Gig #117: Of late 27: Sparks, Pan Daijing, The Dream Syndicate, Total Leatherette, Kutmah, Broken English Club, Nosaj Thing, Nadia Sirota, Couch Slut, Bergsonist, Odwalla1221, Reverorum ib Malacht, Destroyer, Shiva Feshareki, Guided by Voices

Sparks
Pan Daijing
The Dream Syndicate
Total Leatherette
Kutmah
Broken English Club
Nosaj Thing
Nadia Sirota
Couch Slut
Bergsonist
Odwalla1221
Reverorum ib Malacht
Destroyer
Shiva Feshareki
Guided by Voices

______________
Sparks Hippopotamus
‘“There’s a painting by Hieronymus Bosch … in my pool,” Sparks plead in the week’s most relatable bit of art. You know that moment when there’s a “book by Anonymous” in your swimming pool? And “a ’58 Microbus” too? Sparks are just trying to make it through those same piscine nightmares in this crazy mixed-up world. This kicks off the Mael brothers’ first new album since 2009 – and while it’s hard to “miss” a phenomenon as eternally out of place as Sparks, it’s still good to have them back.’ — Gavin Haynes

______________
Pan Daijing Act Of The Empress
‘Perched on the cutting edge where Berlin’s music and art scenes blur into one another, Pan Daijing’s music is steeped in dark noise and cinematic atmospherics, drifting into eerie Morphosis-esque drone and twisted beats. The Chinese-born artist has crafted sonic installations for exhibitions and live scored art performances and dance shows; recordings-wise, there’s a tape on Noisekölln and a new EP with Bedouin Records. Daijing is currently collaborating on a sound performance project centered around her vocals and three mobile speakers as well as making soundtracks for film and fashion shows. Influenced equally by 1980s industrial music, philosophy and Chinese minority and Tibetan music, field recordings in temples and ritual practice are all in day’s work for this blade runner.’ — Sonar

_____________
The Dream Syndicate Glide
‘At one point during the making of our new record I said to my bandmates, “hey, you only get the chance to make a first Dream Syndicate album in 30 years once in your life.” It’s a strange statement but one that’s hard to refute (unless we end up making one at some point in our late 80’s–which, well, you never know). But that was the attitude we brought to the project. Either the record was going to be great, everything we hoped it would be, or we would just shelve and write it off, both financially and publicly, as a bold experiment that didn’t work out. We felt the odds were in our favor. The 50+ shows we’d played since we reunited back in 2012 had been among the best the band ever played, the perfect mix of agile improvisation, wild abandon and rock solid grooves that had always been the band’s hallmark. The only 21st century addition to the band, guitarist Jason Victor who had played with me for years as a member of my solo backing band the Miracle 3, silenced any doubters within minutes of every show. He was the perfect and undisputed heir to the Syndicate axe-slingers who had come before–raw, mercurial, knowing and skilled.’ — Steve Wynn

______________
Total Leatherette Faux Fox
‘Glaswegian duo Total Leatherette excel at unease. Listening to their second album For The Climax Of The Night induces the feeling of being stalked through unfamiliar streets. The album is built on rising anxiety, driving belligerently onwards towards the darkest dancefloor you never dreamed of, climaxing with throbbing machine music. Reverberating, irregular beats from the drum machine are layered with creeping vocals that you can’t quite catch but paranoiacally understand. This is dark disco, mutated EBM, queer industrial music that deserves its face wrapped in latex.’ — The Quietus

______________
Kutmah Cooler Of Evidence (feat. N8NOFACE)
‘Justin ‘KUTMAH’ McNulty was born in Brighton, England to an Egyptian mother and Scottish father. Moving to the United States when he was twelve years old, KUTMAH grew up in Hollywood, California and ultimately made a name for himself as a talented underground artist & DJ. Intrinsic member of eclectic Los Angeles-based music collective “dublab”, in 2004 KUTMAH launched the seminal club “Sketchbook”, which forged fundamental roots of the now-infamous LA beat scene. In spring 2010 without advance warning no any provoking criminal activity, armed US Federal agents entered KUTMAH’s home, incarcerated him for two months at a New Mexico detention center under immigration charges, and ultimately deported him to the UK where he currently resides. Since then KUTMAH has toured Europe, playing shows with Saul Williams, The Gaslamp Killer, Flying Lotus, Gonjasufi, Dabrye and others.’ — Outlook

