Silver Apples Of The Moon - Laika

UK POST-ROCK TOP 14: PART 4

Fuck I loved this record when it came out in 1994. I was already into UK post-rock shit and just starting to get into jungle. I saw this as a terrific amalgam of the two. Maybe we didn't really need it but it was ticking all my aesthetic boxes at the time. I'd been big on Margaret Fiedler's previous band Moonshake since they had released the Second Hand Clothes EP in 1992 followed by the classic Eva Luna LP that same year. Big Good Angel from 1993 was the last Moonshake record to feature Fiedler and was a classic for her to go out on. I must admit I never followed them after she left. The Laika project had me very excited though. Along for the ride were ex-Moonshake bass player John Frenett and producer Guy Fixsen. Chuck in Lou Ciccotelli on percussion, My Bloody Valentine's Colm O'Ciosoig as a digital editor and even Louise Elliot from Australia's great Laughing Clowns on the sax & flute. How could you go wrong? You couldn't, Laika didn't!

Silver Apples Of The Moon kicks off with Sugar Daddy and you can feel the city streets with it's sampled noise, rain and trains. Then a sultry propulsive beat kicks in while classic 90s bleeps drift into the mix as Fixsen and Fiedler sing together. Fixsen, who had produced Moonshake, takes on a more prominent role here. As well as co-engineering, he co-writes every tune with Fiedler, sings, plays synth and other instruments including vibes, marimba, melodica, the sampler and even guitar. Laika were about unison whereas Moonshake had been about tension. Fiedler mirrors Fixsen (or is it the other way around?) taking on all the same roles in the band ie. engineering, sampling, playing all the same instruments etc. Next is The Marimba Song which has a trippy, tropical and Can-esque vibe. This tune introduced the band to the world as two versions of it appeared on their debut recording, the Antenna EP. Let Me Sleep has frenetic beats, unbelievable bass, spiralling layers of free sax/flute and a general air of cluttered urban space. Coming Down Glass is an ultra spaced out funky wind-up toy hip hop jam with flute squiggles. The whole thing sounds like it was recorded backwards.

If You Miss starts out oppressive before a vibraphone appears to brighten things up but then it flitters back to darker terrain and continues to fluctuate between the parallel universes of isolationism and blissed out ambience for the rest of the track. In the meantime the hypnotic beat maintains an amazing flow motion. 44 Robbers has Margaret rapping kinda awkwardly like Debbie Harry, taut guitar lines that sometimes veer off into noise, Pacific(state) Island soundz and an incredibly tight rhythm like The JBs. Red River could be a Moonshake tune with it's squalling sax, tense noisy guitar shapes, claustrophobic minimal bass and tumbling out of control beats. Honey and Heat is a mesmerising off kilter urban dub tune with see-sawing samples. The samples here are meticulously crafted and create an entirely unique peculiarity. Expansive rolling rhythms, loopy flutes, eerie samples, choppy guitars and Guy's whispered vocals all contribute to the strange twilight of Thomas. The delightfully jazzy, almost surf instrumental Spider Happy Hour brings proceedings to a close.

Like a lot of UK post-rock's lost generation a duality was at play on this album ie. alongside the urban intensity was also a swirling intergalactic vibe. This often gave the music a disconcerting feel which made you want to come back for more so you could experience the discombobulation again and again. On their next LP, Sound Of Sattelites, Laika would rocket off into the stars completely, leaving the squalor behind them in a vapour trail haze. Silver Apples Of The Moon is a time capsule of intersecting mid 90s musical zones. A real curio. 

