London trio Olympus Mons have been together for just over a year, and have already attracted plenty of attention after supporting The Pete Doherty Drug Circus (aka Babyshambles) on tour last autumn. Fortunately, their own music has little in common with Babyshambles’ half-baked dirge. Olympus Mons play geeky art-pop or arty geek-pop – depending on which way you look at it. Either way, it’s ace. Stand-out tracks ‘Circles’ and ‘Follow You Down’ manage to blend the Buzzcocks and Bloc Party to great effect, whilst other songs add hints of Pavement and The Cure. Two parts edgy to one part catchy. Top stuff.
www.theolympusmons.com

Ages ago I wrote a review about Magik Markers that got me in trouble with someone I mentioned in the review. It’s here if you want to read it. Anyway, James Smith (aka Stables and drummer for Spin Spin The Dogs) snuck his video camera into the show and now, courtesy of You Tube, you can experience the whole thing for yourself. It lives up to my memory.

So: CLICK HERE!

Triptych, Scotland’s multi-city alternative music festival, have just announced the line-up for this year’s event and, boy, do they know how to throw a launch party. diskant was there in full ligging capacity to take advantage of the free bars and enjoy the impressive interior of the Fruitmarket while having the line-up lasered into our brains via the David Shrigley designed artwork on the video screens.

Even better, The 1990s were on hand to provide some musical entertainment. Their set got off to a false start with eventually seven people all standing round one malfunctioning guitar amp but they soon got things back on track. I have been meaning to check out The 1990s for a while now, not least because singer John McKeown was the man behind the Yummy Fur, one of my favourite bands ever. The 1990s are in no way the Yummy Fur part 2 although John’s ultra Glaswegian vocals and the catchy postpunk pop tunes have carried over. But things are a little more serious now, a little more grown up I guess, with less of the knowing references and spangly keyboards and more of a straight up accessible sound. I hope they do well but I need to spend a bit more time with these songs before I’m fully convinced. As the free bar started to run dry, I left and bumped into John who remembered me from all those years ago in Aberdeen (related in preposterous detail here – oh to be young again). So, diskant vs The 1990s – coming soon!

I do heartily recommend you make it along to some of the Triptych shows if you can (they take place over 28-30 April throughout Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen). It may lack some of the innovation and experimentation of Instal and Subcurrent but where else will you get to see Aphex Twin and Wolf Eyes on the same bill rubbing up against the best in indie, classical, hiphop, dance and everything in between?

To put it in as pretentious a way as I can manage, O are post-music. The sounds they conjure are far removed from songs, from tunes, from rhythm and from melody, but – to echo what Yann (the man behind the O) suggests – the listener makes it music. This CD is almost totally abstract, with hints of ideas and suggestions of sounds being born, writhing confused within the speakers for a moment, only to be supplanted by the next in line. Whilst there are very vague hints of repeated motifs throughout the album, it’s an exhilaratingly confusing listen – it skips from random guitar lines to fucked-up gamelan to Prurient-like noise to Sunn o)))-like doom from minute to minute. Bizarrely however, and beautifully, the album succeeds when listened to with open ears. Heaven knows how this was recorded (it’s like a contact mike was placed on a brain), but it was done with an expert touch. The individual sounds here are engaging and captivating, and as a whole piece the album is as relevant as a Sunburned Hand Of The Man stone jam, or a Vibracathedral Orchestra mantra, or a Keiji Haino cavern of noise.

Antenna
O

Look who i’ve just found lurking in the woods after dark…

Brighton’s newest strange children The Woodsmen “are here for your souls, or whatever else you got”. Their first offering – ‘Only Man In Heaven Wearing Black’ sounds like Nick Cave challenging The Pogues to a knife-fight at a barn-dance, and is creepy enough to unnerve a carny.

The music rests its sweaty head at a grubby halfway-house somewhere between folk and rockabilly, but pitch-black rock ‘n’ roll blood still bubbles in their veins.

Their single – purportedly recorded on equipment half-inched from Pinewood Studios and haunted by the death rattle of Vincent Price and Peter Cushing! – is available for whiskey or hard cash.