_____________
Broken English Club Country Life
‘Dungeness, a headland on the Kentish coast of England, is a strange place. It’s home to two nuclear power stations, one of which remains operational. The site is also a protected nature reserve and a residential area, complete with a couple of pubs and a “mystical” gift shop. Most of the houses are wooden and ramshackle, home to fishermen. Rusted railway tracks stretch into the distance. Broken-down boats and debris are strewn across the shingle and scrub. You’ll also find the “listening ears” of Denge here, a set of alien concrete structures, or “acoustic mirrors,” erected in the 1930s as aircraft detection systems. (They failed miserably.) Walking around it all feels terribly remote and deserted, like some apocalyptic scene straight out of a JG Ballard novel. It’s easy to see why Oliver Ho was drawn to the place. The English Beach is an abstract portrait of Dungeness, written by Ho during time spent living there. The album, Ho’s second as Broken English Club after Suburban Hunting, is a response to the psychogeography of the place—the narrative, both real and imaginary, hidden beneath its geology. The eerie ambience and the contradictions of Dungeness, along with the conflicting metaphor of the British seaside itself—a place at once filthy, ruinous and comforting—are all in play across the record.’ — Resident Advisor

_______________
Nosaj Thing All Points Back To U (feat. Steve Spacek)
‘Hip hop was Jason Chang’s first musical passion, which soon led him to program rhythms and create his first mixtapes with a rudimentary home set up. His first material as Nosaj Thing arrived in 2006, although it would not be until 2009 that he would release his first album, “Drift”, for which he became internationally recognised. Connected to the innovative Los Angeles Leisure label, he has continued to release his own material while also producing beats for hip hop artists including Kendrick Lamar and Chance The Rapper.’ — Sonar

______________
Nadia Sirota Letter O
‘Out of composer Donnacha Dennehy’s and Nadia Sirota’s union arises Tessellatum, an album-length collaboration with accompanying animated visuals by Steven Mertens, an animator whose done darkly whimsical work for Regina Spektor and Dan Auerbach. Nadia Sirota plays the viola, Liam Byrne plays the viola da gamba, and between the two of them, they build up 15 tracks that swirl thickly around you. The music blends into a kind of tabula rasa, pulsing drone, a shifting mass that is meant to smudge the edges on your perception of passing time. It isn’t quite a drone, though: the 15 multi-tracks of strings played by Sirota and Byrne peel off from each other in long, moaning strands, like someone planing clean strips from a board of wood.’ — Jayson Greene

______________
Couch Slut Company Picnic With Dust Off
‘If only every band that went out of its way to be shocking took notes from Couch Slut. The world would be a more disturbed place, mind you, but it would be all the better for it, too. Heavily steeped in the late-1980s/early-1990s work of pioneering noise abrasionists like Swans, the Jesus Lizard, and Today Is the Day, Couch Slut show a like-minded, almost compulsory drive to provoke. As if to broadcast the message “we don’t pull punches,” the cover of the band’s first album, 2014’s My Life as a Woman, was graced by an illustration of an erect penis ejaculating onto a woman’s face, her tongue extended for added effect. In Couch Slut’s case, though, there’s much more going on than just provocation. Even frontwoman Megan Osztrosits’ description of her own lyrical content—which the band sums up as “anger, depression, terror, drug abuse, mental illness, violence, the surreal, longing, and loss”—doesn’t quite capture the hair-raising impact that she and her bandmates make.’ — Saby Reyes-Kulkarni

______________
Bergsonist Ressentiment
‘Derived from Deleuze’s Bergsonism, Bergsonist uses intuition as a method to deliver her/his instinctive psychoanalytic theories. A blend of different audio sources and samples are used as a way to capture the essence of the ‘present’ moment, manipulating found sounds along with self-concocted digital fragments to combine in in the span of a set, given time. Bergsonist allows inspiration to come from anywhere, yet she/he limits themselves by the gear/tools that are used. The approach consists of inhaling all the energy of the city — influenced by trips to museums, galleries, shows, talking to people and sensing nature — and exhaling it sonically. Bergsonist reacts to this energy and inspiration without any specific rules, styles or genres — extending the array of possibilities by always pushing preconceived uses of the tools.’ — Resident Adviser