Eva Luna - Moonshake

UK POST ROCK TOP 14: PART 3

Moonshake have got to be one of the oddest bands ever. Not in a 'hey look at me, I'm freaky!' way though. They were kind of really normal which gave them an unsettling edge. You could see yourself in these guys and perhaps what you saw wasn't quite right. You felt like the daily grind of urban life had taken a toll on these people. A duality was at play here with two singer/songwriters tag teaming at opposite ends of the rock spectrum. Dave Callahan was kind of angry and on a vociferous rant while Margaret Fiedler was muttering to herself disturbingly. While Callahan and Fiedler got all the notoriety, this band wouldn't have been half as good without the most underrated rhythm section in rock history. John Frenett was on bass and his style was a marvellous intersection between dub and funk. Possibly the most awe inspiring element of the group though was the drumming/percussion of Miguel Moreland. It is hard to ascertain though how much of this dizzying percussive display is him or sequencing/sampling. I couldn't really give a shit because whatever it is, it's fucking great! Moreland made this band worthy of being named after a classic Can tune. Has drumming on an LP ever captured so much of the percussive spectrum? Moreland's playing can be really fucking heavy but he's also very nimble and can be light as a feather. The percussion here is all that and everything in between. Moonshake created this music which was an incredibly idiosyncratic expression of who, what and where they were at the time. Not only that, this must have been what they saw as a possible future pop template. It was all about strange blends and weird paradoxical amalgams. Moonshake were shouting out against the world and wanting to hide from it at the same time. They had a No Wave-esque negation happening and yet they embraced current state of the (pop)art technology. Reverence for music's past and musicianship was part of the equation too. Moonshake could only ever sound like Moonshake. Imitating this motley crew would be fucking impossible.

Ultra funky deep bass, groovy congas, surreal guitar squalls, flute, layer upon layer of sampled noise, taught guitar lines, saxophone squiggles along with Callahan's classic post-punk snarl are all jumbled into this kitchen sink mix and that's just on the first tune Wanderlust. Disconcerting atmospheres, black holes of dissonance, guitars bent way out of shape and Fiedler's cloying yet creepy vocals battle it out for a piece of centre stage action on Tar Baby. The title of Bleach & Salt Water says it all as this track is an ambient underwater urban dub whiteout. The beat here is whirling through a vortex to a startling degree. Moreland makes 3 minutes 40 seem like an eternity and I reckon I could definitely go another 20 or 45 minutes of this incredible groove. Little Thing meanwhile is rhythmic psychedelia, that's spaced out to the max. Only Moonshake could make a tune so ambient yet so tense. City Poison is like a history lesson in underground guitar noise. This is like a tribute to all the Posts ie. Post-Psych (cf.Krautrock), Post-Punk, Post Hardcore and Post-MBV. The beauty of this tune though is that it only really sounds like Moonshake. How the fuck did they do that? Spaceship Earth's clangorous guitars fly into an intense slide frenzy, then keep infinitely spiralling. Jesus, even Callahan gets melodic here! Beautiful Pigeon finds Moonshake at their most pop. Massive drums tumble wildly amongst the rest of the noise, while the bass stalks threateningly trying to hold things down as Margaret's eccentric whispers reach melodic levels as well. It was the grunge era so this could have easily been a hit but.......(?). They save the best till last, Mugshot Heroine closes this classic LP on a triumphant note. Horns go haywire, the rhythms get incredibly funky, discordant horror soundtrack strings jolt you out of your seat, ghost(town)like trumpets appear and all hell breaks loose.

Moonshake arrived at a sound (jam packed layers of samples that are piled up to bursting point that still feels like a mine field listening to it today) that was nearly pop. When you had a closer look at its dense layers of detail though it was all, well... quite bizarre. It may seem like an almighty chaotic mess but this LP is meticulously crafted down to every last microscopic sound. Producer/engineer Guy Fixsen is probably to be thanked for that. I've listened to this record hundreds of times and trying to write about it has got to be one of the hardest tasks I've ever set myself. Whatever I write will never do Eva Luna justice. You never know what's going to pop up or which turn it's about to take. This is a trip where the turbulence becomes so disorientating it sort of becomes beautiful (sort of....not really....I dunno....does it?).

Stupendous. 