Gawp at them at: www.thewoodsmen.co.uk

I wasn’t going to do this either but what the hell. I’M GOING ON TOUR tomorrow morning and you should come see us because I’m not doing this again any time soon, not least because I have hardly any holiday allowance left. I leave in 12 hours and still have 4 million things to do. I am coming down with a cold and have just discovered an worryingly enormous bruise on my leg that I have no recollection of inflicting on myself. I also see we are bringing Scotland’s lovely weather with us.

So, yes, ÜTER in Oxford, Brighton and London. One of these gigs is with the mighty econoline, one we are supporting someone who used to be in Spiritualized and thus can’t play our Spacemen 3 cover and the other is FREE. Find out more here and come say hello. I even bought a dress, what more do you want?

(Actual content when I return – I am in the process of interviewing my 4 favourite up and coming bands in Glasgow. If anyone can guess them I will give you a prize*).

* it is not a video camera

Ex-eeebleee frontman Dave Griffiths has a knack for writing obtuse, vaguely sinister lyrics and delivering them in a laconic, Bolan-inflected style which serves to accentuate their weirdness. The subject matter of the four songs here is a mystery to me – I’m sure they’re about something – but I prefer to enjoy the sound of the singing rather than the content. For a self-released single this is determined and ambitious stuff; music constructed with the typical drums/bass/guitar instrumentation is overlaid with trumpets and piano, then bent double with subtly odd constructions. Like Smog or Mercury Rev, Witches can take an average, well-written pop song and turn it into something special by adding certain touches of arrangement and contrast. At times the recording quality struggles to contain the vision at work here, but this is an impressive debut which doesn’t buckle under its own complexity. It takes a lot of skill to create songs which seem initially simplistic but which grow and develop on repeated listens, and Witches have a lot of skill.

Within the Woods/Witches

I wasn’t going to post this here because I thought it might seem too much like spam, but things have recently taken an interesting turn, so I’m doing this for your benefit. Yes, you.

A friend of mine from the icy wastes of Canadia is running a non-profit organisation, and their latest project is to get a bunch of young immigrants (‘new Canadians’) to make their own health awareness videos (because the people that normally make health awareness videos don’t really care or know anything about young immigrants), and they’re actually not that bad considering the kids that made them had never done any film stuff before. In order to get as many people as possible to watch the videos, they’ve done a quiz about them. Easy stuff, like ‘what colour is the girl’s jumper in video number 4’. The prize in the quiz is one of 4 new iPods (2 video iPods, 2 Nanos). Then there’s a ‘tell-a-friend’ contest where you get entered into another prize draw to win a Panasonic digital video camera just by getting other people to enter the quiz too. The more people you tell, the more entries you get.

Now – this is the interesting bit – the quiz has so far backfired quite spectacularly, because people are obviously so used to seeing epilepsy-inducing spyware-packed banner ads for FREE iPODS NOW L@@K!!!!11 that they’re just not entering. And they’re even less interested in winning a video camera. Kids these days are just so spoiled. So far, after 3 weeks of the quiz being open, and I don’t think it’s too unethical of me here to pass along cold hard figures, only 70 people have successfully entered the quiz. The best (or worst) bit though is that so far only 2 people have entered the digital video camera contest. You don’t have to be a mathematical genius to work out from that information that if you enter, you have a pretty good chance of winning. You don’t even need to get the answers to the quiz right to enter the referral thingy. How hard can it be?

Here’s the quiz page
Here are the videos (one of which, iQuit, is actually quite good)

I’ll even tell you the bloody answers if you want.

It is with some embarrassment that I note the release date of this double ‘A’-side/25-minute EP was a while ago, but it is with no small enthusiasm that I recommend you go and dig this sucker out from your local indie store.

By all rights, the Chemistry Experiment should be an institution. Wilfully idiosyncratic and fascinatingly off-kilter, their brooding and experimental pop music deserves far more recognition than it generally receives. Plus, their devotion to perfectionism should be lauded – not many bands would have the patience to spend so long tweaking and fiddling with their debut album, with such spectacular results. Now, after slaving for five years over that rightly lauded album (released last year), they’ve already got around to banging out another four tracks (plus a song off the album) for this EP, led by a characteristically strange and sprawling amalgamation of two songs by other people.

