Review :: Throbbing Gristle :: The Second Annual Report

Throbbing Gristle :: Slug Bait

 

So a band called The Death Factory was formed on exactly September 3rd, 1975.  Two years later, they issued their second annual report under a different name, Throbbing Gristle, as a generous token of what's been cooking.  A sort of "Hey, I wonder what the Death Factory has been up to all this time."  Well, Mom, we've been isolated in a concrete hell-hole decorated with bullet-hole disco-rays and rat shit for two years, obsessing over long-gone Nazi encampments and inventing what some ass pigeonholes as industrial music down the road for journalistic innovation and ease.  Cue elemental worry masked by disapproving looks.

Well, the long-gone Nazi encampments ring true here, but this is no Joy Division.  A recent series of Throbbing Gristle reissues by the original Industrial Records place this debut comfortably alongside the rash of 1970s reissues by labels like 4 Men With Beards and Bureau B.  The Internet is well-seeded with literature about this landmark of drone and noise, but in this collector-nerd's experience, I can't help but draw direct comparison to six-years-previous German innovators Cluster, or a completely sequencer-less Tangerine Dream.  Even those guitar-squalls on "Slug Bait" sound like pristine German engineering racing by on the Autobahn.

The fixation continues on "Zyclon B Zombie," an early single referencing the cyanide gas used in the Holocaust.  Here, this track spans the entire second side, the title making it much more harrowing than otherwise suggested.  I like to internally rename it "Zombie Curiously Gazing Over City-Scape," so I can share it enthusiastically with the family.  It's a bubbling, belching 20-minute outcropping at red dusk, levitating with tape-samples perfect for TV dinners and staining the carpet.

Review :: Paleoacoustics :: The Chills

The Chills
Heavenly Pop Hits
Flying Nun



I belong to four mix CD clubs. I don't recognize 95% of the names that appear on the bubble-protected return address. Sometimes the senders will include tracklists, sometimes not. Sometimes they enclose their deepest sentiments about the month in which their soul-defying mix was crafted, sometimes not. Sometimes I actually listen to their ego-enforcing mix, but usually I don't. That's because I'm an asshole, and my iTunes battleship will sink yours any day, without even looking over the lame-ass barrier that barely obscures your fleet of New Order b-sides -- which I love, and could be the downfall of my belligerent confidence. I'm a softy, see. That's why I write this blog.

The upside of being on the receiving end of so many personalized musical shrines is that, every so often, it just clicks. Consider this: to be a part of a snail-mail mix CD club is to participate in the flesh and blood of what a music blog strives to be, but so often falls flat in achieving -- at least these people have the fucking balls to show up at my front door and make their demons known. There's no waiting for the page to refresh, or for the stream to load, or for the application to mount, or for me to sit here and give a shit. Their carefully-positioned tastes invade my home and I have to find a way to deal with them, on an individual basis.

Somehow this entire Chills album showed up on the floor of my foyer, just below the mail drop (sorry DC friends -- none of you). These songs not only reaffirm my fervor for Flying Nun; they forgive me my melodic sins, and make the case for forgoing a mix CD and just sending a fully-formed, ready-made album. Why not? This one also acts as a mix CD of sorts, compiling about a decade's worth of singles and album cuts firmly rooted in the instantly-catchy yet wholly-original songwriting of the New Zealand indie scene. The songs roll along in a range of styles that never drift too far from the sort of psych that could only come from being outnumbered by goats 2-to-1 every waking day. The Chills haven't received the credit they deserve, probably because it's not actually a band so to speak (over 20 line-up changes with songwriter Martin Phillips as the only constant), but this compilation serves as a required piece in the labyrinthine Dunedin Sound.

