$?

http://www.copywritesworld.com/

http://www.manbitesdogrecords.com/

Underground hip-hop takes distinct forms on either side of the Atlantic, to the extent that it’s arguable that ‘British underground hip-hop’ refers to a genre distinct from the American equivalent, rather than a geographically differentiated variety of the same thing. Arguable, but that doesn’t mean I think that’s necessarily the case… I do think that there are some important cultural differences (place and ethnicity both have very different functions in the construction of American and British identity), but I also think that the adherents of hip-hop’s undergrounds probably have more in common globally than they do with their local mainstreams. That being the case, transatlantic collaborations seem to be a little thin on the ground; as with jazz, it’s taking a long time to convince the fans and creators of this distinctively American creative practice that their tradition has an independent existence in the rest of the world. There have long been exceptions, particularly since early sound sharing sites like iCompositions made long distance collaborations practical for grass roots level artists, but God Save The King (Proper English Version) is one of the most high profile examples I’ve encountered (in my ignorance and indolence).

Copywrite is pretty well known for an underground artist – especially by the uncompromisingly obscurantist standards I usually apply – and has racked up collaborations and associations with some notorious figures, such as Jay Dilla, Killah Priest, and… no, on second thoughts I’m not going to abandon my journalistic principles and list a lot of names here. There are prominent names in the list of US contributors to this album, and prominent names in the list of UK contributors (the best known of which is probably Ms. Dynamite’s little brother and MOBO winner Akala). But I’m going to stick to describing the music.

The beats are top notch, as you would expect from an album released under as well respected a name as Copywrite’s; it’s not massively innovative or genre bending, but production geeks will find plenty of crafty details and sly   manoeuvres to keep them interested, and it’s all highly conducive to head-noddery. The two that stuck out and made me notice them both turned out to be contributed by Jason Rose: ‘Ghosts In The Machine’ is a loping, heavy groove driven by a saturated synth bass (for which the present writer is a sucker), featuring one of the strongest guest raps from Context; the other is (bizarrely) an electronic reconstruction of Dire Straits’ ‘Money For Nothing’, to which Rose also donates some verbiage.

The dominant vocal aesthetic (and it’s hard to generalise about an album with twenty-three vocalists) is ruff and tuff; there is some very engaging wordplay, but it’s never laid on too thick. If it was rock guitar, it would be hard rock, not shred. There’s a lot of no-messing, confrontational swagger here. On first listen I found it a bit heavy on the name-checks and self promotion, but I think my perceptions were initially coloured by the inclusion of two minutes of the delectable Sarah Love bigging up the album on her radio show. Nice as it may be to have someone like that saying good things about your release, I think the music speaks for itself; and on reflection, despite that moment of excess, the album is no heavier on the shout-outs than most. At times it all seems a little bit in thrall to its own testosterone, but on the whole it’s rugged and exciting. Hip-hop can be pretty self-referential, and there’s a fair proportion of inwardly focussed lyrics, but there’s also an enthusiasm for outward engagement, and some social commentary that is less than usually obvious. The best was definitely saved for last: ‘Still Pickin’ offers the sort of listening experience that takes you right outside yourself, with irresistibly funky flows and head-spinning lyrical conceits; the closer, ‘A Talk With Jesus’, contextualises a moment of uncomfortable self-examination with Christian language, but you don’t need to believe to get the point, which is the deepest to be found on here.

This album is a very high quality, well judged piece of work. It strikes a fine balance between earthy machismo, and a more contemplative approach; the creative decisions here have clearly been made by someone with the experience to trade off ‘worthy’ concerns against entertainment value, and the end result is a recording that has a lot of strength in both areas.

God Save The King will be released on 13 June 2012.

What a lineup. Any casual punter could readily be forgiven for being carried out in a box. Not that the sounds on offer were remotely toxic; on the contrary, they were entirely wholesome nut cutlets of crunchthudriffery, but seriously, heavy things can crush you, and things as heavy as this can crush you flat. Perhaps that’s why Colchester Arts Centre is ‘never knowingly understood’: stand under this sort of malarkey and you can wave goodbye to three-dimensionality.

Meadows.

Meadows had the good grace to run the first stage of the relay, as the event was their baby. The last time I saw them, they’d been enjoyable to see and hear, but they hadn’t enjoyed playing much owing to a dodgy stage sound and some sonic gremlins: on this occasion they were loving it, and it showed. Crushing riffs and angry screams were delivered with intensity and obvious relish; the band’s aesthetic involves assembling monolithic structures from massive blocks of destructive power, and then firing them at you really hard. On this occasion they reminded me why I count them among my favourite live acts.