______________
Odwalla1221 live @ Communiversity
‘After meeting at school in 2009, Chloe Maratta and Flannery Silva became inseparable. “We play drums and samplers and speak over them,” says Maratta of the music she makes with Silva as Baltimore duo Odwalla1221 – an unassuming way to describe their unique meld of mantra-like spoken-word and abstract electronic loops. Signed to Brendan Fowler’s label VR/DM8H493, the pair count everything from “ballet” to “the sound of the machine when you’re inside getting an MRI” as inspirations. Between new wave, riot grrrl and noise, it’s debatable as to which category their music falls under – but it’s clear that they’re intent on breaking the mould. Lyrics such as “be you and do your own thing” from their track “What the” and “live, laugh, love” on “My Window Ambience” mark them out as musicians on a mission to empower.’ — Lakeisha Goedluck

_______________
Reverorum Ib Malacht 1 Antiquius Celo et Chao
‘Reverorum ib Malacht is Roman Catholic black metal. There is a lot to unpack in those seven words: definitions, belief, assumptions, religious upbringing, and, perhaps the most glaring… black metal. Black metal’s preoccupation with religion has been a long one. There are many who still abide by the single, antiquated rule that the only “true” black metal follows the Left Hand Path, but Reverorum ib Malacht’s own religious ascension follows an unlikely path — one to the right hand of the Christian God. With roots in the gnostic heresy of first-era Dödfödd, which continued with their first demo as Reverorum ib Malacht (whose title is a Gnostic tenet in itself) What Do You Think of the Old God, We Call Him Judas?, Karl Hieronymous Emil Lundin and Karl Axel Mikael Mårtensson’s conversion to Catholicism was an unexpected story, precluded only by former Mayhem member Kittil. Unlike Kittil, whose name has been lost to history (or, to those who know, relegated to joke status), Lundin and Mårtensson’s decision to stay within (and expand) black metal which added a new, brazen chapter to the genre’s ever-flowing story.’ — Invisible Oranges

______________
Destroyer Sky’s Grey
‘“Sky’s Grey,” the first dispatch from Destroyer since 2015, opens with the sound of a chintzy old drum machine with its tempo knob turned all the way to the right and then some, skittering along far faster than any human could muster. If you thought for a moment that Bejar might finally be embracing frenzied blast beats to match the death metal-ready name of his long-running songwriting project, the joke is on you. Soon, we hear stately piano chords, operating at a fraction of the speed of the rhythm track, and the hyperkinetic opening begins to evoke something like stasis. It’s as if the mechanical drummer is caught in a Parkinsonian loop, constantly moving but never actually getting anywhere. “Bombs in the city,” Bejar repeats like a playground chant. “Plays in the sticks.”’ — Andy Cush

______________
Shiva Feshareki live @ the Amersham Arms
‘Who is she? A brilliant young composer, who’s just turned 23. She was born to Iranian parents, but raised in very un-exotic Chiswick. Was she one of those composing prodigies? She started improvising pieces when she was three or four, on her elder brother’s Casio keyboard. “I had to wait until he went out, because he didn’t like me using it.” But it was being taken at the age of 10 to the exhibition where Tracy Emin’s unmade bed was on display that fired her up. “I stood there and stared and stared at this amazing thing, and knew that I wanted to do something just as personal and intense.” What was her big break? It came when she was at school, where she was the only person studying A-level music. “My teacher told me about this BBC competition for young composers, so I thought, ‘why not?’” She won, and became the National Youth Orchestra’s resident composer. “It was great for me, because I was surrounded by all these people who were much more sophisticated than me, and I wanted to learn everything they knew in two weeks.”’ — Ivan Hewett

______________
Guided By Voices Just To Show You
‘Hot on the heels of the smothered-in-plaudits double album August By Cake comes this hot and heavy fifteen-tune long player, a melody-dense thwack to the earholes that will both energize and deplete your body of its remaining music-appreciation enzymes. Recorded by the band in New York, and by Pollard in Ohio, How Do You Spell Heaven capitalizes on the current incarnation’s tour-buffed shine without sacrificing eternal verities such as but not limited to: off-kilter rhythmic jolts; krazy chords; purposefully imperfect harmonies; and fragmented structures that start and stop on a coin of small denomination and go somewhere else, and quickly.’ — Mid-Heaven

