Big-hearted Jamie Audio Antihero has put together another excellent charity compilation – in fact I think this is the best yet. There’s the big names – well, you know what I mean – who are already Friends of the Label (Jeffrey Lewis, Darren Hayman, both lovely songs); the amazing turn-out of the label’s own stars (Wartgore Hellsnicker, Ben Shaw, Jack Hayter, Paul Hawkins & the Awkward Silences, Broken Shoulder and Fighting Kites… plus new AAH band Cloud, who we will be hearing more from soon); the post-AAH bands (The Jonbarr Hinge); and some established/emerging bands like The Society of Poor Academics and Internet Forever.

That sounds like a lot of tracks? Damn right it is – 31 songs, nearly 2 hours. And it’s great. The mighty Wartgore contribute nearly 8 minutes of craziness, the rest of the AAH roster contribute alternative takes and hard-to-find stuff, and there are other crackers scattered throughout the rest of the collection. It manages to be both a great AAH sampler and an end-of-term report on the class of 2013, like those cassettes you used to get on the front of magazines.

And it supports a very good cause – Rape Crisis England & Wales and Rape Crisis Scotland. You can get the compilation for a minimum donation of £3.99 or you could pay more. £4+ for 2 hours of music. What are you waiting for? Stream the lot then buy it here – though I should warn you that Jamie’s track-by-track guide includes puzzling wrestling chat.

If you want a taster then I suggest these two tracks. First, this lovely version of Jack Hayter’s ‘Sweet JD’, one of my personal favourites from his Sisters of St Anthony singles series, which is also highly recommended; find it here.

And second, this little belter from Internet Forever, from their album of last year. This is perfect pop, somewhere in the vicinity of Helen Love. The album can be found here.

Get going!

jkneale

Jon Hopkins is evidently a very talented chap and someone I’ve been meaning to investigate for some time given he keeps blipping across my radar. This, I’m almost ashamed to say, is my first proper foray into his world (apart from the obvious remixes). And my word what a fantastic sortie it has turned out to be.

Immunity is an album that is shaped and crafted from sounds-found rather than sounds-pre-packaged.  One imagines Mr. Hopkins sits in his studio carefully picking through boxes labelled ‘sounds of loose wiring and unreliable audio connections’ and another stickered ‘miscellaneous crunchy bits’. These parts are then sequenced with enough beautiful bass to shake your fillings and loosen any jewellery you might have about your person. This is particularly so on standout track ‘Open Eye Signal’ which absolutely begs reception from the writhing warmth of a bog-eyed crowd, most appropriately in a decommissioned power station.

On ‘Breathe This Air’ the tone becomes more suitably aerial with Hopkins managing to expertly resuscitate the too-often used ‘lonely-piano-in-empty-room aesthetic’. The crunching assault of ‘Collider’ counterpoints perfectly with the utter melancholia of ‘Abandon Window’ – a tune which only the heartlessly unemotional would find unmoving.

The brilliance of this album is found in its capacity to string you up in a web of emotional contradictions – of melancholia and joy, of despair and love, of isolation and the need for the warmth of your closest. Such sublime incongruity is something that makes the best music. [BUY]

‘Abandon Window’:

‘Open Eye Signal’:

This instalment is long overdue. Life (or more accurately its opposite for one of us) keeps getting in the way of BBO’s desire to share the music we enjoy and love. Yet let us not dwell on such things. Let us instead focus on the present and future.

Immediately contradicting that determination is the fact that most of these tunes have been around for a while. Does this matter? Well, one thing must be remembered: being the first to blog or ‘air’ something doesn’t make you a better person.

Music is not a race.

Anyway, let’s get on with it.

Haiku Salut are from Derbyshire and there’s something deliciously delicate and lovingly original about this glitch-accordion little tune ‘Glockelbar’ taken from their debut Tricolore album [BUY]:

From Winnipeg, Boats present us with a building skewed pop tune that hold all sorts of interests from its backing vocals to its big brass, and from its speeding keyboards to its bubbling weirdness. This strange take on indie pop can only be a result of the bastard Winnipeg cold (and having been there I know this). ‘Animated GIFS’ is from their A Fairway Full of Miners album [BUY]:

2_F are based in New York and that’s as much as I can find out about them. ‘Grandma Song’ is airy dub with cut-up South Asian samples that heralds a joyous summer if you let it. The other two tracks on their Soundcloud are worth your ear space as well:

AK/DK are fashioned from analog-8-bits of pop-punk and are from Brighton. They sit somewhere on the barely recognised continuum of Devo/Add N to X/Polysics. This, of course, is a very good thing [BUY]

And finally, UrbanExploration are part of a collective from Leeds that go beyond just music. Collectives are good things (cf GNOD) being composed of interesting parts that take them in all sorts of artistic directions, including soundtracks to hidden, underground or forgotten spaces:

So there you go. Let’s not leave it so long next time, eh?

