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.
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")
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
John Carpenter and Alan Howarth at work on Season of the Witch (scan courtesy of Mike Conway)
The growing interest in John Carpenter as a composer of electronic music, and not just a director of horror films, seems to be reaching a critical point at the moment: his music is celebrated in The Sound of Fear festival in London this weekend; the latest issue of Wire magazine features an interview with his composing partner, Alan Howarth (who will appear at the Sound of Fear festival); and French duo Zombie Zombie released an album late last year called "Zombie Zombie Play John Carpenter".
A reknowned hardworker, John Carpenter may not be aware of just how much of an impact he has had on a successive number of generations of electronic musicians. Regarded in the same league as Giorgio Moroder and Vangelis, whose soundtracks for Midnight Express and Blade Runner, respectively, have had a life of their own, Carpenter is often cited as a major in inspiration by many electronic musicians.
The real interest in John Carpenter's music began with his soundtrack for his 1976 film Assault on Precinct-13. For its title theme, he used a simple electronic riff that he had pinched from a Led Zeppelin song, and a spare percussive line composed on a drum machine, giving the film an unusual texture, slightly cold and synthetic, and pre-dating the new-wave/industrial sound of bands like Throbbing Gristle and Coil.
Of course it was the Halloween theme (and the film) that put him on the map, acting as a kind of surrogate audio cue for anything spooky over the last couple of decades (along with the Twilight Zone theme and "Tubular Bells" from the Exorcist).
But Carpenter had also composed a number of other exceptional horror soundtracks - The Fog was amazing, and so was the score to the third "Halloween" film, Season of the Witch, even though it was unrelated to the original. With each successive film, he seemed to go deeper into the music, and his elongated sounds - drones, and wide bending bass notes - toyed with parts of the brain rarely used outside of sleep.
Zombie Zombie's version of the Halloween theme live in Glasgow
John Carpenter's music first started being covered by European groups who wanted to recreate what they had heard in Assault on Precinct 13. German producer Ralf Hennings, as The Splash Band released his own 12" of the "End Theme" in 1983, near the height of John Carpenter's influence on the film world.
Strangely, in 2003 - twenty years later - a limited edition CDr came out, entitled The European Tribute to John Carpenter, using the same pumpkin orange colour that the Splash Band had used. It was a compilation of different electronic artists from around Europe, covering and composing tracks in his style, but with a decided dark wave bent. This was at the height of the electroclash movement, where an interest in the origins of modern electronic dance music, in new-wave, EBM, New York electro, and Euro-pop (like italo-disco) was underway. This interest also bought synthesizers back into the standard band line-up, something that hadn't really been seen since the eighties.
A number of musicians like Holland's Legowelt, Germany's Anthony Rother and Booka Shade, and Australian band Midnight Juggernauts have acknowledged Carpenter's influence on their music. Although Carpenter rarely composes music for films now - the workload is just too great - he has left behind a considerable body of music to be enjoyed.
Most of his music is still available. Besides the bigger Varese Sarabande releases, niche labels like Record Makers (home of Sebastian Tellier) released his Assault on Precinct 13 for the first time back in 2003, while La-La Land Records put out Big Trouble in Little China a couple of years back.
For more information about John Carpenter and his music you can visit the Official John Carpenter site.
Trans-European friends (from left to right): Michael Künzer, Keen K, and Fred Ventura
The German electronic outfit Alba are on a winning streak at the moment. They kicked it off late last year by releasing the sparkling, three-part powerhouse Philomena, and are now following it up with the emotionally electric torch-song, Without You.
Though the London-based member of the group, Roland Sebastian Faber has sat this particular release out as he works on his solo album, the other two members who are based in Germany -- Michael Künzer and Keen K -- have gained a singer, the legendary Fred Ventura.
