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NAKED
CITY - Black Box
2CD - Tzadik, TZ7312-2 - 57'52" - £20 1991's Torture Garden and the rare Japanese release Leng Tch'e from 1992, paired together. Yamantaka Eye of the Boredoms features as guest vocalist on both albums. See also John Zorn |
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NEGATIVLAND
- Deathsentences of the Polished and Structurally Weak
CD + book - Seeland 023 - £21 Unusually subtle stuff from Negativland, almost ambient at times. Comes in a large card slipcase, with oversized booklet including many pictures of car wrecks and notes apparently related to them. Intriguing. |
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PHILL NIBLOCK
- G2, 44+ / X2
CD - Moikai, M12CD - £12.50 A long drone piece, all done on guitars, including those of Thurston Moore, Alan Licht, and Rafael Toral. |
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NOXAGT - The
Iron Point
CD - Load Records, LOAD057CD - £10.50 Second offering from the Norwegian three-piece (bass, drums and viola). A dynamic and riff-laden hard-rock wilderness. Likened stylistically to their touring partners and stable-mates Lightning Bolt. NB - The viola player's octogenarian grandad sings on one track. |
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OGURUSU NORIHIDE
- Humour
CD - Carpark Records, crpk15 - £11 Humour packages Norihide's self-released EPs "Study" and "I" together on one disc. At this point still in training for the priesthood, he blends pop, techno and japanese folk using such diverse instruments as guitars, bass and keyboards, recorder and percussion. Not to mention the obligatory laptop. Humour runs from acoustic guitar strummery through to full-on digital blippery, all in the course of one CD. |
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THE
RESIDENTS - Demons Dance Alone
CD - Euro Ralph, CD 027 - 58'49" - £12 The Residents seem to have been listening to a lot of 80s pop in preparation for this album. At times it resembles the Pet Shop Boys, at other times generic eighties balladeering, and occasionally the Windmills of Your Mind... Similarities to the Raincoats also pop-up, and there's no shortage of descending bass-lines. Mix this in with suitably Residenty lyrics about death, pain and moo-ing and you'll get the idea of this record. 'Singing Resident' takes about half the vocals, with female vocals equally prominent, and a couple of tracks delivered by a child-Resident. Whether you like this album will, on the whole, depend upon how tolerant you are of slick eighties-style ballads with passionate guitar solos. If you can handle that, and you like the Residents, then you should really consider buying this album - it's probably one of their stronger releases in recent years. |
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SCANNER -
lost without light
10" EP - Underscan Records, LC12024 - £6 Three track EP of chirping beats, vocal snatches and ghostly melodies, released as part of an Underscan EP series. |
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JANEK SCHAEFER
- Le Petit Theatre De Mercelis
CD - Sub Rosa, AS03 - 51'51" - £12 A live outing from the many-armed turntable deity, recorded in Brussels in April 2002. |
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DAVID SHEA
- Classical Works Vol. II
CD - Tzadik, TZ7079 - 1:08'10" - £13.50 Four pieces here: Chamber Symphony No. 2 takes an ensemble of six instrumentalists (oboe, clarinet, piano, percussion, violin and cello) and has them perform a score live alongside altered samples of themselves. The results vary from meditative changes in the timbre of simple chords to almost techno-like propulsive rhythms. Solo/Duo for Cello and Solo/Duo for Piano both take a single instrument and contrast it with its sampled self. Throughout, the sampler is used quite subtly, extending the timbre and range of the instruments rather than sharply contrasting with them. Finally, 8 Scenes for Computer takes the previous three pieces as source material and makes a new one from them on the Najo sampler (developed at Ircam). Impressive stuff. |
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WADADA LEO
SMITH - Light Upon Light
CD - Tzadik, TZ7046 - 53'04" - £13.50 Five tracks here: A composition for chamber ensemble and gamelan quartet, a solo piece for viola, a bass concerto, and two electronic pieces augmented by Smith’s trumpet work. |
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SONIC
YOUTH - Dirty (Deluxe Edition)
4LP - Goofin' Records, GOO-05 - c.2hrs 20' - £32 Sonic Youth's breakthrough 1992 album, Dirty, gets a fancy boxed-set deluxe treatment. Tons of rare B-sides and unreleased demos sit alongside the remastered original. Plus sleevenotes from Thurston Moore, Lee Ranaldo and music writer Byron Coley. See also G2, 44+ / X2 |
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STARS
OF THE LID - Avec Laudenum
CD - Sub Rosa, SR155 - 42'10" - £13 Droning and ambient guitar soundscapes from the Texan duo, circa 1999. |
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THUUNDERBOY!
