Pointless review of the year, number one…

…because I doubt this release will still be available by the time you read this, being a limited edition of 33 copies! It’s a one-sided 12″ LP with a beautiful etching on the flip, along with a lathe-cut 10″, packaged inside a card envelope tied up with twine. You have to love those production values. And what of the music, you ask? Well, for the most part it’s inept death metal recorded, seemingly, on a very cheap four track, and for the rest of the time a combination of dumb low-fi hip-hop and out-there folk which makes Sentridoh seem like the pinnacle of recording finesse. Is it any good? Well, who knows. Maybe if you’re in the right mindset (that mindset being drunk, angry, alone and in need of some light relief). It does include the lyric ‘You’re gonna break your back / You’re gonna break your back / I hope you break your back / DIEEEEEEE’… which has to count for something.

Rock is Hell
Nate Denver’s Neck

Build Buildings, a.k.a. Brooklyn based Ben Tweel, is a master of subtlety: “there is a problem with my tape recorder” is a strong collection of minimal electronica that is crafted with care, warmth and precision.

Tweel provides the listener with a seemingly limitless assortment of beats and samples, each delicately and purposely placed to build tensions and melodies that slowly slide under the radar of the listener.

There is a feeling of familiarity throughout; Tweel has produced something that is imaginative, playful and rooted in the every day. Sampled clicks, hums and whirrs from the gadget and button filled world around us meet sparingly used acoustic strings, percussion and piano. I imagine at times his music sounds like what a fax machine might sound like if it tried to serenade a photocopier with a harp.

Even at loud volumes, “there is a problem with my tape recorder” will always seem quiet, which is no bad thing. Sounds from outside of the music rub alongside the music with ease – beats mix with the hum of traffic or shop lights elegantly. I even found that at times that I had forgotten that I was listening to music and had become half convinced that my life had always been soundtracked so perfectly by Build Buildings.

Imagine a world in which drum machines are made from bubble gum and the best guitars are kitted from fuzzy pink wool. In such a world Debbie Harry or Vivienne Westwood would rule the earth and Cannonball Jane would be on the radio 24/7.

Street Vernacular is bright pink bundle of New York flavoured lo-fi pop. It rocks, bubbles and shimmers in all the right places, showcasing Cannonball Jane’s warmth and humour. While the album is a perfect soundtrack to daydreams and wistful gazes, it is cute without being cloying. With a mixture of home-taped samples, Abba-esque keyboards, fuzzy guitars, and future disco drum machine patterns it is adventurous, exhilarating and above all really good fun.

Cannonball Jane
Fortuna Pop!

Ug. I did it, i finally caved in and built a proper myspace page.

I don’t know why, i’ve never like myspace from the beginning. It smacks so much of sheer marketing ploy, it gives me the jeebies. I know about the Robert Maxwell Rupert Murdoch buyout of Intermix Media who own myspace and all that, but i mean even before then.

I jumped onto the friendster bandwagon pretty early. It seemed fun, it seemed like all the san francisco and uk indie-kids and hipsters had effectively taken over a dating site. I like mis-using things, i like other people mis-using things, finding new uses for something the original creator never intended. Then came tribe.net, which i reluctantly also subbed up for. It did seem like a genuinely better community site, more geeky and less fratboy. But still.. i got bored entering all that information in a second time. I got bored after that with community sites.

Then i got my audioscrobbler plugin, and when that merged with Last.fm, here was a true community site that really kicked ass, was genuine about the music, innovative with the features, and i instantly fell in love with it.

Flickr is my other online obsession these days, since i upgraded my camera a few months back. Same story, innovative and easy to use website, and seems genuinely passionate about the content and the users.

So, back to myspace. Whats not to like? Its pretty easy to use, up-to-date features (nothing truly innovative there, just seems like the best features from what has gone before), and i guess thats it. Its the ease of use i guess that gets everyone on board, and now that the whole world and their granny is on there, they pretty much have the dominating force for any would-be music community site challengers to the throne. So what am i griping about? i dunno! Myspace is just ugly and full of too many ads, and i feel like i’m selling out by building my own page, so i guess i’m just venting/justifying/whining!

The thing is, what makes a good community site is having a large community, and myspace now has it, with so many members. Everyone i know is up there, and its good people, its people i really do know and share a life with outside of inter-web-land, people doing and making and promoting great independent music.

But still i can’t shake a sneaky image of boardroom meetings and brainstorming sessions behind the myspace origins, rather than bedroom or garage hackers, and *splutter!* thats, thats just not indie-rock!

