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December 2020 = |
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Green Pajamas |
Atlanta |
Buck Curran |
Head 2 comp |
Tristan Perich |
Nathan and the
Sinister Locals |
Los
Days |
Øresund Space
Collective |
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Home |
THE
GREEN PAJAMAS – TEN WHITE
STONES
(
LP from www.sugarbushrecords.com
)
Terrascope
favourites
The Green Pajamas have had their classic 2004
live in the studio album released for the first
time on vinyl, the format on which it quite
clearly belongs; the original ten songs that
were featured on the original compact disc
release have been pared back to eight due to
vinyl limitations. It’s a terrific record which
highlights a band at their rocking best, with
Jeff Kelly clearly channelling his fierce lead
guitar breaks very much in a Steve Wynn/ Neil
Young kind of mode with his vocals being
reminiscent of Jim McGuinn and Tom Petty, just
to give you some idea of what they were sounding
like at this time. The band at this point
consisted of Jeff playing electric guitar, Joe
Ross - bass, Eric Lichter – keyboards, Laura
Weller – acoustic and electric guitar and Scott
Vanderpool – drums.
Things
kick off with ‘The Cruel Night’, which has a
very deliberate long intro before the band
finally coalesce and the slightly world weary
voice of Jeff sings “In
the lonely afternoon, I sit and watch the sky
for rain” Here we now hear for the first
time the ferocious, snarling, snaking lead
guitar of Jeff, I’m immediately reminded of the
sound of the west coast acid rock band
Quicksilver Messenger Service in the guitar
playing, no mean feat as that sound was achieved
by the twin guitars of Gary Duncan and John
Cipollina, so kudos to Laura’s intuitive
playing. It is a paean to the previous summer,
as storm clouds gather overhead, with Laura
providing vocals along with Jeff for the
choruses.
The
short ‘Blue Eyes To Haunt Me’ adds Hammond organ
fills to the sound. There’s more organ on the
intro to the Eric Lichter penned ‘Mrs Cafferty’,
which has a cooking rhythm section and some
stinging lead guitar breaks. Things slow down a
little for the excellent ‘She’s Still Bewitching
Me’, this is great example of why a live in the
studio recording works well, as the vocals are
crystal clear and the sound is very much alive.
The first side ends with the epic seven minutes
of ‘If You Love Me (You’ll Do It)’, informed by
plenty of Jeff’s lead guitar
Laura’s
song ‘Holden Caulfield’, is the first song on
side two, a song which she also gets to sing,
it’s a sassy Byrdsian sounding song, Laura’s
guitar meshing with Jeff’s stuttering lead
lines, propelled by a tight rhythm section, it
ends with Jeff’s guitar sounding like a dying
electric saw. The album centrepiece is
undoubtedly the eleven minute ‘For S’, a
yearning, drifting love song which uncoils into
a cosmic rock song from the top drawer, of
oceans and stars, of night and day. It has a
yearning, keening refrain of “You steal the
darkness from the day”. The album ends with
‘Lost Girls Song’, a kind of duet which sounds
like Roger McGuinn joined by Carls Olsen instead
of Gene, like the kind of stuff put out by Green
On Red, Dream Syndicate and Rain Parade. This
record sounds ace and you all need it in your
collection.
(Andrew
Young)
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ATLANTA
-
NUGRYBAUTI
(LP/Digital
on Lay
Bare Recordings
and bandcamp)
The
band’s called Atlanta, but they’re really from
the Netherlands, and the album title is a
Lithuanian word.
You trackin’?
Well,
hopefully any cartographic or linguistic
confusion you may have will be quickly put to
rest as soon as you drop the needle, because
this is just plain great instrumental psych
music in any language.
Let’s begin again and get properly
introduced. Atlanta,
the Dutch instrumental psych trio, consists of
guitarist Pieter Holkenborg, bassist Sebas van
Olst, and drummer Bob Hogenelst, and hereby
proffer their second album.
Nugrybauti in Lithuanian means “to
become distracted during a task, literally to
get lost wandering in search of mushrooms.”
Ahem.