Re-Entry - Techno Animal

UK POST-ROCK TOP 14: PART 2

This is a fucking out and out (there) classic of absolute epic proportions. Jesus, was there ever a band name and album title more fitting? Never has a band sounded so primordial, cyberdelic and interstellar at the same time. What was happening sonically here was a journey through the stars that eventually reaches the atmosphere and crashes back to earth. This was infinite yet restricted all at once. Re-Entry was a hell of an artistic feat. Here we had Fourth World music taken beyond the stars and its limits. Techno Animal didn't just reference Jon Hassell (like MBV) they got him to play on two of the album's finest tracks. Real time playing was at a bare minimum here with only Hassell's trumpet and a couple of other instruments used. Then Justin Broadrick and Kevin Martin abused those source sounds by pummelling them into shapes barely resembling their origins. The rest of the soundz come from samples that are so deformed there is no way of telling where they came from. Techno Animal get so lost in their machines that it feels like a miracle that they ever make it back out of them.

Today this double cd is still soo irresistible I can barely believe my ears. Re-Entry starts out astronomical and ends up depleted. While on paper it may seem like an absurd and potentially clunky smorgasbord of aural debris, somehow it comes out sounding fucking amazing. It's like they've stolen the soundtrack from a parallel universe. Jazz funk permutations, gonzoid sirens, buckled noise, malignant trumpets, bent hip hop, acid squelches, unsettling frequencies, out of shape drones and nightmarish mutant gamelan are all put through a demented cyber dub echo chamber. Phew...and that's just the first cd. Then on the second cd the beats slow down and dissipate into the polluted air of this vast desolate terrain. Tainted bells appear and a peculiar shape shifting tense ambience takes over. This is where dubbed out contaminated drone-ology reached perfection that remains unrivalled 20 years later. This is undoubtedly a masterpiece and quite possibly the best album of the 90s. 

Evanescence - Scorn

UK POST-ROCK TOP 14: PART 1

Someone once niftily described Evanescence as Metal Box meets Bernard Hermann. That's way too neat a summation of the panoply of sonic experiences contained within this cd though. Evanescence was an incredible solitary sonic document of what musicians were attempting within these musical spheres at the time. Sure there is deep dub bass and spooky horror motifs but a whole lot more was going on here. While other UK Post-Rock groops like Stereolab, Pram and Laika were influenced by the great fluid Krautrock beats of Neu and Can, Scorn's beats were informed by hip hop. Along with darker ambient vibes they had traces of metal (Mick Harris & Nick Bullen were ex-members of the ferocious and funny metal band Napalm Death), goth, post punk, industrial, techno and drone-ology. The grooves are infectious and even sometimes mellifluous. Getting lost amongst these deep and heavy riddims is all part of the attraction of Evanescence. I recall being rather confounded upon first hearing this LP due to its musical juxtapositions and I guess, what I saw as contradictions, but that didn't last long as I kept coming back for more. The occasional vestige of a riff even drifts in now and then. Dread was a major part of original 70s dub reggae and on this recording Scorn certainly captured a unique British gloom. A doomed feel permeates the entire record. Unlike other ambient dub acts of the time this was not good time E-head chill out music. It had mysterious lulls into nightmarish worlds containing all the colours of the dark. Scorn at this stage were like a lethargic cousin to UK's darkside hardcore scene and a precursor to future genres like dub-step and hauntology. On Dreamspace Scorn even give us a bit of bass drum girth gabba/gloomcore style, which is fucking wicked. Exodus, one of the stand out tracks, was like a forlorn My Bloody Valentine with an ominous didgeridoo instead of an ecstatic flute. The lost generation of original UK post-rock were trying to push things forward and this LP stands as a testament to that vision to this day. It was quite an achievement and I kinda can't understand why a hundred groups didn't take up this as a blueprint but I guess the future was still up for grabs at the time and bands were forging their own identities, not wanting to be mere Scorn acolytes. The copyists and clones were gathering together over near or in the charts under the banner of New Wave of New Wave and Brit-Pop, nowhere near these outer regions.

Scorn's Evanescence is magic from the margins.