A well-respected veteran of the italo scene, Fred Ventura started his music career in the late seventies playing drums with the Milanese new-wave band, State of Art. He went on to have a solo career through most of the eighties as a vocalist with a string of hits like "Love Theme from Flexxy Ball (You'll Never Change No More)" and "Body Heat" with the group Fockewulf-190 that have come to be regarded as italo classics. In recent years, he has come back into the limelight outside of Italy through the work of I-F and Alden Tyrell.
Working with Fred Ventura marks a milestone in the history of the Aube label, as their first official release back in 2007 was another italo-styled track, Hold Me by Jupiter Black, that was built around lyrics provided by Ventura. After its release, it received great feedback from music journalists and fans alike; it was championed by I-F on his internet radio station, CBS, and was described by music journalist Lina Goldberg as one of Fred Ventura's strongest songs.
For this new release, Flemming Dalum, the legendary Danish DJ, mentor and custodian (with a record collection numbering in the thousands) has given it the thumbs up for capturing an authentic italo sound, but without what he calls the cheesiness of italo. This is down to Ventura, who has the ability to handle dramatically over-the-top themes, like lost love and bitter seperations, with a poigancy that fits perfectly with moody synth-pop.
Künzer and Keen K are also very talented electronic musicians; they are able to recreate sounds from over twenty years ago, but never lose themselves in it with enough of their own musical inventions and signatures to keep it fresh.
They have also inherited the creative mantle of the Düsseldorf school of electronic music. They don't put out a lot of music; but when they do, it is of a very high quality, with great technical skill hidden behind the vinyl. This particular release was recorded entirely on analogue equipment to get the sound outside of the computer box that most electronic music is often trapped in.
As I have mentioned in previous posts, one of the great features of Aube''s releases are their record sleeves, featuring original artwork by internationally reknowned artists like Emil Schult and Marc Brandenburg. The latest is a return to Syd Brak, who did there first release, Hold Me, and whose iconic airbrush art is instantly recognisable as a major feature of early eighties art.
Although CDs are certainly becoming a thing of the past, I still think that they are a great way for artists to collect their best work together and give themselves some posterity, rather than to be scattered to the four-winds of the internet. I hope that Alba one day collect the best tracks together onto a single album.
Without You is available as a limited edition 12" and digital download through the Aube website, as well as the regular internet music outlets. (You can also download a preview from the soundcloud embed below)
Before and After: French musician Bernard Fevre compares himself to an earlier version
Ray Russell, a former editor of Playboy in the 50/60s, was obsessed with the devil in all its guises, and wrote a short story called "I Am Returning." It was a cosmic tale of how the devil travelling through time and space, finally crashlands on a planet, and watches as over the course of a million years, the plant life and animals grow up around him, slowly shaping into something we modern day people would recognise as our neolithic ancestors.
A strange parallel tale exists with the life of the French musician Bernard Fevre, a pioneer of electronic music, and the first to construct disco music of a dark and electronic nature.
His rare recordings from the late seventies were first mysteriously re-issued on Luke Vibert's Rephlex label in 2004, while his music was simultaneously championed by New Yorker's Morgan Geist and Darshan Jesrani. But it has been the English label Lo Recordings that have invested in him as one of their major artists, releasing three full-length album of his over the past five years.
His come-back has also been enmeshed with a plethora of other artists working in a similar vein of music: a dark, slightly horror-influenced, nu-disco sound.
What is incredible about his original music though was that he was creating it at least half a decade before the advent of MIDI (a special synthesizer language that allows for the accurate synching up of electronic instruments); and that the music itself was just simply so unlike anything else of its time. This unique sound has had a delayed reaction, spanning across the decades, and now having a special relevance to the retrofuturist sound of many new and younger artists.
-- Which just goes to show that the Devil is a survivor.
The latest Black Devil Disco Club album "Circus" is out now on Lo Recordings. Check out the Black Devil Disco Club website for more info.
SELECTED DISCOGRAPHY:
assisted design and site maintenance by chaos.org.au; image: Bronwyn Lace