Here we have medieval chants through the lens of eighties pop, from John Maus' latest album, "We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves." (Phew, talk about a mouthful!) Thanks to my friend Robert for encouraging me to buy it. More info about the album here!
The Sydney Festival 2012 has just begun, and there has been amazing line up of people and events: John Maus has already played, Prins Thomas will be here at the end of the month.
But one of the more interesting groups to be brought out for the festival are Shangaan Electro from South Africa, a collective of artists produced by engineer and talent scout Nozinja. A compilation of their music was released last year "New Wave Dance Music from South Africa" on eclectic English label, Honest Jon's Records.
It's a free event this Saturday night 14th January in Prince Alfred Park, Parramatta.
Listen to an eerie and fantastic piece of film music for the 1971 Michael Crichton thriller, The Andromeda Strain.
Composer Gil Mellé was a Greenwich Village jazz musician, who also had an interest in electronics, and experimental styles like Musique Concréte, where music would be recorded onto tape (no wav files in those days) and then manipulated to create new sounds.
The first track here, "The Piedmont Elegy", is a great example of a perfectly compact piece of music, experimental, but still following a conventional John Barry-like song structure.
However, keep on listening, and the tracks begin to get a bit more out there!
Singer Kristina Brodowski basks in the warmth of an orange stage light
The expression biding your time is an important one to creative people; true artistic success isn't always tied into youth, or being on the cutting edge of fashion. Often creative people spend a good number of years becoming good at what they do, perfecting their technique, and weeding out their imperfections.
The problem with music, though, as a creative art is that it is so tied into commerce and the "rock star trajectory", that the only way to be successful is to capture the youth market -- and that often means by being young yourself. When you look at the bands that have had the biggest impact with a mass audience, they have often only ever been a few years older than the audience, and as they age, they take that audience with them, like the Rolling Stones have with the baby boomers.
German band The Sweeps, however, are a few years older than the average band and are working with the sounds they have grown up with, rather than a purely contemporary sound. A trio consisting of singer Kristina Brodowski, and Christoph Duwe and Niels Wesner, who both play synths; provide back up vocals; and add finishing touches with a glockenspiel and a melodica.
Their fourth self-released album, In the Night, showcases their affinity for analogue synthesizers like the Moog and the Italian designed string-synthesizer the ELKA. With many eighties elements in their music (think Cutting Crew, New Order and Clannad) they have acknowledged a love of Italian singer Valerie Dore and italo-disco, but also cite more recent influences like Röyksopp, Air and St Etienne.
Falling into the same class, as acts like Sally Shapiro (who were also influenced by Valerie Dore) and Ontario's Junior Boys, the Sweeps have a more mainstream pop range, reminiscent of, funnily enough, Phil Collins, and English band Talk Talk (Gwen Stefani covered their song "It's My Life" a few years back).
They nail a particular sound that a lot of younger artists are trying to emulate -- that cool, French Riviera, discotheque sound, their success lying in the fact that have grown up with it and have a natural infinity for it -- and are not just fetishisizing it as generational outsiders.
The other thing that is very interesting about this album is that many of the tracks segue together, something often not looked favourably upon by big record labels who want something that they can market in distinct chunks.
But an album, as a whole, is often a programmed journey for the listener; musicians think carefully about how all the tracks fit together to tell a story -- not always conceptually, but in the mood that the songs evoke, and what kind of feelings the songs will stir in the listener. Major artists have often lamented about letting music executives make decisions about their track-listing in the final stages of their album, and wrecking the feel that they were looking for.
The Sweeps technical accomplishments on this album goes without saying; they have performed, recorded, and mixed the album entirely by themselves -- and musically, its fantastic. Tracks like Days Gone By and Synthetic Lover are excellent; conjuring up an imaginative landscape, it would be great if at least a couple of these songs could make their way into normal radio airplay, or onto a movie soundtrack, the way that many neo-eighties songs were recently picked up by Nicolas Winding Refn for his Drive soundtrack.
Below is an extended remix by The Silicon Scientist of one of their earlier songs, Facing the Night, which was recently released on the fourth Radio Cosmos compilation. The original version appeared on their 2009 Missing Pieces album.
There is also a great video for another version of this song by Zak B, a dark trip through Laura Palmer country.
DISCOGRAPHY:
As I mentioned in a previous post about Roland Sebastian Faber's absence from the most recent Alba and Fred Ventura project, Without You, due to working on a new EP -- this is just a quick post to say that it has finally been released.
Called Society, the new 12" is three original tracks, the sounds of a motorik industrial dynamic, with melodic breaks washing off the grime and grease of nation building (think black and white footage of the early days of New York, men eating their lunch up on steel building girders, and you have the accompanying "image-track")
I initially set up this site to promote a radio documentary I have been working on (and off) for a number of years about the film composer and director, John Harrison, and his soundtrack for the Stephen King-George Romero team-up, Creepshow -- but with the long view of this website becoming a home for audio stories made under the moniker of FOTW Audio Productions.
I recently completed the first of these, "E. A. Poe and the Krautrock Connection", featuring the music of Carlos Péron (one of the two founders of eighties band Yello) and the Seattle band, The Fascination Movement.
The inspiration for the story comes from an experience I'd had as a teenager while visiting a female friend. Having spent years reading Stephen King and Clive Barker, I thought there could be no way I would like someone like Edgar Allan Poe: What could be scary about black cats and swinging pendulums?
But while she was out of the room, I started reading her collection of Edgar Allan Poe short stories she had sitting by her bed -- and within moments I was completely and utterly drawn in. I couldn't believe how quickly it had had an effect on me.
Krautrock, I discovered a few years ago, and thought that it would be a great leaping off point into the imagination, if you were that way inclined. The final element was meeting someone who I thought would be great to try and impress.
[soundcloud url="http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/22687066"]
Johnny Jewel on keys and singer Ida No of duo Glass Candy
Glass Candy and Chromatics recently performed live on Seattle radio station KEXP, during their September West Coast tour. Playing tracks from their new EP Warm in the Winter, Johnny Jewel and Ida No talk about their influences and the level of work going into their next album with Audioasis Producer Sharlese Metcalf.
You can listen to it here.
Incidentally, Jewel was interviewed earlier this month for Box Office Magazine, about his involvement in the latest Nicholas Winding Refn film, Drive, starring Ryan Gosling, where he provided part of the soundtrack. This accompanies news that he is also set to score Refn's upcoming remake of the 1976 sci-fi film Logan's Run for Warner Bros.
If you are not acquainted with the Glass Candy, Chromatics or Italians Do It Better label sound, you can now download their 2007 compilation After Dark for free, a great introduction to many of these artists.
Local Sydney DJ, Bobby O, recently put together a radio special of music that could be loosely defined as "hauntological", eerie sounds from the darker waters of the collective unconscious, interspersed with his trademark disco beats.
Spanning a couple of decades of music, there is a swathe of tracks from the fantastically phantasmic Ghost Box label, including Belbury Poly, Jon Brooks and The Focus Group. Also listen out for Bot'Ox, Visage's The Mind of a Toy, and Japanese producer KZA's, Le Troublant Acid.
The show was originally broadcast on Sydney radio station, 2ser, on Extended Play, Monday 9.00 - 10.30 Pm. You can also follow Extended Play on mixcloud.
Extended Play 15 Aug 2011 Bobby O presents Haunted Dancefloor Special by Extended Play 2ser.Com 107.3fm on Mixcloud
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