This was the first outing for Suns Of Colossus. Rehearsals have obviously been going well. This band’s schtick is classic hard rock, with a distinctly southern flavour, helpfully signalled for the deaf by the Confederate flag hanging from the mic stand; I do like to see disabled access considered in performance practice. They played it straight and they played it hard. The bass player and guitarist both gave good value as far as their playing was concerned, but could definitely have looked a bit less reticent about it; the singer more than made up for it though. He is a charismatic rock performer of the old school, who makes the stage his own by inhabiting all of it, and who enjoys an intimate relationship with his mic stand, an aspect of rock showmanship sadly neglected in recent years. All in all, very entertaining, and when they all loosen up and give it some visually, they’ll be even better.

William English have only released a two track demo (which I reviewed here) so I was surprised how fully formed they seem as a band. They put in a really intense set, presenting themselves with a striking visual impact: nothing overtly theatrical, but each band member has a distinctive visual character and a dynamic approach to stagecraft. Their music is contemporary sludge with a streak of complexity, and the writing is all great, but it was the performance that really got me: I mean, these blokes held nothing back, and there is no better feeling for an audience than to know the band is giving you everything they’ve got. Some mindblowing shit right there.

It’s not long since I last saw Three Thrones play, but the contrast was striking. They’ve always put in a good set when I’ve seen them in the past, but they usually seem pretty shy on stage; tonight they were obviously very happy to be there. Their drummer is the most dynamic presence in their shows, and the two chaps up front are never going to be the sort of performers to leap around doing the splits and simulating sex acts with the equipment; that’s just a question of personality. But on this outing they were relaxed and confident, their body language and their playing both exhibiting a well-oiled, loose-limbed assurance. With their no-vocals format, and their simple, textural compositions, Three Thrones were clearly the evening’s most devout worshippers at the Church Of Riff, their music ruthlessly expunged of all else. Long may they continue in that vein, because they make a truly awesome noise.

Slabdragger.

While Slabdragger were getting ready to play, their bassist was testing his instruments, with a sound processed through some blistering, gritty distortion: it sounded, in fact, like a slab being dragged, which answered the first question I had about this band. I first came across this act while writing reviews for the sadly somnolent Live Unsigned, so my familiarity with their sound was based on some online tracks, which were great, but probably not that representative, and it was all a bit of a long time ago. What I said then did still hold true as a description of their music, to whit: ‘this is thick, treacly, heavy shit, that bludgeons you into a semi-conscious trance, best enjoyed at volumes capable of liquefying small animals’. Slabdragger knew exactly what to do with their headline spot, and played an absolute blinder, bestriding the stage with approachable majesty, and drugging us to the eyeballs with their hallucinatory aural intensity. This is another band with an arresting visual impact, especially enhanced by their guitarist’s selfless commitment to radical hirsutism; from writing, through playing, to stagecraft, all the ingredients were in place for a charismatic and brutal performance, that rounded off a very high quality night to perfection.

Massive props have to be directed at everyone involved in organising this night: it represents exactly the sort of grass roots scene making that keeps music a living art, rather than a professionalised consumer culture irrelevance. The Arts Centre’s brilliant sound engineer Chris obviously had a lot to do with how good everyone felt on stage, but the atmosphere was superb from the back of the house to the front. Roll on Church Of Riff 3.

The Beroan family kept the matriarchal Roganid Custom in their domestic arrangements; Feldua sat on his wife’s right hand, and Ukhand faced him across the table, sitting, as the most honoured male guest, on her left. Shenailo directed the meal from the head of the table, beautiful, pale, and very young, her courage fragile as she feigned normality, and cast continual anxious glances at her husband. The fare was good, wrasse in a green sauce, roasted tomatoes, rice with pumpkin seeds and dried apricots; Dorna’s port remained open, the pretender having no ships.

‘With food like this on the table, we must assume the pretender intends to assault the walls,’ observed Ukhand. ‘He has no way to lay an effective siege.’

Feldua nudged his fish anticlockwise around the plate with his knife. His drooping moustache lent experience to his face, but his large, dark, long-lashed eyes betrayed his fear. Ukhand knew the young hipparch had courage: he had seen him at the forefront of a charge against very stiff odds, and he hadn’t flinched from the fight, even when more than half his own men had met their death or were begging for it. The fear he felt now was for others, Ukhand could tell; those child’s eyes, incapable of dissembling, lingered with anguish on his wife, on each of his children.

‘The walls are strong,’ said Feldua. ‘They are not the most modern design, or the tallest, but they are sturdy, and easily defended. We may have taken heavy losses yesterday, but there are still hundreds of men to hold the parapets.’

The children had been dismissed from the table some time before, and were playing nearby; Shenailo sent them to the far side of the round hall, the ground floor of the Water Tower at which the city wall terminated, built on jagged rocks overlooking the sea. This had been the Beroan family home since Dorna’s succession dispute had become heated; they could only assume that the family estate had long since been plundered by the pretender’s forces. The room was well lit by a large window, far above ground level on the city side of the tower.

Maghîllin flicked a plump green olive into the air and caught it in his mouth.