*

p.s. Hey. ** Dóra Grőber, Hi! Oh, it was very cool to start laying in the subtitles. We’re doing that roughly now, and then we’ll have to go into a proper studio to place and time them exactly. But, yeah, it’s nice to see the English there. We got about half of the subtitling finished yesterday. So … did all of your friends make to the meet-up yesterday, I hope? Yay, you’re really far along with SCAB! Do you have the overall design in place and everything? Is the order of the works easy to decide? I hope your day was most awesome! ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. Yes, RIP Mirielle Darc. That was sad news indeed. ** Steve Erickson, Hi. Ah, the streaming issue, gotcha. It’s hard for me think of a case where a band moving to a major label wound up being a good decision. Or at least since maybe Sonic Youth who managed to get their way despite the overhead, but I can’t imagine a band having their degree of freedom in the ‘big leagues’ now. Hard rock hit singles that aren’t novelty items or faux- or fronted by very photogenic singers/bands are a rare thing du jour. Back in the freeform FM radio days, if a DJ played a whole album side, it was clear that he or she was either baked or lazy. Thornton’s work in general is very strong, I think. I think you would be interested by the two ‘Peggy and Fred’ sequels. I think I always admired what Soderbergh did more than loved his movies barring two or three. I do really like ‘The Limey’. And of course I was heartbroken that he never ended up making the ‘Cleo’ musical penned by Jim Greer and using Guided by Voices songs as the score. I hope the filmmaking bullshit is no longer bullshit. ** Bill, Hi, B. She is great. Steve who runs SF Cinematheque and who you dinnered with when Zac and I were out there loves her work and screens her films sometimes. New toy, work progress, … music to my ears, it goes without saying. ** Jamie, Eimaj! Hm, that doesn’t work as well in your case, shame. Yes, email me your number. Basic scoop: the bus to Parc Asterix departs the Louvre at 9 am and then picks us up at the Parc for the return at 6:30 pm. We should try to meet around 8:30 am to be safe ‘cos we have to venture into the bowels and buy bus tickets, etc. So maybe just outside/at the top of the stairs of the main entrance/exit of the Palais-Royal metro station. Lines 1 and 7 go there. But let’s do the detailing via phone or text or something. Rain, they do say. Hopefully very scattered showers, if so. The subtitling is going well and is a great pleasure. I really like the presumed feel of that empty (but you) building, no surprise. Oh, shit, the top video must have been passworded since I put the post together. Sorry. You come here tomorrow, right? Just in time to miss the shitty little heatwave we’re having, or so it is promised. Oh, jeez, okay, if it is easy and technically possible to bring me a scone in one piece, that would be lovely, but no anticipation. May today spare you like the poppy field spares the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz. Subtitled love, Dennis ** _Black_Acrylic, Cool, glad her work intrigued you. Dundee-ensconced again, eh? ‘Twin Peaks’s is nearly over? Damn. Time for me to start organizing a viewing somehow. ** Misanthrope, Hi, G. Every junkie I knew who died young of an overdose was a completely great person. They just got trapped. You’ve got some serious arms there, buddy boy. Many have tried and filed to defeat and destroy Ticketmaster. One of these days. France has some kind of law that prevents a thing like that existing here. ?? ✌️ ** Armando, Hi, man. Things with the movie are great. Yes, we’re amidst subtitling, then on to the titles and end credits. Today: subtitling and hopefully seeing my visiting friend and d.l. Thomas Moronic at least. ‘The Damned’ is awfully good. I will tell Stephen. He’s on tour, but he gets back soon. Yes, he lives in Paris. He and Gisele Vienne are a longterm couple. Charlemagne Palestine lives in nearish-by Brussels, which I think explains his regular presence here. Damn, I’m glad the doctor visit is over and did the trick. I’m so sorry about your battling with depression, my friend. Keep it your enemy. You made noise! I’ll go listen to that the first minute I get! Everyone, artist, writer and d.l. Armando made some ‘noise’ that is now available for your listening pleasure on bandcamp. Please go check out his work. Hereabouts. Uh, I have hard time remembering disaster movies. Which I kind of like, I don’t know why. I think I enjoyed ‘Poseidon’, and … I’m not remembering ‘Pompeii’ clearly. I’ll have to watch a little clip or something to jog my opinion. Chances are I liked it. Honestly, I rarely meet a disaster movie I don’t like. Bon day to you! ** Okay. I made you one of my gigs of music I’ve been listening to and being interesting in enough to want to pass long some tracks. Hope you guys like a thing or more up there. See you tomorrow.