Gig #67: Of late 15: Trash Kit, Oren Ambarchi, Hacker Farm, Deerhoof, Low Jack, Eiko Ishibashi, Jo Johnson, Zu + Eugene Robinson, 18+, Neel, Elvis Depressedly, New White Light, Richard Dawson

_______________
Trash Kit Beach Babe
‘TRASH KIT have a wild feel for melody, writing songs that pull at the reins with a spontaneous charm. Having formed the band in 2009, Rachel Aggs, Rachel Horwood and Ros Murray have since become the glowing core of London’s DIY underground. Their music is primal yet thoughtful, affirming yet sincere, drawing on the potential of post-punk and the naturalism of an internal folk music. Although Trash Kit have their forebears in bands like X-Ray Spex, The Ex and The Raincoats, their sound is very much their own take on facing forwards. Galloping polyrhythms, overlapping sung-spoke lyrics and entwining guitars are all drawn together into a taut unity, sounding willfully alive. Both Rachels tangle their vocals with each other whilst expressive drumbeats and restless guitar flurries provide the rhythmic drive.’ — Upset the Rhythm

_______________
Oren Ambarchi Park It Where the Sun Don’t Shine
‘Combining threads from rock, free jazz, electronic music, and contemporary composition, Ambarchi’s output is a combination of improvised elements carefully assembled into multifaceted pieces that draw from his many inspirations. It’s dense, to be sure, and often thick with drones sourced from his unique guitar techniques, but depending on the performance and the setting, it’s possible to walk away from one of his performances feeling as though you’ve witnessed anything from drone metal, to free jazz freakouts, to much more subtle sound art. Ambarchi’s ideas have been further honed by his hectic touring schedule, which has taken him around the world and enabled him to acquire a sort of recognition rarely attained by musicians so resolutely experimental.’ — collaged

________________
Hacker Farm Silver Street
‘With Glitch returning to the UK in 2003 and continuing to make electronic music, Hacker Farm were formed in a Yeovil pub in 2009, on the night that Michael Jackson died. “I just remember the TV being on and we were having a drink and Farmer Glitch said, you know, maybe we should do something, and as we were talking about it there were ambulances outside Jacko’s house.” An intersection between Kek’s passion for freeform noise and Farmer Glitch’s interest in circuit bending, plus his desire to get away from laptop music-making and sample-based sounds, Hacker Farm were from the start as much about building and recycling their own noise-making equipment as being a band. Music, films, packaging and promotion combine art, subversive intentions and a wry sense of humour that to my mind recalls a less commercially-focused KLF, utilising electronic music as part of a broader artistic statement that can be read on any number of levels. They even make their own cider, emblazoned with the slogan “home brewing is killing music.”‘ — collaged

______________
Deerhoof Exit Only
‘After Deerhoof finished recording demos for La Isla Bonita this past February, they began rehearsing for an upcoming tour. Halfway through a run-through of a long-time Deerhoof live favorite, their cover of the Ramones classic “Pinhead,” someone offhandedly asked, “Why don’t we ever write a song like this?” So Greg quickly dashed off a song on a scrap of paper, showed it to the band, and they recorded the breakneck stomper “Exit Only” in one take. La Isla Bonita was recorded in guitarist Ed Rodriguez’s basement. Situated next to a parking garage, it was perfect for making noise till the wee hours. They recorded live, DIY style, “a weeklong sleepover arguing over whether to try and sound like Joan Jett or Janet Jackson, cracking each other up, one guitarist whose name starts with J always putting too much red chile into the rations,” says Greg. But more than that La Isla Bonita is about the eclectic worldwide community that has supported them.’ — Polyvinyl Records

_____________
Low Jack Flashes
‘”It’s going to be quite different, because I’m always trying to do different things, and the In Paradisum guys are really into doom and drone music, stuff like Sunn o))), that kind of sound. I was quite a newbie with all that stuff, and they made me listen to a lot of those records, with the double pedals, mad drummers, and when I heard it I was like, ‘What the fuck, this stuff is so good!’ So basically I tried to make a record with that feel, but with my own perspective, my influences, and using some drum machines. It’s probably going to be the most… uh [pause] … wide and rough record i’ve ever done. I mean, it’s basically death metal with drum machines [laughs].’ — Low Jack