Vision Fortune make taught and tense tunes. Filled with an apprehensiveness that signals either, on a good day, a hope for change, or on a bad day, an irritable itch you just can’t reach to scratch, this is music on the edge of something.

Mas Fiestas con el Grupo Vision Fortune is sparse and repetitive. The constant duplication insinuates the emptiness of industrial and tertiary toil. A recurring wooziness fills the album, whether through the drones or the visceral builds of guitar noise. It can be dizzying, akin to that feeling of too much screen-watching.

This is an album of dislocation, disjunction, and more besides. It’s the repetition of a stripped down, skeletal, less sunshine fuelled Wooden Shjips. Most often it reminds of the later Gilded Eternity period Loop.

And it’s got the best album cover of the year by far – perhaps chosen as a reflection of both disconnection and optimism. Buy it here.

XVII:

XIV:

The Suicide of Western Culture trade in a similar sense of space, distance and expanse to Fuck Buttons and then mix it with the scuzz and distorted melodies of Dan Friel or Parts & Labor, and top it off with sprinkles of lower region body music and shards of the cinematic. They simultaneously infuse their tunes with a pumped groove and a ’hands in the air’ rave sensibility: for example, ‘Love Your Friends Hate Politicians’ has a beginning that emits ‘Charly’ before burying itself in catacomb beats. Huge and heavy breaks and bleeps are the order of the rhythm and there’s not a gimmicky sub-wobble in earshot, although crowd-pleasing drops are a plenty.

This is eminently clever stuff in that it traverses a line between something for the glitched abstraction set and those that want their electronic fixes more visceral and immediate. In some ways they remind of Beat Culture’s excellent Tokyo Dreamer through filtering a heritage of Orbital frugging into something very shiny and glisteningly now. At their best when they segue from darker to sunrise still-wired aesthetics, The Suicide of Western Culture have produced something remarkable in Hope Only Brings Pain. Get it here.

‘I Know The Name Of The Culprits’:

The talk of a ‘psyche explosion’ across various media outlets in recent months has been met here at BBO terraces with a degree of incredulity in that some (not all) of the bands being labelled as such lack that third-eye melting something that we would see as central to the genre. Luckily there are still tunes and bands out there that can eddy consciousness, trance your surroundings and give glimpses beyond the veil. This time the purveyors of sonic altered perception and inter-dimensional grooving come from Chile, which in itself speaks to the reach of the psyche.

On the face of it Föllakzoid are more of the same Spacemen/Shjips/Moon Duo repetition: their second outing, wondrously titled II, sounds at first lovingly familiar if not radically innovative. Yet dive deeper into their swirling depths and you begin to realise this is a quality album that tweaks and extends the ideas of their forbears.

Composed of five extended jams around minimal chords, II is truly an experience for the ears and soul. It wraps you up in its warm production, drives you forward with its subdued but energising motorik beats, and delivers you elsewhere with its swoops of electronic noise, muted vocals and (forever) delayed guitars.

This is one to be given time and a receptive headspace. Once opened out to the possibility, new insights and transformed knowledges will be yours. Highly recommended. Buy it here.

‘Pulsar’:

’9′:

Il Sogno del Marinaio is Mike Watt, of Minutemen, fIREHOSE, and Stooges fame (and lots more besides), and two young gentlemen of Verona and Bologna, Stefano Pilia and Andrea Belfi. I can’t believe that Watt ever sleeps, given his proliferating collaborations, podcasts, and side-projects, but this is one of the most consistently exciting bands he’s put together for a while. Pilia and Belfi are very gifted musicians, and the whole thing gels as if they’ve been playing together forever (which they haven’t, it was recorded in two days).

