profiles

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 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.

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 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

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.

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