_________________
Eiko Ishibashi Resurrection
‘J-Pop, if the J stands for Jazz. Eiko loosens the instrumental reins and cracks her songwriter’s code, writing in two languages to achieve the proper remove from her subjects. You can only regain life when you accept death, and throw yourself into the sea! “In my hometown, cars and refrigerators were often abandoned and just left lying around. I have always remembered this as the image of a landscape that has inspired my music. I have had the image that even though abandoned, their souls, and those with no life, even with electricity running through them, only regain life when they accept death by throwing themselves into the sea. This was the image that ran through my mind in making this record.” – Eiko Ishibashi, 2014’ — collaged

______________
Jo Johnson Weaving
‘That Jo Johnson once played in Huggy Bear probably bears little relevance to her debut solo album. The standard-bearers for riot grrrl’s UK faction, Huggy Bear were noisemakers with a gleeful vengeance, courting chaos and ecstasy in buzzsaw punk anthems that made good on Emma Goldman’s maxim about revolutionaries cutting rugs. The most overtly political thing about Weaving, on the other hand, is a dolefully Dickensian track title, “In the Shadow of the Workhouse”, and the noisiest thing here—well, actually, there isn’t one. Sonically, these stately, meditative ambient fantasias are a world away from Huggy Bear’s manic flare-ups. If we’re trotting out biographical bullet points, Johnson’s membership in London experimental techno promoters Bleep43 has more bearing on the sound and shape of Weaving, which seems determined to reimagine New Age music as another form of techno—or, perhaps, vice versa.’ — Philip Sherburne

_________________
Zu + Eugene Robinson Taking the Give
‘Zu has always been a mercurial and ever-changing entity: unafraid of cross-genre explorations, eager to break down barriers between musical styles. Despite playing traditional instruments, major influences on Zu’s music have always been sonic explorers like Coil, Throbbing Gristle, or early Neubauten. The sound of The Left Hand Path is the somewhat hidden side of Zu, though latent in all of its previous music. It’s like digging out a box from the earth, containing everything the band had wished to highlight in previous works: ambient and droney landscapes; acoustic explorations in obscurity. The album starts programmatically with the sound of a shovel digging the earth — a soundtrack for a descent into the underworld. It’s moon musick. All of the members played electronics and Massimo focused mostly on guitars. The recordings were then sent to Eugene S. Robinson of Oxbow fame. Zu knew he was the right person to add vocals to it, and to transform the music again, into a sort of contemporary post-everything voodoo blues.’ — Forced Exposure

______
18+ Crow
‘To see the put-on “objectification” of 18+ as negative or fitting into some punk-rock idea of authenticity is not productive, or even applicable to the duo’s project. Giving up anonymity may very well be a logical decision to better represent the contemporary, sexual content/semio-text they’re dealing with. After all, is anonymity even possible? Weren’t we just filling in the blank-faces of “Boy” and “Sis” with real bodies anyway? Now we’re given the opportunity to visualize the proxy between body and image — perhaps it’s the human drive to press the spacebar before a stream-of-consciousness vocal take. The session may have pulled out something dark, sticky, weird, and deformed, but it came from somewhere; and now that original internal material can be appropriated, stylized, rendered into the next-outfit adorned by the ever-changing, consuming virtual identity. At the end of “Crow,” you can hear just that — the sound of an isolated spacebar hit in that liminal moment in between “Samia” and “Sis” — the moment where she leaves the state of mind responsible for the strange, verbal swill that’s now recorded (captured) and now floating on-screen. The ghostly voice was captured, and its reality is nuanced in the intersection between Samia as a user with intention, a subject, and the object of her exaggerated character. It came from somewhere… “real.”’ — Tiny Mix Tapes

_______________
Neel The Secret Revealed
‘There’s a large empty space on your record shelf, in between Nurse With Wound’s “Space Music” and Pete Namlook & Tetsu Inoue’s “Shades of Orion”: a gap between the cold, lifeless experimentations of Steven Stapleton—space heard as a largely silent void punctuated by the sudden and infrequent arrival of massive objects—and the romantic imaginings of 90’s space ambient which filled space with idealistic longings of earth. There aren’t many records to put right between those two. But now Neel has given us one, Phobos, and it’s both a lustrous and shadowy beauty. After debuting stellar live performances at Mutek in Montreal as well as Berlin Atonal, the time to release an album documenting the material has arrived.’ — Editions Mego

