Tasty Bits

New York City's Tristan Perich builds the circuitry that plays his album, so, rather than record tracks and convert them to a digital of stream of ones and ohs, he creates ones and ohs that become music.
Tristan Perich - One Bit Symphony


Parisians, Chateau Marmont --named after an historic CA hotel, tend toward lusher strings than their lo-fi American counterparts like Worchester, MA's Dom or Princeton, NJ's Com Truise.
Chateau Marmont - Solar Apex

Get Music

Sometimes it's great to have reasons to like music, sometimes it's better just to like it regardless of didactic trumped up meaning. Trump up the volume knob, that's what I say, how about that. Life is better when you remember to load up your portable music device or burn discs for your car. I forget sometimes then end up stranded in traffic at the mercy of NPR. Friends, the radio will not be enough, get plenty of what you love and slather it in your ears. You must remember, it will be worth it. Is that the romantic view versus the classic view? I'm feeling very holistic right now. Must be the location of the moon in relation to the stars or maybe something in a fortune cookie stuck to my bones more than just the bland vanilla substitute. There's some fortune cookie lines in these songs I guess: "Love is stronger than pride." Or "I was made for you and there's nothing I can do about it." Or "It's so sexy to be living in America."
So, here's some love songs for the gushy heart:
Warsaw Polish Brothers - Love is Stronger Than Pride

Trampled By Turtles - Empire

Linda Rondstat - Blue Bayou



And, in honor of the bonds of brotherhood and friendship here's a couple more from a good friend:
Com Truise - Sundriped


Dom - Living In America


Also, check out my review of Chicago rawkers Panther Style, who just released their first full length !Emergencia!

Disarming Space

During its early American renaissance, folk was considered a weapon to combat war and political bull honky: folk was, in many places, considered a sort of gun of ideas. The initial idea of American folk seemed to be a celebration of simplicity, directness, and grassroots independence: the idea that you can take your guitar and speak anywhere/anytime. With the evolution of tech (where simplicity does not necessarily mean “acoustic guitar”) and the massive expansion of the cultural conversation towards a global community (particularly in the US) to encompass a much wider social sphere, listeners can look to style and intention rather than instrument set-up. Folk is at once psychological and simple. It is conversational and personal, and in that sense, it is political and cerebral.

This mix is not made to lay a groundwork for a new definition of folk, rather, I wanted to create a vein here of musicians that use the power of speech, a conversation implied between musician and listener, to convey force and emotion in music. In the case of From Monuments to Masses and The Books, this conversation is crafted using sound clips, creating a more psychological effect. In Britain’s Protein Window and San Francisco's Enablers, the verse is an elegant, semi-narrative free form rich with undertones, and the chorus is a shimmering wall of distortion that the listener fills with her own thoughts and verse. In This Will Destroy You, the notable lack of lyrics creates a wide headspace and pacing towards a personal conversation for the listener (leading to perhaps the ultimate and incidental goal of these great musicians: listener revelation.)

Bill Callahan and Leonard Cohen have a consuming, immediate lyrical style that is stripped down so that the delivery and quantity of verse unfold layer after layer of subtext, a style mirrored in PW and the Enablers but with a post-modern buzz.

In Washington D.C.’s Weird War, lead singer Ian Svenonius playfully wields a powerful vocal style that is more speaking than singing. It’s engaging and slightly atonal, but also filled with jokey, sometimes throwaway lyrics that give listeners space to shout over, to drink over, to talk over. Perhaps this is the gift and evolution of past folk, not to be a gun of ideas and to sharpen the political opinion of groups as it once did, but to be a disarming space for individual expansion of identity and interpersonal armistice.

The Books - An Animated Description of Mr. Maps

From Monuments to Masses - Sharpshooter


Protein Window - Diptych Dipstych


This Will Destroy You - Freedom Blade

Weird War - Girls Like That

Enablers - Blown Realms & Stalled Explosions


Leonard Cohen - The Stranger Song

Between Verse and Chorus

Rhythm, tone, and nuance are natural to vocals, so much so that, for many musical aspirants looking to trap beauty between verse and chorus, there is a strong belief that the pop dream of creating lucid powerful music can be idiot savant short wired vis-a-vis Jim Morrison with the right mix of booze, noise, and brain candy (which sometimes it sort of can). So, what happens when you take the vox out of the equation? In the hands of less dynamic musicians, you get chakra meditation drones and music suited for the beflowered Target listening station.
Not so for Brooklyn's Ensemble, Et Al. whose compositions march with patient strength, and thrum with firm, deliberate insistence. The resonant, tonal pallette of chimes, bells, and percussive ringing instruments (like vibes, marimba, and Indian Cowbells) effectively drum across the tightwire between post-punk textures, airport spaces, and the endless grass fields of the mind. Clearly these gents listen to a lot of music because there is a pop sensibility in their work that keeps their tunes engaging throughout, bobbing bouyantly on the ocean limn of awareness and sometimes submerging briefly and, sometimes, bringing you with them. Their commanding compositions are balanced perfectly to weave in and out of consciousness, which reminds me:

