Well here it is my last music post until late August, so not actually too long to wait then. As most people know I’m off to America on friday and will be traveling around the western national parks, starting off in minesota and finishing off there. I’ll be updating the blog whenever I find some internet just about where I am and what I’ve been doing. Anyway I can’t actually spend long doing this as I have to pack and go to bed, I have an early plane to catch tomorrow back to London.

Dinosaur Jr. - You’re Living All Over Me

An absolute woolly mammoth of an album.

A blitzkrieg fusion of hardcore punk, Sonic Youth-style noise freak-outs, heavy metal, and melodic hard rock in the vein of Neil Young, You’re Living All Over Me was a turning point in American underground rock & roll. With its thin, unbalanced mix, the album sounds positively menacing and edgy — Lou Barlow’s bass barrels forward over Murph’s clanking drums, with J Mascis’ guitar twisting pummeling riffs and careening, occasionally atonal solos. It established guitar heroics as a part of indie rock, bringing the noise of Sonic Youth into more conventional song structures. Also, Mascis’ laconic, self-absorbed whine was a distinct departure from the furious post-hardcore rants, or the mumbling Michael Stipe imitations, that dominated indie rock. While the songwriting is occasionally uneven, the best moments of You’re Living All Over Me — “Little Fury Things,” “Raisans,” “In a Jar,” and Barlow’s proto-Sebadoh “Poledo” — retain their power, and it’s possible to hear the record’s influence throughout alternative rock.

Nico Muhly - Mothertongue

A stunning album from a great young composer, I posted Speak Volumes, his debut, earlier. Hopefully people will luck this just as a much.

Within the space of his short, yet incredibly illustrious career, Nico Muhly has contributed his talents as an arranger to recordings by Bjork, Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, Rufus Wainwright and The National, while also enjoying a successful sideline as a composer in his own right, presenting works in conjunction with a variety of high profile orchestras - he even finds time to work as a performer and conductor for Philip Glass on his various film soundtracks. Mothertongue is the sophomore solo effort from Nico Muhly, following up on the wide acclaim of his 2006 debut, Speaks Volumes, and marking a further step towards genre cross-pollination and a more avant-garde approach to the conventions of composed music. The album is segmented into three different suites, the first (itself titled Mothertongue) being an exercise for ensemble and choir, which begins with female vocalists chanting numbers and dispensing information as if sifted through some granular synthesis plugin. In addition to the predictably luscious string section backdrop, Muhly injects some electroacoustic presence into the mix on ‘Shower’, via watery samples, and chiming glockenspiel and piano strikes, mirroring the raindrop effect given by the recordings. This first cycle of pieces concludes with ‘Monster’, the final component of the Mothertongue suite, characterised by bold, percussive chord changes and an awkward time signature, all made to sound thunderous under the supervision of producer Valgeir Sigurdsson, who brings a heaviness to the sound balance you’d be unlikely to find on many other recordings in the field of modern composition. The next suite is titled Wonders, and retains the female choir from Mothertongue, this time setting it against harpsichord, percussion and brass arrangements, often sounding quite playful in its rhythmic instability and occasional ventures into discord. The final sequence, titled ‘The Only Tune’ is a collaboration with fellow Bedroom Community artiste, Sam Amidon, who helps fashion an exended folk narrative, beginning with the banjo plucking of ‘The Two Sisters’ before shifting into less familiar territory on the bluegrass operatics of ‘The Old Mill Pond’. By this point, any notions of comfortable, conservative Americana are out the window and you’re confronted by a highly experimental clash of vastly different musical schools, before finally, ‘The Only Tune’ restores a semblance of normality with a lovely piece of widescreen folktronica. Quite unlike anything you’re likely to encounter, this second album from Nico Muhly shows even greater ambition than its predecessor, establishing a language that’s far removed from the kind of easy-going post-Blue Notebooks modern composition that’s become so widespread. Very highly recommended.

Mark Hollis - Mark Hollis

This will always be one of my most favourite albums ever, truely beautiful.

Achingly gorgeous and hauntingly stark, Mark Hollis’ self-titled debut picks up where he left off with Talk Talk’s Laughing Stock seven years earlier, re-emerging at the nexus point where jazz, ambient, and folk music collide. It’s quite possibly the most quiet and intimate record ever made, each song cut to the bone for maximum emotional impact and every note carrying enormous meaning. Hollis paints his music in fine, exquisite strokes, with an uncanny mastery of atmosphere that’s frequently devastating. And if anything, his singularly resonant voice has grown even more plaintive with the passage of time, which — combined with the understated artistry and minimalist beauty of tracks like “The Colour of Spring” and “Watershed” — makes Mark Hollis a truly unique and indelible listening experience. His obvious understanding of the power of silence aside, one prays he doesn’t again wait for the seven-year itch to strike before returning.

Motorpsycho - Little Lucid Moments

An awesome band from Norway.

a huge but worth reading review from AMG

Over the course of nearly 20 years of playing together, Norway’s Motorpsycho have become one of the most complex, erudite rock bands in the history of the music. With new (permanent) drummer Kenneth Kapstad, multi instrumentalists Hans Magnus “Snah” Ryan and Bent Saether have found yet another platform from which to launch their sprawling rock investigations. The group began as a heavy metal/acid rock monolith and evolved toward grunge, then stoner hard rock, post-rock and jazz, prog, and finally into Little Lucid Moments, the sonic terrain where all the music they’ve ever played or seemingly been touched by comes into play in one way or another. What’s really incredible about Motorpsycho is that the band’s sound, no matter how indulgent, has never been derivative of Yankee or Brit bands that were playing in any of the above rock subgenres. In fact, they have never sounded like anyone but themselves — even if influences are readily apparent. Little Lucid Moments is Motorpsycho’s self-produced debut for their homeland’s Rune Grammophon imprint. It will welcome back fans who were put off by the trio’s more experimental and electronic forays into reserved psychedelic ambience. This is a rocker, though no less experimental and far-reaching; it’s a messed-up ride into Motorpsycho Land, without a net or gas for the ride home.

