profiles
Ashtray Navigations - The Big Interview
Over the past 15
years, Phil Todd's Leeds UK-based Ashtray Navigations has pretty clearly led
the world in the production of psychedelic noise freakout rock
transcendental electrification drone music. Quoting myself here, describing the
Ashtray sound: "free improvisation, lo-fi psychedelia, noise and found sounds,
the raw power (though rarely the form) of rock, and the tonalities of various
drone and ethnic musics. Pure underground sound, basically." Todd's ability to
chart infinite variations within this ever-expanding musical universe, plus the
seemingly endless flow of releases on his own and other labels, don't really
have a lot of parallels in "rock" (Sun Ra might be a kindred spirit), and
perhaps for that reason remain heard by far too few.
Zelienople - Cinematic Rituals for Decaying Architecture
Zelienople is a Chicago trio that takes
their favorite bits of atmospheric sound from the last four decades and places
them in one big pot of simmering ambience. Their music glides elegantly through
cinematic dreamscapes, urban fog, stretched-out tone clusters, free-flowing
improvisations, corrosive string ceremonies and detailed mantras of
fragmentized noise. Given their sonic focus, most of their output is surprisingly moody and melancholic;
never letting things to slip away too far from the organic base they refer to
as home.
What they do is to construct stunningly delicate and convincingly toned down sound sculptures, slow building, trance inducing improv and texturally challenging drone music that is packed with so much emotion and darkly seducing beauty that it sucks the listener in time after time. We got in touch with Mike Weis and Matt Christensen to learn how they're capable of turning blurry shots of empty city streets or natural landscapes into immortal music.
The Goner & the "Grass Root Feel of the Whole Thing"
One-man folk/psych/drone ensemble The Goner
AKA Daniel Westerlund is unquestionably one of my favorite sonic discoveries of
2008. He delivers spiritual music that accompanies dreams, as it organically
flows across the sky when you're walking to work and creeps up on you when you
least expect it to. It's tempting to place his work along the lines of Hush
Arbors and Six Organs of Admittance and although that's true you can also hear his
background in the lo-fi scene. We got in touch with Westerlund to learn more
about where he's coming from and what's next.
"I Wanted Weird Sounds!" - Elektronavn's Spiritual Culture Clash
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,
"Simple Patterns to Useful Effect": The Music of Roy Montgomery
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
Scars & Memories #1: Not Not Fun Records
I make no secret of my
analog nostalgia. I'm a Mexican kid from East of LA, and my childhood was not
as awash in digital enhancement as it is today. I remember days watching
hand-drawn cartoons on a mirror-projector big screen, renting fuzzy video tapes
from the local hole in the wall every weekend, and listening to tape-saturated
dirty raps after my parents went to sleep every night. Much of my "musical
upbringing" happened on a record player. My dad is a recovering vinyl addict;
every week he would walk down to Poobah Records to buy a couple of LPs. Well, over the weeks and the years, his
collection began to fill out: prog-rock (lots of Yes!), sixties hippie-shite,
ZAPPA!, a few bits of jazz, disco, heavy metal, power pop, punk, movie
soundtracks, drippy singer-songwriters, and tons of R&B. It seems to tail
off with a handful of terrible ‘80s pop records and virtually comes to a dead
halt mid-80s, just about when the second kid was born (me) and vinyl reached
the end of its reign as the industry standard.
Xenis Emputae Travelling Band's "Idiosyncratically English Works of Magic"
I've always been a pretty firm believer in Sturgeon' s Law,
the postulate credited to science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon that "90% of
everything is crud" - a number that, in today's user-generated media world, might
seem even higher. But I think the percentages are holding pretty
steady, it's just that the sheer volume
of stuff out there has jumped
exponentially in recent years. Which is a great (if sometimes exasperating) thing
for dedicated music fans (though perhaps not for their bank accounts), since it
means that the overall amount of genuinely creative sound production has also exploded.
Certainly the ability to self-release and virtual-distribute one's own music
has made it possible for folks who wouldn't have gotten a second glance from most
conventional "record labels" to spread their sounds to similarly-minded others