‘I seen walls defended good,’ he said, in his curious accent; ‘but I never see a wall that couldn’t be breach. City wall not the same as a fortress.’

He shrugged, smiling. Beside him, his sister nodded in agreement, her copper skin showing a faint bloom of sweat from the raw chillies she had eaten with her meal, as well as the opium she had smoked before it.

Shenailo put her hand on Ukhand’s and leaned close, lowering her voice. ‘I would ask you to tell us honestly, sir: could they breach the wall? And if so, how long might we have?’

She looked towards her children, tumbling obliviously in a patch of dusty sunlight by the open door. Her husband was a commander, and a seasoned one now, by most measures, but she had seen how he looked to his hireling Ukhand for advice.

‘Until Lancer Irtain returns from the gate, madam, it is very hard to be certain. It is certainly not unrealistic to expect the assault might fail; but you have asked for honesty, so I will say clearly that the numbers do not favour us. If I were your husband, I would place you and the children on a ship to take lodgings at Tortenos, simply from prudence.’

Shenailo set her jaw and creased her brow in a determined frown. ‘I will not leave the city while my husband remains here.’

Ukhand put his other hand on Shenailo’s and squeezed it reassuringly, nodding to acknowledge her courage. His archer Umbaral spoke up from his left.

‘Rest assured, madam, we’ll not stint from defending you and your family while there is breath in our bodies.’

His words dripped insincerity like unction, but Ukhand supposed that someone who didn’t know him would take them at face value. Shenailo smiled gratefully, then directed the servant to refill their cups. The young woman was pale with fear, but her skin was olive and her eyes dark like her husband’s; she reminded him a little of the girl he’d been betrothed to before he was stripped of his hipparchy and his inheritance, but perhaps it was just that she was young and pretty. It was Feldua who truly reminded him of his past, of the future that had been laid before him and denied him. He hoped this brave, honest, noble youth would fare better.

There was a jingling of chainmail as the guard admitted one of his lancers, a young Maiagefid, who crossed the floor quickly and whispered in his ear that Irtain had returned, and wished to speak to him secretly. He excused himself discretely, and followed the man outside.

He led him through the Blackswords’ horsefold to the large tent the junior lancers slept in. He could see Irtain’s shock of prematurely white, wiry hair from outside, even with the sun in his face; the Chokhali was standing just inside the flap, his flat, tanned face downcast.

‘Lancer? I expected you back an hour ago.’

‘Yes, sir. I went to the port, sir… the Yellowbird is making ready to sail, sir, and I think they’ve put off some of our supplies.’

‘The port? On whose instructions?’ Irtain seemed uncharacteristically reticent.

‘May I make my report please, Captain Ukhand? I think you’ll see why…’

‘Why here? I take it the situation must be grave, if you think it best to keep it from our commander.’

‘The Gate Commander told me to, sir.’

Ukhand raised an eyebrow at that. ‘Well and good, then. Make your report.’

When Irtain had finished Ukhand knew his lancer’s downcast, sullen look for shame. He considered how many of his men would have come back to report under the same circumstances; his brother Rajir certainly, but few others.

‘And so, after you left the gate, you went to the port to check on the disposition of our transport.’

Even in the shade of the tent he could see that Irtain had reddened to the roots of his hair.

‘I’m sorry, sir,’ he blurted, ‘I wasn’t thinking, I would never… I owe everything I am to you, sir, I will accept my punishment without complaint.’

Ukhand had to smile. ‘If I were a lord, Irtain, I would make you my hipparch.’ He gripped Irtain’s shoulder. ‘You’ve scouted the harbour, and you’ve brought me a chest full of treasure, in addition to discharging the duty you were commissioned to perform. I have no cause to reprimand you that I can think of.’

‘But, sir…’

‘Shut up, Lancer. I’m interested in what you did, not in what you thought of doing. Come and make your report to Commander Feldua; you can describe the dispositions exactly as you just have, but leave out the message that was sent to me. When we took this city’s coin we became its soldiers, and to go aboard ship now would be desertion.’

He put the chest’s key in the pocket at his boot top, without inspecting its contents.

When Irtain had repeated his report, Shenailo was white and trembling, unable to speak. She went to her children and gathered them in her arms, although they would plainly have preferred to continue playing. The blood had also drained from Feldua’s face, but he maintained his composure.

‘Then the time to debate is over,’ he said, mastering himself to keep his voice steady. ‘Order your men to arm, Captain Ukhand. I shall see that my household troops are ready.’

‘Before we arm, Commander,’ said Ukhand, ‘it is my duty to point out the alternative course. We have chartered the Minessorid caravel Yellowbird to take twenty men and forty horses to Tua at the conclusion of our engagement; it is at the wharf here, and with our reduced numbers there is easily room aboard for your household.’

Irtain looked anxious at this, but remained silent.