For starters, these tracks, which range anywhere from 11 and a half to over 21 minutes, move seamlessly between darkly psychedelic pop, the prog rock excess of Yes, the floating sprawl of Pink Floyd’s Meddle and Atom Heart Mother periods, hypnotically rhythmic Krautrock, and the soulful heaviness of Deep Purple’s Burn. But that isn’t all they do; there are subtle electronic treatments and textures by unofficial member Jørgenen that meld one segment into another — all of these pieces are like suites. To balance all the heaviness, there are such languid moments of quiet, blessed-out melodic reverie that it’s hard to imagine there is only one band playing on this record. The title track opens the set; it’s a four-part suite that begins as spacy psych-pop worthy of an Elephant 6 record, but is darker and a bit more sinister in sound. The vocals are in perfect harmony as the guitars distort and drums pop over and through the cut-time signature in a hooky spastic wash of sonic bliss. It gets countered by frenzied power chords, insanely tight drum fills, and a bassline that propels both ends. This should be a four-minute tune; instead, it begins to shift its shape within that time to become something wholly other; there are other vocal parts, and overdriven chords and twin leads give way to fingerpicked slide guitars on stun. The drift begins and continues into other regions too numerous too mention here — except that near the end there is great use of the bassline in Pink Floyd’s “One of These Days.” Whispering quiet ushers in an almost dancing drum line mixed way back before it all explodes into something else again — both heavy and majestic — while maintaining a sense of stretched space and time before generating a punishing rockist vamp that walks the line between Motörhead and Radio Birdman.

Other cuts here, such as “Year Zero (A Damage Report),” are a tad more conventionally structured with even more dynamic range from shimmering melodies to bass and guitar throb in excess. “She Left on the Sun Ship” carries within it a hooky pop guitar line (that sounds like it was played and recorded on a Rickenbacker) and a rhythm part that is pure ’70s hard rock. The striated, bent melody that emerges can’t make up its mind whether it wants to just disintegrate or morph into a very heavy pop song. It manages both. The album’s final cut, “The Alchemyst,” beings on a note that is reminiscent of their more spacy albums from earlier in the decade, when ambience and gently insistent electronic textures provided by then-producer Deathprod moved the band toward something near electric nu-jazz. This is simply a teaser, though, because what emerges is something so freaky, tripped-out, nasty, and sprawling that it obliterates that earlier impression — even as the whispered vamp remains a part of the tune for a few minutes longer. The pop angle is here; in fact, it’s evident not just in the vocals but in the way the punk-pop hook generates a razor wire of pure rock attack. After an hour — but probably long before — the stunned listener has no choice but to conclude what many other fans have known all along: that Motorpsycho are in a league of their own, and have, despite the many types of music that have influenced them, come up with something so unique and genre-defying that they deserve their own category. If you’ve never heard Motorpsycho, start here and work your way backwards, or start at the beginning, but no matter what you do this year, make sure you find the time and space to give this a listen. It will literally blow your mind.

and due to popular demand

here’s a link, not mine, to

The Avalanches - Since I left You

8 comments

So this looks likely to be my penultimate music posting of the summer, get your requests in for must have albums for the last update. I’ll try and do a bumper edition on tuesday or wednesday and finally finish off the archive section.

All these selections are so good I don’t know where to start.

Mogwai - Rock Action

A serious late comer to Mogwai, I recently picked up this and Young Team from their catalogue. I’m regretting not taking the time to listen to them before. I also recently bought a ticket to their Hammersmith Apollo gig, which has support from the superb Fuck Buttons.

AMG

Their most impressive work since Young Team, Mogwai’s third album, Rock Action, boasts an ironic title as well as an ironically successful new direction. By stripping away much of the noodling and noise of their earlier work in favor of tighter structures, more immediate melodies, and vocals, they’ve recaptured the excitement that surrounded their first releases. Like so many groups stuck with the post-rock tag, Mogwai needed a way to expand beyond the term without changing their sound completely, and aided by guests like producer Dave Fridmann and Super Furry Animals’ Gruff Rhys, they’ve found it. Rock Action incorporates bristling distortion, propulsive drums, and electronic textures similar to Tortoise’s Standards — particularly on the opening track “Sine Wave” — but the album’s most remarkable moments revisit and reinvent more traditional sounds. Buoyed by lush string arrangements and Fridmann’s detailed, warm production, the brooding ballads “Take Me Somewhere Nice” and “Dial: Revenge” couldn’t be further from “rock action,” but they display the album’s refreshing restraint and immediacy. In particular, “Dial: Revenge” — so named because “dial” is the Welsh word for “revenge” — benefits from Rhys’ emotive yet cryptic vocals in his mother tongue, but the general emphasis on vocals adds to the album’s organic, emotive feel. Nowhere is this more evident than the nine-minute epic “2 Rights Make One Wrong”: With its lush layers of brass, strings, banjo, guitars, and vocals, it sounds like the rock-oriented cousin of Jim O’Rourke’s pocket symphonies. Meanwhile, “You Don’t Know Jesus” uses its eight-minute length to reaffirm that the group is still at the top of its game when it comes to guitar-driven catharsis. “Secret Pint” sends the album out on a serene note, proving that in the proper hands, the quietest ballad is just as commanding as the loudest rock action; Rock Action shows that Mogwai have mastered both styles.

John Maus - Songs

I know there was some serious love for John Maus’s last album so I thought I’d add his debut as well. Its great, kind of.

from his label:

‘Songs’ is Maus’ debut, his life work, which was written and recorded at home over the course of five years. It’s a twisted baroque pop record that brings to mind early 80’s hits and coming-of-age movie soundtracks. Almost entirely electronic, the Maus sound is created from synthesisers, drum machine, bass and his remarkable vocals, which are pitched somewhere between Ian Curtis, Calvin Johnson and David Bowie.

The record is a manic lo-fi masterpiece, which blurs addictive melodies, emotive lyrics and dreamy soundscapes to memorable effect. Permeated by feelings of intense nostalgia, with this album Maus has created a testimony to lost romance and to longing. These combine in such a way to make the listener feel as through they have stumbled across a lost classic. Ambitious in his musical and thematic scope, Maus touches upon timeless subjects such as the conflict between the mind and body, unrequited love, death and eternity.

Faust - Faust IV

I’ve heard its their best but this AMG reviewer wasn’t too praiseworthy.

