Seefeel. Quique (Redux).

In 1916, Russian Futurist painter Vladimir Rossiné invented the Optophonic Piano, an electronic instrument that created sounds and projected colors and patterns through a series of painted glass discs. Most likely, it sounded like shit. But if you could do such a thing correctly, and had someone like, say, Helen Frankenthaler or Agnes Martin or Bryce Marden been responsible for the layers of plates, then you might have gotten something quite beautiful. Something like Seefeel.

Formed in the early 90’s as dream pop was just beginning to discover electronics and samples, Seefeel melded My Bloody Valentine’s lush fuzz with Aphex Twin’s serenity into a mesmerizing pulsar of languidly revolving beats, rubbery bass lines, and looped guitars. Approaching the idea of techno from the standpoint of a rock band, and using its instruments to replicate and interpret that sound, they stretched dream pop out like ribbons of taffy, endlessly folding it over and over on itself until it became a moebius strip of glassy-skinned candy.

Like looking through a glass clockworks, their compositions reveal themselves by adding and subtracting layers of sound, with different elements rising to the surface or slinking off into darker depths, with only the slightest of glows to remind you of their presence. Chord and tempo changes are kept to a minimum, so the songs float along as the textural, ambient equivalents of Op Art. It’s better than sonic wallpaper though—it’s more like the dizzy buzz of butterflies in your stomach, or the blissful space between orgasms and sleep.

I seem to remember referencing the Cocteau Twins ambient experiments before and I was planning on doing so again here, when I noticed that Seefeel member Mark Clifford produced those remixes (on the Otherness ep), which is probably why this album feels so familiar. The second disc includes remixes and alternate takes that push the songs further into pillowy, endorphin-flushed, Terry Riley territory.

CD 1
CD 2

James Ferraro. Marble Surf.

If you're unfamiliar with James Ferraro...remember the guys in high school who planned to start a band and then change their name for every release, and it didn't matter if anyone knew how to play an instrument? James Ferraro actually did that. If he's most well known for anything (and he isn't), it's probably The Skaters. As a "solo" artist, he's had more identities than it's worth listing here. He's probably the only person who's more prolific than Acid Mothers Temple. You could spend a lifetime trying to track down all of his releases and never be sure you'd found them all, or if they were even the right ones. It can be pretty hit or miss, too, depending on your patience for lo-fi, scrambled tape messes of wasteland-psychedelic samples and alchemical keyboards and random noises that sound like they were rescued from a box of betamax tapes. That whole alternate 80's universe that bands like Wingdings, Sun Araw, Dolphins Into the Future, Infinity Window, Matrix Metals, et al are floating in? James invented it. I think he's kinda genius, but it's an acquired taste.

Except for Marble Surf. This is simply the most endlessly beautiful thing I've ever heard. In a post-post-Eno way, he's composed a slow-motion, ocean-sized waterfall of washed-out angelic choruses, watery steel drums, and dreamy synths that repeat the same basic structure for forty minutes (there are two tracks, but they're essentially the same piece of music). Eno proposed the idea of "holographic" music that would be indistinguishable from any other part of the recording no matter where you started listening to it. Marble Surf does it in a way that's gorgeously, almost psychedelically hypnotic rather than ambient.

At first it might seem like he's just set a brief snippet of music on repeat, but as you get drawn in it's clear that he's actually playing this. Musical cues come in at slightly different points on each loop, making it sound shiveringly, shimmeringly alive and organic, like light sparkling on water. Even when new instruments do arrive, it's so subtle and matched to the grand astral pageantry of the whole that you hardly notice they weren't there before. It's a cloud-floating heroin-basted rimjob from jesus in a Terry Reilly calypso dream. It's J.S. Bach for the polaroid-transfer, new-age tapes set. It's weightless and epic and magnificent and ecstatic and transcendent all at once, and it's the best fucking thing I've ever heard.

Marble Surf

Palm Fabric Orchestra. Vague Gropings in the Slip Stream.

Some of the best music I’ve ever heard came in snatches from passing cars, or fell from apartments, muffled and crumbling in the rich sonic mulch of the city.