Feldua looked taken aback. ‘No,’ he said, ‘my duty is here, to my city…’

Umbaral rolled his eyes scornfully. The twins, Maghîllin and Ashurra had locked forearms, and were staring into each others’ eyes, as they always did before battle, whispering in their own language.

‘Consider your family. It seems unlikely they could make their way to the port unescorted, and the Yellowbird’s captain will certainly not board them if I am not present.’

‘We will not leave him!’ gasped Shenailo, sobbing. She repeated her words, and again, more quietly, like a mantra, rocking herself and her children.

‘Then we will arm immediately,’ said Ukhand reluctantly, ‘but may I make one suggestion?’

‘What is that?’

‘Leave your household guards here with your family.’ All but three of Feldua’s own troops had been killed in the charge the previous day, and one of those three was developing a fever from the wound he had taken. ‘Let them barricade the door and retire to the top floor. If the Suluf come plundering they won’t be looking to storm a small fortress like this, and you are well provisioned.’

Feldua nodded. ‘Thank you for your concern, Captain. I will feel much happier leaving them if they’re guarded.’

Ukhand beckoned Maghîllin, who served as cornet over the lancers, and muttered into his ear. ‘Get the men ready. Bring nothing big, but small or valuable effects in saddlebags. Fully armed.’

Maghîllin nodded his understanding and went outside, followed by his sister.

Feldua’s farewell to his wife and children was tearful, on all sides; his three well armoured soldiers looked on stoically, standing to attention with their halberds presented in salute. Irtain brought up the rear of the column so that Feldua would not notice the small chest strapped to his harness. Ukhand took no pleasure in the task that lay before him, and it pained him to see the small size of the company he now led, but it was still good to see his troops turned out in good order, marching willingly into danger with quiet discipline.

The Blackswords rode tall destriers, the same heavy horses that cataphracts would ride, either Herekhis or the shaggy Suluf breed, the Morfeld that was traded at the Saramet horse fair to the north of Dorna. They wore thick leather leggings and boots, mail hauberks and open faced capelines on their heads; their armour was fire blackened and their black surcoats bore the outline of a sword in white. Their shields carried the same device, as did the pennant flying from Maghîllin’s lance. Each man carried a sabre or backsword with a blackened blade, except Irtain who preferred a double edged longsword; their lances were three yards long with narrow pointed blades designed to impale through armour. Black had seemed the right colour when the time came to set a uniform for his band: fire blackened their blades, as the executioner’s fire had taken his father’s life for his treason, and would have taken his own if he had remained in Jeikhaf.

Ukhand still conducted himself as a hipparch, and was at pains to behave with integrity and honour when circumstances would permit him, but for the dozen years of his exile he had been a stateless commoner, and as such he would attract no ransom. He had no illusions regarding his fate should he be captured, or that of his men.

He led the column out, riding abreast with the young hipparch, Feldua Beroan, who wore his family’s badge, a red curlew on a yellow field. It had felt better the day before, when the course of the hours to come had held uncertainty, and consequently hope. Any pride he felt riding beside this handsome and honourable man, this courageous paragon of hipparchy, was as bitter as earwax in his mouth today.

There was a spur of rock between them and the main part of the city; as soon as they rounded it they could hear the sounds of battle. The clamour increased dramatically as they made their way towards the gate. Ukhand signalled Maghîllin to halt the column, and walked on a few yards with Feldua before pulling up.

‘From the sound of it there’s a lot of men fighting on each side,’ he said.

‘Our side may have sallied out…’

‘The gate was barricaded, and you don’t get hundreds of men out through a sally port. Also, the sound is too clear: do you hear how crisply those swords ring out? They’ve breached the gate or the wall beside it.’

‘Really? Then we must press on!’

Feldua stood in his stirrups and raised his hand.

‘Commander! We will throw our lives away if we go charging straight into the unknown, and it seems unlikely we will get any orders when we reach the gate. We should consider how we can cost the enemy the most.’

The streets were deserted, and every building shuttered, but they were still on a broad, main thoroughfare; reinforcements might come marching past them at any moment, or a messenger might pass by. Ukhand looked at the narrower, twisting streets that approached the wall. Houses and small tenements built from yellow brick and thatched with reed crowded together, with little sense of order away from the main road.

‘We have little time to consider, Captain; the enemy is in my city now! What do you suggest?’

‘We should approach along the wall: that way we won’t be riding out into open space, and we won’t be anticipated. We may be able to charge the enemy’s flank as we did yesterday.’

That was an extremely slim chance in the melee Ukhand would expect to find around the gate, but Feldua seemed to find it plausible, and assented. Ukhand signalled to Maghîllin, and led off into the alleys toward the city wall. When they had turned a corner and left the larger street, he rode ahead of the hipparch and turned his horse to block the younger man’s way. Feldua’s face darkened in anger.

‘What is it now? The battle is not waiting for us, Captain!’

