Mining the vein opened by his first solo album, February (2005), and later by his very successful EP, I Looked at the Sun (2006), Jonathan Kane continues down the shores of “progressive blues” with Jet Ear Party. Kane winds and unwinds catchy loops, purging the genre of all incidentals, keeping only the essential: the telltale chiseled riff, repeated ad infinitum. A pursuit that began with his collaborations with some of New York's most prominent minimalists, Kane’s quest travels backwards in time to the blues, the genre from which he draws his main inspiration: “Listen to Mississippi Fred McDowell, Son House, John Lee Hooker. These artists will often play pieces consisting of one droning chord and a hypnotic, repetitive riff!”

Jet Ear Party isn't happy simply to dig the plot mapped out by February. With his new album, Kane frees himself from Rhys Chatham's influence to discover his own voice, that of a jubilant Americana launched at full speed on the hot rails, bringing all the voices of the New Continent along with it. The tracks of Jet Ear Party are also spiced with new sonorities, lending passing winks and applied homages to Kane’s musical heroes. Slipping and sliding through the slow and irresistible progressions we came to love in February are denatured loops à la Phil Glass, heavy tremolos à la Chatham, the 2/4 measure of Ragtime, and jubilant funk riffs à la Sly Stone.

After forging this new route alone on February, the composer invites numerous collaborators aboard, making Jet Ear Party a story about friends. Passing from track to track, we chance upon his brother Anthony's harmonica, David Watson’s bagpipes, and Igor Cubrilovic's guitar. Finally with “Up in Flames,” a soul ballad that is certainly not the album's strongest piece, but absolutely its most touching, Kane silences his guitars to let the voluptuous voices of Lisa Burns and Peg Simone ring out, set to a text by Holly Anderson. Hypnotic, explosive, at times abrasive, Jonathan Kane’s music is always warm. We wish him many more happy encounters.

Words: Sophie Pécaud
Translation: Khira Jordan

Originally published on Chronicart, along with an interview with Jonathan Kane. English version available here.

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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Following Architectural Failures (2003), their first effort, Hi Red Center has lead us to the other side of the mirror. With Assemble, recently released on Joyful Noise, these four New York stooges propel the listener into a sumptuous and colorful wonderland where everything is falsely welcoming. Taking cues, perhaps, from the likes of Lewis Caroll and his foul-mouthed flowers, Hi Red Center conjures scenes of toothless imps and giants that aren't so giant at all. A play with off-kilter syncopation on the opening track sets the tone for what is to come: everything here may topple without warning. From song to song, logic is joyfully pushed and pulled, and common sense turned on its head; these boys cannot introduce a riff or catchy backbeat without exploding them like fireworks just a few seconds later.

Hi Red Center could not have found a better label in Joyful Noise. The group maintains a tricky equilibrium between bubblegum pop and experimental noise; they make music “for folks who like to sing, for people who like to dance," but, above all, “for everyone who likes their songs thoroughly mixed and mashed.” The sound that results is almost as puzzling and ironic as the Cheshire Cat himself. On keyboard, Russell Greenberg straddles hulking synth lines and light-footed vibraphone motifs. On guitar, Thomas Yee, a master of heavy distortion, alternates between primitive riffs and extended prog solos (“Trees in a Row,” “Los Olvidados”). On bass, Lawrence Mesich “unites the frenzy of post-punk with the dexterity of krautrock.” Finally, on drums, Mike McCurdy effortlessly navigates between Battles-style metronomic beats (“Littlest Giant”) and uncomfortable, floating rhythms (“Toothless Beau”).

The result? Songs that are fractured and unpredictable, guided by a fugue aesthetic that would please any pop baroque enthusiast: melody lines crisscross without much concern for harmonic coherence. Hi Red Center’s spastic spice comes from a commitment to musical contrariety, a pleasing do-si-do of technical opposites: fast and slow, high and low, tormented and carefully measured. The ethereal choruses that lacked accuracy and definition in Architectural Failures 

Depuis 2003 et Architectural Failures (2003), leur premier opus, Hi Red Center nous emmène de l'autre côté du miroir. Avec Assemble, tout juste sorti chez Joyful Noise, les quatre compères new-yorkais nous propulsent dans un monde brillant et coloré où tout n'est que faussement accueillant ; si chez Lewis Carroll les fleurs s'invectivent, chez Hi Red Center, les beaux gosses sont édentés (“Toothless Beau”), et les géants pas si grands que cela (“Littlest Giant”). Dès l'ouverture de l'album - un jeu de déphasage brinquebalant -, le ton est donné : tout peut basculer à tout instant. De chanson en chanson, la logique est joyeusement bousculée, le sens commun mis sens dessus dessous ; à peine un riff est-il esquissé, à peine un backbeat est-il installé, que les quatre garçons font tout exploser dans un joyeux feu d'artifice.

Lisez la suite dans Chronic'art.

