Gig #48: Of late 3: Demdike Stare, Oneohtrix Point Never, Castevet, Helm, Forest Swords, Moonface, Laurel Halo, Shit and Shine, Puce Mary, Tim Hecker, Four Tet, Damien Dubrovnik, Julia Holter, Brigitte Fontaine, Gnaw

‘The manner in which music can bring forth beautiful forms without any particular affective content can be illustrated in a general way by a branch of ornamentation in the visual arts: the arabesque. We take in sweeping lines; at times they dip gently, at times they strive boldly upward; they discover and leave one another; they correspond in their curves large and small, seemingly incommensurable yet always well proportioned. Everywhere there is a welcoming counterpart or pendant, a gathering of small details and yet a whole. Let us contemplate this arabesque not as if it were something dead and static, but rather as something constantly in the process of creating itself before our eyes. How the broad and fine lines surprise the eye at every moment, pursuing one another, raising themselves from small curves to a magnificent height, then sinking again, then expanding, coming together and in ingenious alternation of rest and tension! The image as a whole thus becomes higher and more noble. If we think of this living arabesque as the active emanation of an artistic spirit who ceaselessly pours into the arteries of this motion his fantasy—does not this impression approximate quite closely that of music?

‘It is extraordinarily difficult to describe this self-sufficiently beautiful in music, this specifically musical beauty. Because music has no prototype in nature and expresses no conceptual content, it can be discussed only either in dry technical terms or through poetic fictions. Its kingdom is truly “not of this world.” All the fantastic descriptions, characterizations, and paraphrases of a musical work are figurative or wrong. What in accounts of every other art is merely descriptive is already metaphorical in music. Music demands to be perceived simply as music; it can be understood and enjoyed only in terms of its own self.

‘The concept of “form” is realized in music in an entirely distinctive manner. The forms created out of tones are not empty but full; they are not merely the outlines of a vacuum, but rather a spirit that creates itself from within. In contrast to the arabesque, music is nevertheless in fact an image, albeit one whose object we cannot express through words and comprehend through concepts. In music we find sense and order, but these are musical; music is a language that we speak and understand yet are incapable of translating. That one speaks of “thoughts” in musical works represents a profound insight, and as in speech, a trained judgement easily distinguishes genuine thoughts from empty phrases. In just this way, we recognize the rationally self-contained quality of a group of notes in that we call this grouping a “sentence.” We feel precisely where its sense is completed, just as in a logical sentence, even though the truths of the two propositions are entirely incommensurable.’ — Eduard Hanslick

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Demdike Stare Transmission
‘Demdike Stare is the occult project of Miles Whittaker and Sean Canty. Miles is also known as Modern Love’s DJ MLZ or as one half of Pendle Coven. Sean Canty is the dedicated digger behind the Haxan events and a member of the respected Finders Keepers crew of vinyl vultures. The duo’s collaborative project tracks the sonic ley lines of cult soundtracks, Arabesque dubs and psychotomimetic ephemera with a proper Lancastrian twist. Their releases, notable for their beautiful cover design by Andy Votel, have included Symbiosis, Liberation Through Hearing, Voices of Dust and Forest of Evil.’ — collaged

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Oneohtrix Point Never Problem Areas
‘If you didn’t know anything about Daniel Lopatin — the synth maestro behind Oneohtrix Point Never — and you just had to guess what he might be like based on the music he releases, it easy to see how his recorded output could easily conjure visions of some kind of very relaxed intergalactic wizard methodically crafting sonic soundscapes on a variety of machines created sometime in the 1980s that were presumably found drifting in space. In the world of minimalist electronic music, Lopatin has carved out his very own zone — a sonic landscape characterized by otherworldly synth sounds, occasional bits of drone, and wide swaths of silence. In reality, Lopatin is just a very industrious guy living and making music in Brooklyn.’ — Stereogum

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Castevet Cavernous
‘Castevet will tease you, but don’t take it the wrong way: On their stubborn and excellent second album, Obsian, the New York math-metal-madman trio hint at climaxes they refuse to deliver and misdirect their redirections as a rule. When they race into instrumental codas at the exits of their blackened labyrinths, as they do on opener “The Tower”, they don’t do so in order to ease away from the intensity and float toward an end. They instead only get more complex, drawing outside of plain rhythmic lines. When they add an acoustic guitar, as they do on centerpiece “As Fathomed by Beggars and Victims”, they don’t do so to soften their sound or mitigate their density. They do it to make their spider-webbed arrangements that much more intricate, disrupting the generally clean spaces between their six-string bass, electric guitar, and ultra-articulate drums with a feathery texture.’ — Pitchfork