‘I must ask you again, Commander.’ Ukhand looked the hipparch directly in the eye, unflinching, holding his attention with a hard-earned air of authority. He spoke loudly and deliberately. ‘We are not yet far from your tower; your tower is not far from the port. There is a ship waiting. We could have your family aboard in half a watch.’

‘Gods take you!’ exclaimed Feldua angrily. ‘I cannot abandon my city in its gravest need! We have already wasted enough time on this: are you a coward?’

‘No, I am no coward.’ Ukhand lowered his voice, but pitched it to carry. ‘You must understand this, Commander Feldua: in this battle there is no chance of victory, and little hope of survival. What hope of survival there is will sooner or later lie only in retreat. You fight to save your city; we fight for coin, coin we cannot spend if we are dead.’

Ukhand met Maghîllin’s eye, and the Shallu grinned, taking his meaning immediately. He handed his lance to his sister, who rode beside him, and edged his horse closer.

The anger that had darkened his complexion now drove the blood from Feldua’s face, and he trembled with indignation.

‘This is the risk you are paid to take,’ he said, his voice tight with fury. ‘If you take our coin but will not take the risk you deserve the headsman’s axe for a deserter.’

‘I am no deserter, Commander.’ Ukhand held Feldua’s eye, speaking levelly but intensely. ‘I am a man of honour and a man of my word; I was raised to be a hipparch, though my family’s fortunes did not permit me to remain one. We will fight and die for you, but you must understand exactly what it is you ask of us.’

Feldua’s shoulders dropped; he relaxed, and nodded in understanding. Ukhand nodded to Maghîllin, who drew his knife hard across the young man’s throat, cutting cleanly through his windpipe, and then embraced him with both arms to stop him drawing his sword. It seemed a span of ages before blood welled from the ghastly injury, and Feldua emitted a wordless, gurgling gasp, his gaze still locked on Ukhand’s in an expression of pain, horror and accusation. Ukhand felt that he was staring into a pit; he could stand it only for a moment. He leaned forward, and drove his poniard through Feldua’s left eye; the light went out in his right.

$10.99 (CD) $8.99 DD

http://home.earthlink.net/~falcone/grindlestone.html

http://grindlestone.bandcamp.com/album/tone

http://www.nohpoetryrecords.com/

When music has no lyrical content, its titles become gnomic and mysterious, intentionally or otherwise. ‘Our Floor With All Its Beliefs’ could be taken in so many different ways, but to be honest I think it’s best not to take it at all. Unless there is a very clear relationship between the musical themes and title it’s safest to assume it’s some kind of private joke or reference, and concentrate on the sound instead: and surely the point of music which refuses, not only verbal language, but the established tropes of musical narrative, is to present itself to the auditory cortex abstractly, as sound, in just the same way that the stone reproduced as the cover of Tone presents itself to the visual cortex. The experience of listening, I suspect, is intended to resemble the experience of seeing such a piece of stone, and touching it with the fingertips; it certainly struck me as analogous.

Grindlestone do not use the term ‘field recording’ in relation to this album; that term implies a degree of documentary rigour in the representation of a sound, an assumption that it is harvested whole. These sounds are very much constructed, although in some cases their source is an act of musical performance, and in others it is a ‘found sound’. The degree of mediation involved makes it hard (if not impossible) to identify their origins, and indeed obscures the distinction between the intentionally musical and the aleatory; as the very idea of ambient music confounds, to some extent, the conventional distinction in use value between music and non-music, this seems to reinforce the searching questions that are asked of us, as listeners. The pieces collected on Tone are structures of long notes, extended textures, albeit that some of them are highly granular, or proceed in pulsing judders of attack and release. Some elements are tones, of which some are apparently generated by bowed strings, others synthesised or gathered from the wild; other elements are noise, although very few are harsh or abrasive. They come and go in accretions that build up to, and retreat from, defined maxima of density, outweighing the textures of chamber homophony (for example) but stopping some way short of a stampeding orchestra. Their ebb and flow is pelagic, surrounding and enveloping the listener.

‘Elevator Music In A Silent Hotel’ seems like a microscopic close up of the sounds that inhabit an elevator shaft, as much as it mimics in any obvious way the action or effect of an elevator. ‘Fragments Of Past Sounds’ is haunted by the human voice, but the element that resembles a voice is firmly the other side of the comprehensibility horizon, and could plausibly be the singing of tensile elements in a mechanical structure (but then, it occurs to me, isn’t that what the human voice is anyway?); as the piece develops the sound mutates, and its vocal qualities recede. ‘Of Enough Importance To Fear’ drops small sounds into a hugely reverberant, bassy space, a vast gap between equally vast masses, like the central shaft of the Death Star, or the canyons of Ridley Scott’s dystopian Los Angeles. There is sometimes a specific warmth, a harmonic richness to these sounds, but their ambience is that of a cold and somewhat threatening space, it seems to me. There is something of a rusted, urban pastoral about this music; it resembles the night noises of a somnolent industrial cityscape.