When Andrew Kenny of Amanset discovered Explosions in the Sky, he sent the tape to their label, on it scrawling the words, "This fucking destroys." What a thing to say about instrumental music.
Counterintuitively perhaps, instrumental music can be so powerful and raw, so emotive, edgy, ripped, mean and real, so punk rock. I'm not just talking about metal drone walls either and classical symphonies, (which are more "metal" perhaps...:P).
There's two reasons for instrumental music's punk power: One, it can be demanding to listen to. It's not part of our natural FM pop programming where vox are mixed like Sinatra and everything else is compressed to kazoo hum in the background. Two, I think it reminds us that music has so much power to speak more than just what the words are expressly describing, and instrumental music (particularly saavy intrumental post-rock) reminds otherwise pop listeners how much there is in the composition and how much there is to experience outside of our usual array.
I saw Explosions in the Sky at a small spot in Tucson and I remember thinking how loud they were, then a moment later, I heard the crisp snap of someone in front of me opening a beer: the music wasn't loud, it just felt loud.
My acid test for killer instrumental music is if I realize suddenly during the middle of the song that my mind is off somewhere else; good instrumental music lubricates thoughts, it unlocks corridors to the less traveled pathways of the mind. It goes it's own way. That's pretty fucking punk rock. If I had to classify Ensemble, Et Al, that's how I would do it: pretty, fucking punk rock.

...
Here's a school of tasty tracks flapping their fins in similar eddies and currents of EEA...
The Six Parts Seven - Stolen Moments

Appleseed Cast - Last In Line

Unwed Sailor - Cuckoo Clocks. The Call of the Windmill

Mark Mothersbaugh - Let Me Tell You About My Boat

Chicago Love Mix

I love it when bands decide to rock. Is it a decision decided via pow-wow over peace pipe? Is it democratic, taken to a vote? Perhaps it is more transcendental than that, the guitar speaking to the hands through the amp or some other ghosts of rock and roll spiriting through the windy corridors of the city. These are all Chicago bands, so I have to think there must be some back room politics, palm greasing, and ubiquitous eye winking.

The Halamays were formally Katie & Pat. This incarnation sees them rocking harder and beefing up their multi-instrumental sound with more thumping rock drums and gushing synth rivers. The theme of the two songs on the Zombies EP is, well, surviving a zombie apocalypse. It frames the understated, direct lyrics of the band in a post-apocalyptic world, making their emotive verse playful and sometimes a little funny.

The Halamays - Zombies


Another Chicago band getting their feet wet in the making-waves pool. Sleek and richly tonal Chicago rock, I've got more on 'em here in my full review.

The Pear Traps - The Pear Traps EP


Guitarist Jay Ziegler unloads tasty licks galore in this bar filth 80's blues inspired party rock album to add a razor edge to Neil Turk's punk laments and gritty heartbreak ballads. Bassist Matt Cushing's torpedo rides and thick train rail lines glue these tracks to the back of your mind. Several songs feature School of Rock drummer Kevin Clark saddling the kit.

Top Shelf Lickers - Head First


Another great Chicago band who just rocked the Do Division fest which is reknowned for its hula hoop crazies and tattooed hotties stripping off sweaty layers near the free cigarette booth. This is the newest single from California Wives. For their EP review and tracks, there's more here.

California Wives - Tokyo

Composition Clip: Making Electronic Music

Writing music certainly is not always glamorous work. Still, there’s something to the process that sometimes begets spectacular results. The most inspirational composition clip I've seen is the classic Dylan documentary scene from Don’t Look Back where Joan Baez is singing for the camera from the back of her throat while Bob Dylan is rocking back and forth to his own rhythm, trying to punch out a new song of his own on a typewriter. Whenever I feel overwhelmed with distractions, I just think of Bob and Joan.

One of the great excitements of a live band is seeing a work come together. This is particularly of note for electronic bands in an era where Apple's Garage Band program (which comes installed) has made beat programming as simple as selecting adjectives. Finding out that killer music has a killer composition process can amplify the effect. There's a resonance psychedelic electric indie group Cloud Cult taps into at their shows by having painters on each side of the stage concocting murals Bob Ross style while the band spins their tunes.