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Helm live
‘Helm is Luke Younger – a sound artist and experimental musician based in London, working with a vast array of revolving instrumentation and abstract sound sources. Younger’s compositions build a dense aural landscape which touches on aspects of musique concrete, uncomfortable sound poetry, industrial, and hallucinatory drones. Younger creates a world where his instruments morph into spectral rust, a shimmering klang swims alongside passive noise and the relationship between acoustic and electronic derived sounds forms a solid foundation.’ — surefire.agency

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Forest Swords Anneka’s Battle
‘Barnes incorporates field recordings and refers to his locale in song titles; he also mixed the entire album on his laptop while sitting outside. Opening his process up a bit to include his environment perhaps explains how music this skeletal can sound like it has so much blood coursing through it. It also explains how the one-man world of Forest Swords can feel so universal. Unrestricted by words or verse-chorus structures, Barnes’ songs reflect the way life can feel like an endless loop, growing and building without ever losing its cyclical nature. Maybe that’s why, even though Forest Swords’ sound skirts an array of genres, it doesn’t belong to any single one. Barnes’ work is less concerned with trends or scenes than experiences and memories that everyone has had, regardless of what music they’ve listened to before.’ — collaged

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Moonface Love the House You’re In
‘Spencer Krug’s Moonface records—like the early Sunset Rubdown EPs, which also centered around a single instrument—are less dizzying than some of Sunset Rubdown’s more circuitous work, but they’ve occasionally seemed more conceptually clever than genuinely captivating. There’s an urgency at work throughout his new album that keeps convolution at bay, a sense that these songs had to come out this way, commanding and unadorned. On paper, the piano-centric album may appear to be another of Krug’s experiments, stripping back as a means to stave off boredom. But Krug, in foregrounding his voice and minimizing the instrumentation, is clearly trying to limit the distance between himself and these songs, resulting in his most immediately gripping work in ages.’ — Pitchfork

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Laurel Halo Ainnome
‘Time, post-internet, works in two ways online. There’s the slide/slice: the object, the moment, the discrete unit of time that acts as a node in the flat internet universe. Then there’s the scroll/stream: this is stuff like Facebook or Twitter feeds; it appears to flow linearly, but it’s essentially a skeuomorphic calendar filter applied to an aggregation of the flow of slides, because once new things are added, and then become part of the flat agglomeration of data, they are never lost. Lived time is another beast entirely: it seems to be linear, but memory isn’t; bodies droop and look progressively worse in selfies; the second law of thermodynamics kicks in. There’s a lot of post-net art that addresses the possibilities and trauma caused by the first two conditions while completely ignoring the third. Chance Of Rain is one of the first albums I’ve heard that fully acknowledges, let alone addresses, these contradictions and compositionally works across all three modes of perception.’ — The Quietus

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Shit and Shine live
‘Imagine you’re in a glider with Merzbow and Earth — heading straight towards a pylon — and, if you’re still conscious, the barely lucid aura rapidly engulfing you will be somewhere close to the jarring and unhinged noise-scapes of Shit and Shine. The brain child of Todd impresario Craig Clouse, Shit And Shine have been churning out hulking sonic spasms of unrelenting, loosely structured noise since 2004’s limited edition LP You’re Lucky To Have Friend Like Us, steadily building momentum through a series of seemingly non-coherent releases, and semi-comprehensible live performances — frequently featuring no more than guitars, oh, and about ten drummers.’ — The Quietus

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Puce Mary live
‘Sometimes you want to make love and sometimes you want to get fucked. Noise can fill a hole similar to the way hair-pulling, slapping, screaming, I-don’t-care-if-the-neighbors-complain coitus does. Like the hickey you have to hide the next day and the bruised shoulder that aches each time you move, the piercing tones, rib-cracking thuds and raw-throated vocals of Noise are a perverse pleasure; it says “you’re alive, you’re human, and you’re dirty.” Enter Puce Mary, whose sound has late 70s Industrial’s sexual preoccupation with a vein of dark purple malaise running straight to the tip.’ — Tiny Mix Tapes