This is not ‘heavy’ or disturbing music, but its atmospheres are clearly both unsettled and unsettling. It is assembled with a meticulous attention to the interactions between its elements, its various layers often painstakingly equalised so that, even at its points of maximum density, the music is sonically open, orderly and comprehensible. These sounds are mixed in stereo, but the resulting spaces are convincingly three dimensional, locating the listener as a subject within the soundworld rather than an external observer. Clearly the consequence of a thoroughly considered creative agenda, realised with intelligence and expertise, Grindlestone’s aesthetic is a fairly desolate one, but it is an aesthetic in the conventional sense; there is beauty here.

self released, 2012, CD & DD album, 46m 11s

€12 (CD) £7.49 (Amazon DL)

http://www.facebook.com/wearedinmartin

Serious pop music: I love it. Of course most pop music has been made with a serious attention to getting the sound right, such as it is, but then there’s the stuff that applies the language and sensibility of pop to its chosen themes in a manner that looks way beyond the superficial concerns of the mainstream. Obviously the ‘popular music’ label has ended up including tons of stuff, such as extreme metal and progressive rock, that have pretty much nothing to do with pop, but while DIN Martin’s filigreed post-punk is hardly in the pop mainstream (and is certainly a lot more gloomy than anything that charts these days), there’s still something distinctly pop about this. There’s a commitment to getting the point across melodically, making the tune mean the lyrics and vice versa, in a way that is appealing and involving irrespective of the mood or content.

These songs are arranged in interlocking layers of instrumental melody and texture, that seem to inhabit their various timbres and frequencies more so that they can distinguish their voices from the others, rather than just so they can play their conventional part in the orchestration of an electric guitar band. The entire approach is almost baroque it’s so contrapuntal, but unlike most baroque music it is full of space; the atmospheres seem calm and limpid, but when you listen deeply they turn out to be built from an intricate meshing of components that operates like clockwork. Every instrument is played with an awareness of texture and orchestration, and every arrangement is built from painstakingly marshalled flights of imagination. You can really hear the time that went into this. The Second Before You Faint is a soulful record, one in which mood is everything, written with a very informed command of the effects of harmony and timbre, and it’s clear its meanings are easily apprehended by simply drifting with it. But detailed listening is richly rewarded as well. This is a very accomplished piece of art.

Elika – Always The Light (dreampop)

Saint Marie Records SMR007, 2012, LP, CD & DD album, 33m 35s

$24.95 (pink vinyl LP) $19.99 (LP) $11.99 (CD)

http://www.saintmarierecords.com/products-page/elika

http://saintmarierecords.bandcamp.com/album/always-the-light

http://www.elikamusic.com

Elika are pretty explicit about their influences; this is music that owes a large creative debt to shoegaze. It’s not shoegaze though, if only because that genre’s most defining feature, the huge, mushy wall of over-saturated guitars, is entirely absent. This is predominantly electronic music, and it’s actually pretty sparse in the way it’s arranged, certainly in comparison to their earlier Snuggle Bunnies; and yet, the atmosphere it evokes, the way its meanings filter into the listener’s consciousness like dye crossing from one medium to another, or ink travelling through blotting paper, is as much like shoegaze as anything I’ve heard. I wouldn’t like to commit myself to saying exactly what those meanings are (songs are complex things, after all, and it’s not the reviewer’s job to pre-empt the listener’s understanding), but although there’s a certain melancholy, they certainly feel less emotionally desolate than on the previous album.

Sonically, this album takes the path less travelled. Little here would strike anyone as experimental, but some detailed attention paid to the ostensibly straightforward surface textures of the music reveals them each to be made up from bespoke materials, assembled with imagination and invention. Elika never rest on their laurels, but regard finding a way to construct the recording with the same importance as writing the song; even when the arrangement seems to be composed of conventional bass/guitar/drums (‘Trials’) there are carefully tweaked little textural elements in the beat that lift and enliven the track. Recalling shoegaze guitarists with their hypnotic ranks of pedals, there is an obsessive sonic craftsmanship at work here, which gives these simple, powerful songs the presentation they deserve.

Shaz – Good Evening (hip-hop)

self released, 2011, CD album, 47m 32s

£?

This is a very well put together album. The production is varied and polished; a lot of the songs have sung hooks, heavy on the sugary autotune, but well-turned melodies nevertheless; it’s programmed for a dynamic narrative that balances the bangers nicely against the ballads. The lyrics are big on autobiographical sincerity, integrity and optimism in the face of adversity; the beats are propulsive and atmospheric; Shaz and his guests flow with a funky, loping swagger. But there’s not really much going on here.