Coming on the heels of the cut-and-paste sound-collage schizophrenia of The Faust Tapes, Faust IV seems relatively subdued and conventional, though it’s still a far cry from what anyone outside the German avant-garde rock scene was doing. The album’s disparate threads don’t quite jell into something larger (as in the past), but there’s still much to recommend it. The nearly 12-minute electro-acoustic opener “Krautrock” is sometimes viewed as a comment on Faust’s droning, long-winded contemporaries, albeit one that would lose its point by following the same conventions. There are a couple of oddball pop numbers that capture the group’s surreal sense of whimsy: one, “The Sad Skinhead,” through its reggae-ish beat, and another, “It’s a Bit of a Pain,” by interrupting a pastoral acoustic guitar number with the most obnoxious synth noises the band can conjure. Aside from “Krautrock,” there is a trend toward shorter track lengths and more vocals, but there are still some unpredictably sudden shifts in the instrumental pieces, even though it only occasionally feels like an idea is being interrupted at random (quite unlike The Faust Tapes). There are several beat-less, mostly electronic soundscapes full of fluttering, blooping synth effects, as well as plenty of the group’s trademark Velvet Underground-inspired guitar primitivism, and even a Frank Zappa-esque jazz-rock passage. Overall, Faust IV comes off as more a series of not-always-related experiments, but there are more than enough intriguing moments to make it worthwhile.

To Rococo Rot - Abc123

from boomkat

It’s funny how you only realise how much you’ve missed something when it comes back. To Rococo Rot haven’t made a new record since 2004 and the excellent ‘Hotel Morgen’ but now they’re back with this brand new mini-LP and easily their best material since the groundbreaking “Amateur View”. With ‘ABC 123′ the band have gone back to what they do best, choosing to drop much of the instrumentation that defined their sound; analogue synthesizers, guitars and drums - and opting instead to use only their computers and the simple Yamaha Vss30 synthesizer. By harnessing the limitations of this setup the band have truly rediscovered their identity and these eight tracks are just a joy to behold. In fact they bring back some very fond memories - the album starts with ‘Frietag’, a track built around a rolling synthesizer loop, the kind of loop you know within seconds simply must have come from the To Rococo Rot studio. With the emotional resonance of their classic ‘Cars’ and a swift look back to Kraftwerk or Tangerine Dream the band have re-defined what it means to make electronic music in 2007 and although ‘ABC 123′ might be their most electronic record to date it’s also one of their most unashamedly enjoyable. Just take a listen to the almost breaks-ish ‘Lvx 4′ with its rolling bass and cyclic beat and you’ll remember just why you fell in love with the genre in the first place and why there’s so much mileage in this excellent band yet. To Rococo Rot have honestly surprised us with this EP, forging one of the most unexpected high points in an already stunning year for music. If this is a hint of what is to come then the rumoured new album should be something very special indeed…. Absolutely essential music.

I hope everyones well and have had a good week so far.

Abe Vigoda - Kid City

AMG

Not to be confused with the actor of the same name (most notably from The Godfather and Late Night with Conan O’Brien), Los Angeles’ Abe Vigoda represents an exciting crop of young and arty punk bands emerging from local all-ages venue the Smell, that also includes bands like Mika Miko, Silver Daggers, The Mae Shi, and No Age. The band — consisting of Juan Velasquez (guitar/vocals), Michael Vidal (guitar/vocals), David Reichardt (bass), and Reggie Guerrero (drums) — formed in Chino in 2003 after Velazquez and Vidal caught a Mika Miko set at the aforementioned Smell while they were still in high school, and channeled the energy that they took from that performance into starting a band of their own. Amid a long line of solo and split limited-run 7″ releases of distorted noise punk, they released their first full-length album Sky Route/Star Roof on Not Not Fun Records in 2005, and followed that with Kid City on olFactory in 2007. As the band amassed a fervent local following by playing regularly at the Smell and opening for touring acts such as XBXRX, Chromatics, and Old Time Relijun, they also began experimenting with their sound, steadily incorporating tropical and Caribbean rhythms into their music. By early 2008, the band had finished recording their follow-up full-length, and planned a release for later that year.

Glissando - With Our Arms Wide Open We March Towards the Burning Sea

Experimental Leeds group Glissando latest album is their finest work to date without question. The record is a sweeping 70 minutes that after one listen will make you look at all your other records differently. This is a stunning work of art that needs to be cherished. It seems that the band is really the duo of Elly May Irving and Richard Knox. The record also does feature members of iLiKETRAiNS, Her Name is Calla, Held By Hands, The Rosie Taylor Project and Immune.

The record as a whole is very fundamentally sad for lack of a better word. Elly and Richard have these opera like vocals. If you combined these with that staunch piano in each track it comes out with some really unique album in every sense possible.

The record gives you everything you could need from the beautiful and brief sounds of “Goodbye red rose! This was not for you” and the haunting lyrics at the end of “put your hand close to her face so she can feel the warmth.” Then you are hit with the epic and spaced out sounds of “Like Everything You See.” During the track I thought I was in some sort of action movie watching a space shift take off. It was so transfixing. I just was taken for the full fifteen minutes.

This record completely took me over for the whole 70 minutes. I was hanging on every chord waiting for their next move. The album is not for everyone and really shines late at night during those sleepless nights of angry and misery.

Highly Recommended

Flower-Corsano Duo - The Radiant Mirror

Again not mine.

Chris Corsano and Mick Flower, the duo responsible for The Radiant Mirror, are apparently quite well known in the improvisational rock scene, which shows what I know. I am quite sure though, after listening to this three song EP, that these guys definitely have something great going and free-form instrumentals are their collective canvases. There’s about 40 minutes of music here that will keep your ears keenly tuned to the wide variety of sounds presented.

The three tracks, simply titled “Earth”, “Wind”, and “Fire”, elicit a diverse tapestry of organic sonic textures that suit the names perfectly. Although the songs give the absolute impression of jam sessions, Corsano and Flower feed off each other brilliantly. “Earth” makes me think of an awakening - sort of like one of those sped-up nature films where you are watching flowers grow and bloom at super high speed. “Wind” is much more subtle and almost drone like, with softly swirling rhythms that brush past each other in delicate eddies of sound. The final, “Fire”, is the longest of the bunch at nearly 20 minutes and here you will find Corsano and Flower spacing out a bit. The tone is somewhere between the first two pieces and the music is as mesmerizing as watching a campfire burn.

Perhaps the most intriguing thing about The Radiant Mirror is the instruments. Chris Corsano’s drumming is spectacular and he manages some beautiful tabla-esque rolls that perfectly punctuate the Eastern feel of much of the music. Mick Flower plays something called a “shaahi baaja” or “Japan banjo”, which is actually an Indian instrument that is a kind of hybrid of a dulcimer and a fretted stringed instrument. Flowers’ plugged-in, electric shaahi baaja seems like a deeper sitar and the drawn out drones it provides are thickly layered on each song. Some might argue that the Japan banjo takes precedence here, but since Corsano and Flower both aided in the mixing of this disc I have to imagine the result is more than intentional.

