reviews

KM kicks things off

It seems like just last week we were putting the finishing touches on our "Best of 06" columns, yet here we are again trying to make sense of another four seasons of musical output. In retrospect, it seems like I didn't really come across a lot of new music that was breathtakingly new this year, but I did hear plenty of stuff that pleased my ears just fine. Like my friend Tony Dale (below), I'll call it a year of consolidation and expansion rather than revolutionary advance, but I don't think that's a bad thing at all; refining and extending are worthwhile steps that easily can be forgotten in the midst of today's constant mania for novelty.

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

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

Back for more, with Tony Dale (Lee follows below)

This is the time of year I like to call "nailing smoke to a wall time". With the proliferation of releases on CD and LP on major and minor labels, and the explosion of artifacts issued by the handmade CD-R underground, chances of actually hearing more than an infinitesimal sample of what's going on are slim, and add to that the increasing impact of download only releases and you've got an exercise on par with sorting out the shenanigans of quantum particles. Nonetheless, here is a selection of ten releases that stayed with me more than briefly - works that in effect became invisible co-travelers in the hurtling rail cart that was my passage through 2006.

As you may have noticed, we've been away from the Garden on an extended sabbatical over the last few months, and we emerge from our voyage fully charged and ready to shine more light on the precious substrate of the weird music underground. All in all 2006 has simply provided the mother load in terms of far-reaching, strange, unique, mind-bending, soul-cleansing sound. It's a great time to be alive if you have the ears for this stuff and the time to sift through it all. Enter your ever diligent gardener.

First off: a few words about the highly influential VHF Records. For over 10 years now owner Bill Kellum (who also played with Kranky prog-droners Doldrums) has served as a dependable bridge between the psychedelic underground and the avid sound art consumer. Certainly one of the most influential and dependable bands on the roster - it gave us Jack Rose for Chrisssakes! - is Pelt, the improvised brainchild of Patrick Best, Rose, Mike Gangloff and Mikel Dimmick. The story of how Pelt went from a primitive anti rock unit to one of the most fluid cosmic noise raga bands on the planet probably deserves a book, but in the meantime Skullfuck / Bestio Tergum Degero, a recording of a recent live set captured in NYC at the Knitting Factory, not only shows how far these lads have come compositionally, but also just how much their musicianship has improved, from Rose's fluid open-tuned fingerpicking to the other players' command of the deep drone (comprised of harmonium, srutis, fiddle, singing bowls, gongs, portacello and flute). It can all be glimpsed magnificently on their epic, mind-blowing rendition of Rose's "Calais to Dover." Perhaps even more fascinating are the brooding gongs and percussive drones of the three part title track, which grows from a cold whisper to a cloud-breaking sunburst before it's through.

Y'know, it's kinda surprising that a publication located as far off the main highways as Deep Water Acres still receives a significant amount of music sent our way for possible review. We're mighty grateful for it though, yes we are. There's just such an explosion in creative independent music-making nowadays, and thanks to technological advances so much more of it is available/findable than ever before, that it can be a real bear to keep up with it all. We do try to stay on top of things, but making time even for the music we've spent our hard-earned money on (or traded a chicken for, or whatever) can be a big enough challenge, let alone sorting through all the surprises that arrive in the mail. Now, it's only fair to note that some of those items don't necessarily fit within our particular purview, though we're still thankful for the chance to hear ‘em. But at least a few do hit us right where we live (here, that would be), and so we'd like to take this opportunity to spill a few words in their honor.

After some delay we’re back in full force here at the compound: watering the greens, raking the dirt and finding fresh digs, including a few goodies nabbed on our recent Terrastock voyage. First off, let me just say we love vinyl. We love the warm clicks and pops that come with giving an old (or new) 33 (or 45 or 78) LP a spin. We even love that there are entire musical genres devoted simply to playing records, but mostly we just love the feel of vinyl’s smooth surface, the overt bulkiness of its package and the eye-popping dimensions of its artwork. We also love that records take up too much space and have to be flipped over halfway through playing. It’s the ritual.

In the annals of recording, an interesting development is the lathe-cut record, a thin polycarbonate disc that looks and sounds (almost) like a real record and plays on normal turntables. The rationale behind the lathe-cut apparently has something to do with cost effectiveness. Homemade in New Zealand by Peter King, it might seem unlikely that shipping to and from NZ for anything could ever be considered cost effective, but that doesn’t stop artists of every stripe from giving it a whirl. A quick glance at Dan Vallor’s Lathe Cut Universe reveals hundreds of folks from all over the globe that have gotten in on the action, and if you own a lathe-cut, then you have too. Lathes are much thinner and their aural capacity is diminished compared to normal records, so a piece of music coming from a lathe has a ghostly, tinny quality. This quality is perfect for Steven R. Smith’s recordings under the name Hala Strana. His compositions—combining 4/8-track recordings of live instruments with minidisk and boombox overdubs—conjure a dream symphony that defies easy categorization on the 7” lathe, White Sleep (Soft Abuse). Beset with wheezing ambient tones and degraded tape noise, these pieces (including a Dog Faced Hermans cover!) sound positively ancient and fall somewhere between Eastern European traditional folk, the homemade primitive works of Harry Partch and the early noise drone of Velvet Underground. Limited to 60.