_______________
Elvis Depressedly No More Sad Songs
‘For the better part of the last five years, South Carolina’s Mat Cothran has plied his trade under the name Coma Cinema. Over four albums under that Joy Division-referencing moniker, Cothran has explored the limits of moody, downtrodden songwriting. These are tracks that mine the darker parts of his upbringing and his menial day-to-day to reveal sublime transmutations of singer-songwriter tropes. But the beauty of Cothran’s work is that it isn’t entirely centered on darkness and futility. For Cothran, it’s just as important to be able to laugh into the void. That much is evident even in the name of his onetime side project, Elvis Depressedly. Though his work under the Depressedly banner is largely simpler and shorter than his album-length statements as Coma Cinema, these full-band efforts have illustrated the full breadth and depth of his songwriting repertoire.’ — Interview Magazine

_______________
New White Light Dust 3
‘Dust is the new nine-part musical sequence and album by the mysterious and extraordinary New White Light whose prior multipart sonic tome Bela Tarr was one of the sleeper boons of 2012.’ — collaged

________________
Richard Dawson The Vile Stuff
‘There’s an episode of Seinfeld in which Jerry declines an offer to go and see legendary crooner Mel Tormé, aka the Velvet Fog, explaining that he “can’t watch a man sing a song”. I wouldn’t go that far, but I sympathise. I have a tendency to relate far more readily to female voices. But then there’s Richard Dawson. … “The Vile Stuff’ is an astonishing piece of music – a dogged stomp adorned by astoundingly dextrous Arabesque modes that lend portentous gravitas to increasingly inebriated and self-destructive teenage behaviour. Again, Dawson’s lyrics have a Chaucer-by-way-of-Alan Bennett flair that far transcends the prosaic nature of their narratives.’ — The Quietus