You
have to really distinguish yourself to stand out
in the jamming-guitar-psych trio-instrumental
field, and Atlanta gets there for me.
They do it with creative melodicism,
variety and
discipline. Although
each of the tracks on Nugrybauti are improvised,
it’s evident the three musicians went into all
of them with a solid game plan, a starting
point, and where they wanted to end up, and let
the music gods guide them along the path.
Each track has enough variations in
tempo, melodic themes and hooks, and loud/soft
dynamics to pique the listener’s interest and be
unique standalone pieces. Count me a fan of
Pieter Holkenborg’s Hendrixian distorted guitar
tone and balance between laying low,
pace-setting and out-and-out shredding.
And Hogenelst and van Olst make a super
tight rhythm section.
Now
it’s a common thing for improvisationally-based
bands to think their own jamming is better than
sliced bread and leave all sorts of noodling
into rabbit holes on the record.
And I’ll allow there is some of
that on Nugrybauti, where some editing might
have come in handy.
But on the whole the playing is never
short of stellar.
The three guys soar to some pretty
amazing heights, and you have to climb the
mountain first.
Atlanta also includes some nice changes
of pace to their often frenzied rocking and
mushroom hunting, such as the dimly lit
nocturnal pacing and quietude of “Firefly
Lullaby.”
Atlanta
shoots and scores with Nugrybauti, an album of
intelligent, inventive instrumental guitar
psych. The
talented trio lays down some excellent extended
grooves with nice melodic flourishes.
Recommended.
(Mark
Feingold)
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BUCK
CURRAN - NO LOVE IS SORROW
(Available on ESP-Disk and Oblique
Recordings)
Buck Curran will be familiar to Terrascope
readers for the band Arborea, but he has also
occasionally stepped out from their folkier
efforts to create more intimate recordings
reflective of his love of the raga and
traditional guitar work of John Fahey, Glenn
Jones, Robbie Basho and Jack Rose (he has also
coordinated tribute albums to Basho and Rose).
His third solo album continues to mine
these fertile fields from ‘Blue Raga’ (ably
assisted by Dipak Kumar Chakraborty on Tabla)
and the stark minimalism of ‘Marie’,
‘Chromaticle’, and the atmospheric title track
to the more song-oriented ‘Ghost On The Hill’
that bears more than a passing resemblance to
the work of Chris Wade (aka Dodson and Fogg) and
Timothy Renner (Stone Breath, et.al.)
The
melancholic
emotion seeping through ‘Deep In The Lovin’ Arms
Of My Babe’ and ‘Odissea’ bear the familiar
stamp of Leonard Cohen, Scott Engel, and Jeff
Kelly’s solo work with the latter track updating
Homer’s classic epic for the 21st
century. Frequent collaborator Adele Pappalardo
(aka Adele H)’s occasional vocal support deliver
soft counterpoints to Curran’s gruff vocals,
lifting the more sombre tracks from devolving
into gloom and doom self-pity. Curran’s ‘For
Adele’ (Serenade in B Minor)‘ is a loving
tribute/thanks for a job well done!
A
forlorn piano in an empty room echoes the inner
melancholia of a lonely, post-celebratory ‘(New
Years Day)’ [sic], Curran’s parenthetical
tribute to ‘Django’ Reinhardt, while the more
expansive, heavily-treated sound sculpture ‘War
Behind The Sun’ breaks out of the typically
mournful surroundings for some elbow-stretching
and head-clearing pyrotechnics verging into the
industrial noise territory of Jason DiEmilio’s
latter Azusa Plane excursions (cf., America
is Dreaming of Universal String Theory, The
Highway's Jammed With Broken Heroes).
A
quiet, intricate portrayal of sorrow, loss,
loneliness, and hopelessness, No
Love Is Sorrow is the perfect soundtrack
to these lonely days of anger, frustration, and
desperation. Stay inside, stay safe, and listen
to the sound of a heart breaking.