This is the music that wafts through open windows. It’s a masterpiece of floating moods and textures that richly evokes the feeling of being adrift—in nature, in sleep, in life—calm, accepting, and sensual. Like feeling the pulse of the ocean making space in itself for the shape of your unmoored body. Vague Gropings in the Slip Stream works just as well as a review as it does a title. Its gentle, acoustic ambience drifts like dandelion seeds, or swells and ripples like prairie grass in the wind. It’s wordless, though not without vocals, and Susan Voelz’ violin works some kind of magic with Ellen Fullman’s “long stringed instrument”, weaving luminous drones throughout several songs (If you’re familiar with Volo Volo, that’s her playing on the almost otherworldly Entrance and Endtrance). And Frank Orrall’s guitar has the same kind of happy nonchalance that Mark McGuire has been playing with on his solo acoustic releases.

I should probably mention that this album was a side project of Poi Dog Pondering, one of my favorite bands when I was in high school and college. There were bands that I idolized (like the Cure or the Velvet Underground), and then there were bands that I would have actually wanted to be in, and being in Poi Dog Pondering sounded like it would have been one of the most exuberantly wonderful things you could do.

Orrall, who once portrayed "Happy-Go-Lucky Guy" in the film Slacker, managed to write incredibly catchy songs about how awesome being alive feels without any of them being the absolutely gag-inducing shit-fests that would imply. Also, a lot of the songs were pretty filthy (Pulling Touch, Diamonds and Buttermilk). It’s ridiculously happy stuff that doesn’t think feeling ridiculously happy is anything to be ashamed of. Irony doesn’t exist for Poi Dog Pondering. Even some of their best songs (Complicated and God’s Gallipoli from Pomegranate) put relentlessly danceable music behind tales of cancer and loss and death—not as a joke, but as an acknowledgement that eventually life will be your adversary, and that, although you want to live as much of it as possible, sometimes the only weapon you’ll have left against it is joy.

Slip Stream

Sovetskaya Gone. Sovetskaya Gone.

I came across this a couple of years ago and it instantly became of my favorites. Kevin Danchisko is a genius at creating endlessly fractalized abysses of cycling, shifting drones and golden tones. This self-titled tape coats blissful glacial fields with an analog glaze of synapse-frying, minimal psychedelia. Whether igniting a de-orbit burn into crackling, minimal dub space, or sending telegraph signals from the dream-like ambience of Twin Peaks, Sovetskaya Gone sounds like it’s choreographing a Skylab waltz among the stars. It’s music that exists only in crystal fracture planes—the sound of the infra-thin, that stretches to infinity when experienced head on but disappears entirely at right angles.

Look for an Ossining and Sovetskaya Gone vinyl outing on Digitalis in the near future.

Get Gone

Sovetskaya's Blog

Sovetskaya on myspace

The Goodwillies. Greenmachines for All the Childrens.

Tim Goodwillie is one third of (VxPxC). This is one of his solo releases, a washed out, sun bleached, outer-space groove decay of keyboard and guitar distortions. Digital fluff and flutter for the summer heat.

Greenmachines

Goodwillies on myspace

Wingdings. Wingdings II: Zarathustra's Puzzle.

So it turns out that Wingdings is Sam Meringue, of Matrix Metals and possibly Explorers and Flashback Repository. He also worked with James Ferraro on one of the 90210 projects. Wingdings I was pretty 1980s-radio-through-a-loop-delay-and-effects-pedal dipped in Lamborghini Crystal's beer, so that makes sense. Each of the subsequent Wingdings releases seem to develop more song-like structures. Wingdings II has a definite beachy feel to it—sort of like Rangers and Ducktails playing the Hokey Pokey at a roler rink on the boardwalk. There's so many layers of sound and I'm pretty sure they're referencing all sorts of cheesy, good-times songs (at the very end, they just space out on the Witch Doctor song. Oo Eee Oo Ah Ah, Ting Tang Walla-Walla Bing-Bang and all that) that have been processed through Dylan Ettinger styled memories of neon-lit futurescapes from bad 80s sci-fi films. It's quite enjoyable.