Now that I’ve had a little schooling in improv free rock I feel like everyone should take a stroll through this EP. This isn’t just fade-into-the-background instrumental music, as The Radiant Mirror commands your attention without being too in-your-face. Slip in this disc, chill out or space out, and take a 40 minute break from the mundane with The Flower-Corsano Duo as your tour guides.

Micah P. Hinson - … and the Red Empire Orchestra

a great review of a great album from drowned in sound, make sure you buy it.

Gravel-voiced Texan Micah P Hinson has seen his share of tragedy. Much has been made of the prescription-drugs addiction and jail stint that marked his teenage years, and the redeeming achievements of the two albums he released soon afterwards. Yet on his third LP, … And The Red Empire Orchestra, sorrow and apprehension seem to dog him still.

It’s a magnificent, tender album regardless of its back story. Hinson follows in the footsteps of lyricist-craftsmen like Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson, and his easy hand with the Hammond organ’s higher registers would do Dylan proud. But he’s no aural historian. There’s a super-modern flair to his lushly layered wall-of-sound instrumentation. The delicate ‘Come Home Quickly’ opens with a verse of crackling piano, scratchy guitar and faded vocals, like an old record played with a dull needle in a black-and-white film. Then a cymbal shivers and a Technicolor universe bursts open into lush, swelling organ, strings, guitars and bass. It’s like the world has been created anew - imperfect perhaps, but bright and fresh and full of possibility.

There’s a dreamy precision to ‘I Keep Havin’ These Dreams’, like a half-remembered vision of infinity. Violins bounce measure after measure of eighths over quarters over half and whole notes, all overlaid with a stream of seemingly infinite chords. “And I keep having these dreams, that you were all I needed”, Hinson sighs over and over, without ever seeming to have started or stopped, forever trapped on the far side of the looking-glass of consciousness. ‘Sunrise Over The Olympus Mons’ starts humbly enough, slow and dreamy and swooning with reverb. Rising fragments of scales build to a shivery top-register whammy-barred guitar that soars, rough-edged, over everything you’ve ever heard before descending into a fuzz of feedback. Nestling amongst the layers is Hinson’s quiet refrain, “Oh, love of my life”, its quiet yearning almost unbearable against the euphoric backdrop. Instruments fade out one by one until a pure single note stretches into the distance.

Hot on its heels, ‘The Fire Came Up To My Knee’ lands like the blade of a guillotine. Bare-bones acoustic guitar stutters in and out as Hinson croaks a chilling vision: “The flood came down to my knee and you were there, drowning below / the fire came up to my knee and you were there, burning below”. ‘Wishing Well and the Willow Tree’ would be a pitch-perfect closer, gorgeously awkward with its insistent piano refrain and scratchy wall of feedback pushing the vocals away. Over the course of nine songs, Hinson’s breathed to life a landscape as deep and vivid as Morricone’s or Badalamenti’s, a soundtrack to long-suppressed, near-forgotten desires and disappointments.

A limp sense of regret clings to the two further songs that do, in fact, close the album - Hammond-happy music-hall sing-along ‘We Won’t Have To Be Lonesome’ and textbook lament ‘Dyin’ Alone’. Both are perfectly nice, just unnecessary. Still, the awesome joy and pain of the first nine more than merit a blinked-away wetness of the eyes.

You might remember me posting Trouble Book’s latest album The United Colours of Trouble Books, they had sent me a CD-R from Akron, Ohio, and I had listen and loved it. I straight away bought the lovely hand made vinyl, cd included, and it has fast become one my favourite albums of the year. Oh yes, I am now a quote worthy-able site

Anyway off the critical success of United Colours… an ambient pop masterpiece, they’ve decided to remix select tracks from their first two albums. In their words:

“Selected Early Songs” from the out-of-print first two Trouble Books albums (”Such a Sound Sleeper” and “A Dull Roar”) and the first demo EP. This is what we were up to in 2005-2006; less ambient and more song-oriented than “United Colors…”. Debra has hand-drawn a bunch of covers, but we’re probably not going to make terribly many of these. Just wanted to give everyone the chance for seven minutes in heaven with the skeletons in our closet.

Selected Early Songs

Buy it here for $5!!!

As always highly recommended by m(i)e.

So we’re coming into the last 10 day of my posting before MIE goes on a summer hiatus from music uploads. I’ll try and get as many great albums down before I go and I’ll try to complete the Archive section. Where I aim to have every link still working in an easy format. This next week I’ll be spending my time by the beach in Venice Italy.

Also a quick request, does anyone have John Cage’s Postcards from Heaven? I would love to listen to it. Thanks.

Michio Kurihara - Sunset Notes

A complete gem of an album I just recently re-found in my collection. Michio is the premier guitarist of the Japanese underground psychedelic movement, having played in bands like Ghost, Damon & Naomi, White Heaven, The Stars and Yura Yura Teikoku. Recently he’s been the fourth member of Boris when they’ve been touring Europe, you may remember I upped his collabrotion with them, Rainbow, back round the new year., and I had the good fortune to see him and Boris perform recently.Well in Sunset Notes, his debut solo album, he has made a sublime album. Its impressionist concept record that refracts the golden radiance of the magic hour, its nine songs drawing inspiration from nine different sunsets spanning across the calendar year. A largely instrumental effort, Sunset Notes is foremost a showcase for Kurihara’s remarkable guitar work, his leads soar like exotic birds in flight, brilliantly evoking the moods and colors of the solitary moments in time the songs capture.

James Blackshaw - Litany Of Echoes

from Dusted:

Just in case you weren’t paying attention, James Blackshaw reminds you straightaway: he is a composer first, a guitar player second. His latest full-length opens with “Gate of Ivory,” a feature for Blackshaw’s piano playing. Sure, his much-discussed guitar virtuosity is apparent throughout Litany of Echoes, and his 12-string is still the main instrument, but the album really showcases how well he’s integrated – and expanded upon – his considerable influences.

Whereas on past records Blackshaw tended to present a mixed bag of ideas along with his riveting guitar work (such as the Takoma revenants and electronic treatments on Celeste, or the dense passages of string dissonance on last year’s Cloud of Unknowing), the six pieces here show remarkable restraint and concision. Fran Bury’s violin and viola play a key role on “Past Has Not Passed,” droning away below Blackshaw’s theme and providing subtle harmonic shifts. “Infinite Circle” works layers of flowing piano deep into the piece’s musculature. This expanded palette is not an adornment, but a real attempt to build a thick, ravishing sound.

