Monthly Archives: March 2016

German- based musician-composer Jan St. Werner has been an important member of the international electronic scene for over two decades, both as a solo artist and as half of the pioneering duo Mouse on Mars. Displaying no signs of creative stasis, St. Werner is releasing his fourth full-length for Thrill Jockey; brandishing a disciplined approach to forging fresh sonic paths, Felder transcends genre, and it’s available on CD, LP, and digital April 1.

Emerging as part of the fruitful ’90s electronic milieu, Mouse on Mars is unquestionably Jan St. Werner’s highest profile musical endeavor; he and partner Andi Toma brought the New in no uncertain terms, debuting in ’94 with Vulvaland on the Too Pure label. Newness is in some cases tantamount to the ephemeral, but Mouse on Mars has hung in there, issuing ten albums amidst a substantial number of shorter works and collaborations (2014’s extensive 21 Again is a swell exposé of connections), and their discography stands amongst the least dated in the ‘90s electronic wave.

St. Werner’s been busy on his own; Felder is the fourth installment in his Fiepblatter Catalogue, a parenthetical attached to the entirety of his Thrill Jockey output. The series’ modus operandi, to quote the label’s promo text for inaugural 2013 entry Blaze Colour Burn, is to “encompass electro-acoustic experimentation, algorithmic elements, scored music, digital signal processing, field recordings, improvisation, public performance, and graphic works. These pieces aren’t just about sound; they’re about location, structure, time, aesthetics. Stories that overlap and interact with each other.”

In short; hell, yeah! Blaze Colour Burn delivered a major slice of well-considered abstraction, and the Fiepblatter Catalogue continued the same year with Transcendental Animal Numbers. Fittingly, it was Thrill Jockey’s first cassette only affair as it dropped two 20 minute tracks onto opposite sides of a tape with packaging recalling the heyday of the format as a vessel of uncompromising invention; just as appropriately, it was issued in a micro edition of 150 copies.

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How is it that sometimes, not always but just sometimes, the LP you swore your undying love for and allegiance to back in the day fails, after not having heard it for a long time, to set you on fire? It makes you feel like a turncoat.

Such is the case with Talking Heads’ seminal 1980 LP, Remain in Light. When it came out, I couldn’t find enough good things to say about it; it was flawless, an unparalleled work of synthetic Afrocentric genius, and I would have sworn under oath to the 1981 hearings of the U.S. Senate Commission on Un-American Influences on Rock’n’Roll to that effect. Now it fails to move me as it once did, and I’m left feeling like Benedict Arnold—a traitor to an album I once would have set off firecrackers in my pants for.

On Remain in Light, Talking Heads and co-conspirator Brian Eno eschewed the band’s heretofore twitchy new wave paranoia in favor of a liquid African-based sound that incorporated Byrne’s new stream-of-consciousness approach to writing lyrics, and it worked like gangbusters. Everyone I knew loved it and played it continuously. The hypnotic beats, the great percussion and insane guitars, the syncopated layers of backing vocalists, and David Byrne’s new and more ecstatic vocal delivery all contributed, as did Brian Eno’s far from negligible vision and musical and production skills, to create an album that was truly contagious.

On the LP, Byrne abandoned (for the most part) his characteristic deadpan irony for a potpourri of disparate influences: African rhythms, the fire and brimstone cadences of holy roller preachers, the studied speaking delivery of Nixon underling John Dean’s Watergate testimony (seriously!), and even the new-fangled rap of Kurtis Blow (seriously again!) Throw in a novel free-associative approach to the lyrics and what the Heads ended up with was an album that was radically different from their previous LP, 1979’s excellent Fear of Music.

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Press Play is our Monday recap of the new and FREE tracks received last week to inform the next trip to your local indie record store.

Swoop Swoop – It’s Spring
Frances Luke Accord – Nowhere To Be Found
Grandpa Was A Lion – Caged Birds
Richard Lomax – Butterflies feat. Natalie McCool
Tacocat – Talk
Ded Rabbit – Never Gonna Learn
LIMBS – Moonshine
Erik Soto – Virtue
Tryptamines – Nina Shuffles
VON POE VII – Basquiat ft. Saeed

TVD SINGLE OF THE WEEK:
The Mynabirds – Velveteen

RISLEY – Kill The Clock
Polyenso – Let It Go
Cristina Soto – Open Up (prod. by 9th Leap)
Grand Pavilion – Anywhere (Ft. Loretta Angus)
Kero Uno – Falling Apart ft. Lindsay Olsen
Finding Hope – Time (feat. Ericca Longbrake)
Lara Maxen – Man Up (Prod. Mickey Valen)
Jackson Whalan & Jules Jenssen – Home Again
Poi Dog Pondering – All Saints Ascension
Psymbionic – Retroactive

It is unfortunate that my only clear image of the great Van Morrison is at The Band’s Last Waltz, where the pudgy Morrison, resplendent in an awful brown pants suit speckled with sequins, ends a sublime version of “Caravan” with a series of ludicrous leg kicks, all of which are unintentionally hilarious. I always have to remind myself that Morrison—with his “little fireplug body” to quote Lester Bangs—is one of the Immortals, and that his 1968 album Astral Weeks is one of the best rock LPs ever recorded and certainly in my Top Ten, and this despite the fact that I don’t even like half of its eight songs.