This one is by request for Glangel. Thanks for the email.

Zarathustra's Puzzle

V/A. Oz Days Live.

The second disk is really the only reason anybody ever looks for this album, as it houses both The Taj Mahal Travellers and Les Rallizes Denudes in what must have been one massive mind-fuck of an evening. But I’ve written about them elsewhere, so I’ll tell you about the real reason you need this: Dr. Acid Seven.

Side one is clogged with otherwise completely forgettable folk singers and Group Sounds bands that may have known how to dress like rock ’n’ rollers, but didn’t have the first clue how to play it. Dr. Acid Seven easily bests them all on Track 4, a thick slab of biker rock that singlehandedly makes the case for the importance of hard drugs in music. This guy makes the whole record worthwhile. Especially on Track 5’s sublimely good-natured drunken sing along. It’s a lanky, strutting song (with kazoo solo!) that happily ambles on down the road feelin’ great, while Dr. Acid Seven (who I imagine as a stilt-legged version of R. Crumb’s “keep on truckin’” guy) gets progressively wilder and sillier with his vocal acrobatics. It would be worth learning Japanese just to be able to properly sing along with this. Proving he can do “pretty” just as well as anybody else, he gets serious on track seven, going back to his futen days with a beautiful, delicate Japanese folk number. This is apparently his only legitimate appearance on record. Unlike the tidal wave of Les Rallizes Denudes releases, I haven’t been able to find any other bootlegs of him in action, which is a crying shame.

This doesn't sound anything like his set on the record, but it's still a pretty bad-ass clip of Acid Seven, Keiji Haino, Kenny Inoue, Masato Minami, Shime Takahashi, and Takashi Mizutani at Hibiya Yagai Ongakudo, Tokyo, May 1974.

Part 1:


Part 2:


Oz Disc 1
Oz Disc 2

Coelacanth. The Chronograph.

Joseph Beuys collected objects he considered "psychic batteries"—piles of peat blocks, a copper cast of a mammoth's tooth holding a heating element—which, if hooked directly to a tape recorder, might have made the noises on this record.

Coelacanth manipulate environmental recordings to impenetrable effect, until they seem to consist not of known elements but of the talismanic patina those elements acquire through decay. It's ambient, though not in the usual lovely, drifting, post-Eno manner. They've completely sidestepped any known maps of musical structure. I'd call it minimal, but only in the sense that—once broken down into its sub-atomic elements—this is the finest division of anything that might still be called music.

After the Taj Mahal Travelers, this may be the most way-out thing I've posted. It creates its own sound-space, integrating itself into your environment rather than floating overtop or hovering in the background. It's just there. As Marge Simpson once profoundly said, "Whatever it does, it's doing it now".

Everything sounds fragile. Like with William Basinski's Disintegration Loops, we're immersed in decay, but where his tapes made beautiful, tragic opera out of the sound of their own death, Coelacanth is content to draw chalk outlines around the dead bodies of microscopic, deep-sea bone machines.

A Peculiar Stone or the Iron Molecule makes speaker hum sound organic, if not a little bit creepy. Something's happening in the dark—a blind wraith reaching for a tin bowl on the stone floor of an abandoned building. But only for a minute. Eventually it settles into something like the circuitous wobble of crackling vinyl. We may very well be listening to the vastly amplified sound of oxidation. Method of Extracting a Live Wire might be a deep-sea recording of some new form of planktonic life. How Bodies Become Phosphorescent whirrs and squeaks like an army of miniature scissors snipping away at a rusty playground whirlygig, collapses into the dead-eyed tapping of some exoskeletal machine scratching out a graph that records the flow of silt through a sieve, and then spins clockwork gears behind the pulsing, high-pitched drone of cricket violins. Vaporization of a Convergence unleashes all of of Coelacanth's tiny monsters at once, chittering away until they gently burrow into the sea-floor with a deep sigh.