(Jeff Penczak)
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HEAD
MUSIC 2 – VARIOUS ARTISTS
(3xLP
set on coloured vinyl from Fruits
de Mer )
This
one’s a beauty. One of the most successful and
sought after records on Fruits de Mer was the
original Head Music double album released back
in 2012, an album dedicated to the classic
Krautrock records released on labels such as
Brain in the early seventies. This theme also
spawned a classic double 7” on the label, called
Shrunken Head and also a little earlier this
year a new set entitled Head In The Clouds. And
now Keith has added to them with another massive
set of krautrock covers (with one original).
The
album kicks off with Russian band Vespero who
cover Amon Duul 11’s ‘Between The Eyes’. It is a
strong opener with a great drum pattern setting
the scene and allowing other instruments to fit
around it, throbbing bass, swirling synths and
some fierce electric lead guitar, the song is
unfamiliar to me, mainly instrumental passages,
with a few vocals. The genre’s given name of
‘Krautrock’ is next in the sequence, with a
Faust cover by Das Blaue Palais who deliver a
languid, drifting, lengthy guitar led piece (I
am reminded a little of Steve Hillage on some of
the latter passages) which chugs and pulses
merrily along for a good ten minutes or so. Then
Tony Swettenham from Frobisher’s Neck covers
Rucksturtz by Agitatation Free, lending it a
Parisian flavour, it’s a highly melodic piece,
quite short and purely instrumental.
Now
there comes a wonderful track which in itself is
well worth the price of admission. Cary Grace
covers the Amon Duul 11 song ‘Surrounded By
Stars’. It has some mesmeric gypsy jazz violin
passages played throughout its duration by
Graham Clark and a wall of guitars by John
Garden. It twists and turns and has some
fantastic playing from the ensemble, Grace
singing her heart out injecting just the right
amount of passion and I haven’t even mentioned
the tremendous bass figures, the sympathetic
drumming or the mad swirling synths, superb
stuff indeed. ‘Dreaming Girls’, originally by
Embryo, is covered by Revbjelde who also infuse
the song with more violin, adding woodwind,
electric harpsichord, glockenspiel, synths and
many other exotic instruments, it’s like some
narcotic spy theme and is also ace and again
purely instrumental. As is the next song by Das
Blaue Palais who arrive again, this time
covering Mythos’s ‘Dedicated To Wernher Von
Braun’, a squiggling discordant song with some
fine fluid electric lead guitar lines.
Vespero
get another slice of the action with a very busy
song, this time it’s a cover of ‘Castle In The
Air’, originally by Eloy, maximum riffage to the
fore with more mad synths, electric guitar,
propulsive drumming and excellent electric
violin with what sounds like balalaika, it’s
also another song which I can imagine
accompanying an imaginary sixties spy film. The
surprising thing on the album so far is the
amount of electric violin and the quality of the
nagging, insistent melodies which are often
highlighted to great effect. Jay Tausig gets to
grips with the classic Can track ‘Father Cannot
Yell’, sticking fairly close to the original,
the track shows what a great guitar player he
is, playing some blistering lead guitar runs
over the top of a cooking rhythm section, with
mad vocals and more swirling, bleeping synth.
Amon
Duul’s ‘Snow your Thirst And Sun Your Open
Mouth’, is covered by Das Blaue Palais, their
third song on the set. They dutifully deliver a
stonking version. More excellent, drifting
languid passages of guitar and synth action, the
song feels like one long ending, but in a good
way. Now the only original on the album,
‘Galactic Joke Part D’, (inspired by The Cosmic
Jokers) hoves into view, by the first band to
record for the label, Schizo Fun Addict. Jet
Wintzer leads the band through a fairly dense,
riff heavy pretty mad twelve minutes of imagined
krautrock. The Legendary Flower Punk cover
Michael Rother’s Sonnenrad. It starts with a
ghostly, wintery synth melody which sounds like
the sound achieved by Matthieu Hartley on
Seventeen Seconds by the Cure in 1980, before
blossoming into a grunge flavoured, highly
melodic krautrock song.