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Tim Hecker Stab Variation
‘What you immediately notice about Virgins with respect to Hecker’s consistently reputable oeuvre is a certain shift in focus. Associated above all with ambient soundscapes and artists such as Stars Of the Lid, I have always regarded Hecker’s musical production as activity that arises out of passivity. Even on 2011’s acclaimed Ravedeath, 1972, which contained a considerable amount of sonic movement, it was on the whole a certain circular withdrawal into itself — tracks fade in and out with repose, and remain as untouchable as the enigmatic aftertaste of rave itself. This is ambient music without abstraction: a lowered gaze of incisive vision.’ — Tiny Mix Tapes

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Four Tet Parallel Jalebi
‘Kieran Hebden (born 1978), best known by the stage name Four Tet, is a post-rock and electronic musician. Hebden first came to prominence as a member of the band Fridge before establishing himself as a solo artist. Hebden’s music originally eschewed the traditional pop song format in favour of a more abstract approach—his sound and melodies incorporate elements of hip hop, electronica, techno, jazz, grime and folk music with live instrumentation. His newer works are inspired heavily by house music.’ — collaged

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Damien Dubrovnik The Boys Would Lie Flat On Their Stomachs
‘Loke Rahbek and Christian Stadsgaard are two young Danish musicians you might recognise from their other bands. Rahbek is in in Vår and Sexdrome, as well as contributing every now and then to the Sacred Bones-signed Lust For Youth. Stadsgaard plays under the name Sarah’s Charity, and has also appeared in bands like Angry Ayrans, Opec and Severe Photography, who also featured Rahbek. Together they are key to the vibrant, tight-knit and unnervingly young noise and punk underground in Copenhagen. With their label Posh Isolation, they have lent some coherence to a scene built on tiny runs of cassettes and impossible-to-find 7″s. Everyone seems to have played in everyone else’s band at one stage or another. Everything seems linked, from Iceage all the way down to projects with one run of 25 improvised, blackened noise cassettes under their belt.’ — The Quietus

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Julia Holter World
‘In the last seconds of the string-laden, heavy-burdened “World,” the opening track from Loud City Song, everything drops out except for a voice that sings with hopeless deflation, “How can I escape you?” Julia Holter has always had a flair for not only drama, but also the dramatic. She’s loosely based albums on Greek tragedies and the classic New Wave French film Last Year at Marienbad. And on Loud City Song, due out August 20, Holter looks to the 1958 musical film Gigi for her third album in as many years.’ — collaged

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Brigitte Fontaine Les Crocs
‘Brigitte Fontaine, born in 1939 in Morlaix, France is a singer of avant-garde music. Her narrative music is experimental. She is also a writer, comedienne, playwright, and poet. During the course of her career she employed numerous unusual musical styles, melting rock and roll, folk, free jazz, spoken word poetry and world rhythms. She collaborated with such celebrated musicians as Jean-Claude Vannier, Areski, Jacques Higelin, Sonic Youth, Stereolab, Noir Désir, Grace Jones, Gotan Project, Archie Shepp, Arno, Georges Moustaki and Art Ensemble Of Chicago.’ — last.fm

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Gnaw Horrible Chamber
‘While the similarities to Khanate are absolutely impossible to ignore here, Gnaw firmly hold their own and have a real aptitude for creating genuinely disturbing atmospheres. Gone are the twenty minute 10BPM monoliths and oppressively endless walls of drone, but in their place lies a more direct assault with fiery buzz-saw guitars and a more regulated approach to song structure. There’s still tons of hissing, shrieking feedback, ghost-in-the-machine voices, and pummeling waves of noise, but it all feels more calculated and plotted out than the spontaneity shown on the bulk of Khanate’s records.’ — collaged

