So it seems the new Squarepusher album is one you either must love or hate, but undeniably, Tom Jenkinson’s recently released Just a Souvenir is that it’s a hell of a conceptual project and you’re expected to work very hard to reap rewards when listening. So it comes without surprise that the visual accompaniment to the track “Planet Gear” follows a similar course, with a weird, geometric light show that could be the MacBook screensaver of 2020 and fits the song’s trippy, scatter-shot musical landscape. The seizure-prone and over-caffeinated should proceed with caution.
Wilderness to Tour with San Serac
Wilderness‘ third full-length, (k)no(w)here, came about after the Baltimore-based, most unconventional band was asked to collaborate with renowned visual artist Charles Long at an exhibit the latter put on in the spring of this year. That said, the musical aspect of the project is quite the conceptual beast, and another one for experimental rock fans to add to the iPod.
So you wouldn’t think such an outfit would be an intuitive fit for a tour with disco/dance music don San Serac, but the two parties have teamed up for a round of dates that will keep them busy through November and the beginning of December. Wilderness will also be embarking on a few shows of their own in between the dates with San Serac.
11/19 New York, NY – Cake Shop*
11/20 Brooklyn, NY – Union Pool
11/21 Providence, RI – Narwhal Arms
11/22 Baltimore, MD – Floristree
11/23 Pittsburgh, PA – Brillobox*
11/24 Cleveland, OH – Beachland Tavern*
11/25 Chicago, IL – Schubas*
11/26 Bloomington, IN – Jakes Nightclub
11/29 Asheville, NC – Harvest Records*
11/30 Atlanta, GA – The Earl*
12/01 Birmingham, AL – The Bottletree*
12/02 Baton Rouge, LA – Spanish Moon
12/03 Houston, TX – The Mink
12/04 Austin, TX – Emo’s*
12/06 Tucson, AZ – Solar Culture*
12/07 Phoenix, AZ – Modified
12/08 San Diego, CA – Casbah
12/09 Los Angeles, CA – The Echo
12/10 Santa Cruz, CA – The Crepe Place
12/11 San Francisco, CA – Bottom of the Hill
12/12/08 Arcata, CA – The Lil’ Red
12/15/08 Portland, OR – Rotture
* = w/ San Serac
Premiere: Actuel “QRS/TUV”
Details on experimental producer Actuel are few and far between, but one thing this track tells us is that he’s a percussion enthusiast. A rather abstract cut, “QRS/TUV” seems to be about exposing the many different musical combinations one can create when armed with laptop and drum kit. The track is off a new Asthmatic Kitty compilation, where label boss Sufjan Stevens, along with AK co-owner Lowell Brams and Micahel Kaufmann, hand-picked two discs’ worth of songs from Stars Like Fleas, Cepia, Alias, Son Lux, i am robot and proud, and others. Oh, and it’s for a good cause too, with proceeds from purchase going towards Habitat for Humanity.
Habitat
Disc One
01 Tidal River “A Cross Section of Clown Mountain”
02 Aspects of Physics “Utiliterranean”
03 Jim Guthrie “Little Furnace”
04 Kristin Miltner “The Barns Flock”
05 Instruments of Science & Technology “INST.stem.INST”
06 Nick Hennies “The Living Piano”
07 Ero Gray “Staircase and Water Pipes, 42 Broadway”
08 Cepia “Algiers”
09 Ben Owen “5 for 14”
10 Alias “In Hope of Witchless Attics”
11 Alfred Brown “SphericalType GasHolder”
12 Cheryl E. Leonard “Uncle Iroh’s Teahouse”
13 Blevin Blectum “Vast Angles”
14 Son Lux “Speak”
Disco Two
01 Actuel “QRS/TUV”
02 Sole w/ William Ryan Fritch “All Tomorrow’s Sewers”
03 i am robot and proud “Jeanne Mance”
04 900X “BGM”
05 Yuko Nexus6 “Wsagg-Chorus for Spaces”
06 KILN “Marigold Bunker”
07 therefore “Piznanano”
08 Six-Fing Thing “Sandpiper on the Warehouse Floor”
09 Stars Like Fleas “Call Me Trimtab”
10 ting ting jahe “d3p574”
11 Moth!Fight! “A Long Way from Home”
12 Jon Galaxy “Shelter?”
13 Kadet “Horizon”
14 Wayne Feldman “Calling On You”
15 DM Stith “Your god is a Lion recently fed, drowsy”
Inbox: Rainbow Arabia
Sure, we’re always curious to know about an artist’s upcoming release, most recent tour, or arsenal of analog gear, but XLR8R’s also got a curiosity for quirk. Thus, each week, we email a different artist and find out what makes them tick, in the studio and in life. Next up is husband-and-wife duo Tiffany and Danny Preston, otherwise known as Rainbow Arabia.