Speaking of ravishing sounds, Litany evinces the immersive simplicity of Morton Feldman’s Rothko Chapel. And even though Blackshaw often uses tunings of his own invention, one doesn’t have to work hard to make sense of them – intuition trumps intellectualism. Of course, in its dynamics Blackshaw’s music is nothing like Feldman’s. For that, one should think of the rapid, seething melodic undertow of Terry Riley’s Harp of New Albion or Lubomyr Melnyk’s piano works. Blackshaw’s default tempo is fast, to the point that his finely articulated notes start to blur and run, and, like a Rothko canvas, he uses every available inch of space. He seems to have taken another key inspiration from Feldman, what composer

Kyle Gann has described as the way Feldman helped composers by saying it was actually liberating to limit one’s style.

So, yes, much of what you hear on here is familiar ground for Blackshaw veterans. There are his subtle droning foundations, overlaid with short and simple themes and pushed along by irresistible, midstream harmonic shifts. The effect is also similar, that of weightlessness and wonder. No surprises – just a stunning level of accomplishment that pulls you along with it. Litany of Echoes is not the sound of Blackshaw finding his voice; it’s the sound of him perfecting it.

Terry Riley - A Rainbow in Curved Air

The Minimalist composer’s best piece of work?

After several graph compositions and early pattern pieces with jazz ensembles in the late ’50s and early ’60s (see “Concert for Two Pianists and Tape Recorders” and “Ear Piece” in La Monte Young’s book An Anthology), Riley invented a whole new music which has since gone under many names (minimal music; a category often applied to sustained pieces as well; pattern music, phase music, etc.) which is set forth in its purest form in the famous “In C” (1964) (for saxophone and ensemble, CBS MK 7178). “Rainbow in Curved Air” demonstrates the straightforward pattern technique but also has Riley improvising with the patterns, making gorgeous timbre changes on the synthesizers and organs, and presenting contrasting sections that has become the basic structuring of his works (”Candenza on the Night Plain” and other pieces). Scored for large orchestra with extra percussion and electronics, some of this work’s seven movements are: “Star Night,” “Blue Lotus,” “The Earth Below,” and “Island of the Rhumba King.”

His Name Is Alive - Sweet Earth Flower

Last paragraph from this review:

Sweet Earth Flower is one of those rare moments when a restless talent like Defever, whose musical interests are all over the map (and some of his recordings have suffered for that, too) can focus his vision on something outside the indie rock comfort zone and pull it off authentically. This is jazz, to be sure, but it’s unlike jazz as well, taking into itself the full measure of Brown’s own ambition to make a universal, reflective, meditative music that encompassed many traditions and notions of aesthetic evolution, from ancient folk traditions where stories are revealed to a future where space and quiet would walk hand in hand with something more chaotic and undefined. Under Defever’s direction, His Name Is Alive has given us the full panorama of that vision and done it with elegance, grace, and spiritual toughness not normally associated with rock.

Todays collection should hopefully be a varied and eclectic mix. Not much has happened for me recently, I’ve been in Oxford this week doing chores but come Friday evening I’ll be back in London for the first proper My Bloody Valentine gig, hopefully it’ll be just as good as the ICA gig. Then I’m off to Venice on Saturday for a bit of beaching and bathing, don’t worry I will be updating then.

GAS - Nah und Fern

Well this is not my area of expertise but it is simply a stunning album so I have for you a review from Boomkat to tell you more about it. It is ther current album of the week, and I shall be purchasing this on vinyl as soon as I can.

ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT BODIES OF WORK IN ELECTRONIC MUSIC IS FINALLY AVAILABLE IN ONE INCREDIBLE PACKAGE - PRETTY MUCH THE ENTIRE GAS DISCOGRAPHY IS COMPILED ACROSS 4 CD’S CLOCKING IN AT ALMOST 5 HOURS OF THE MOST IMMERSIVE MUSIC YOU’LL EVER HAVE THE PLEASURE OF HEARING. THINK OF IT AS THE DARKEST DRONES FROM TWIN PEAKS CROSSED WITH BASIC CHANNEL AND ARVO PART FOR A VERY VAGUE IDEA OF THE GENIUS AT WORK HERE* This four-disc retrospective anthologises one of the seminal bodies of work in the recent history of electronic music. Wolfgang Voigt’s recordings under the name Gas have gone down in folklore as one of the key ambient/techno/drone touchstones of the nineties, providing the Mille Plateaux imprint with some of its finest ever output, which in certain quarters (namely Boomkat HQ) is regarded as just about as good as it gets. First thing’s first, it should be pointed out that ‘Nah Und Fern’ collects the four principal Gas albums, electing to miss out 1995’s Modern EP and other scraps from short-form releases. This should be regarded as a good decision, because the consequent four-part cycle feels very much like its own, self-contained catalogue. The first of these constituents, the eponymous, debut Gas album somehow sounds more current than ever. You can hear the current generation of Kompakt artists striving for the sounds Voigt mapped out 12 years ago, that thunderous bass pulse destabilises the notion that this is ambient music in any passive sense, instead injecting a sense of pace and motion to a music that’s otherwise difficult to interpret in any structural sense - and it’s certainly far too richly layered and abstract to be filed under the banner of techno along with some of Voigt’s other work. 1997’s Zauberberg established the Gas language as we currently know it, based around an effulgent blend of samples, noises, treated recordings and clever filtering all locked in place by that stately bass drum pulse. It was this album that started making explicit links between forest imagery and the thicket of sound Voigt concocted, but as signposted by the surreal colour schemes of the album’s original sleeve, this is a dream forest - a psychotropic… tropic, with hints towards nightmarish oppression intimated by the deep, dark dissonances that occasionally reach out from the torrent of sound. The last of these albums, ‘Pop’ takes this forest imagery to its natural conclusion, rendering an environment so verdant and teeming with life you can literally hear it dripping, in all its gooey fertility. Samples of flowing waters intermingle with dense air currents and synthetic landscapes, resulting in a more vivid picture of Voigt’s hyper-real forests than perhaps ever before. Pop is probably Voigt’s most accessible album, and the record that can most directly be attributed to establishing ground rules for the famed Kompakt Pop Ambient sound. A special mention should be given to 1999’s Konigsforst, however. Of all the Gas releases this has to be the most enduring and resonant. Somewhere within that album’s configuration of sounds lies a magical balance between neo-romantic orchestration and the more esoteric, electronic ambient elements Voigt brings to the table - and moreover, the individual tracks making up Konigsforst fit together into a single long-form narrative so beautifully, it represents an undeniably special musical voyage. Compiled together in this ineffably wonderful package, and ‘lightly’ remastered, the Gas catalogue - slightly abridged as it may be - stands as a singular and totemic body of work within the great canon of ambient music. As essential as essential gets.