Brainticket’s
One
Morning covered here by Rob Gould arrives with a
peel of thunder, a fine highly melodic nagging
piano led song, imbued with mad synth action. He
takes us back in time with a sixties flavoured
psych pop feel, a song of escape from the
mundane drudgery of everyday life, it ends with
more ominous thunder. The first of three songs
by Kraftwerk is delivered by Maat Lander, he
covers Neon Lights to fine effect. A proggy,
keyboard rich song delivered with icily detached
Germanic vocals, highlighted with another
memorable melody, it also has some fine fluid
electric guitar bursts over the top of tumbling
drums. Phew!
A
little injection of the melody from ‘Autobahn’
by Kraftwerk is dropped in by Spurious
Transients before Black Tempest arrive with a
krautrock classic ‘Nights Of Automatic Women’,
by Tangerine Dream’s Edgar Froese, taken from
his fourth solo album, released in 1978. Steve
Bradbury (who is Black Tempest) delivers a
cracking version, which rattles along nicely
with plenty of mad synth’s propelled along by a
classic motorik rhythm straight out of the
Berlin school. A short sharp ‘Moonshake’ by Can
is covered by The Arthur Park. They stay fairly
true to the original and I’m reminded of how
poppy the song is. The album ends with a reprise
of the melody from ‘Autobahn’ by Spurious
Transients.
The
album is released at the end of this month and
has already sold out on pre-orders at the label,
but some stockists of the label will be
receiving copies, so I suggest that you get in
quick because it is a fabulous album and one
that quite frankly is one of the finest releases
on the label to date and one of best things I
have listened to all year, you have been duly
notified of a bona fide classic.
(Andrew
Young)
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TRISTAN
PERICH – DRIFT MULTIPLY
(CD/Digital
on Nonesuch
Records
and New Amsterdam)
New
York-based composer Tristan Perich’s Drift
Multiply is a wonder of art, ambition, scope and
beauty, where technology and organic sound
collide, blend, repel, and shine, where the
holistic work vastly exceeds the sum of the
parts, or definitely what you might expect of
the sum of the parts.
The
ten-track work is scored for 50 violins and 50
elements of 1-bit audio electronics.
The one-bit tones take the form of small
assemblies of electronic circuitry and wires,
each emitting “the most basic digital waveforms
made of just ones and zeroes.”
You can see a video on YouTube showing a
brief, interesting excerpt from a performance of
Drift Multiply.
You’ll see the 50 violinists, each with a
circuit board and a small speaker clipped onto
their music stands.
The result, rather than the cacophony you
might think, is a most pleasing journey of the
ears and the mind.
While
the work is Perich’s most ambitious yet, lest
you think this is new for him, he actually has a
touch of one-bit audio on the brain.
His first foray of many was in 2004 with
‘1-Bit Music,’ an album released on a microchip,
with a circuit stored inside a CD jewel case,
and a headphone jack built into the case.
My
initial impression listening to Drift Multiply’s
first tracks was a comparison to the minimalist
works of Philip Glass and Steve Reich (and
Perich has drawn glowing praise from none other
than Reich himself).
But I always found Glass’ and Reich’s
works could be a bit harsh and abrasive on the
ears. This
is anything but.
Give it time, and the work unfolds itself
– drifts and multiplies if you will - and its
sonic beauty grows and grows on you, being
hypnotic, peaceful and calming.
Headphones aren’t required, but
definitely enhance the listening experience.
Oh,
this is music that sets the imagination wild.
My thoughts drifted from forests of
trees, their leaves fluttering in the breeze, to
distant galaxies and nebulas, to tropical reefs
bursting with color with schools of fish dancing
their ballets together as one before reversing
direction in unison, to the psychedelic scene in
Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001:
A Space Odyssey.’
And after a while, I’m sure a man with a
pocket watch swinging on a chain could have
convinced me I was Napoleon, or a Yeti, or a
strawberry.
But
why 70 minutes?
I’ll admit I found the total length
intimidating at first.
But it didn’t take long before I was
fully invested and swallowed up, the extended
length making perfect sense.
The textures change almost imperceptibly,
as insidious as trying to watch the minute hand
on a clock. But
change they do.
The tracks are simply titled “Section 1”
through “Section 10.”
