aught music : 2001 : "a raga called john" by pelt

Music from 2001 is currently being reviewed over at the Aught Music blog. Here's my sixth post for that project (my second for 2001).

The music world, collaborative and promiscuous by its very nature, tends to generate its share of "strange bedfellows"-type alliances. A good example could be seen by those who kept an eye on psychedelic music throughout the Aughts: early in the decade that scene was characterized by a lot of heady cultural exchange between the free folk subculture and the drone subculture. This fecund blooming of partnerships between two microgenres of music that didn't look that similar on the surface was puzzling: both groups were obviously interested in prying at the doors of perception, but was there really a meaningful sonic kinship, or were these just folks who got along because they liked the same drugs? For my money, this is still an open question, but it's helpful, now as then, to have the band Pelt to gesture at as an illustration of the potency of the allegiance. Everything seemed to flow into them—Fahey-esque Americana guitar, Indian raga structure, ethno-drone instruments from around the globe, acid-trip logic, the blasted-out hum of post-Sonic Youth rock amplification—and from this nexus materialized this campfire apparation: the 2001 double album Ayahuasca. This album maintains real value for me as an awesome synthesis of disparate influences.

Listen: Pelt >> "A Raga Called John, Part Three"

the overdriven landscape: summons of shining ruins

A nice album from 2007 that crept under my radar until I stumbled upon it a few weeks ago is the self-titled debut release from Japanese one-man band Summons of Shining Ruins [MySpace]. The pieces are mostly made with guitar drone and tape echo, which puts me in mind of acts like Rafael Toral and Area C (and anyone who likes those acts should definitely check this out), but this album also has a melancholic sweep and grandeur that sets it apart. You could almost imagine it as having been cut from the same cloth that makes up M83's overdriven electronic anthems, although you'd have to imagine viewing that "cloth" under an electron microscrope, blown up from a detail into a texture into an infinite landscape.

Or you could just click this link to hear an eleven-minute piece with a lyrically unwieldy title: "Facade was burned down, glass cracks innumerably and diffused reflection, How did I come here?"

The Summons of Shining Ruins debut is available through Moufu-Rokuon, as is this year's "sequel release," entitled "Summons of Shining Ruins 2." Also available is a collaboration (dated 2009?) between the Summons of Shining Ruins dude (Shinobu Nemoto) and another gentleman, Brian Grainger, who some of you may know as a result of his very fine release Autumn Soil Feedback (2008).

10 albums from 2007 (#4)

4. White Lichens, self-titled

A great pregnant thundercloud of a record. Each of the five drones collected here brood and surge and bristle, although spend enough time navigating their fields of electrical menace and you'll find nothing but mystic peacefulness at their center. A perfect soundtrack for some kind of as-yet-unrealized Tesla biopic. This disc represents a collaboration between Lichens (aka astral child Rob Lowe) and the heavy guitar duo White/Light: excellent acts in their own right, although neither has ever sounded better (and—full disclosure—I say this as one of the people who released the White/Light debut album a few years back).

Listen: White Lichens, "Belial"

10 albums from 2007 (#5)

5. Stars of The Lid, And Their Refinement of The Decline

It's true that each subsequent SoTL album grows softer and more edgeless, to the point where my associate D. Bauler can claim that they're now essentially making music for car commercials. But I'd be remiss in not including it in my list: it is two discs of grand, sad fanfare, in a year where grand, sad fanfare seemed all too appropriate. This is a music that makes failure into a kind of dignity, and that alone makes it a document of enormous value. Happy holidays.

Listen: Stars of The Lid, "That Finger On Your Temple Is The Barrel of My Raygun"

track of the week: " f/b (e) electric," by derek bailey

Anyone who comes to this blog for the music should already know Derek Bailey (1930-2005), famous for his idiosyncratic approach to free-improvisation guitar. Bailey spent his entire life relentlessly developing and re-inventing this approach, but ask someone to define Bailey's "signature style," and they're likely to describe something fragmented, discontinuous, flinty, and angular, like say, for instance, this track ("M9") from his representative 1975 album Improvisation.

But the Bailey catalog is forty-odd years of documentation of an especially rich creative process: consequently, it's also full of oddities, left turns, and intriguing digressions. One of the most compelling of these, for my money, is the 2000 album String Theory, a suite of experiments exploring the potential of guitar feedback. This track, "F/B (E) Electric," explores the dynamics of long sustained tones as finely as any drone I've heard, and would fit sublimely on a playlist of stark minimalist electronica.

ornate tangles and grubby drones

Growing, "Fancy Period"

This inspired number starts off by cultivating a field of acid-trip patterns into an impossibly ornate tangle which threatens to blot out everything behind its whirling calligraphic streamers. Like all barriers, though, this one is illusory, and around minute four you slip through into a totally different landscape, where pseudo-Zimbabwean filligrees float beatifically over funky bionic stutter. Ambitious!

Vulture Club, "Untitled"

I don't know much about Vulture Club other than the fact that it has released an album full of heavy guitar drones in their most concentrated form: no riffs, no melody, no Julian Cope poetry, just sweet sweet room-shaking low-end, with the tiniest bit of occasional modulation serving to hold interest. This track is for anyone who finds unadorned amplifier hum to be strangely lulling and comforting.

Vampire Belt, "Snake Out"

Mixtape-makers take note that that Vulture Club track flows nicely into this piece, which commences with a few seconds of grimy hum before busting out into some of the finest splattering skronk I've ever heard. Chris Corsano has been earning so much praise for his inventive improv drumming that people forget that he can also do straight-up hardcore pounding when paired with a player who demands it: Bill Nace is that player here, providing inspirational art-damaged guitar-work that is very finely mangled indeed.