Unlike a lot of experimental bands that fuss over field recordings and abstract sound, Coelacanth never lose sight of aesthetics. The Chronograph always remains strangely, magnetically listenable. While not conventionally pretty, or even concerned with creating its own kind of beauty, it does patiently transport you into some undeniably unique and rewarding realms.

Chronograph

Coelacanth website

Landing. Centrefuge.

We spent a couple of years in Landing's home base of Connecticut, so I was lucky enough to see them live a number of times. At house party at Dave Longstreth's place, The Dirty Projectors , Mount Eerie, and D+ played acoustic sets in the middle of the bare living room. Phil Elverum tried to teach us a slow stomp...stomp...clap rhythm to accompany one of his songs, but as we tried it everyone burst into laughter as we collectively realised we'd slipped into doing Queen's We Will Rock You instead.

I guess because they'd brought all of their instruments and needed a better electrical hookup, Landing played in the basement. It was tiny and the band took up most of the available space. The rest of us were packed in like cordwood. I was about a foot away from Adrienne Snow. It felt weird staring her in the face so I just closed my eyes. Everyone was reverentially silent and as they started to play, the room and all the people in it just evaporated. Even listening to them on record feels like wearing the Aurora Borealis as a blanket. You're both embraced and dissolved. They make perfect company with Seefeel, Harmonia, Cluster, and Harold Budd, so if you're into those sorts of drifting, midnight-deep pools of sound, this EP will be exactly your sort of thing.

Centrefuge

Landing on myspace

Landing's website

Labradford. Prazision LP.

It starts by hemorrhaging sound. Some type of deep space satellite has sprung a leak and a bottomless ocean of electronic scree is seeping out into the universe.

Switching between dissonant drone (Listening In Depth's layers of looped feedback) and cloudy ambience (Disremembering's shades Stars of the Lid or ambient Cocteau Twins), Labradford instantly made a name for themselves as the flagship release on Kranky (soon to become well known for this type of updated, experimental space-rock). Think of Loop covering Cluster, and you have the basic idea. Of course, you can also hear a bit of Landing, Aix Em Klemm, Pan•American, and some of the Cure's best minor key atmospherics. And nestled right in the middle of all this static is Soft Return, whose pillowy instrumentation and whispered vocals sound like Spiritualized on some sort of cosmic quaalude comedown. It's a divine, Sunday morning pop song by any standard and easily the best thing they've done.

Prazision

Buy the reissue with bonus track

Labradford online

Labradford on myspace

Bonecloud. Teenage Lycanthropy.

Way back in high-school when I had dreams of being an artist, I wanted to make what I thought of as "dry art"; things made out of dust and cobwebs and stale air that functioned analytically as much as poetically. I read later that Duchamp had coined the same term (art sec in French). Bonecloud seem to have embraced the same idea for their music. Even their name conjures images of dessicated nothingness (it also might work if they were a Norwegian death metal band). This album, especially, makes me think of what William Basinski might sound like as a live act; crumbling bits of accumulated notes, silver dust from the backs of antique mirrors, a midden of cellular detritus under a cold sun.

Teenage Lycanthropy

Bonecloud on myspace

Wingdings. Wingdings I: Return to Earth.

Windings traverse the same sunny, intergalactic, hypnagogic, scrambled-tape recesses of space as James Ferraro and Matrix Metals. There are two more Wingdings tapes available from Outer Limits Recordings, all of which come with extensive inserts that read like Dr. Bronner's spaced out cousin explaining his theory of everything.

Return to Earth

Buy a copy

Windy & Carl and Heavy Winged. Monolith: Earth.

The original vinyl version of this was a lovely, single-sided picture disc with both tracks mixed together, but hard panned to the left and right channels. By adjusting the balance, you could control how much drone you heard in relation to your rock (sort of like Boris' Dronevil, or the Velvet Underground's Murder Mystery). The groove on the vinyl also spiralled out from the center of the record, which was a little confusing at first, since it didn't come with instructions.

Windy & Carl have melted into pure, gorgeous drone that barely shifts or stirs but still manages to entrance and immerse (the CD version, which I'm making available here, has an extended mix of this). Heavy Winged lay down an epic free-rock guitar jam bolstered by primitive, gargantuan drumming. It's surprising how well these tracks work, whether together or alone.