What band did you want to be in when you were 15?
Tiffany: Metallica
Danny: O.M.D.
Worst live show experience?
When our micro-synth pedal broke just before a show in San Francisco. It added to the already sucky sound that night.
Favorite city to play in?
Anywhere with Pictureplane and BDRMPPL.
How did you come to incorporate the Middle Eastern influences into your songs?
We were really into the Sublime Frequencies releases Choubi Choubi and Omar Souleyman. We were watching a video on Youtube of the Omar Souleyman song “Leh Jani” and noticed that the oud and beats were played on a keyboard with microtonal scales. I immediately researched it and ordered one. It pretty much came together from there.
Is this something you think you’ll continue to do with future projects?
Yes, we would like to keep the Middle Eastern influence in there, but plan to explore and incorporate other influences, particularly African, Southeast Asian, and East Indian ones.
What is your favorite thing you own?
Our basset hounds and a pit-bull.
Name one item of clothing you can’t live without.
Tiffany: Flannel shirt.
Danny: Patent leather top siders.
What’s more tempting: alcohol, money, or baked goods?
Money and Kombucha.
What did you always get in trouble for when you were little?
Danny: Not eating vegetables.
Tiffany: Not eating anything.
What other artist would you most like to work with?
A collaboration between Paul Simonon, Wes Anderson, and Three 6 Mafia.
What’s the last thing you read?
Room saver for New England
Complete this sentence: In the future….
Rainbow Arabia and Hecuba will go on a movie theater tour with 5.1 surround-sound.
Stupidest thing you’ve done in the last 12 months?
Spaced out on a Silver Jews show that we already bought tickets for. We realized a week later that it had passed. We were pissed, especially Tiffany.
What’s next?
Hopefully working with a dope producer and bringing our music tothe next level.
MP3: “Omar K”
Faunts “Memories of Places We’ve Never Been (T.H. White Remix)”
Canadian indie-rockers Faunts released their only full-length to date, High Expectations/Low Results, in 2005, and New York-based downtempo DJ T.H. White revisited it with this lovely remix. The song evolves from a slow, ethereal mood to a meteor-shower of synths and driving double-time percussion. It’s like floating around your neighbor’s pool on your back during the last day of summer. Lulu McAllister
Memories of Places We’ve Never Been (T.H. White Remix)
Passions: Dubstep Meets Gothic Dance
In the grand tradition of Charles Bukowski, Jack Kerouac, and Ernest Hemingway, 17-year-old Bronx native Ben Deitz dreamed of becoming a writer. However, he soon realized all those guys had something in common–they were constantly drunk. Fresh out of rehab himself and not wanting to make a career of getting wasted, he began recording grinding breakcore tracks as Math Head, pilfering the moniker from a character in Paul Pope’s graphic novel The One Trick Rip-Off.
On tour in summer 2006 with his crew, NYC party rockers Trouble & Bass, Deitz had a revelation: He was tired of the breakcore scene and all the dreadlocked dudes that came along with it. Enamored with the burgeoning dubstep scene, he began producing wobbly, half-time bassline bangers, which can be heard on 2006’s The Most Lethal Dance (Reduced Phat), as well as 12”s for Ruff, Pitch Black, and Terminal Dusk.
Soon after, he started Passions, a project inspired by the emotion and drama of favorite bands like Nine Inch Nails and Joy Division. “You can still make dance music and have it say something that’s maybe kind of scary and very personal,” he explains earnestly.
To evoke the right mood, Deitz, now 25, takes further inspiration from the underground culture of 1920s Weimar Germany (“They were so open and free artistically, almost naïve. That can’t ever happen again,” he says) and cult films from the likes of Maya Deren (Meshes of the Afternoon) and Kenneth Anger (Scorpio Rising). What results are songs that seem to have been crafted in a factory–this is music to solder car parts to. A sense of danger and alienation lurks, yet early Passions tunes sound like Trent Reznor finding his dance legs. His debut 12-inch, “Emergency” (Kitsuné), features manic sirens and a thumping guitar, while “Afflicted by a Strangeness,” featuring Comanechi and Pre frontwoman Akiko Matsuura, is a chaotic synth odyssey that sounds like robots have taken over the planet. Recent Passions tracks evoke a gothic melancholia with slow, reflective power chords (“In Remembrance of”) and haunted-house acoustics, as on “Nobody,” which begins with a heady drum roll and an unintelligible male voice that creepily echoes off into oblivion.