There’s so much good quality stuff in the hip-hop underground these days that it takes some seriously clever wordplay to stand comparison; it takes wit, charisma, verbal dexterity and the sheer blunt instrument of years writing every idea in a notebook, until you can draw on a hoard of devastating turns of phrase and unexpected twists of meaning. Everything in these lyrics is very straightforward, in terms of their vocabulary, their themes and their delivery. I wouldn’t want to suggest that everything has to ‘clever’ to be good, but the value of putting something in a rap, rather than just saying it, is that it hits hard, and carries meanings that can’t be contained by a simple statement; I’m sorry to say that these words haven’t been put together with the creativity or imagination to do anything more than just sit there, meaning what they mean.

There is some social awareness in evidence here, and I can only praise someone who wants to highlight the struggles of the disadvantaged, even if I’m not overly excited by the language they use to do so. On the other hand, the humour, in conjunction with the conventionally confrontational language of hip-hop, is the least successful aspect of the album. I certainly buy into the idea that offense is taken, not given, but going to great lengths to incite offense still results in language that means something; and in the final analysis, a line like ‘any woman gets offended/ rape that whore’ just isn’t funny. You might as well say ‘any black gets offended/ lynch that nigger’.

Suus – Jack Beatz Vol. 2: Lights Down, Music Up (hip-hop)

self released, 2012, DD album, 55m 38s

£0+ (name your price)

http://suus.bandcamp.com/album/jack-beatz-vol-2-lights-down-music-up

http://www.facebook.com/SuusUpNorth

Like the album reviewed above, Jack Beatz Vol. 2: Lights Down, Music Up does not represent an attempt to re-write the language of hip-hop, or to proclaim any great political or ideological manifesto. It’s independent hip-hop, but not with any particular allegiance to the underground; I’m pretty sure Suus would be very happy with commercial success, and would probably carry on much as he is now, spitting from his own experience, and recounting humorously exaggerated scenarios in which he features as the potent alpha-male hero… Like the album above, the beats are well crafted, well produced, pretty slick and pretty interchangeable. What sets this album apart is everything the other one lacked: wit, charisma, verbal gymnastics, infectious humour and intelligence.

The tracks here swing between slinky tension building and high impact, full force intensity. Suus’ flows are always relaxed, right on top of the beat without sounding percussive, and he doesn’t double-time much (although when he does, he nails it but good); but he’s adept at manipulating the stresses of his delivery, and setting up cross rhythms between the metre and the rhyme scheme, that drive his words home like a sledgehammer. His lyrics are imbued with an undisguised joy in language, a sheer pleasure in making words and their meanings dance to his tune, bouncing from double meaning to cultural reference to self-deprecating aside to belligerent boast. The humour is razor sharp, and knowing irony is well balanced with confessional sincerity. This is the sound of a dexterous street linguist having so much fun you can’t help but enjoy it with him.

Wednesday 9^th May 2012

http://christt.com/

http://www.shemakeswar.com/

http://www.paulgoodwin.com/

http://www.facebook.com/sophiejamiesonmusic

http://www.greenmind.co.uk/

She Makes War

I should come clean at the outset: I knew about this gig because She Makes War, of whose music I’ve been a fan for some time, put it on her website, and as it’s in my old stamping ground, it seemed an ideal opportunity to finally find out what she does live. It was only the day before the gig that I discovered Chris T-T was headlining, and I would guess that he’s just slightly too famous for me to have heard of him, with my warped and inverted approach to cultural discovery… I had no idea there was anyone else on the bill until I got there, but as it turned out, all four acts were well worth hearing.

Sophie Jamieson writes thoughtful songs and performs them with her voice and an acoustic guitar. She seemed excessively self-deprecating, apologising for one perfectly good (in fact rather lovely) song in advance… I guess this was a sign of relative inexperience; performance is the best vaccine for a lack of confidence and her guitar playing, while quite shapely and sophisticated, displayed a few rough edges in the execution that some time on the road would rub off soon enough. The material and arrangements were all there, however, and any other considerations seemed trivial once I heard her voice, a sweet and well modulated instrument, which she employed with considerable skill; I intend no criticism of the other performers when I say that hers was decidedly the best voice of the night.

Chris T-T

Paul Goodwin has a rare talent of conveying deep passion and commitment without any melodrama or histrionics, his every vocal line delivered with, and his body language imbued with an abject sincerity that verged on the uncomfortably honest. His songs are novelistic and observational, with the wry, critical distance of the semi-outsider, that member of a social group that’s quite happy on the fringe. Between vocal lines there were a lot of shifty looks from side to side, as though he was concerned someone was about to find him out or expose him… for what, I have no idea, but proponents of confessional art often, and understandably, display a degree of self doubt; his songs certainly give the impression that they draw quite ruthlessly on his own experience. His guitar playing and singing are clearly means to an end, and don’t draw attention to themselves; the songs are intelligent, funny and frequently touching, with some very well turned phrases.