What does it sound like? A mix, largely but not entirely instrumental; you could call some of it post-rock (both Tortoise-like and gloomier), like the eight minute opening track, ‘Zoom’. There are jazzier moments, like ‘Punkinhead Ahoy!’, and more experimental passages, like ‘Messed-Up Machine’. Since everything appears to be ‘prog’ these days, there might be some of that too. ‘Il Guardiano Del Faro’, one of the quieter pieces, is beautiful. Here’s ‘Partisan Song’:

And ‘Punkinhead Ahoy!’ because it cheers me up.

You can listen to this on Spotify here but if you want them to eat you should buy it on clenchedwrench records – CD here or iTunes here.

jkneale

When Parts & Labor announced their retirement, an audible howl of anguish came forth from BBO terraces; gentle tears dripped from our cheeks and short-circuited the resistors and wires as we knelt in silence over our shrine to the Brooklyn noise popsters.

But dry your eyes mate. It became apparent not long after this despairing news that Dan Friel was going it alone and taking much of what made Parts & Labor so great with him; Total Folklore is the result.

Stripping away the vocal element of P&L, Friel delivers an album of top-notch electro-terror-pop best exemplified by the twelve-minute opener ‘Ulysses’: a stomping mini-epic with IEDs used for beats and rhythm. The P&L melodies are there throughout – particularly on hyper-speed ‘Valedictorian’ – but they seem somehow more delightfully excited than ever. It’s as if Friel’s machines and effects are so glad to be in use again they’ve gone all hyperactive and giddy. In fact, on ‘Scavengers’ they seem drunk on their own freedom as they stagger woozily over the machine gun pace.

There’s no real let up in the distorted and maxed out electronics; everything has that feeling of peaking in the red and there are moments on tracks such as ‘Thumper’ where no amount of turning the volume down will save your synapses.

Being a short album, Total Folklore doesn’t outstay its welcome, but a welcome return for all P&L fans it most certainly is. Buy it.

When a band decides to change direction one inevitably thinks ‘Jazz Odyssey’. When the curve ball of artistic diversion involves one of your favourite outfits the worry is doubled. Fortunately, given the avant-garde output of Gnod in the past, and the sheer quality of their oeuvre, those fears are reduced; you just know that whatever they turn their various talents to is going to be worth a listen. So when Gnod Presents… Dwellings & Druss was previewed a while back anxiety turned into a twitching joy at the possibility and potential.

Consisting of three tracks of throbbing industrial techno Dwellings & Druss is a fantastically transcendental listen and evidence that this isn’t Gnod’s first communion with transistors, samplers and machines. The low-end bass is all-consuming, the reverb chilling and the modulation dizzying. It’s akin to Basic Channel filtered through a turbine and then submerged and played out fifty fathoms down. It’s skull-shaking in its intensity, but obscurely calming and meditative despite or because of the clanks, whirls and pulses.

Gnod Presents… is out on vinyl in February on Trensmat records. But if you pre-order now you get the album for download replete with an extra track of improv techno wobbles and shimmers clocking in at a mighty 49:49. That’s called value that is.

LP Sampler:

Defeatism:

I’ve always been fascinated trying to work out when the best time to listen to drone is. It’s hardly the sort of stuff you need on your morning commute to jolt the senses awake and enliven you to perpetuate capitalism. Perhaps the afternoon? Biorhythmic carbohydrate crash usually prevents this for me. So the evening seems ideal? Well possibly, unless you are gearing up for a ‘night out’ (remember them?)

After listening to and absorbing (for that’s what you do with this album) Oh/Ex/Oh’s Extant I realise that I’ve been focusing my fascination too much on the daily cycle. Instead, I should have been thinking longer time scales as it seems the new calendar year is the best time for drone. January, with its temperatures paralysing and its perennial sense of comedown is the time to listen to drone. This is electronic blues for the New Year; blues which manages to hint at a small change in the light and something brighter approaching.

Listened too closely these pieces are interspersed with distanced static or at least a half formed memory of what static might have sounded like. Sometimes these pieces take shape as the hum of some unidentified electrical equipment or the last life gasps of machines fly-tipped in rural lanes. At other times there’s glacial movement and enveloping warmth. There are barely distinguishable sounds drenched in, or perhaps even self-generating their own, reverb. There are spoken samples from film texts that I should know or at least I used to know but now don’t. There is the odd arpeggiator seemingly organised and run by a remote, even astral, hand.

All in all this is the soundtrack to an airborne journey across landscapes waiting for warmth, across beauty, majesty and utter desolation.

That’s my geography trip, what’s yours? Buy.

‘The Last Days’: