Chasing Mailboxes announces the 14th annual Coffeeneuring Challenge. Last year I failed ignominiously after disappearing off to Le Guess Who with only five rides in the bag, and coming home too hungover to contemplate getting on the bike to finish it off. This year I will brook no failure.
Dean Roberts died a few months ago, far too young. He never seemed to receive the attention that his music deserved, despite releases on labels as storied as Mille Plateaux, Kranky, and Erstwhile. He probably tired of the comparisons with Mark Hollis and Talk Talk, but I can think of few artists who could bear the comparison so well, whose music matched that taut-nerved tension and haunted beauty.
Philip Sherburne’s comprehensive retrospective at Futurism Restated has disappeared behind the paywall, but Tone Glow and the Wire have reposted old interviews.
A highly entertaining interview with Kramer, stuffed with scurrilous detail on his time with Gong and the Butthole Surfers. Rick Moody (a name that hasn’t crossed my mind in two decades–plus) asks the questions. Hat tip to Rory for this one.
While we’re on the subject of the Butthole Surfers, Tone Glow offers up an equally exhaustive conversation with their guitarist, Paul Leary.
Over at Tone Glow, a typically in-depth interview with David Lance Callahan, formerly of the Wolfhounds and Moonshake. As Callahan comments, Moonshake were a schizophrenic band, the sneering edge of his songs rubbing up awkwardly against the breathy sensuality of Margaret Fiedler’s. For me, Moonshake were always outshone by the brilliance of her subsequent work with Laika, but listening to the songs laced through the interview reminded me that even if Moonshake weren’t the easiest band to listen to, they were consistently inventive, never dull. Stacks of interesting detail in the interview, the remastered Eva Luna went straight to the top of my shopping list.
Burning Ambulance runs the ruler over Sonic Youth’s first decade. It can hardly be controversial to suggest that their early work is far and away Sonic Youth’s best, a dislocating, psychedelic collision of noise, dissonance and rock. The further they travelled from their roots in no wave and Glenn Branca–esque drang, the more musicianly they became, the less individual they sounded, until the last reminders of their former abrasiveness and darkness were Kim Gordon’s vocals. The decision to hive off their experimental and improvisatory tendencies into the SYR series probably did much to keep Geffen on side, but surrendered the essential tension between pop and avant-garde that fired their eighties work. You could argue that the arrival of Steve Shelley was as much a curse as a blessing: without his power and fluidity, Sonic Youth could never have rocked like they did on Sister and Daydream Nation, but it’s hard to imagine they would have gone on to become so mature and assimilable with Bob Bert still on drums. In 1990, Sonic Youth were my favourite band by a country mile; does anyone say that about the Sonic Youth of ten or twenty years later?
2023 already seems like a long time ago, but I suppose if the Quietus can publish their list a month before the end of the year, I can publish mine a month after. In any case, I’m so laughably out of touch these days that it would be the height of presumption to call these albums the best of 2023. Rather, these are the ten albums (not necessarily released in 2023) that represent best what I was listening to last year.
If I were to single one out, it would be the Mabe Fratti album, which has some truly breathtaking moments that give it the edge over Vidrio, the debut album from her new project, Titanic. But if I hadn’t come late to Se Ve Desde Aquí, Vidrio would be in the list instead.
Likewise, Afternoon X nudges the Holy Tongue album, Deliverance and Spiritual Warfare off the list, both sharing the rhythm section of Valentina Magaletti and Susumu Mukai. Having seen Magaletti drumming with Holy Tongue and Raime last year, I had concluded that she’s more about precision than swing, and it’s interesting to hear her laying down a muscular boom-bap on the title track of the Vanishing Twin album, even if the effect is more vintage DJ Shadow than James Brown.
The Radian album barely made a ripple as it slipped into the world — the only review I saw was on Brainwashed — but it’s a tense, vivid collection of dubbed, glitched post-rock. Maybe there were obvious points of comparison when they started out back in 2000 but at this point they’re in a league of their own.
Sad to hear of the unexpected death of Neil Kulkarni, one of the handful of Melody Maker journalists whose name and style were unforgettable. He was, it turns out, exactly the same age as I am, but I could only aspire to a fraction of the verve and confidence of his early work in the MM.
I lost sight of him when MM folded so his reappearance in the early days of the Quietus came as a bolt from the blue, the more so because it heralded his A New Nineties series, still the most memorable articles I’ve read on that site. At a time when I was groaning from the surfeit of post-punk reissues, A New Nineties came as a salutary reminder of the febrile genius of the music I grew up listening to: the shattered-glass post-rock of Disco Inferno, the austere reductions of Main, the bruised, sombre moods of Codeine and Come.
More recently, it was pleasure to see his byline appearing frequently in the Wire, even if he was usually touting something I wouldn’t have listened to in a blue fit. Farewell Neil, you will be missed.
A fascinating, in depth report on the DIY music scene in Cork, by Mariana Timoney. It’s hard to imagine that there’ll be many more like this on Bandcamp Daily, since Songtradr sacked nearly all the staff writers immediately after acquiring Bandcamp, but credit where credit is due—few other sites would have commissioned it in the first place.
The Quietus were unusually restrained this year, letting three whole days of December pass before publishing their Albums of the 2023 list. It’s as dementedly eclectic and esoteric as ever—I doubt I’ve even heard of two-thirds of the albums listed, much less listened to them.
Mammoth interview with Autechre in advance of their Vicar Street gig tomorrow night. I’m not usually gone on interviews that just present the unedited transcript of the conversation, but it seems appropriate here, given the multi-hour scale of some Autechre releases. There’s something of the same sense of wandering aimlessly in their world and unexpectedly happening on something really interesting.