I’ve always liked electronic music where the human element shines through. I crown Vangelis the king of this postand perhaps my heart, at least for the duration of his Love Theme. While he may not be the earliest synth composer (that title goes to Wendy Carlos Williams), he exhibited to the masses the full power of strong synth voice in classic soundtracks like Blade Runner and Chariots of Fire.

I used to have a Blade Runner tape that I’d listen to in my car, and it was, in fact, the last cassette to work in it. The tape deck slowly gave up as the tape itself wore thin. Still, even as conditions degraded, somehow the music sounded good with the rhythm in the wear and the gradual warp as the circuits slowed. The tones morphed so that my tape deck’s swan songs were surprisingly sweet, unique performances.

Vangelis - Love Theme (From the Blade Runner Soundtrack)

Among the occult apocrypha that veils Boards of Canada’s heady electronic cuts in folklore mystery are backwards samples from cult leader Amo Bishop Roden. In Kid for Today, BoC builds the beat as you listen, spellbinding you into the trance of the song.

Boards of Canada - Kid for Today

Mu-ziq’s Mike Paradinas meticulously programmed the sounds and sequenced every trip beat and break. With so many ideas and explorations in his ecstatic candy modem melodies, these tracks still ring prophetic and futuristic .

Kraftwerk (German for power plant or power station) and early techno bands prided themselves on the shiny robotic throbbing metallic beats. More recent electronic groups like Flying Lotus, Baths, Talk Demonic, and Groundislava sometimes feature slightly off kilter beats, played either by hand with a beat pad or deliberately staggered with cycled rhythm loops or swaggered programming. This sound gives normally autonomous sounding beats a human hand to them, an organic texture.

Baths – Animals

Flying Lotus – Brainfeeder

Talkdemonic’s live drums and violin bring warmth to the electronic sounds and by matching the nuance in programming with their own playing achieve a heady, cerebral sound that carries powerful emotional push.

Talkdemonic – Mountain Cats

I'm following up Talkdemonicwithgroundislava, and I’m putting the whole Groundislava album here because it’s a classy ride all the way through. It’s at once electronic and organic. Jasper Patterson’s frenetic and perhaps slightly ADD composition process sounds like he jammed a Commodore 64 sound chip into a Never Ending Story VHS and recast the whole shebang on the limn of a sexy Biggie hot tub party.

The headspace this music traverses is vast, but the sounds are always immediate and visceral, so that to plug into it is to be taken on a journey. It’s great to put on if you like to listen to something while you write or while you dance or in my case, where your girlfry creams you in Doctor Mario and then while you act like it wasn’t a big deal.

When vocals come into the mix, the soundscape and the vox themselves are cleverly mixed, maintaining the continuity of the album as a whole. In Panorama featuring Weary, Patterson runs vocoder on Weary’s voice to sway his singing into the electronic realm. This effect, rather than weighing down the vox recasts the entire palette of sounds into a choir of Patterson’s own making.

Like a piñata, this album is filled with candy and suprises, still, in all its nuance, it’s cohesive and driving enough to bear heavy rotation.

Groundislava

The Fuck Buttons compose their sound on a medley of equipment featuring toy keyboards and vocals screamed into a children karaoke tape recorder.

Fuck Buttons – Bright Tomorrow

The first time I saw the Roland SPDS sampling pad, I was in smitten. Though I did procure one, it did not survive the rigors of my life. In the end, it was probably a blessing that my SPDS broke when it fell off the couch arm: My schedule opened up and I was subsequently able to get my life back in order.

The show that lit that fuse for me was Themselves. I’m including the track here where you can really hear the hip hop influenced finger beats stroked out of a sampling pad. Watching the beats form before me opened the idea of the lyrics to me, this unleashing of the id, this natural punch and flow. By seeing the process, I began to understand something more in the music. I saw that the lyrics themselves were playful, that meaning was in the act itself.

Themselves – It’s Them (1999)

Tobacco, keyboardist from Black Moth Super Rainbow, polishes the folky synth sound from BMSR to drive heavy, huge lead lines. BMSR's combination of lo-fi guitar and thick vocoder give them a sound that is seventies electronic wonderland brewed with swamp shed folk. Tobacco and BMSR have huge bodies of awesome work that reward spelunkers mining deep.