( http://myspace.com/highpointlowlife in case you were wondering.. )

This is a beautiful and nifty-looking little CD in a miniature sleeve. It makes me feel most giant-like. The three tracks on here seem to me like fairly close cousins to the music on Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works, vol. 2; moody-sounding, sparse ambient instrumentals with a general lack of apparent beats. First track ‘The Beauty of Repetition’ is a wonderful 9’31” series of drones, which enveloped my ears and warmed up my chilly car this morning. As the CD goes by, the edge (for me) is slightly taken off with the introduction of more structured melody and rhythm, making things more FSOL than Sunn o))), to put it ham-fistedly. But what a great little item this is! A compact twenty-minute blissout in a pocket-sized edition for those with tiny pockets.

noground-r

Smooth-edged melodic independent pop music of the kind which America seems so proficient, this CD is almost defiantly removed from the ongoing vogue for violent, aggressive and dissonant underground music. The eleven tracks on the album chime and twinkle, with upbeat, clean guitar lines skipping across soft drum patterns at odds with the wistful and heartfelt vocals. This music evokes bands of a different era – McCarthy, the Pale Fountains, even Felt – but it is of course timeless. At times the addition of synths, brass and spoken word can bring things to a fearfully glossy place, but at the same time I can’t fail to love the simplicity and purity of a band like this. There will always be many such bands producing pure pop music, but this one has a grasp of melody, arrangement and brevity which helps them to poke out above the crowd.

Bird in Box Records
The Dalloways

You know I’ve been waiting all year to do this again.

ALASDAIR – for patiently re-introducing me to Fun, amongst other things
BUNNIES – I have spent way too much of 2005 stalking bunny rabbits
CHANNEL 4 – Damn you, I wasn’t supposed to get addicted to TV again
DATA PANIK – my favourite new band of 2005
ELEPHANTS – providing the main entertainment of being a corporate designer
FLICKR – my year in photos
GREEN TEA – begone, caffeine
HIS DARK MATERIALS – The stage show was one of the greatest things I have ever seen
IPOD – completely changed my listening habits, probably for the worse
JAPAN – I’M GOING TO JAPAN (my catchphrase for 2005, my most anticipated thing for 2006)
KNITTING – and sewing, as part of www.misofunky.com
LAST FM – See, Crazy Boys IS my song of the year
MONO – home from home this year with the fantastic Plan B and Beard events, our gig with Wolf Eyes and many happy hours just hanging out with friends.
NOODLES – Do I eat out anywhere else than Ichiban and Wagamama? Probably not.
OWW – Brain melting noise at Instal and Glasgow Implodes
PROPERTY OWNERSHIP – In progress. Keep your fingers crossed!
QUIET – Living in a tiny house in a garden, down a lane
RSI – pros: less time on computers, more going out. cons: PAIN, losing touch with online friends
SNOW – on December 29th. Just in time!
THIRTY – My turnaround year, and how
UTER – Still fun, mainly due to good gigs with so many lovely and fantastic bands
WALKING – also rediscovered thanks to living next to the River Kelvin walkway
XENOMANIA/RICHARD X – responsible for most of my pop thrills this year
YOU – for continuing to read diskant. Thank you!
ZINES – I’m not going to get my zine done by the end of the year am I?

I can’t confirm and apologise if wrong but it seems guitarist Derek Bailey died on Christmas Day. My good friend Luke posted the news and a couple of sites seem to know too so unless a bad mistake has happened it looks like the original skronker has gone.
I heard Bailey before I heard Beefheart even courtesy of a friend from my school days called Stuart. He made me a tape of Evan Parker on one side and Bailey’s 80s record “Drop Me Off At 96th” on the other. He wrote on it “This K7 is a bit of a fucker. Bear with it!”. I still have it and I moved through being totally freaked out by it, to not being able to relate to it, to finding it hilarious then baffling then super powerful (with the hilarity remaining).
Bailey mastered technique to make most guitar players shit through their eyes and then decided it was simply not rewarding enough and developed a language on the semi acoustic jazz guitar that seems impenetrable at first but slowly reveals itself as being a plunging-the-depths personal language that actually sounds like incidental music to a Tom n Jerry cartoon. Like Fahey he didn’t wait for someone to put his records out and founded the Incus label pressing records that collectors today would kill for. His sides with drummer Hann Bennick are insane and my personal highlight.
I never saw him play. He was supposed to tour with Fahey under the banner “Guitar Excursions Into The Unknown” but pulled out. I think it was a measure of my tastes that I was shitting it over Bailey playing and had to ask who Fahey was. When he pulled out I wasn’t interested and ended up missing two of my favourite players perform in one foul swoop.
Anyway, expect to read a million better and more gushing (and more sober) tributes but I thought I’d add mine.
As a footnote: Stuart, who got me into Bailey (and Beefheart too!) ended up playing with the man himself recently under the name THF Drenching. A long way from playing drums on Sex Pistols covers with me! XXX

