rhythm, there’s not melody and there’s no typical harmonic progression. And the work is very much about non-development, in the musical sense. The same thing is true of the films. Most of the vocabulary of the film is simply not there. Not narrative, no montage. I think there’s two shots that are out of chronological order in the entire 40 hours of film." In the mid 1970s, Village Voice critic Tom Johnson summed up this process with a memorable: "No melody, no harmony, no rhythm. No bullshit."

The music of Phill Niblock is far removed from the repetitive, psychedelia-tinged minimalism of Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass. It is closer to the radical minimalism of La Monte Young, which hinges upon duration. The majority of his pieces consist in an ensemble of drones—buzzing held notes which expand out infinitely, evolving almost imperceptibly and emitting a host of sparkling harmonics. For the composer, "the idea is to make this sort floating environment" for the spectator to get lost in, gradually losing contact with reality, and, especially, with time. "If somebody, after an hour’s performance, thinks it was only ten minutes long, that’s perfect. And that happens. People don’t have any sense of how long the thing was."

Niblock’s composition process is very manual, very artisanal—a perfect metaphor for the images that appear in his films. Recordings—once analogue, today digital—serve as his base material. Every one of his pieces consists of an ensemble of drones produced by instruments—always analogue!—that are particularly rich in timbre: electric guitar (Guitar Too, for Four), hurdy-gurdy (Hurdy Hurry), nasal voices (A Y U). The composer combines these recordings, gently modifies their frequencies and allows them to interact. Phill Niblock is passionate about microtonal intervals and the surprising acoustical phenomena that take place when they are allowed to intermingle. At the heart of his music lies a certain indeterminacy—one which distinguishes it from the work of La Monte Young. Often, Phil Niblock allows himself to be surprised by his pieces: "I can predict, but I can’t exactly predict. So that some pieces will be somewhat different than I expect them to be."

Phill Niblock’s pieces are incredibly plastic. If one asks him whether he conceives his pieces in relation to the spaces where they will eventually be performed, he turns the question on its head: "It’s more the other way around, that the music changes incredibly, drastically, depending on the space it’s played in. And, obviously, the sound system. Typically, spaces which are really fantastic would be, like a cathedral, or a large church, which is very open, where there’s a lot of reflection off of surfaces." A spatial dimension accentuated by the composer’s desire to "get people to wander around," to experience the plasticity of the sound material for themselves—a kind of dare, Phill Niblock admits. "Nobody wants to wander around. They get the idea that they should sit there very quietly."

The music of Phill Niblock can appear inaccessible, too intellectual, too elitist. In reality, it is extremely sensual—carnal, almost—accessible to all who are willing to dive in, close their eyes and allow themselves to be carried off by the vibrations. The composer insists that his music (which, in live performance, usually combines recordings and live musicians) be played EXTREMELY loud, so that it fills the room, envelops the spectator and maximizes its harmonic potentialities. Far from assuming a passive role during a Niblock performance, the spectator takes the reigns by carving out his or her own unique path through this extreme acoustic environment. "I’m interested in making a sound world and a visual world which is very much open to different interpretation and different perception. So, if an audience comes and everyone has a different perception of what happened to them, then it’s perfect for me." The very simplicity of the drones, their very "minimalism," opens up a vista for the imagination to roam in, a liberty without equivalent. With no melody, no harmony, no rhythm to guide it, consciousness becomes free in its associations.

The work of Phill Niblock is an experience to live through. Only a professional speaker system and live musicians can do it justice. Next Thursday, April 3rd at the Nantes Musée de Beaux-Arts, you will get a chance. Don’t miss it.

Words: Sophie Pecaud and Emilie Friedlander, 2008.

Performance co-sponsored by Cable# and Apo 33.

French version available on Fragil.org, a Nantes-based online culture magazine. Link to original article here.



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