The Chills :: Kaleidoscope World

Review :: Paleoacoustics :: Roedelius

Roedelius
Selbstportrait I
Bureau B




I'm gonna pretend for a minute that this blog has no particular aesthetic. I stumbled down the embarrassment that is 18th St. NW the other afternoon and picked up this one from Red Onion (surprise surprise - very likely the only place you'd find a title like this in DC). I've been a longtime fan of Cluster, Harmonia, Conny Plank and just about anything that came out of the 1970's Germanic landscape. I even went as far as to write a graduate thesis on the Zodiac Free Arts Lab in West Berlin, which was co-founded by Roedelius in 1967. I think it's since become a porn shop or something... maybe Chuck E. Cheese. Anyway, handing over an hour's pay for this one was a no-brainer.

Mr. Roedelius (who turns the decidedly palindromic age of 77 this year) was and still is a prolific motherfucker, having recorded this set during his off-time from Harmonia, Cluster, and both of those acts' sessions with Mr. Eno. Oh, to kick back and press record when you're not busy inventing ambient music. The liner notes here suggest a bucolic tone - Roedelius claims that these are spontaneous compositions influenced by "balmy summer evenings" in the Weser Uplands. Just him and his Farfisa VIP 600, a shitty reel-to-reel, and a few effects pedals, watching the deer fornicate outside his perch of pleasant living. This is the one to have when you're having more than one.

Roedelius :: In Liebe Dein

Review :: Paleoacoustics :: Sven Libaek

Sven Libaek
Inner Space
Trunk Records



I love the 1987 sci-fi-rom-coming-of-age classic film Innerspace, starring Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan. Especially the part when Martin Short makes out with Meg Ryan and the tiny Dennis Quaid jets himself in his little circulatory buggy from one open mouth to the next like some mechanical STD. To this day, when I make out with a girl I imagine tiny little spaceships are trafficking through our passion. Which means I've imagined it exactly one time.

Unfortunately, this post has nothing to do with that movie, but a record of the same name that I picked up a while back at Academy Records in Brooklyn. This was a pure impulse buy... the one that I casually place under my arm to make myself feel better about approaching a record clerk. Needless to say, I had no fucking clue who Sven Libaek was, nor the $20 to walk out with it. Fortunately, some Brooklyn record clerks have compassion, and he took my $15 and let me go. I've been thanking him ever since. Inner Space has become, without a doubt, one of the most-spun records in my collection. I want vibraphones on everything I hear. If the District replaced every brick in this city with perfectly-pitched wood blocks and forced every resident to attach mallets on the soles of their shoes, I would cease to look for cheaper rent in Baltimore.

Hats off to Trunk Records for providing thorough background info as well. This collection (subtitled The Lost Film Music of Sven Libaek) compiles music from four films (one drama, three documentaries) composed by Libaek during his time in Australia from 1965 to 1974. It's fitting that two of the documentaries are water-themed... the aforementioned vibraphone drips and ripples throughout, while wah-ed guitars bob along the current. I strongly recommend checking out the Trunk website, not only for their fixation on topless women, but also for the catalog, especially The Wicker Man soundtrack.

Sven Libaek :: Dark World

Review :: Paleoacoustics :: Electronic Music Winners

Electronic Music Winners
Columbia/Odyssey, 1976

It's rare that I sift through the Electronic/New Age section of a record store (how are they clumped together anyway?), but this recent find at Red Onion Records & Books made a case to change my habits. Here's the premise: four distinguished judges must select the best electronic compositions from a pool of 129 unlabeled tapes representing composers from 15 countries. The results, seven in total, are contained in no particular order on this LP.

What this collection so beautifully exhibits is the common thread from classical composition to literally "computer music," while simultaneously setting itself apart from any recognizable form. Each of the seven pieces here demonstrate masters of composition grappling with music as technology. Like an equestrian attempting to ride an octopus, these men and women have little to guide them but the rules of nature. For instance, Joel Gressel's Points in Time utilizes the ratio-relationships within the 12 semitones of an octave and applies them to rhythm, resulting in a constant accelerating and decelerating rubber band of tones. Paul Lansky's Mild Und Leise is a stunning lesson in timbral change, like watching piranhas trapped under a thick sheet of ice. Slippery and distant, until the ice gives way.

Mild Und Leise - Paul Lansky