Part one has both of the individual tracks. Part two is the hard-panned stereo mix.

Part 1
Part 2

Windy & Carl official website
Windy & Carl on myspace

Heavy Winged on myspace

A Sunny Day in Glasgow. The Sunniest Day Ever & Tout New Age.

Pretty noisy/Noisy, pretty.

Everyone calls them shoegazers, so I guess I'll go along with that. It's not shoegaze like anyone I'm familiar with, though. The Sunniest Day Ever is a masterpiece of vertiginous, see-sawing rhythms and smashed glitter-ball textures that suggests an alternate universe Siouxsie Sioux/Cocteau Twins mash-up with severe equilibrium problems. I've never listened to it on headphones, but I'm pretty sure it would be impossible to do while standing. You know that sliding sensation you get just before fainting, where the world itself seems to have tilted before you realize it's actually you? That's what this sounds like. A Mundane Telephone Call to Jack Parsons is a whole new kind of awesome.

Tout New Age is a bit tamer, eliding into the sort of sound the Cocteau Twins were exploring on their later ambient remixes (this has become more pronounced on their latest release, Ashes Grammar). Not quite as fractured as thier first EP, but still adventerous and very pretty.

Sunniest

ASDIG official site

ASDIG on myspace

Windy & Carl. A Dream of Blue.

As kids speculating on the hidden origins of dust, we reasoned that it must come from great, soft clouds of silver winged moths that descended in the night, like a legion of miniature powdered wigs shivering off the accumulated particles of crystallized sleep that grew on their delicate furry bodies, the sediment gradually coating our daytime world in soft-focus nostalgia.

Blue

Windy & Carl's official site

Windy & Carl on myspace

Taj Mahal Travellers. August 1974.

Completing our troika of Taj Mahal Travellers posts.

August Disc 1
August Disc 2

Taj Mahal Travellers. Live Stockholm July 1971.

It's more avant-garde noise from nature's drone gods. When you have all of eternity, why not spend two hours singing your first note?

I think this was the last of the Traveller's albums to be released, although it was actually the first to be recorded. Paradoxically, they sound more relaxed and assured here then they do on their second album, merging their scrape and rumble to such an extent that no one instrument or member ever takes over, allowing you to float along, caught in their massive undertow.

July Disc 1
July Disc 2

Taj Mahal Travellers. July 15, 1972.

UPDATE: I just discovered the download link was redirecting back to this page. That's been corrected. Sorry about that.

Speaking of the Taj Mahal Travellers, here's their second album. I learned of them through Julian Cope's excellent book, Japrocksampler: How the Post-War Japanese Blew Their Minds on Rock 'n' Roll.I'm always amazed to discover that music like this exists, much less was made so long ago. It's psychedelic in the purest sense of being capable of transporting your mind to a completely new and unknown space. It's more landscape than music (one member's instrument was "tree branch"), complete with its own peculiar, unnerving weather.

I've become more and more attracted to music that disorients me from where I am and what I'm doing. There's nothing to hum along to here, the singer has a voice like a rough-hewn wooden bowl (his few vocals are deep, rumbling throat calls), there's no melody or trajectory to anything they're doing, and most of the music is so heavily treated it's hard to tell (or believe) that a human being has mapped out that noise on a known instrument. This (thankfully) isn't even free jazz. It was something completely unique to these guys at the particular time it was recorded. Despite the processing, it remains purely organic. Despite its amorphousness, it's never anything less than compelling.

July 15

Bonecloud. Drawing Spirits in Crystals.

I pulled out this album again the other day and was surprised to discover that my memory of it being the snow between stations was completely wrong. It's actually the sonic scree of the Taj Mahall Travellers covering the Harmony Rockets Paralyzed Mind of the Archangel Void.

Spirits

Bonecloud on myspace

Harmony Rockets. Paralyzed Mind of the Archangel Void.

Over forty solid minutes of shimmering, hypnagogic beauty from inside a diving-bell.

Void