Mats Gustafsson

Round 2, Lee Jackson takes the lead

2008? Still haven't caught up; in fact I probably fell even further behind. 2007 was definitely a good year, with vets like San Francisco's Holy Mountain and North Carolinas's Three Lobed Recordings unleashing some of their most varied and unique slabs to date. And there were dozens of fine records on Not Not Fun, Important, Kranky, Digitalis, Soft Abuse, Locust, Drag City, Sublime Frequencies and on down the line that helped make '07 a little brighter. Speaking of Sublime Frequencies, must acknowledge the untimely passing of Charles Gocher due to complications from cancer in late February. Gocher played drums and sung some pretty messed up lounge songs for Sun City Girls, whose bassist Al Bishop co-owns and operates Sublime Frequencies. Needless to say, Sun City

I have to admit that it's pretty much impossible to keep up with everything great that is popping out of the CD-R underground these days. Given the amount of discs that come this way I am sure there's a whole bunch of great stuff passing by without me paying attention. Luckily, I didn't miss Elektronavn's Songs of Impermanence on the consistently great Ikuisuus label out of the land of lakes (Finland), as it's easily one of last year's most impressive discoveries. Elektronavn, AKA Magnus Olsen Majmon, is a Danish sound sculptor that shapes a claustrophobic, almost physical experience with haunting drones constructed from an arsenal of instruments such as clarinet, voice, guitar, organ, flute, gong, harp, field recordings and percussion. The music is pretty much impossible to lump into any particular genre but there is a strong folk vibe that runs through a lot of the music,

There are probably only a handful of bands and artists that I've been truly obsessed with, and one of them is unquestionably Lyttleton, New Zealand folk/noise/drone guitarist Roy Montgomery. I've ranked him as cult guitar hero number one ever since I first got acquainted with his music through the masterpiece Scenes From the South Island (Drunken Fish, 1995). As a matter of fact, I think bored everyone silly with rambling descriptions of how great that album is for a very long time. I occasionally forget why I like it so much, maybe because its textures are so deeply ingrained into my mind. Montgomery runs his meditative guitar explorations through a squadron of effect boxes, and on the other side we find a ghostly precise sonic equivalent to the striking landscape of this musically fertile country. Scenes From the South Island is the pastoral elegance of a hidden valley, the abandoned settlements of the harsh

KM up first

The practice of looking back on a previous year's cultural output seems to be almost a necessary ritual among those who pay attention to such things, but 2006 highlighted a whole range of developments that make such attempts harder and harder to countenance and conceptualize. In music especially, most of my serious-listening friends and acquaintances seem to agree that this past year was one real damn doozy, and even kind of dizzying in some regards. The sheer abundance of music (available via microlabels, self-releases, downloads in addition to the usual channels) made it nearly impossible for any individual to keep up with new developments in any but the smallest corner of the world of sound. Plus, I mean, the whole concept of time as a linear count-up and count-down thing is starting to get pretty fuzzy in our

This past April (21-23, to be precise), the fine city of Providence, RI, USA played host to the sixth Terrastock music festival (cleverly titled Terrastock 6), which gathered some 35 of the finest artists in the contemporary psychedelic rock / folk / avant / whatever scene for what surely rates as the underground musical event of the year. Luckily, several members of our Deep Water team were able to attend the festival, and with a little bit of editorial arm-twisting we managed to convince them to reflect on their T-stock experiences in a round-robin conversational fashion via the magic of email. So, without any further ado, your editor will get out of the way and turn the floor over to: Mats Gustafsson (MG), Lee Jackson (LJ), Nathaniel Rasmussen (NR), and Heraclitus Franklin (HF). Take it away lads!

HF: I think we definitely need to start by giving major kudos to the folks behind the festival, especially Phil McMullen (longtime visionary behind the Ptolemaic Terrascope publication and the Terrastock festivals) and Jeffrey Alexander (of the excellent group Black Forest/Black Sea, the Secret Eye label, and the AS220 club). It’s probably totally oversimplifying things to see it as Phil providing the inspiration and Jeffrey providing the organization, especially since they both chose the roster of artists that appeared over the weekend. In fact, I know that some folks wondered in advance if that might not lead to a somewhat schizoid fest—Phil and his mates over here, Jeffrey and his gang over there... But I think the scheduling of the groups helped mitigate against that, and one thing that really worked for me was the diversity of sounds on hand, as you could walk from a set of solo acoustic guitar instrumentals to a noise-rock maelstrom to catchy pop to avant experimentation without ever losing a sense of flow.

UK ensemble Sculptress evolved from the remnants of A Warm Palindrome, one of the most criminally overlooked bands on the planet. This outfit explored a new kind of music in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s through putting disparate sound elements together in a fragmented and hallucinatory but well-functioning aural body. With a skeleton containing equal amounts of heavy guitar spectacle, sampler effects, electronic manipulations, flowing drones and unexpectedly excellent folk instrumentation Phil Todd, Anthony Joinson, Daz Kirkland, Mikarla Jarvis and Andy Jarvis probably were a few years too early for the whole “free folk” movement. To some extent I’d say that Sculptress (including Joincey, Mikarla Jarvis, Melanie Delaney, Andy Jarvis) kicks off at the same mysterious place where their forefathers left off.

Sculptress is a band that didn’t completely win me over instantly, but as any seasoned fan of weird sounds can tell you, that’s usually a good thing. The growers tend to strike the deepest. Their strangely fractured folk/noise/drone-scapes have become a permanent fixture on my sonic horizon recently. It’s not a sound easily described or enjoyed, but it’s remarkable and utterly original at the same time. To see what keeps these highly imaginative, experimental UK musicians going we contacted Joincey, Mikarla, Andy and Mel for the chat that follows.