- Thuunderboy!
CD - Table of the Elements, TOE-CD-76 - 1:13'34" - £12.50 When Tony Conrad's two year old son holds aloft his magic stylus, he becomes Thuunderboy!, the most powerful DJ in the universe. See Donny Osmond quiver in the grasp of this infant scratchmaster. Young Master Conrad's treatment of Puppy Love, and other kiddy-friendly classics, recalls the cut-up experiments of Terry Riley and the scratchier works of Christian Marclay. Admittedly, an hour and a quarter of this can perhaps get a little trying, but really, some of this stuff ranks amongst the great works of turntablism. |
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WARMDESK
- Prole Drift
7" - Static Caravan, VAN28 - £3 We still have one copy left of this limited-edition transparent-vinyl three-track 7" from Bill "Warmdesk" Selman. Crunchy metal percussion and found sounds weave together, Matmos-like, into some lovely downbeat electronica. |
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OTOMO YOSHIHIDE
- sound factory (1997)
LP - Gentle Giant, GG021 - 40'24" - £12.50 Otomo weilds his turntable and hard disc with an aggressive brutality over two sides of vinyl. Electronic noise and screaming, ear-bleeding sine-waves combine with stylus-melting turntable work; the results akin to a miniature Ground Zero. |
| JOHN ZORN | |
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JOHN ZORN -
Filmworks VII: Cynical Hysterie Hour
CD - Tzadik, TZ7315 - 25'20" - £13.50 Zorn's music for four short cartoons by Japanese animator Kiriko Kubo. Contributors include Bill Frisell, Christian Marclay, Bobby Previte, Arto Lindsay, Marc Ribot and Ikue Mori. |
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JOHN ZORN -
Filmworks XI: Secret Lives (aka Under the Wing)
CD - Tzadik, TZ7339 - 54'18" - £13.50 Music for a film about Jewish children hidden from the Nazis during World War II. This is suitably sombre on the whole, though with one or two more lively moments. The themes are Jewish-inflected. Played by the Masada String Trio, this is really beautiful stuff. |
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JOHN ZORN -
Filmworks XII: Three Documentaries
CD - Tzadik, TZ7340 - 1:01'27" - £13.50 Three scores are on this second installment of Zorn's 2002 output for celluloid. "Homecoming", a film about the dance scene in New York's East Village, gets a pretty light and airy score. A couple of the tracks have a distinctly minimalist slant, with one of them, "Midnight Flight", sounding just like a 1960s Terry Riley piece. "Shaolin Ulysses" is about Shaolin Monks living in America - the clash of the two cultures is reflected in the instrumentation, with Marc Ribot's guitar playing with Min Xiao-Fen's pipa. Personally, I'm not convinced this ever gets above chocolate-box pretty-pretty Chinese fluff, but the inclusion of some Latin rhythms add an extra element and thickens the plot somewhat. Finally, there is "Family Found", a film about the outsider artist and doll maker Morton Bartlett. This is scored for just cello and voice and gives you four different versions of what is essentially the same piece. This isn't the best of the Filmworks series, but there's a lot of nice music here, and the minimalist numbers show a side of Zorn's music rarely seen before. |
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JOHN ZORN -
Filmworks XIII: Invitation to a Suicide
CD - Tzadik, TZ7341 - 57'44" - £13.50 Touted as one of Zorn's greatest film scores, written for a film about a man who sells tickets to his own suicide in order to raise money for his dying father. This is very compelling stuff, relatively mainstream, perhaps, very lyrical, almost Romantic even. But there's the usual eclecticism - blues and jazz sit quite happily alongside more conventional film idioms. Features Marc Ribot on guitar, Rob Burger on accordion, Erik Friedlander on cello, Trevor Dunn on bass and Kenny Wollesen on vibes and drums. |
| See also: Naked City | |