Recently, Deitz has been holed up in a Brooklyn basement studio working on a forthcoming EP. “It’s really important to me to make an album that works thematically, not just a bunch of dance tracks,” he asserts, trying to mentally separate his two alter egos. Deitz is performing solo for now, but plans to turn Passions into a multi-person outfit. He has big hopes for live gigs, willing his audiences to “fight without hitting each other.”
“I want them to lose control,” he says. “I want to lose control. I want it to be this cathartic experience for me.”
Math Head’s Stab City EP will be out this winter on Ad Noiseam; his Passions album, Nothing, will be out on Rallye/Klee in early 2009.
Squarepusher Just a Souvenir
It’s hard to pinpoint when Squarepusher became the electro-prog Primus, but it feels at times that Tom Jenkinson, the one-time IDM dandy-turned-binary bassist behind it all, is fucking with us. There’s an abstract, absurd concept behind this album–its inspiration said to be glowing, emerald anamorphic coat hangers, oscillating architecture, and time-continuum-shattering instrumentation. Of course, there’s also some interesting explorations of robo-disco (“Star Time 2”), a supersaturated ?-ziq-esque odyssey (“Planet Gear”), and snake-charming distortion (“Tensor in Green”). The production (especially “Delta -V” and “Quadrature”) is much airier and filled with headroom–it feels more like a tracking session than an in-the-box sound-design seminar. Just a Souvenir is another fretless frolic for those who like cross-genre noodling with hints of Jamiroquai, King Crimson, and chiptunes.
Jazzanova and Mr. Scruff Southport Weekender Vol. 7
At the U.K.’s infamous Southport Weekender event, words such as “soul” and “jazz” take on meanings that might seem outlandish in other settings. But in Southport’s empowering context on this new double CD of mixes–from one-crew zeitgeist Jazzanova and maverick vinyl hog Mr. Scruff–such genre-twiddling seems not just possible, but desirable. The results are two mixes parsecs apart in some ways, but beautifully complementary in their end state. Jazzanova uses digital beats to place Badly Drawn Boy and Henrik Schwarz in the same soulful sentence as South Bronx Community Youth Project. Meanwhile, Mr. Scruff mashes together a bank-breaking playlist of rare-groove vinyl from Claussell, Ray Frazier, Gloria Scott, and more. A finer po-mo soul collection does not exist.
Panther Offers Monthly Free MP3 Covers
While they work diligently on the follow-up to their last album, 14 kt God, the kids of Portland’s caustic-pop outfit Panther will give away a free cover MP3 every month on their blog for the next two years. To kick off the hit parade, the band will offer a unique cover of the Bee Gees classic “To Love Somebody,” followed by a random assortment of singles that might include throwbacks from Black Flag, Sonny Sharrock, or The Replacements–stay tuned to find out who makes the cut.
Panther will also play a few shows next month at home before heading over to Europe in March.
Dates
12/5Portland, OR – Doug Fir*
12/14Portland, OR – Rotture**
3/4 Koln, Germany – King Georg
3/5Offenbach, Germany – Hafen 2
3/6Metz, France – L’Emile Vache
3/7Antwerpen, Belgium – Scheld’apen
3/8Bruxelles, Belgium – La Filature
3/12 Nantes, France – TBA
3/13 Bordeaux, France – Heretic
3/14Nancy, France – L’Autre Canal
3/17Dudingen, Switzerland – Bad Bonn
3/24Geneve, Switzerland – L’Usine
3/25Luzern, Switzerland – Treibhaus
3/27Prague, Czech Republic – Klub 007
*w/ The Thermals
** w/ Explode Into Colors, Hawnay Troof
Give the Drummer Sum
From the first bold horn blasts to the final shake of the rump, this video for Black Milk’s bumping single off of the new album, Tronic, pulses with funky energy. “Give the Drummer Sum” features an improved late-’90s-style screensaver moving in hypnotic swirls of texture and color around sinuous go-go dancers and musicians sharply dressed in coordinated black-and-white semi-formal attire. As the band heats up, the images only become progressively more psychedelic. Go, daddy, go! Lulu McAllister