Pour plus d'informations, voir :
- le site officiel de Hi Red Center
- la page Myspace du groupe




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Recorded in Brooklyn, at the heart of the winter of 2008, and completed upon the arrival of the first blooms of spring, Choral offers a rich and unique listening experience. If Mountains’ music is often lumped in with the “ambient” category, this term is surely way too reductive; the associations of elevator music that it calls to mind, or, at best, of airport music (ie., Brian Eno’s seminal Ambient 1. Music for Airports, 1978), do little justice to the complexity of the New York duo’s experiments. Brendon Anderegg and Koen Holtkam’s first met in middle school; far from following the path beaten by Eno, they have been roving immense sonic landscapes ever since, jumping from the dizzying peaks of noise to the fertile valleys of American folk and, with Choral, arriving at a crossroads between the hypnotic drones of a Phill Niblock and the heady loops of a Steve Reich.

Captured live, or almost live, Choral follows the duo’s imagined adventures over this uneven musical terrain. Over the album’s six pieces, Brendon Anderegg and Koen Holtkampt paint misty topographies with tiny brush strokes, patiently sculpting the sonic mass while continually introducing new sounds, each evolving almost imperceptibly. Acoustic instruments (accordion, guitar), rub elbows with synthesizers and electronic incursions by evocative field recordings (an Arizona storm brewing in the viewfinder of a telescope, the crackling of a campfire in Alaska, produced by leaving through the pages of a book). The listener loses himself in a meditative dream-state; unwilling and unable to pry out its numerous instrumental superpositions, he embraces the totality of the sonic mass and takes the opportunity to let his imagination run free.

If I had to fall back on the comparison game, I would probably liken Mountains to Debussy before waxing about its more superficial similarities to Eno. Choral has little in common with the majestic coldness of the British ambient guru; mutatis mutandis, it is as sumptuous, warm and mysterious as the French impressionist composer’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Fawn (1894). Mountains do everything in their power to heighten the subjectivity of our listening experience: the association of acoustic instruments and synthetic string loops gives rise to a multitude of shimmering harmonics, angelic voices both real and imagined. Little by little, the elongation of each piece in time ("Choral" and "Melodica" clock in at over 12 minutes) and the constant use of repetition make us lose our sense of duration. In its freedom of structure and harmonic language, Choral could almost be said to recall the avant-gardism and tranquil mysteriousness of John Cage’s In a Landscape (1948). The obstinate repetition of simple forms, as graceful as they are strange, ultimately leaves us with nothing but the reminiscences of tonality. And, perhaps, a call for a new musical language.


Words: Sophie Pécaud
Translation: Emilie Friedlander

Originally published in French on Chronicart, Winter 2009.





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The cover of Figs, Wasps, and Monotremes, Rob Fisk’s second offering under the Common Eider, King Eider moniker, presents the outline of a corpulent fig, cross-sectioned to reveal a hidden kaleidoscope of seeds. Fisk’s music has always meshed beautifully with his visual practice, but this image is a particularly apt metaphor for his sound: delicate and linear, but with shocks of wild profusion.

Figs, Wasps, and Monotremes is melodic drone at its loveliest, and is singular for being built primarily upon the manifold voices of a viola, bowed and plucked. Rusty tremolos, twinkling pizzicato runs, and grinding held notes slide over one another like tectonic plates, throwing out microtonal beats as fallout. The fine line between “in tune” and “out of tune,” “in time” and “off”, is the site where most of the action on the album takes place, and this logic carries over to all of its other elements: voice, piano, guitar.

None of the album’s eight tracks are “songs,” per se, but they are always flirting with the rules of pop musical seduction. Fisk’s feminine falsetto sketches out tentative melody lines that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Goblin soundtrack, buoyed by an occasional choir (also Fisk) of tenor and bass. The guitar solo, climax par excellence, dies and reincarnates itself in deranged bursts of noise, sometimes dialoguing with Fisk’s fragile melodies, sometimes swallowing them whole.

Fisk’s album is not with out its fair share of skronky, rambling drone, and the textures and flyaway tones he is able to pull out of his instruments are highlights in their own right. Even at their most unfocused, however, Fisk’s compositions always eventually reveal themselves to be governed by a kind of higher logic. Bowed viola drones of every possible color and value layer into the sound an orchestra tuning up before the curtain rises—only to turn transform into a “refrain” in its own right when the choir girls (Fisk again) chime in.

Figs, Wasps, and Monotremes may be more humble than it is monumental, but it is a joy of an album, and sets the bar high for musicians interested in drone as a musical building block—not as an academic pursuit.

Words: Emilie Friedlander

Originally published on Foxy Digitalis, Winter 2009




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United States postal worker by day, musician and co-founder of the mythic Tetrapod Spools label by night, Mark Tucker is finally beginning to earn his due as one of America’s lesser-known outsider heroes. Batstew, his 1975 debut, is now a cult collectible, and De Stijl’s 2006 reissue of the album has expanded his fan base beyond the more obsessive collector contingent. With new reissue “In the Sack” (1982), Tucker’s second album, De Stijl reopens Tucker’s slanted and enchanted universe to the public.