If you’d asked me thirty years ago which bands of the day were likely to go down the Grateful Dead route of massive documentation of their live work, I might have guessed Sonic Youth, but Autechre wouldn’t have been anywhere on my radar. Nor Fugazi, for that matter.
Chasing Mailboxes lays down the law for the Coffeneuring Challenge 2023. The challenge is straightforward (ride your bike and drink coffee seven times in seven weeks) but in keeping with the grand tradition of randonneuring established by Audax Club Parisien, there is an elaborate set of rules, some honoured more in the breach than the observance.
Burning Ambulance runs down the oeuvre of Hedvig Mollestad. I only know Black Stabat Mater (and fully endorse Phil’s praise) but this video of Ekhidna covering “Red” convinces me that I need to dig deeper.
Tone Glow top their hefty A.R. Kane interview with an even chunkier one with Hal Hartley. Last year I rewatched the video shop classics of my youth — The Unbelievable Truth, Trust, Simple Men, and Amateur — and they still hold up for me. Judging from the interview, I have a lot of catching up to do.
“When you grow up in the East End of London in the 1970s, you wanna believe in evolution, I’m telling you. You don’t wanna believe that this is the end game.”
I’ve listened to the Up Home! EP a few times in recent weeks, A.R. Kane on my mind since the review of the box set in the Wire. Filleted from the Complete Singles Collection, the EP sounds more striking than ever, almost incomprehensibly accomplished for a band only on their third single, and a quantum leap on from their debut, “When You’re Sad”. The lacerating distortion, the cavernous dub spaciousness, the rough sutures between the musical ideas left defiantly exposed…even in the febrile milieu of early UK post-rock, there weren’t many bands who sounded so individual, so unexpected. Maybe My Bloody Valentine (the jagged stop-start noise of Isn’t Anything more than the amniotic wash of Loveless) or Disco Inferno. It surprises me that several times in the interview Rudy mentions Slowdive, who I always thought of as being irremediably obvious and plodding, but perhaps I underrate them.
Aquarium Drunkard explores guitar/drum duos, talking to Steve Gunn, Jim White, and Rick Brown of 75 Dollar Bill (who played two transcendental sets at the Workman’s Cellar last Saturday).
Jazz will, I suspect, ever remain an unknown continent for me. I bought my first jazz album, one of those low-rent I Love Jazz compilations, when I was too young to drink. I’ve picked away at the music over the thirty-five years since but my knowledge remains only fingernail deep. In the end, I just don’t find the head-solo-chorus jams that are the meat-and-potatoes of jazz that compelling. I struggle to discern the nuances of individual style — I could number the players (mostly pianists) that I can reliably recognise on the fingers of one hand. My favourite recordings run to more developed arrangements, or collective improvisation (better yet, both at the same time…Charles Mingus often delivers here).
Conference of the Birds is a heavyweight session, but of the four players, I’m familiar only with Dave Holland, from his brief tenure with Miles Davis. I’ve never heard a note by Sam Rivers (despite his even briefer tenure with Miles), nor Anthony Braxton, though both are major figures in the avant-garde. Barry Altschul is no more than a name. The generally reliable Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings gives it Core Collection status, rating it a “quiet masterpiece”. That the last edition of the Guide came out in 2008 gives a fair idea of how long I’ve been intending to listen to this album.
Despite the free-playing credentials of the four musicians, Conference of the Birds charges out of the gate with “Four Winds”, a track that sounds almost nostalgic for the bebop era, Altschul laying down a high-tempo cymbal pulse while the horns chase each other. The solos stray a bit too far into goose-throttling territory to have been tolerated at Minton’s but the spirit is there. Three of the six tracks follow that template. Two take a more conversational approach, forgoing steady drum rhythm and long horn lines to open up a space into which the four musicians interject brief phrases. The second and shorter of these, “Now Here (Nowhere)” gradually builds to a perfectly balanced, suspended shimmer. Were it not for the title track, it would be the highlight of the album.
But “Conference of the Birds” is a thing apart. It opens with a meditative bass solo from Holland, before he strums a few chords (sounding implausibly like a Nirvana riff) to announce the main theme. As he picks out the melody, flute and saxophone twine around each other, rising into the air. As the theme repeats, Altschul moves from hand percussion to cymbals to marimba. Inspired, apparently, by the sounds of the dawn chorus outside Holland’s London flat, the melody seems to reach centuries back in time. It’s like little else I’ve heard in jazz — maybe Coltrane’s version of “Greensleeves” from Africa/Brass is a second cousin — and I wonder if Holland had perhaps been listening to some of the jazz-adjacent UK folk bands like Pentangle? Either way, it’s a limpid, spellbinding piece of music that immediately reminds you that this is, after all, an ECM album.
This post is the second in an occasional series, in which I’m working through the span of life, picking an album (and, preferably, artist) new to me for each year of my life. Previous posts.
Jazz will, I suspect, ever remain an unknown continent for me. I bought my first jazz album, one of those low-rent I Love Jazz compilations, when I was too young to drink. I’ve picked away at the music over the thirty-five years since but my knowledge remains only fingernail deep. In the end, I just don’t find the head-solo-chorus jams that are the meat-and-potatoes of jazz that compelling. I struggle to discern the nuances of individual style — I could number the players (mostly pianists) that I can reliably recognise on the fingers of one hand. My favourite recordings run to more developed arrangements, or collective improvisation (better yet, both at the same time…Charles Mingus often delivers here).