Tobacco - Hairy Candy

Black Moth Super Rainbow - Roller Disco

Casino Vs. Japan is one of my favorites. I’m always a sucker for the slow, kick-heavy beats. The big open tempos create a space where veils of synth can flutter from polyrhythms into a wash soundscape where samples unfold. Here a simple beat can become a sea of ideas.

Casino Vs. Japan – Single Variation of Two

Italo Disco: Musical Subterranean Metropolis

I'm happy to announce Stereo Delay's inauguration of guest writer Jay Ziegler. Ziegler, one of the founding writers for Consequence of Sound, is the ripping soloist in Top Shelf Lickers and also fellow mellow axe wielder in Wooden Wing. Here's his take on the elusive electric music that soundtracked the motion of hips at the height of the pill popping era. I think because it ushered in the birth of my favorite console music, Italo Disco will always have an unfair advantage when fighting for king of the mountain in my ears. Take her away Mr. Ziegler:

T.Ark - Under Cover Lover (Germany)


Throughout the cosmos of time, music has always possessed the amazing ability to crossbreed and assimilate multiple genres, in essence creating newer ones. One genre that came out as a sense of discovery during my final year of college at Florida State was the long lost form known as Italo Disco. Found by sheer accident one day during a routine trip to and from the campus, Italo Disco struck a raw nerve deep within me. Split between my classical training, my love for rock music and keeping up with the college Joneses in regards to the newer breeds of music, Italo Disco had that rare combination of approachable dance rhythms, pulsating electronic basslines and an over-the-top 80s sense of not taking itself too seriously. More and more I listened, this specific genre held more than meets the ears.

After finding about ten Italo Disco "Best Of" compilations on numerous websites, it was definitely apparent by this point that there was a whole world stuck in the underground. Even the term itself, "Italo Disco" referred to the European landscape as well as alluding to the off-putting nature of the music. Throughout the 70's and up until the early 80's, most popular dance music came from the U.S., UK and Australia. Bear with me as I'm paraphrasing. The term Italo Disco, while it started as an Italian phrase, came to encompass all dance music and early house/disco music that was purely not from the UK or the US (which later proved to have some exceptions from these nations respectfully). In the midst of all this craze, you have changing time periods from the 70's to the 80's. As a result, nations such as Poland, Italy, Germany, Russia, Canada, France and even the Scandinavian countries came together and created their own musical subterranean metropolis.

The elements of Italo Disco are purely 80's, purely tongue-in-cheek, and purely science fiction. Put it to you this way, Rick Deckard in "Blade Runner" could pop this in his car while looking for "replicants" and you'd think nothing of it. So sleek and natural, yet highly refined. What makes the elements of this particular brand of dance music lie in the arrangements. While most disco employed a good amount of horn sections (Santa Esmerelda, The Trammps) as well as string sections via synthesizer (Donna Summer, The Bee Gees), Italo Disco contained a much more minimalist approach. Artists such as Chris Luis, who's 1983 single "The Heart Of The City" employed a thick drum & bass straight beat with heavy saw synthesizers. No guitars, a minimal bassline and dueling synth and keys set the stage for Luis' soulful and controlled vocals. What makes this song tick is not just in Luis' limited vocal range, but the synthesizers give the song much more dynamic and allude to imagery of a lonely single man looking for love in the heart of a gigantic city (think from Chicago to Cairo).

Chris Luis - The Heart Of The City (Italy)


Another example of Italo Disco's enigmatic mastery of genre mashups is "Man To Man" by Italy based band Scotch. Implying multiple poly-rhythmic electronic percussion, Scotch also use the futuristic synthesized wave sounds to create an upbeat and almost impossible beat to escape from. The robotic quality of the drumming as well as the vocoders used by the singers add more drips of eastern Europe's influence over the genre. By taking the spacy elements found in rock, dabbling much more rhythmic inflection and adding dashes of quality synthesizer, Scotch also have a great knack for creating intense loops of bass driven riffs. In "Man To Man", the bass takes over and has it's own quarrel war with the keys while the drumming picks up and chugs away like a Sherman tank. I don't want to give the whole thing away, but needless to say, it's a treat you'll loop for the next twenty minutes.

Scotch - Man To Man (Italy)


There are literally hundreds of these similar artists that make the whole treasure hunting experience so worthwhile. Some recommended artists to check out include:

Ken Laszlo - 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8 (Italy)


Linda Jo Rizzo - Heartflash (Tonight) (Germany)


Chester - Hold The Line (Italy)


Dust Man - King Of The Ghetto (Italy)


Cleo - Go Go Dynamo (Italy)


Fake - Frogs In Spain (Sweden)


Laserdance - Humanoid Devotion (Netherlands)