The Sea and Cake - The Fawn

The product of an uncharacteristically long two-year layoff, The Fawn is the Sea and Cake’s most experimental effort to date; the influence which the electronica movement exerts over the record is substantial — drum machines, sequencer tones, and synths are dominant throughout, and the group even dabbles in dub textures and sampling techniques. What’s remarkable about songs like “Sporting Life” and “The Argument,” however, is that the addition of electronics never upsets the music’s delicate chemistry — as is again proven here, the Sea and Cake’s greatest gift is their ability to assimilate the breadth of their inspirations, no matter how far afield, to emerge with something new and distinctive each time out; impressive in scope and rich in detail, The Fawn is as seamless and sophisticated as ever.

Akira Rabelais - Spellewauerynsherde

A lovely album but I don’t know much background so here’s the blurb I found on the forum where I found the album.

While on Eisoptrophobia (2001), Rabelais used his self-designed filters to rework piano music, and …benediction, draw two years later was sourced in his electric guitar, the raw material here is a collection of forlorn, windswept archive recordings of a cappella Icelandic folk music he came across in a closet in Valencia CA. “I didn’t want to abstract it so much that it lost its essential quality,” wrote Rabelais of the source material: “I didn’t want to damage the fabric of the original language, I wanted to set it, cast it in a certain light.” The resulting music is quite extraordinary: a curious and compelling mixture of the medieval and the modern, which, as one critic puts it rather memorably, “despite its resonating sadness [..] grows on you like moss.

Paavoharju - Laulu Laakson Kukista

Boomkat:

It’s hard to pin down precisely what it is that’s so alluring about Finland’s hugely acclaimed Paavoharju, but the consensus seems to have been that their remarkable debut album “Yha Hamaraa” quite simply managed to marry a myriad disjointed influences and sound sources without ever sounding like it was trying too hard. If you’ve never heard the music of Paavoharju, prepare yourself for one of life’s more considerable and uncontained pleasures. They are a band who take in influence from the “Radio India” style shortwave pop transmissions of the Sublime Frequencies label, freak folk, Europop, modern classical, plunderphonics, choral, devotional, experimental and multicoloured music of almost every description imaginable - and yet they embody a specific sound that’s unmistakably their own. Their aforementioned debut “Yha Hamaraa” made such an impact when it first came out that it seemed to unify music critics and the buying public from all ends of the musical spectrum, worshipped by chin-stroking journalists and passers by alike - one of those records that you could play almost anywhere and guarantee people would virtually queue to ask who it was by and where they could buy it. Their long awaited follow-up “Laulu Laakson Kukista” does that remarkable thing and doesn’t disappoint. The scope and energy here is once again impossible to contain - opening with drone washes, de-tuned music box tones and vocals degraded by worn down analogue tape, it sounds like a day in the park, a far away ice cream van, an orchestra rehearsing and Fennesz doing a soundcheck all at the same time. From there we go to “Kevätrumpu” - an absolutely genius generic jamboree that sounds like Kylie Minogue playing with a backing band that’s half Finnish folk and half Bolywood session band, recorded to a four-track recorder that’s been thrown into the sea and discovered 20 years later by some fortunate anthropologist. Heck, there are even some Autechre-style rhythmic distortions towards the end of the track - you just couldn’t make it up, and it sounds SO good. Next - “Tuoksu Tarttuu Meihin” takes in some far away solo piano and quietly malfunctioning distortion pedals in a Tim Hecker meets Akira Rabelais sort of fashion, while “Ursulan Uni” sounds like a cross between Isan and Philip Jeck - and is just utterly beautiful. It’s virtually impossible to sum up the sheer brilliance and scope of this schizophrenic yet brilliantly coherent album, it shimmers with all the excitement and knowledge of a seemingly endless stream of influence and once again manages to sound unlike anything you’ll have ever heard before in your life. And believe us when we say that recommendations really don’t come much higher than that. An utterly Essential Purchase.

Firstly thank you very much to everyone who sent me wonderful emails and comments, really brightened up my week, not that my week was to bad. Also I’d just like to clear things up MIE is not closing down after the summer, just for the months of July and August I’ll be away from my hardrive and won’t be able to update with music, I will instead just pop by and tell everyone what I’m doing, I’m planning on driving from Minnesota to the West Coast stopping at the National Parks, then going down along the coast to San Francisco before heading diagonally back up to Minnesota and stopping off at all the National Parks on the way. Some little trip.

So I have seen My Bloody Valentine for the first time since they split in ‘95. All four of them played a rehearsal gig at the ICA in London before next weeks residency in the Roundhouse. After starting out slightly tentatively they soon found their stride and hammered an hour and twenty minute set amid screen projections and strobes. The set list was as follows and they finished off with a twenty minute version of You Made Me Realise.

My Bloody Valentine Live at the ICA, London, 13-06-08

I’ll upload a bootleg of the whole concert later today. If you’ve got tickets for their tour you’re in for a huge treat and I hope they find the stamina to carry onto September. I have one more gig of theirs to look forward to on friday when they start their 5 day residency at the Roundhouse, hopefully it’ll be even better if thats possible. Also check out this interview with Kevin Shields here (and laugh at the awful interviewer) if it wasn’t Kevin Shields being cheeky and having a laugh at the interviewer than the next My Bloody Valentine album is 3/4 finished and should come out before the end of the year! I think we’ll be very lucky if it does.

To the music

Brain Eno - Here Come The Warm Jets

The first two albums upped are influenced from the new Deerhunter album. I had read on a forum that Bradford Cox, lead singer of Deerhunter, had raved about this album on his blog. So I checked it out and I can really hear the influences in Cox’s work in Atlas Sound and Deerhunter. Eno’s first solo album is a spirited, experimental collection of unabashed pop songs on which Eno mostly reprises his Roxy Music role as “sound manipulator,”. Eno’s compositions are quirky, whimsical, and catchy, his lyrics bizarre and often free-associative, with a decidedly dark bent in their humor.Yet the album wouldn’t sound nearly as manic as it does without Eno’s wildly unpredictable sound processing; he coaxes otherworldly noises and textures from the treated guitars and keyboards, layering them in complex arrangements or bouncing them off one another in a weird cacophony. Avant-garde yet very accessible, Here Come the Warm Jets still sounds exciting, forward-looking, and densely detailed, revealing more intricacies with every play.