Pressing play for the first time on this CD, I was struck how the first ten seconds sound like a snatch from DJ Shadow’s “Endtroducing” album, but then I realised that this was the Experiment playing “Forever Autumn”, a song best-known for its inclusion in the famous War of the Worlds soundtrack (no, nothing to do with Spielberg). And a grand job the kids do in tackling a fairly drippy song,

Around four and a half minutes in they start vamping it up and you realise that the dreamy wistful melodies have been replaced by chaotic echoing slide dobro, droning synths, clattering drums and smears of cymbals that gradually peter out before regrouping and kicking into that familiar chord progression from “Interstellar Overdrive” by Messrs Barrett and those other cunts. Then, just to top it off, the Experiment pull a double-reverse and segue straight back into one final refrain from “Forever Autumn” as one final cherry for as proof of the pudding for this feast of a sonic gateau.*

Twee enthusiasts and apologists who might be feeling scared by this point, please note: the radio edit of the title song and album track “You’re the prettiest thing” (serving as the other ‘A’ side) save this CDEP from all-out prog nonsense. Don’t worry, the Experiment haven’t forsaken you entirely. But watch out! The remaining EP tracks include disco beats with swashbuckling wah-wah guitars on “Karin”, and then lots of heavenly squiggling synths alongside some neat vocodering of Steven J. Kirk’s distinctive vocals on a cover of “Belt and Shoelaces” originally by The Butterflies of Love.

Something of (another) triumph from The Chemistry Experiment then – a fantastically good-value-for-money deal on a serious chunk of music, along with a cracking couple of covers. Go seek it out.

[*Yes, I said sonic gateau. Sorry.]

www.thechemistryexperiment.co.uk
www.fortunapop.com

Yeesh; bit of a weird one this one. The prodigiously talented Ms Vipers wrote, arranged, performed and produced this 6-song, 3-track, 26-ish minute “single”, which calls to mind Kate Bush, This Mortal Coil, opera singers, prog rock and god knows what else. Primarily driven by pianos and a gusty set of lungs, this release is guaranteed to sound out of kilter with pretty much everything else musical you would encounter in an average day.

Kat Vipers comes from Greece, and (inevitably enough) is very much classically trained. Trained enough to tire of just doing all that classical crap and start experimenting with songs herself, apparently throwing in “alternative rock”-influenced catchy bits (I think I must have missed those) and “jazz”y flourishes in something of an over-rich cavalcade of music inspired by many sources. The resulting mixture is certainly thick and voluminous. The tracks on the CD range from seven to eleven minutes long, each incorporating two distinct movements. The longest, closing track is one long overblown epic which goes all over the place like some never-ending story of a song. Her music is very difficult to do justice to in print – I suggest visiting her website and sampling some music for yourself if you’re thus far intrigued.

This said; I’d better make some effort to give you an idea of what you should expect though. Consider some key elements: First of all there’s Ms Vipers’ incredibly surreal, warbling voice, coming on a little like a husky Kate Bush with an extended vocal range. There’s a hell of a lot of pseudo-classical and Tori Amos-inspired piano. Ghostly wailing background vocals pop in and out, even predominating from time to time. The first song has an annoying bunch of wind chimes, and the last song has a drum kit popping up here and there to complement and emphasise sections. Oh, and don’t forget a bunch of synthesised strings popping up every so often to punctuate and unctuate with abandon. The construction of the music itself is certainly hard to pin down – there’s little pop-conventional repetition of phrases or melody, and there’s a lot of meandering minimalism and soaring vocals.

Mix together these ingredients and see what comes out: self-indulgent prog nonsense or refreshingly ambitious idiosyncratic music? Whatever your initial reaction, you’ll certainly need a few listens to digest and process such a rich soup fully. You should probably decide whether you want to risk indigestion for yourself.

www.katvipers.com
www.pyrecords.net