Less an LP than a spiritual attempt to storm Heaven, Astral Weeks showed Van Morrison to be a seeker in search of some unreachable mystical plane—like John Coltrane, only playing a kind of jazz-folk hybrid instead of free jazz. His vocal phrasing speaks to this search; he repeats words, stuttering and stammering and scatting his way to a breakthrough to some otherworldly place, while the mostly jazz musicians behind him play ethereally lovely melodies that provide the perfect counterpoint to his quest. I will go out on a limb and say this is more than just Morrison’s masterpiece—it’s the most spiritual rock LP ever produced, and Morrison the visionary’s most perfect expression of his attempt to utter the unutterable.

Astral Weeks was Morrison’s second LP. Recorded in 1967 with a crew of jazzmen only one of whom he’d met or played with, he told them to more or less wing it, and they did, to remarkable effect. Not everybody liked this approach; “No prep, no meeting,” said double bassist Richard Davis, whose remarkable playing dominates the contributions of his fellow musicians. “He was remote from us, ’cause he came in and went into a booth… And that’s where he stayed, isolated in a booth. I don’t think he ever introduced himself to us, nor we to him…”

The Velvet Underground’s John Cale—who was recording in an adjoining studio—echoed Davis’ comments about Morrison isolating himself from his fellow players, saying, “Morrison couldn’t work with anybody, so finally they just shut him in the studio by himself. He did all the songs with just an acoustic guitar, and later they overdubbed the rest of it around his tapes.” But this is untrue; Morrison WAS in a separate booth, but the other musicians were playing along in another room, all but the strings and horns that is, which were recorded after the songs had been recorded.

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Van Morrison is not, nor has he ever been, some mere singer. He’s a man on a spiritual mission, in search of transcendence, like W.B. Yeats and all the great Irish poets who came before him. He’s produced dozens of great “pop” songs—he has a knack for writing hummable and catchy melodies—but he is at his best when he is trying, through sheer primal vocalization, to break through the barrier that separates us from the Godhead.

Two albums in particular stand out; 1968’s Astral Weeks and 1972’s Saint Dominic’s Preview. Both feature songs that find Morrison seeking, through repetition, stutters, grunts, growls, exclamations, and shouts to reach the whole damn way up, through the stars and the galaxies, to infinity. On the latter in particular, “Listen to the Lion” and “Almost Independence Day” come as close to reaching Nirvana through the use of the vocal chords as you’re ever likely to hear in the Western World.

1972’s Saint Dominic’s Preview is so great that, although two of its seven songs are so-so at best, anyone with ears is beholden to give it an A+. About those two songs: “Gypsy” is a horn-driven number along the lines of “Domino,” a song I’ve never liked. It swings in a folk-jazz kinda way, and Morrison’s in good voice as always, but the fast-paced sections annoy. Similarly, follow-up “I Will Be There” is a jazz blues that proves Morrison knows his ways around both genres. He sings up a storm, and the sax break is great, but placed next to “Listen to the Lion” it just doesn’t cut the mustard. The competition’s too stiff.

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“Kris and I feel like a person is either into vinyl or they aren’t. It’s a form of musical intake that is tactile. It requires patience and exploration. It’s a journey that will take you places you may have never intentionally meant to go. We might begin thumbing through our collection under the pre-tense that we want to hear Prince, or John Prine, or Mozart, but because we purposely do not organize our vinyl collection in any way, we end up pulling out 1 to 5 other records that catch our eye and will shape the next few hours of our day simply through chance.”

“When Kris and I were first courting each other, one of the first things we looked at relative to the other was their vinyl collection. We’d sit in each other’s apartments and laugh at the others odd individual pieces or revel in the ones we shared. We weren’t even singing or writing music together at this point, but we were intertwining our musical helixes.

We’d spend afternoons rummaging through goodwill vinyl bins, walking the aisles at warehouse flea markets, or just sifting through the used vinyl section down at Sound Garden in Baltimore. We’d try to make sense of why someone had lost touch with this record or that record and more often than not leave with a dozen or more new additions to our now synergetic and growing collection.

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