Highly Recommended

Broadcast - Tender Buttons

I always heard so much of Broadcast in Atlas Sounds album and then when Microcastles appeared I could have sworn most of the bass tracks were broadcast Bass then I heard Atlas Sound performing at the recent Explosions ATP consisted of two Broadcast-ers. Anyway this my favourite album of theirs. Boomkat review: It’s been a long time coming, but Broadcast have made sure it was worth the wait. With a rotating membership that even the most ardent of Warp heads must be struggling with, Broadcast are renowned for tortuous sessions that go right round the houses before making it onto record; but this might just be their special ingredient. From the opening cascade of electronically numb melody and the first glimpse of Trish Kennan’s bewitching voice, ‘Tender Buttons’ is a breathtaking achievement that is positively drenched in considered arrangements that are intricately plotted without ever losing the all important spark of spontaneity. Moving closer to their Slowdive/Kevin Shields roots than ever before, songs such as ‘Black Cat’ are classic Broadcast with a drum machine fuelled twist, combining a driving electro soused beat with ethereal vocals and shoegaze guitar. Elsewhere, ‘Tears In The Typing Pool’ strips the production right back to reveal a beautiful vocal veneer, ‘America’s Boy’ sees them getting all political, whilst ‘Goodbye Girls’ is what electroclash should have sounded like all along. Good enough to eat, positively their best album to date.

Melvins - Houdini

Co-curators of Atp’s Nightmare Before Christmas with Mike Patton this is their most famous album. Its a really great album but I think an Amg review will do it better justice than me.

To essay a concise, surefooted summation of the Melvins’ catalog would be reductive at best, and laughable at worst. This is, of course, underground rock’s trio of pranksters — unpredictable and capable of complete musical about-faces in the turn of a measure. That said, Houdini is about as close as one gets to a representative Melvins album, and it vividly captures the band’s unreconstructed power, vision, and musical strangeness. During the early-’90s purge of hair rock and candy-footed funk metal, the Melvins, as with many other acts, seemed fair game for a major label in search of another post-Nirvana gold mine. With Kurt Cobain’s assistance, the band was snatched up — and summarily dropped (after three brilliant albums, this being the first) — by Atlantic. Though Houdini’s immediate predecessors, Eggnog and Bullhead, pried open a few screwball chasms in the Melvins’ syrupy distillation of Sabbath riffage and Flipper’s noisy anti-punk, it was this album that displayed the full fruition of the outfit’s sonic breadth, from the cough-syrup river drag of “Night Goat” to the revved-up “Honey Bucket,” and from the creepy “Joan of Arc” to the glue-damaged “Sky Pup.” Ringleader King Buzzo’s riffs are stretched — taffy-like — to meltdown, and at other times they are razor sharp. Either way, they abound with a lumbering, lurching power. With their voluminous output and determination to continuously expand their sound regardless of musical trends, the Melvins oeuvre has begun to rival — at least on paper — the career arcs of Frank Zappa and Neil Young.

Stars of the Lid - Carte-de-Visite

A superb rare tour album for SotL, a little blurb from another website.

This CD can only be picked up on SOTL’s current world tour (or for exorbitant sums on eBay), which is a shame, as it’s one of the best “tour CDs” I’ve ever heard. One would expect this release to be just a random collection of B-sides, studio outtakes, and one-offs - and technically it is - yet it somehow manages to be both a cohesive album and a perfect encapsulation of their career, with nine gorgeous tracks ranging from “dirty” ambient (early 90’s) to modern classical (late 00’s). There’s more consistency here than in their occasionally spotty full-lengths (if you can sit through sides A/B of ‘Tired Sounds’ without getting a little bored, more power to you). There’s not a single weak track to be found, in my opinion; plus this CD is the only place that you can pick up some long out-of-print rarities.

Oi, no one ever leaves me messages anymore. Come one guys and girls? Feedback.

Yo La Tengo - I Can Hear The Heart Beating

I had never really taken much notice in Yo La Tengo till I listened to this album. I rarely listen to an album which gives me a such a jolt to my music system on its first listen, I was just spell-bound from the first track listening to his album. Small AMG review: Functioning as a virtual catalog of mid-’90s indie rock trends, I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One is an astonishing tour de force from Yo La Tengo, establishing their deep talents as songwriters and musicians. Although the album may run a little long for some tastes, there are very few throwaways on the record — even the shoegazer cover of the Beach Boys’ “Little Honda” is a revelatory gem. But what truly impresses is the way the songs, ranging from hypnotically droning instrumentals to tightly written and catchy pop songs, hold together to form what is arguably Yo La Tengo’s finest and most coherent album to date.

Evangelista - Hello, Voyager

Last Months Wire cover star for your fancy, Boomkat review:

F*ck. There, I’ve started with an expletive so now I have your attention I can probably let you know why I bothered. ‘Hello, Voyager’ isn’t the sort of album destined to draw the attention of the busy, net-addled music fan. Carla Bozulich’s second album for the on-form Constellation label and first under the wing of her newly monikered band Evangelista, it’s not exactly the easiest sell, but then there’s the small matter of the music itself. Bozulich is no newcomer to the music scene, but ‘Hello, Voyager’ has her sounding more self-assured than ever before, and while her previous album (entitled ‘Evangelista’ just to confuse matters further) was a triumphant return, it is with ‘Hello, Voyager’ that she finally creates the grubby mark she’s been hinting at for so long. And the reason for that expletive? It was exactly the reaction I had when I pressed play - and I continued, motionless, to listen as the album grew into a fuzzy skirmish of blues, no-wave, noise, rock ‘n roll and so much more. ‘Winds of St. Anne’ begins our journey with Bozulich groaning and wheezing like a female Beefheart as discordant guitars attempt a sequel to ‘Moonlight on Vermont’ and within minutes of the album beginning you’re already trapped by this singular, pervasive vision of poetry and music. Then we’re thrown into the album’s finest moment, the drum-led screech of ‘Smooth Jazz’ a track which is anything but, sounding closer to the most abrasive moments on Sonic Youth’s seminal ‘Sister’, a comparison I don’t use lightly. Basses fall through the rugged amplifier speakers as if held by monstrous behemoths and the drums rattle through the walls with everything mixed expertly by Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s Efrim Menuck. Menuck isn’t the only name to show up on ‘Hello, Voyager’ either, as various Montreal veterans and members of A Silver Mt. Zion show up sporadically to contribute drums, string arrangements or whatever is deemed necessary for the record’s progress. Most of it works too, occasionally the string parts, for me at least, take some of the focus from the genuinely debauched sound of the record, the noise-laden bass-heavy core which defies its Northern pedigree, but we have variety and who can possibly begrudge Bozulich that? By the time the wails, moans and basement grit evolve into the final, twelve minute title track there should be no doubt in your mind that Evangelista is something truly spectacular, and when Bozulich blood-curdlingly squeals ‘LOVE’, you know exactly what she means. F*ck yes.