UK Post Rock - The Lost Generation

In keeping with my recent recent posts about Main, Ice & Techno Animal I thought I'd go into a bit more detail on UK's Lost Generation of Post-Rock. Good ole Professor Reynolds was writing about these groups in the pages of Melody Maker from at least 1991 onwards. There's was an article in the 91 Christmas issue of Melody Maker with no byline that I assume was penned by Simon. It documented the first stirrings of a new (non)scene that included a bunch of disparate musical units committed to taking their music to the limits well away from the commercial alternative business of the time. Cranes were the hot topic with their 91 classic Wings Of Joy but they weren't what was soon to be called post-rock. They were a one off post-goth/industrial band with, and I quote 'a lush Scott Walker/Euro cabaret grandeur.' Anyway AR Kane's (forefathers of UK post-rock) label H.ark get a mention with their roster containing Papa Sprain & Butterfly Child. Kevin Martin's label Pathological rate a mention too with his own great band Techno Animal plus Oxbow (whatever happened to them?). Avant Yanks Cop Shoot Cop and Twin Infinitives era Royal Trux get thrown in the mix as well. But it was future post-rock icons Disco Inferno, Bark Psychosis and Main who were the most celebrated/anticipated in this article as some kind of future saviours of what was still being called Avant-Rock. Two years later in 1993 the lost generation were still dubbed as Avant-Rock along with the speculative term Cyborg-Rock, which never really gained any traction. I guess weird non UK bands like Young Gods and The Boredoms would have fitted this category with relative ease. In the UK though more and more groups like Insides, EAR, Moonshake Scorn, Ice, Seefeel were displaying un-rock tendencies in a beyond rock context so this wasn't a classification that was to properly fit. Avant-Rock still implied that the genre was still rock'n'roll at its core despite innovations and modern tendencies. While half of what ended up being called Post-Rock still rocked in some mutant form, the other half was not so rockin. Hence the term Post-Rock making perfect sense.

The thing is this music was already under my skin so by the time Simon Reynolds came up with the term Post-Rock for these bands in an article for Wire magazine's May 1994 issue (reprinted in Bring The Noise pages 186-193) it kind of didn't really matter. I've never really thought about it before but I guess it was named in hindsight as the scene had been going for 3 or 4 years already. As is usually the case with these things a demise was on the way with only a few classics of the genre to be released after 1994. Post-Rock now also included the likes of O'rang, Laika, Flying Saucer Attack, Pram & Movietone. Parallels were being drawn to other artists on the outer musical limits like Paul Schutze, Jim O'Rourke, Thomas Koner, Aphex Twin, Eddie Prevost, Zoviet France etc. In an article in Melody Maker in July 1994 past artists were retroactively inducted into a post-rock hall of fame lineage from The Velvet Underground to Krautrock legends Neu, Faust & Cluster to Brian Eno to Post-Punk groups like PIL, Cabs and The Pop Group to 80s UK noise/bliss rockers from JAMC, MBV, Spaceman 3, Loop, The Cocteau Twins, AR Kane etc.

Post-Rock was all about samplers, drum machines, studios, effects, sequencers, jettisoning the guitar as a riff apparatus and integrating the techniques of dub, 70s Miles Davis, Can, hip-hop, ambient & techno into rock. Guitars were still sometimes used but in more of an unfamiliar and un-rock way. Mixing real time instrument playing with sampling was the raison d'etre for some which gave the recordings a really strange edge. Others opted for a wholly synthetic approach. This bunch of groups rarely sounded like one another, they were on the outside, went out into these zones alone and wore that status like a badge. Some were beat scientists, while others severed beats altogether and space was the place. Anyway that doesn't really sound like Explosions In The Sky does it? This UK shit was the shit! This was the sound of my bedroom in the early 90s while your more accessable rock/pop stuff (Shoegazers, Breeders, Pavement, Mazzy Star, Portishead etc.) from the era made it into the lounge rooms of the share houses I lived in at the time, Post-Rock was not embraced by all and remained in the ghetto of my bedroom (along with strange septic tanks like Slint, Trumans Water, Thinking Fellers Union 282 et al.). This parallelled how Post-Rock was pretty marginalised in the outside world too apart from Stereolab who were quite the cult band.....I suppose.