Following Batstew, which doubled as an ode to girlfriend Eva Bataszew and a 1964 Cadillac hearse, Tucker struggled through a series of nervous breakdowns and relocated to Encinitas, California. The cover of In the Sack, released on Tetrapod Spools under the pseudonym T. Hunter Storm, signals the end of Tucker’s automobile obsession with an image of a postal truck crashing into a sand dune. And the beginning of a new one: among its many idiosyncrasies, Tucker’s second offering is arguably the only album ever made that can boast the U.S. Postal Service as a central narrative theme. If the open canvas sack in the foreground is any indication, In the Sack is as much about Tucker’s daily frustrations as a mail carrier as it is about his luck with the ladies—especially if we allow “frustration” to include frustrations of the sexual kind.

But asides from track four, which reproduces the boring bureaucratic details of a post office staff meeting, and track ten, a nine-minute rant against a male customer much richer and much more attractive than Tucker himself, In the Sack lacks the narrative focus of an actual concept album. More than tell a story, it recreates a headspace: one of a postal worker gone slightly “postal”, but who would rather search for creative ways to liven up his itinerary than go ahead and crash up the car. Resolutely Major key piano melodies set the soundtrack for a typical day out on the mail route, starting out all “walking with my mailbag and waving hi to all the neighbors” groovy, stumbling over a few tricky roadblocks (a lost letter, a rabid dog, a sexy lady), and ending, infallibly, on a note of reconciliatory schmaltz. Vibrato-laden vocals, recalling Van Dyke Parks at his most vaudevillian, combine with high-pitched wining, backwards song, spoken word, and passages of found sound, marking the manifold voices (and escape routes) of a man who spends his days walking and driving in circles.

Tucker clearly has a lot more formal musical training than most of the other outsider/real people artists who have made a comeback in the last decade (Kenneth Higney, Gary Wilson), and he probably could have dropped the mail gig and successfully pursued a career writing jingles for radio stations and children’s television shows. But writing TV music in the context of a rock album is a lot different from writing TV music for TV, and Tucker would probably have bristled at the very thought. Where else, other than in the privacy of his own home, could he have embellished his jazzy lounge numbers with the sound of sandpaper on wood, with one-man barbershop quartets, backwards love poems, Alan Vega shrieks, and recorded sound from a dinner at home with mom and dad? Where else could he have been free to create an album at once abysmally unfocused (to our ears, at least) and 100% his own?

The recent vogue for outsider music, and outsider art in general, is not without its ethical conundrums. One might argue that to laugh at the fruit of a troubled mind, even if we simultaneously experience it as beautiful, is to reduce “real people” and their art to a sideshow attraction. And to allow them to be exploited—or to exploit themselves—as such. But Tucker was aware of this way before Daniel Johnston ever became a household name, and he can be credited with a degree of self-awareness that most of his like-minded contemporaries would never own up to. “You’re selling your craziness,” Tucker’s mother famously complained upon the release of his first album. “So was Beethoven,” Tucker replied.

And who knows? Maybe one day misunderstood geniuses worldwide will be saying the same thing to their moms about Tucker.

Words: Emilie Friedlander

Originally published on Foxy Digitalis, Winter 2009



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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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In the liner notes for Stone Breath’s second lp, re-issued last month in an expanded double disk by Hand/Eye, clawhammer banjo player and weird folk visionary Timothy Renner confesses that the album “almost didn’t happen.” Those of you who wish that The Incredible String Band hadn’t stopped producing records like “The 5,000 Spirits or the Layers of the Onion” or “The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter” in the late 1960s will be glad that it did.

As a piece of contemporary American music, “Lanterna Lucis Viriditatis,” or “the lantern of the greening light,” feels like a record that could only have come out of a campfire in Brattleboro, Vermont or Western Massachusetts, though rural Pennsylvania comes close enough. The anonymous folk ballad arrangements and the Clive Palmer cover on track 4 say it all: the four members of Stone Breath, like Palmer and Mike Heron before them, are “traditional” folkies at heart, with one foot in Appalacia and one foot in old England. But between yodel sessions for The Spectral Light & Moonshine Firefly Snakeoil Jamboree, their main project, the group’s search for roots has led them as far as India, Egypt and darkest Peru, splurging on a witchfinder dulcimer, a pan flute, or a sitar for every banjo and 12-string.

There is a good deal of mystical head-scratching here, but Renner, Prydwyn Piper, Sarada, and RA Campbell seem a lot more earth-bound than their Scottish antecedents, favoring repetitive incantations and minimal drone arrangements over flying 180 degree turns. Timothy’s voice lumbers drowsily over everything from last year’s harvest to Christian martyrdom, riding on a constant flow of repetitive banjo and guitar motifs and punctuated by a few candleflickers of harmonium and vocal harmony. With a second disk full of tracks from previous 7 inch and CDR releases, there is a whole lot to digest here, but it is hands down one of most gorgeous folk releases I’ve heard since the Feathers lp—even if it predates that album by a couple years. And perhaps the soundtrack to the salvia trip you never had the guts to take.

Words: Emilie Friedlander

Originally published on Foxy Digitalis, December 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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