Pavement - Slanted and Enchanted

One of the summer albums

Slanted & Enchanted is a left-field classic, a record that came out of nowhere to help establish a new subgenre of rock & roll. Pavement had already sketched out their sound, as well as their amateurish lo-fi aesthetic, on a series of indie singles before recording their debut, but Slanted & Enchanted is where they pulled all of their disparate sounds together into a distinctive style. At first, the primitive sound of the record is the most gripping thing about Slanted, but soon the true innovations of the record appear through the songs themselves. Stephen Malkmus and Spiral Stairs subvert conventional pop structures, turning melodies inside out, reinterpreting and reworking older songs, and bending genres together. It’s a complex, enthralling record, filled with fractured riffs, strong melodies, and cryptic melodies, and with all the hiss and static, Slanted & Enchanted sounds like listening to a distant college radio station — melodies and hooks keep floating in and out of the mix, with individual lines instead of full lyrics surfacing through the murk. This unique song structure as much as the sound of the album itself makes Slanted & Enchanted an individual, signature work and one of the most influential records of the ’90s.

Konono No.1 - Congotronics

Awesome summer album from Africa this time.

AMG

This amazing record is the product of utility, coincidence, and accidental discovery as much as it is a product of academic deliberation, and it manages to sound old and traditional even as it is refreshingly (even radically) new and avant-garde. Konono No. 1 was formed in the 1980s by a group of Bazombo musicians, dancers, and singers from the Democratic Republic of Congo to play traditional likembe (thumb piano) music in the streets. They soon discovered, though, that they needed amplification to be heard and — this is where the story of this album really begins — they took a DIY and utilitarian approach by building their own amplification systems out of junked car parts, magnets, and other flotsam. Once assembled, the system produced a huge hum that Konono No. 1 embraced as part of the sound of the group. At the center of everything were three amped-up thumb pianos tuned to three different registers, and coupled with all manner of pots, pans, whistles, and brake drum snares for percussion and with the vocals blasting through megaphones, all embedded in the huge buzz and hum of the homemade PA system, the group accidentally created a sound that was at once both ancient and traditional and yet eerily akin to experimental 21st century electronica. Congotronics is Konono’s second album (the first was a live outing entitled Lubuaku), and while it was ostensibly recorded in a studio setting, it sounds wonderfully live and immediate, as if the dozen members of the group were standing on a busy street corner like some Congolese version of a second-line Mardi Gras band, only with thumb pianos instead of horns. Musical themes emerge and reemerge in the various tracks, and what sounds initially chaotic and random is revealed to be nothing of the sort, giving the whole album the feel of a ragged, joyous suite. Part traditional, part African rhumba, part smart avant-garde electronica, Congotronics is the sound of an urban junkyard band simultaneously weaving the past and the future into one amazingly coherent structure, and not only that, you can dance to it. This is the band Tom Waits has been looking for all his life.

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The lovely people at The Green Man Festival sent me an email a couple of days ago explaining their Green Man Poll so I thought I should share it with you guys.

The Green Man Festival is a wonderful festival on August 15th, 16th and 17th on the Breacon Beacons, somewhere in the west country I think, UK. The bands playing are mainly folky influence and the atmosphere of the festival is regarded as one of the nicest and best in the UK, miles better than Glastonbury, so if your still undecided about which summer festival to go too go to The Green Man.

The Green Man Festival

Line-Up

Super Furry Animals (Saturday headline), Spiritualized (Friday headline), Pentangle (Sunday headline), Iron and Wine, The National, Richard Thompson, Black Mountain, Drive-By Truckers, The Cave Singers, King Creosote, Lightspeed Champion, Archie Bronson Outfit, Wild Beasts, Eugene McGuinness, Caribou, Magik Markers, School of Language, One Little Plane, James Yorkston, Badly Drawn Boy, Devon Sproule, Howlin’ Rain, Alela Diane, Make Model, Nina Nastasia, Jennifer Gentle, Little Wings, Pete Molinari, Lou Rhodes,Fu*k Buttons,The War on Drugs, Emmy The Great, Laura Marling, Los Campesinos!, Damien Jurado, The Accidental, The Drift Collective, Cath and Phil Tyler, The Moon Music Orchestra, The Yellow Moon Band, Duke Garwood, Threatmantics, Mugstar, Radio Luxemburg, Cymbient, Beth Jeans Houghton, Brigyn, Truckers of Husk, The Bowerbirds, O’Death, Ox.Eagle.Lion.Man, The Owl Service, Prince Rama of Ayodhya, Cats In Paris, The Saffron Sect, Agnostic Mountain Gospel Choir, Wolf People, Barbarossa, Nic Dawson Kelly,Pete Greenwood, Heather Jones, John Stammers, Gwyneth Glyn, Grand Archives, 9 Bach, Simone White, Babel, Cate Le Bone, Mumford and Son, Burning Leaves, Rod Thomas, Mary Hampton, Essie Jain, Jacob Golden, Pamela Wyn Shannon, City Reverb, Jane Weaver, The Gentle Good & The Peth

So what they were getting in touch with me about was the Green Man Poll. They want to give any band, signed or unsigned, the chance to perform at the festival. Basically you go to the website, register and hope you get the most votes.  I cheekily emailed David Thomas Broughton asking if he wanted to register so I could ask all you guys to vote for him.

Anyway here’s the blurb from the Green Man site for all you budding artists.

Green Poll - Your Band’s Chance to Open The Festival

The Green Man is delighted to announce an online band competition where the lucky winner will have the opportunity of being the opening act at this year’s festival, and play to a capacity crowd of 10,000 alongside the likes of Super Furry Animals (Saturday headline), Spiritualized (Friday headline) and Pentangle (Sunday headline) - full line up so far above, with more acts to be announced soon.

Green Man Festival has always championed new and emerging talent. Taking risks by booking unknown acts alongside popular and iconic music artists is very much part of the rich Green Man experience. The competition allows interested artists, signed or unsigned, to upload a YouTube or MySpace clip of themselves, and these clips are then voted upon by the general public to choose who will open this year’s festival. This is how it works:

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