I think a top 14 of the original UK Post-Rock is in order. This is when the term made sense, meant something and the music was bloody great.

THE TOP 14
Hydra-Calm (compilation) - Main [1992]
Eva Luna - Moonshake [1992]
May - Papa Sprain [1992]
Transient Random Noise Bursts With Announcements - Stereolab [1993]
Iron Lung - Pram [1993]
Under The Skin - Ice [1993]
Quique - Seefeel [1994]
Hex - Bark Psychosis [1994]
Evanescence - Scorn [1994]
DI GO POP - Disco Inferno [1994]
Silver Apples of The Moon - Laika [1994]
Herd Of Instinct - O'rang [1994]
Further - Flying Saucer Attack [1995]
Re-Entry - Techno Animal [1995]

*The top 14 has just one record per artist.
These are in chronological order.
This list is by no means comprehensive.
Each of the top 14 will be featured in a future blog post.

**Stereolab, Flying Saucer Attack & Third Eye Foundation all released gems after 1995. I must admit I didn't really follow the next wave of  Post-Rock groups from the UK. I'm actually struggling to come up with any of their names beyond the Flying Saucer Attack affiliates Piano Magic, Crescent and Amp.

Moritz Von Oswald Trio - Sounding Lines

WHAT'S ON THE HI-FI PART 42

MORITZ VON OSWALD TRIO - Sounding Lines
Always avoided Moritz Von Oswald Trio as I read somewhere that they were like a jazz trio. For some reason the words 'Jazz Trio' make me feel a little bit sick which is funny because I'm not averse to a bit of jazz. I guess jazz trio brings to mind trad sax, scatting, drum solos etc. Not the ultra minimal and restrained voyages into rhythm and occasional faint bits of dissonance that make up Sounding lines. I mean I haven't listened to jazz in a long time (apart from 70s Miles Davis) but I was once really into John Coltrane, Pharaoh Sanders, Don Cherry and John's Mrs Alice. MVO Trio only really get about as jazzy as Can ever did. Speaking of Can there is quite a Can-esque feel to many of these trax. Some of Sounding Lines evokes the less furious side of 70s era Miles. The best parts though are when Moritz conjures his own Basic Channel vibes with 90s German stylee dub influenced techno like on the fabulous epic opening tune Sounding Line 1. Sounding Line 4 is classic ambient dub-tech that could have come straight off BCD except it has real drums. Even Hauntology is invoked on Sounding Line 5 (Spectre) with it's dreamy library electronics and slight faux jazz soundz, I didn't even know what it was called when those thoughts crossed my mind until I looked at the track listing and thought 'uh huh! I'm onto something there.' After a bit of library-jazz-funk, a drum machine appears along with some gaseous squelches on Sounding Line 7 and causes a ripple of nostalgia that makes you wanna get out those old Basic Channel tunes. This is an incredibly enjoyable microbic beat odyssey, quite the little surprise then that I'm really glad I checked it out. I didn't think it was gonna be anywhere near as good as it is. I might even go back and check out their other albums.

*Conjures, evokes and invoked all in the same bloody paragraph! Jesus Christ! What's with that?