By the deep zone of “Section 5,” your
mind is completely blown.
“Section 5” undulates through flashing,
colored lights in your mind to an all-electronic
section that sounds like waves on a shore,
morphing into wind blowing through the trees, to
a chugging train.
I listened sober as a judge, but I got
the feeling the slightest form of chemical
stimulant would put the listener in another
universe.
As
“Section 5” slides into “Section 6,” the
electronic cascading seas give way back to the
violins, soon rejoined by the all-surrounding,
sparkling 1-bit music.
It’s another mind-blower, and it keeps
going into “Section 7,” a powerful display of
strings and pulsating bits and bytes probing and
perforating you through and through.
Some
of the later tracks do add some discordant
touches, alternating with the sound of a sort of
church organ from deep within the cosmos.
“Section 9” throws everything swirling,
sawing and blinking around you at once again,
and the effect is sensory overload of the most
pleasant kind. It
also has the most melodic themes and fanfares of
the album, courtesy of the violin section,
before splintering and fracturing into its base
elements in Mendeleev’s periodic table, and
recombining into new compounds in a sea teeming
with primordial life.
Drift
Multiply is a completely uncategorisable work of
brilliance, with Tristan Perich bringing
together the vibrations from horse hair on
strings with the most elemental digital sounds
for a stunning whole.
Don’t miss this one.
(Mark
Feingold)
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NATHAN
HALL AND THE SINISTER LOCALS – ON THE BLINK
(CD
from Bandcamp
)
We
do like a bit of Nathan here at Terrascope.
Nathan was the leader of Welsh wizards The
Soft Hearted
Scientists, guiding us through a number of
albums before deciding to go it alone a few
years back. This is his fourth album since his
debut in 2017 with Mute Effigies Soundtracks.
This was originally to be his fifth album after
the scheduled and nearly completed ‘Pointing
Paw’ album had to be put on ice due to the
restrictions of Covid 19. The song and title of
the album ‘On The Blink’, were conceived before
the current pandemic, but just seemed to be an
ideal choice of title for obvious reasons.
On
The Blink is a double album, stretching to 22
songs. Nathan’s music is very much whimsical pop
psych, with haiku like songs; throughout which
various instruments frame lyrics of serpents,
solar swans, bumbling bees, of country houses,
modern day highwaymen, tin robots and orange
elephants. The instrumentation is mainly
acoustic guitar, organs, analogue synths, pianos
and electric guitar with a whole host of others
enriching his playful songs. He even had to
learn how to play the bass guitar due to
lock-down rules.
Along
the way we take in the skewed pop psych of
‘Serpent On The Path’. Reminiscences with the
barking mad title track ‘On The Blink’, the
humorous envisaging of ‘Stand And Deliver’,
where all that could be proffered to an
assailant these days would be a debit card! It
is a cracking tune, with electric guitar rhythm
and woozy mellotron to the fore. ‘When We Are No
Longer Numb’, adds sitar and drones. There are
linking pieces, Interludes and multi part songs
such as ‘Solar Swans’, which sounds like a long
lost children’s show theme tune, with music by
Vernon Elliott. Songs about childhood continue
with ‘The Signs’, with its multi tracked
harmonies, accordions and synths, drifting down
the river on a bed of hammered acoustic guitar
notes. Most of the songs are fairly short and
whimsical; nothing here is in the slightest bit
heavy, the songs for the most part being soufflé
light concoctions. ‘Angels Understand’, is a
multi part song which incorporates a spoken word
section on park life and is pure fun.
More
pop psych abounds with ‘The Orange Elephant’, a
highly melodic song, a dreaming of Albion. The
percussion is quite light and used sparingly
throughout the album and used to particularly
fine effect on ‘Figure Of Fun’ a did me wrong
song with acoustic guitar over which analogues
synths bleep and pulse. ‘Insomnia’, playfully
deals with lack of sleep to drifting organ and
synth, dreamy psych from a man desperate to drop
off into the land of nod. The Victoriana of
‘Spring Song’ takes us out into the country to
the awakening flora and fauna. ‘Time Stables Its
Horses’ unleashes strange forces, another mad
melodic merry go round of a song. The album ends
some 60 odd minutes later with another multi
part song, the playful, organ infested strains
of the near instrumental ‘The Sea Is In The
Trees/The Sea Ignites The Stones’, a song which
does indeed excite these weary bones. This is
another terrific album from Nathan and is pure
escapism for these troubled times.
