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#Tags - Christmas (I’m Not The One You Want)
“Nettle is a band project led by DJ Rupture. For this album, Nettle imagined a remake of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining set in a luxury hotel in Dubai, U.A.E. El Resplandor: The Shining In Dubai is their soundtrack for that nonexistent film. Cello, violin, guembri, guitar, and voice combine with digital processing to create a complex sound-world whose acoustic and electronic elements are in intimate dialog. Produced and arranged by Rupture, El Resplandor offers vivid, haunting pieces that draw on the band’s various backgrounds in North African folksong, experimental electronics, contemporary classical, and free improvisation.”
New Pete Swanson track from his upcoming Man With Potential on Type.
TwinSisterMoon | When Stars Glide Through Solid | Blackest Rainbow | 2011 (reissue)
Mehdi Ameziane is one half of French psych-drone-folk group Natural Snow Buildings and performs under the name TwinSisterMoon. The group, and their members’ solo work, have become all-time favourites of mine over the past few years. I’ve definitely metioned them on here before, and probably bored people who know me to death about how brilliant they are.
The people over at Blackest Rainbow (shout out to Joe Blanchard who does an amazing job there) have reissued Mehdi’s long out of print 2007 sophomore album, When Stars Glide Through Solid, originally released as a limited CD-R. While recent album have still been great, Stars remains one of the best and defining NSB-related works. It’s also notably the most song-driven release by either member of the group, so if you’ve previously been intimidated by the thought of twenty-minute drone-cycles, this is a great place to start. Fans of Grouper should love this.
Not much else to say. Some of France’s finest out-there but unquestionably beautiful folk tunes. The reissue is beautifully packaged with stunning drawings from Solange Gularte (the other half of NSB), and the vinyl version comes with a whole new side of material.
When Stars Glide Through Solid is out now on Blackest Rainbow.
Drone/ambient favourite Tim Hecker is releasing a new record called Dropped Pianos, a set of “sketch pieces” recorded in 2010 that led to this year’s brilliant Ravedeath, 1972.
Dropped Pianos will be released on October 10 on Kranky and this is a preview clip.
In this month’s WIRE magazine there’s an excellent primer on ‘Militant Tuning’ by Philip Clark, outlining music composed with alternative methods of tuning to ‘equal temperament’, which has dominated Western music since the 18th century. This is something I’ve been interested in ever since I reviewed Catherine Christer Hennix’s The Electric Harpsichord last year. Here’s a short summary with some excerpts to listen to.
Johann Sebastian Bach, The Well-Tempered Clavier (performed by Robert Levin)
Bach’s ‘well-tempered’ tuning is often cited as a major influence on the development of ‘equal-temperament’, but they were not interchangable. In the 18th century there was no mechanism available to tune to perfect mathematical ratios, and Bach would have relied on ear, allowing for far more variation than the history books suggest.
Pandit Pran Nath, ‘Raga Kut Todi’ (from The Raga Cycle)
I posted a short documentary about this guy a couple of weeks a go, so it was great to see him pop up again. His influence on composers such as Terry Riley was profound, but he was not a militant tuner as such because equal temperament does not exist in his tradition.
And here’s some amazing footage of Riley going solo in 1977. It’s incredible how fresh this still sounds; it’s not unlike something by Emeralds.
Wendy Carlos, ‘Beauty in the Beast’ (from Beauty in the Beast)
Carlos described her own composition as “the most unusual music I’ve ever heard”, and this really is quite strange. But also very pretty, I think, demonstrating thepossibilities of different tuning methods.
Tony Conrad, ‘Refusing to Cross the Bean Field at his Back’ (from Slapping Pythagoras)
And at the other end is this very noisy jam from Conrad featuring Jim O’Rouke, performed with a mixture of violin, guitar and accordian drones. Brilliant.
pumped for this album.
Not familiar with Simon Scott until this but sounds great, looking forward to his new record Bunny next month.
Wolves in the Throne Room | Celestial Lineage | Southern Lord | 2011
Behold the majesty of this subterranean initiation! Raise your hands to the astral plane and absorb your rainbow illness! Transcend the haptic void, and offer up a prayer of transformation for Wolves in the Throne Room, for they have unleashed this beast of dark and powerful brutality.
Seriously though, I was in the middle of writing a review when Pitchfork went and made most of the points I was going to. It’s a well-written and spot-on review, so check it out.
There are a couple of extra thoughts I had on this that I haven’t seen elsewhere. With it’s ascending synth lines, Celestial Lineage recalls Emperor’s finest moment, Anthems of the Welkin at Dusk, which no doubt adds to the overall epic-ness of the album. And like Anthems, Lineage incorporates clean vocals into Black Metal more effectively than anyone in recent years. This is no doubt due to Jessika Kenney’s sense of composition - at no stage does her voice feel like an extra, but woven into the overall sound.
In fact, this is essentially what makes Wolves and Lineage so special, their ability to introduce elements of choral-composition, ambient passages and slow, doom-metal barrages, but never sounding anything less than an extreme black metal band.
Phillip Freeman stated in last month’s The Wire that Celestial Lineage is the first of the band’s albums that can be considered “truly important to the development of US Black Metal as something separate from its European origins.” I agree with this. Lineage completely tears up the black metal rule book, but we must remember that so did all the great second-wave bands. Burzum did it, as did Emperor and Darkthrone. They created music that transcended the genre. For me, Wolves have marked themselves as the first American band to produce something as good as, but completely distinct from, their Norwegian ancestors. All hail the Cascadians!
9/10 - RECOMMENDED
Celestial Lineage is out now on Southern Lord.
New album from the ever prolific avant-folk Maine outfit, Big Blood. Five extended jams, with the standout being the final track, ‘Water’, which is quite lovely.
Listen below and download the album over at the Free Music Archive. You can order a vinyl edition of the record from Phase Mag.