*

p.s. Hey. ** Kier, Hi! Thank you for inspiring it/me, pal. Fave? Well, I haven’t seen it in a long time, but I thought he was really great in ‘Dirty Little Billy’, which is also the only film in which he played the lead character, I think. I remembering being sort of charmed by ‘Every Says I Love You,’ but it might have been the Paris setting, and I do quite like some of Woody Allen’s films. Oh, okay, yeah, I’ll see if I have the gumption and inspiration and materials to make a wreath. Might be too physical an activity for me, ha ha. Was the family dinner nice? Your quiet and/or mysterious weekend had a nice, soothing quality for some reason. Mine, uh, … Well, Zac got sick during the night on Friday, so we didn’t edit on Saturday to give him a little time to recover. So I worked on other stuff, which was good. I guess the big event, which isn’t interesting, is that in the late morning the Recollets had a big power outage. It killed the internet and took out all of the electricity on the ground floor and on the first floor. (I’m on the second floor). I kept thinking someone would fix it. But nothing happened, and I thought, Okay, it’s still daylight so nobody really cares for some reason, and they’re all maxing out their Personal Hotspots like me to keep their internet going, but then it got dark and it still wasn’t fixed. Everybody was walking around with flashlights. It didn’t get fixed until after 11 pm. Strange. On Sunday, we went back to editing. The 3rd scene got finalized in its rough form and put in a secret place on Vimeo so our d.p./cameraman Kiddiepunk could watch it and so the composer/musician guy whom we hope will score the scene could see it. And we started working on Scene 1, and, not to brag, but I have to say that I think the first scene is going to be fucking amazing. We’re really thrilled with how it’s looking so far. So that was exciting, and we’ll continue working on that all day and into the evening today. That was pretty much my weekend. Wow, it’s Monday. How was yours? ** Tosh Berman, Nice that you’ve had encounters with Mr. Pollard. Hm, I wonder if he’s distantly related to Robert P. Probably not, but it’s a cool idea. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. When you said Warren whose last name need not be mentioned, I immediately thought you meant Warren Oates, ha ha. It’s like a rorschach question. ** Kyler, Hi, K. Cool that you saw him in that ‘Bye, Bye Birdie’ production. That seems have been his major launching pad. ** Rewritedept, Hey there! You are back! Very glad to see you, natch. Watching porn on a phone seems simultaneously totally weird and labor intensive and totally appropriate somehow. Weirder than filming sex with a phone at least. What’s the new job? Congrats on that. Was it good acid? I’ve been extremely busy in my woods’ neck editing our film mostly, but everything’s going very well. Obviously, I’m glad you’re swinging into a good mood. Glad to have you here again. ** Sypha, Believe me, I’m looking forward to the album. Given the state of my brain du jour, it would probably just sound like static at the moment. I’ve never heard of Max Carter. Maybe I know him by, er, face. Let me see if I can find him courtesy of google. Oh, yeah, I’ve seen him a bit in stuff. I’m not really up on porn so much these days. He seems interesting, I guess. Nice nose. I don’t know. I don’t know who Matthew Keating is either. Again, hold on while I find out. Oh, yeah, I recognize him. Helix boy. Yeah, he’s okay. He has that kind of cookie cutter Helix model look. I don’t feel strongly about him one way or the other. I like that he’s doing or did gender reassignment. That makes him seem interesting. In fact, I just found a couple of photos of the new him, or, rather, the new her. She looks good. ** _Black_Acrylic, That Print Collective thing sounds and looks really cool. I love those sorts of things. I just missed the big annual zine fair in Paris, which sucks. Next couple of days! At long last! That is exciting! Remember that I’m way into using a post to help alert the world to it if you want. ** Keaton, You’re already here! Whoa, that was fast. And you already saw the Sade show? Wow. Well, where are you? Hook me up with you, and let’s try to meet up and stuff. Welcome! ** Thomas Moronic, Hi, T. Yeah, his bit in ‘Scrooged’ is really haunting. You good? Good weekend? ** Steevee, Hi. Oh, I think the last time we broached the subject, I said I hadn’t seen the new Dumont, but I didn’t realize you meant that TV series. I thought maybe he’d made a new feature film in addition. I did see that. I thought it was fantastic! Really good news that you’re feeling a lot better! ** Schlix, Hi, Uli. Yeah, other than the missed day due to Zac’s illness, it was a very productive editing weekend, thanks. Um, one of the reasons we’re working our brains to a crisp on the editing is to try as hard as we can get to the film ready in time for the Berlin Film Festival. Of course they’ll have to like it enough to want it. Anyway, we’re planning to send two roughish cuts of two scenes in the film to our producers this weekend so they can show them to the Film Festival honchos. Then the festival guys will either fall in love and say they want it, or they’ll say they’re intrigued enough to hold a spot until they see the completed film, or they’ll say, No thanks. Well, yeah, how hard the funeral hit you makes a ton of sense now. That’s a lot of accumulation of death and grief, and it makes sense that the funeral formed the overall breaking point. Yeah, I’m so sorry for your losses, man. That Utrecht festival sounds great! I knew Stephen was off to do something, but I didn’t put two and two together. I just saw Iceage too, as you probably know, and got to hang out with Elias, who is such a great guy. Were Autechre great? I haven’t seen them do their thing live in such a long time. And Wire, yes, so great! They’re curating a big festival in Brighton right that I wish I was at, and it includes a performance of ‘Drill’ by a supergroup composed of Wire combined with Swans. Yikes. That Utrecht festival sounds so good. Really nice that you got to be there. ** Misanthrope, Hiiiiiiiiiiii. I saw something somewhere about people being irked that Moses in ‘Exodus’ is being played by a white guy, my pal Christian, but that’s about it. The film just looks like a bloated snooze fest like every Ridley Scott film of that past twenty or more years. I don’t know. That just sounds like the latest semi-arbitrary trigger of the outrage addiction running rampant on Facebook, etc. Yeah, it’s complex about the Bieber controversy and blah blah. I don’t know. I just don’t blame him for it. Whether that’s me being contrary or me being reasonable, I have no idea. Well, yeah, the media is an attention-starved psychotic mess. ** Right. I made another gig of new music that I’m listening to and liking. And you traditionalists out there might be pleased that there are a fair number of guitars being played and actual rock/pop-like songs in there, unusually. Or not. Not pleased especially, I mean. Who knows. I’m off to edit a film. See you tomorrow.