(Andrew
Young)
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LOS
DAYS – SINGING SANDS
(Too
Good/bandcamp)
Multi-instrumentalists
Tommy Guerrero and Josh Lippi decided to check
off the grid into the desert of Southern
California’s Wonder Valley, north of Joshua Tree
National Park, to a tiny one-room, solar-powered
jackrabbit shack called “House of the Rising
Sun.” There,
christening themselves ‘Los Days,’ the two spent
five days letting the desert work its magic and
terraformed this wonderful little instrumental
album Singing Sands.
Taking
their album title from the tuneful sounds of the
sand blown by the desert gusts, the result is
some of the finest, laid-back West Coast
super-chill music you’ll find.
The 12 short pieces are all named for and
inspired by the desert environment our two
blissed-out souls were surrounded by, such as
“Traveling Light,” “Painted Hills,” “Starlight
Lullaby,” “Twilight,” “Wonder Valley,”
“Expanding Night,” and of course the title
track.
Using
acoustic and electric guitars, bass, vibes,
bells, and occasional light percussion, Guerrero
and Lippi let you choose your own paradise.
It may have been recorded in the desert,
but if a margarita by the beach is more your
style, by all means indulge, even if doing so
only in your mind is the best you can manage
during lockdown (or as Sir Paul McCartney has
taken to calling it, “Rockdown.”)
The feel is somewhere between the Twin
Peaks theme, spaghetti western soundtracks,
Santo & Johnny’s 1959 hit “Sleepwalk,”
exotica, and even Glen Campbell’s baritone
guitar solo in “Wichita Lineman.”
The
album is evocative, relaxing and enthralling at
the same time, even if a major streaming service
has the chutzpah to place a recommendation at
the bottom of the page that if you liked this
record, you might also like “Music for Plants.”
Big sigh.
Well, I suppose even your monstera
deliciosa and draecena draco
houseplants needs love.
(Mark
Feingold)
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ØRESUND
SPACE COLLECTIVE - FOUR RIDERS TAKE SPACE
MOUNTAIN
(double
LP
from bandcamp
)
Regular
readers
will no doubt recognise the name Øresund Space
Collective, a group of Danish, Swedish and
American musicians who specialise in improvised
space rock music - they’ve been around since
2004 and sport a bewilderingly complicated
discography, of which ‘Four Riders Take Space
Mountain’ is their latest, and for my money
their best yet; probably because it’s their most
“prog”. It’s basically one looooong jam until
you reach the final side, when it bursts into a
sitar medley; the effect is rather like dining
out on a delicious meal after a hard night’s
work in the studio. Actually this banquet dates
from a later (2016) studio session and aside
from being an excellent space-rock raga it’s
also notable for some gorgeous violin work from
Jonathan Segal.
The
previous
three sides consist of one 62 minute track,
entitled ‘Approach’ (side 1), ‘Ascent’ (side 2)
and ‘Summit’ (side 3) which the collective
recorded in Denmark in 2014 - the same sessions
produced the ‘Different Creatures and Visions
Of’ album released last year, although to my
mind this is a step up from that, possibly
because it has an underlying theme or concept, a
thread which can be followed from one end to the
other. The musicians involved are predominantly
the same, including the outstanding guitarist
Mathias Danielsson who brings to it an intensity
akin to the early Outskirts of Infinity; “Dr
Space” on synths - and Hasse Horrigmoe
underpinning the whole thing on bass throughout.
Hasse is best known for his work with Norway’s
Tangle Edge, who we featured in issue 3 of the
Ptolemaic Terrascope and who therefore, along
with the aforementioned Outskirts, pretty much
counts as Terrascopic Royalty. And if that’s not
recommendation enough, I don’t know what is.
(Phil
McMullen)
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