It must be tough to be an electronicist nowadays, it being a genre that’s entered a kind of adolescence. Older forms have a long and fruitful past to draw upon. A guitar-rock band can easily flourish and become massively successful while sounding much like another guitar-rock band that was around thirty years ago, based entirely on an ear for a catchy tune and nice white smiles. Form a folk act, and while there are many qualities that your audience will expect from you, exciting new forms of sonic creation are going to be fairly low down on their list of priorities. Novelty, while always entertaining, holds far less value to a long-established musical genre than it does one for which the listener’s perception is that of acres of new ideas and possibilities stretching into the horizon, waiting to be harvested.

Partly, this is an illusion caused by massive growth spurts over the life of the genre. Hardware which would have required the taking out of a mortgage in order to possess a decade ago is now available, in one form or another, to any back-bedroom tinkerer of a modest income. Undoubtedly a good thing, optimistically leading to the democratization of music and making the major labels sweat, this rush of technological advance has had the effect of stamping a “best-before” date on almost every new work, to the point where the canny listener can place previously unheard records to within a couple of years.

Now that’s reaching an age where, while still a young pup, it actually has some kind of commonly recognized history, electronica is faced with a problem. How to address its past while still expected to be constantly eyeing the future?

Richard D. James gave us one answer with his Analord series of EPs, restricting himself to ancient equipment but approaching it without a hint of nostalgia to produce something that sounds every bit as fresh as you would expect if he allowed himself a less restrictive palette, but which is sonically rooted in his own personal tradition.

For Huddersfield’s Signal Generator, on the other hand, the past isn’t there to be dissassembled and pillaged for raw material, but is a place whose customs and architecture are familiar and comforting. If played this record without any prompting as to its origin, I would have placed it in 1995 sooner than 2005. By putting out an EP of electronic music which has so little regard for recent fashion, Signal Generator seem to suggest that the electronic genre might be one which could do with slowing down, taking a breath, and spending some time coming to terms with its own history before it goes tearing off again. If, indeed, there really is anywhere left that’s worth tearing off to. The four tracks on this record range from the playfully melodic (“Memory Helmet”) to the pleasingly ambient (“Legno Lungo”) or skittishly sinister (“Radix Lecti”) and are all perfectly effective and constructed with a sense of confidence which is admirable. Somehow, they fail to engage as they might, but there’s a sense of promise which, while frustrating at present, suggests that the individual behind Signal Generator might yet unearth something rare and exciting from his personal archaelogical dig.

Occasional Records

Make no mistake, this is nasty stuff. Trenchant, massively-distorted basslines, an entire Luftwaffe squadron of hissing guitars, sing-song Liars-style vocal snippets and The Locust’s misanthropic approach to melody – and that’s just in opening track ‘War Course’. ‘The Night The Rope Broke’ is relentlessly bleak, with some David Yow-style vocal acrobatics weighing in against an almost-industrial backdrop. ‘Rising up Through Your Chest’ complements its menacing coda perfectly by landing a gunship laden with old 70s synths square on top of it, and there are all manner of pleasing digital belches and skwerks punctuating the altogether more analogue aggression elsewhere. Perhaps best of the lot, if you’ve the stomach for it, is the sludgy magnum opus ‘The Last Friend Left Alive’, which finds the middle ground between The Birthday Party’s ostentatiousness and the bullish antagonism of Will Haven and celebrates its achievement by hammering the point home for ten minutes.

Sure, there are times when The Swarm lean a little heavily on their influences (viz. The Jesus Lizard on ‘Shacked Up With The Flies’), but they get away with it, through bloody-minded belligerence if nothing else. Not only are you guaranteed an absolute hammer blow of hardcore barbarism, but there’s measured intelligence waiting underneath all the bombast, each track slipping out of your grasp with a deft sidestep just when you think you’ve got a handle on it. Nasty stuff then, but excellent with it.

Who knows what they’re putting in the water up in Derby, but the fellas at Fight Me Records, who have already put out Fixit Kid and You Judas! alongside The Swarm this year, are starting to put together a very impressive roster. More please!

The Swarm
Fight Me Records