ROME - Rome
So while we're feeling 90s zones, here's one I gave a spin recently after finding all those 90s German cds due to the Mego reissue of General Magic & Pita's Fridge Trax Plus. Anyway Rome aren't German but American and this came out on Thrill Jockey. During that rummage I came across other er...post-rock from America such as Cul-De-Sac, Directions In Music, Ui, Jessamine, Labradford, Tortoise, Bowery Electric & Sabalon Glitz. This is the only one to get any airtime so far (can't bring myself to listen to one song wonders Tortoise) and it complements the MVO Trio record perfectly as Rome were also a trio and the most dub influenced US post-rock group. This 1996 release is the only Rome album who came and went in a flash. I have no idea what happened to them after this. Their self-titled cd is quite the underrated little gem though. This is something along the lines of dub applied to US underground noise, making it a one off artifact. The music here is closer to Cabaret Voltaire and PIL's post-punk dub gloom than say US post-rock or German dub-techno though. Even that's not really a fair comparison as Rome were really fucking original and unique. I once read an article on Kevin Martin's dub noise band Ice in Lime Lizard in the early 90s and Rome were more along the lines of what I thought Ice were going to sound like. I can't believe how well this shadowy experimental dub un-rock stands up today. This LP is a terrific ghostly haze. Rome is forgotten but should perhaps be unforgotten. Now I'm wondering if they had any other releases worth checking out...I'm sure they had a 12" that never crossed my path plus a tune on Macro Dub Infection 2, otherwise I think that was it. At least they didn't hang around too long and get boring.

*It turns out Rome is unforgotten as this album was posted on the I Hate The 90s blog a few hours ago which I came across after writing this post while searching for other Rome material. The blog confirms there was just another 12" called Beware The Soul Snatchers where Rome were reduced to a duo plus they had a tune on the compilation In Memoriam Gilles Delueze on Mille Plateaux from 1996, which I never tracked down despite it being highly regarded amongst Wire writers at the time. I would suggest downloading Rome's Rome LP from i-tunes though where it's available but the elusive 12" isn't. Perhaps that shall remain a mystery to me till my dying day.

**Ice: I ended up really loving them. Under The Skin (1993) is one of my favourite records from the 90s and Kevin Martin's duo with Justin K Broadrick, Techno Animal, had a really amazing double cd Re-Entry from 1995.

***Don't get me wrong DJed the one classic song from Tortoise is a top tune. Its just that nothing else they did was ever as good. I mean did we need a lounge version of Slint's Spiderland that was the first Tortoise LP? Millions.... was DJed with a bit of math-rock and 90s electronica filler  chucked in. Then, I dunno, wasn't TNT a muzak version of Steve Reich's Music For 18 Musicians? John McEntire from Tortoise did an incredible remix of Stereolab's Les Yper Yper Sound though, which featured on the choice 1996 Virgin compilation Monsters, Robots & Bugmen.

The mysterious Rome 12" eludes me.

Dolphin Post-Rock

Totally loved this track by Bark Psychosis back in 92, still got the cd single. The Manman EP is a classic. Anyway there's a dolphin-esque sound in amongst the rest of their sumptuous sounds on this tune. Actually I remember this being way more dolphiny than it is. God I haven't listened to this in 20 years I reckon. You think Godspeed You Black Emperor had a few Bark psychosis records along with their Swans ones? I have a feeling that Bark Psychosis had another track that was a bit dolphiny but that would involve me having to go find the other cds, finding this one was hard enough. I know youtube! but hey that's lazy and I don't mind a bit of a rummage.  

Still in the 90s

I can't seem to escape the 90s anymore. A couple of weeks ago I saw a terrific band  Chinese Handcuffs who had me flashing back to slowcore into post-rock Godspeed stylee. Then there is this bar I sometimes frequent and I swear the last 4 or 5 times I've dropped in they have been playing Afghan Wigs. Then there is hip hop which I hadn't listened to willingly for something like 15 years but after going back to Hardcore/Jungle etc. it made perfect sense to check out some of those gems from the 90s and even further back. You know before it all went a bit shit. I'm even gonna put some old DJ Shadow onto my I-Pod in a minute. I never thought I'd listen to those records ever again but listening to Wagon Christ the other day put me mind of this stuff. I was really diggin Throbbing Pouch, Wagon Christ's 90s classic. Still can't bring myself to put on Tricky or even other 90s faves Mouse On Mars. I guess it's only a matter of time.

I was nearly thinking of abandoning an end of year best of 2012 article which will be due soon but I've come out of my fear of the present and have started listening to recent LPs again. Artists might not be breaking much new ground but there is still some great shit out there worth listening to.

A picture from the park a couple of
weeks ago just because. Nice.