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p.s. Hey. ** Steevee, Hi. Oh, okay, about the Fandor list. Yes, let us know when it has launched please, thanks. Mm, I might have come across those Cinemascope reviews when I was making the post, I can’t remember. Of course the critical reaction to his films interests me a lot. How critics deal with representations of violence, rape, etc., is inherently interesting, given my interest in how to represent such things appropriately in my stuff. ** David Ehrenstein, Thank you kindly, sir. Oh, so I’m guessing that, if not a month, it should not be a huge amount of more time? Things have to be gotten right. That tunnel’s light gives me bated breath. ** Rewritedept, Hi. The Illuminati conspiracy stuff is bottomless and kind of fun to play like a game. It’s like numerology meets Shakespeare meets Agatha Christie or some such thing. I was in the States when Body/Head played Paris. And I think I was in Berlin when Lee Ranaldo played. (I’ve met and interviewed Lee, and I don’t remember him being particularly short at all.) And I know I was in the States when Thurston was here reading with Eileen Myles a few weeks ago. The Sonic Youthers and I seem to be in different dimensions. No, you didn’t say you stayed at the Cecil Hotel, but that’s creepy. My week is/should be pretty excellent, I think. Has been so far. Like I said, I completely forget that Thanksgiving exists nowadays, and it was always my least favorite holiday, so I will think nothing about it on whatever day it occurs. Thursday? Jeez, that’s a big, interesting list. I’ll have to pore over it. Looks eclectic, interesting. ‘Abbey Road’?! Huh. I should make a new favorite albums list or something. Yeah, might be fun. I know about the ‘White Album’ thing. Is it possible to hear it somewhere? Probably, right? I’ll go look. I don’t think I know Cicada 3301. Hm, curious. I’ll investigate, thank you! ** Etc etc etc, Hey, man. Oh, four years, and you went to UCLA? That’s very interesting. Herzog’s reasons are funny. It’s such a weird place. There always seems to be this divide between the way that people who grew up there, like, say, me, and people who ended up there think about it. The falsity thing about LA is so much less present and significant to me. It’s there, but it’s a part of a world within LA that has no real relationship to the world I’ve known and lived in there. Maybe it’s like the difference how Disneyland seems to visitors vs. people who work there or who built it or something. I don’t know. I totally get how it could be the most American city. Except it isn’t a city really. It’s a stretch of places. City is just the place’s job or profession. Calling it a city is like calling something that’s confusing surreal. People love to consolidate it. I guess that’s why people think detective novels set there are the best portraits. People want to visit a zoo based on LA. I don’t know. It’s interesting. The lit scene there is very odd and dispersed. Good for doing the actual writing, not as good for community and proximate recognition. Yeah, Penny-Ante, they’re cool. Fingers crossed. I got your email. Thanks a lot, man! ** Torn porter, Hi. Thanks. Traveling and shit. Cool, I hear you. Happy birthday belatedly but very sincerely! Big Sur, sweet, have fun or, well, I guess I hope you had fun, assuming you’re there or on your way. Not the tiniest molecule-like trace of Thanksgiving makes it over here to France, thank fucking goodness. ** Keaton, An Eli Roth Thanksgiving sounds like a nice take. Yeah, Thanksgiving is just about being force-fed your family’s presence, which I was never happy about. I guess if I’d had sexy cousins, it could have been different. I think I’ve met my cousins once or possibly twice in my life. I don’t know their names or where they live. Weird. Uh, good question about the pre-death reaction. I’m sure I’m immortal, but I would definitely freak way the fuck out if that ever happened to me. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. Thanks for explaining that. I thought maybe it had a physical effect like a drug or something, but it sounds more like a particular kind of meeting ground. I know Patrick Cowley, of course, but I didn’t know about his porn soundtracks, weird, interesting. I’m almost sure I saw ‘School Daze’ back in the day, though. I’ll google it and find a way to hear his score too. Cool, thanks! ** Misanthrope, Hi. Well, and you’d have to become a legal resident of France too, which I guess would be expensive. I mean, you’d have to semi-live here. That’s expensive. I don’t personally get the benefit of French health care, for instance, since I’m just a tourist who won’t go away. I wonder how hard it is to start a Pharm Company. Really hard, I guess. Yeah, really, really hard, I guess. ** Bill Porter, Hey, Bill. Your wife wants to be a chiropractor or is one? That’s cool. Chiropractors are magicians. Real magic. Fingers definitely crossed on your MFA applications. Really, really hard to think that you won’t get swept up, but bureaucracy is so unpredictable. Where did you apply? ‘LA is so stuffed with symbols’: Nice, very nice. ** les mots dans le nom, Hi! Nice to see you! Yes, his image making is very cool and sometimes exciting. I think that’s what I’m most drawn to in his films. ‘Pieta’ is my least favorite of the films of his that I’ve seen probably for very similar reasons to yours. Anyway, thank you. It’s nice to hear from someone who knows his work and is into it to some degree. I hope you’re doing great! ** Sypha, Hi, James. Thanks for the email. The photo of P&R; is awesome, and of course I’m thrilled that Best referenced me in his dissertation. That’s really, really cool. Yeah, thank you so much! That fencing thing just sounds like the retaining of some wonderful freedom of movement-meets-imagination thing from childhood, i.e. not weird but rather a gift or something. ** End. Uh, … oh, I made a gig out of some of the stuff I’ve been into lately as a sharing type of situation, I guess you could say. See if anything in my soundtrack seems qualified to make it into yours, I suppose. See you tomorrow in any case.