As I said at the outset, I’m very well acquainted with She Makes War’s recorded output, which is quite intricately assembled, and I was filled with curiosity as to how she would realise her material live. She took a variety of approaches, from the straightforward strum-and-sing to the clever layering of vocal loops. The loop pedal was definitely her secret weapon in presenting her material, enabling a really varied and engaging set of arrangements; I hadn’t really noticed how many of her songs are based round short, repeated chord sequences, which she was able to bang out quickly on her ukulele before switching to guitar. ‘Delete’, from her latest Little Battles was a high point for me, with its clever and appealing layers of vocal rhythms. A couple of songs were delivered without trickery via a graunchily (I may have just invented that word) distorted Telecaster, at volumes that were ear-bleeding by the standards of the otherwise acoustic night. And I happen to be very keen on electric guitars at ear-bleeding volumes (especially Telecasters, also the weapon of choice of Rose Kemp, one of my favourite musicians of all time, who I was slightly reminded of by this brief outbreak of racket). She Makes War is a consummate performer, who looks after every aspect of her presentation, from the visual to the sonic, in great detail; she’s a real musician’s musician, never missing a chance to improve an arrangement with a well judged tweak, although her songs all stand up extremely well on their own. I was slightly surprised by her stage demeanour, I have to admit, which was considerably more nervous than I anticipated; I guess I’d expected  supreme confidence from someone whose branding and online presentation is so brilliantly executed, but her manner was approachable and appealing. Her set was definitely the night’s acme of awesomeness (sorry Chris), and it was well worth the wait to finally hear her in the flesh.

And so to the headline act. Chris T-T resorts to no technical wizardry or visual gimmicks; he is a singer songwriter, who stands at the mic with an acoustic guitar and sings the songs he’s written. We’ll come back to the songs, but what set his performance apart from the acts that preceded him was his easy confidence, and consequent charisma; this man is clearly as happy on stage as off it (or he’s a damned fine actor). Although some of his songs are very funny, you wouldn’t call them comedy, but his whole schtick on stage might have been honed in comedy clubs; it’s conceivable that he thought he was just punching the clock at work, and was really just thinking about curling up in bed with a book on 1960s trolley-buses, but the impression he gave was that he was enjoying himself enormously, and there’s nothing better for getting an audience behind you. (Figuratively speaking, that is; obviously the best way to get the audience behind you is to face the back of the stage). The songs Chris T-T is known for (according to my painstaking research) are of a political bent; the ones he played on this occasion certainly had some political content, but they also had a great deal of witty, and sometimes surreal, humour in them, and some were concerned with that great obsession of songwriters, love. (Honestly, there are books about love, but there are also books about late medieval social history: why does no-one write songs about that?) There’s not too much to say about the songs, which are musically conservative in both composition and delivery, except that they are simply very good, and frequently profound. This is a man who takes seriously his responsibilities to his audience, making them laugh, making them think, and above all entertaining them; I’m pleased to have come across him, and will be keeping an eye on his activities in the future.

Photo credits: I stole them from the artists’ Facebook pages, because the ones I took on my phone were shit.

http://barrenwaste.bandcamp.com/

http://www.facebook.com/BarrenWasteBand

https://twitter.com/BarrenWaste

New Hampshire, USA band Barren Waste first came to my attention when they sent me their debut release for review: Divine Intervention is an EP of six very short tunes in a predominantly grindcore vein, but with a very distinctive and creative approach to texture and dissonance, which immediately struck me as an interesting and committed artistic statement. The band has since released more material in a similar style (broadly comparable to some recordings by Hack Circle, for example), of which the excellent Dreaming In Aeons is a prime example, but alongside this work they have maintained a prolific schedule of experimental electronic releases. The combination of these diverse practices under a single authorial identity is an unusual strategy, and suggests an ambitious creative agenda; that they are able to operate in both theatres with a comparable degree of quality and creative rigour suggests that Barren Waste are well placed to pursue it.

Max Clark and Scott Crocker began their musical association in their high school days, sharing, according to Scott, ‘a bizarre compulsion to expose ourselves to every form of music under the sun’. However, college obstructed any full blown collaboration until some years further down the line; I asked Scott to outline their subsequent creative history.

Post-college we hooked up with Rich Libby and formed Boson with me on guitar, Max on vocals and Rich on drums. We excelled at not selling tickets and frightening audiences. After eight months or so we hit a creative wall and added Alex Silverman on guitar, while I switched to bass. We formed Barren Waste and put Boson on hold. Divine Intervention followed shortly after. It’s a solid set of tunes, but is very obviously the soundtrack to us trying to figure ourselves out.

After Divine Intervention we hammered and honed the songs that would become Dreaming in Aeons with a renewed sense of purpose. I started releasing electronic albums under the Barren Waste moniker around this time. The recording session for Dreaming in Aeons was pure magic. Other than a lacklustre first take of ‘Egress’, we killed each track on the first try. Rich left the band shortly after recording Dreaming in Aeons and has since fallen out of contact with us.

With Rich gone and Alex starting college, Barren Waste started morphing. Max and I shelled out hundreds of dollars for music software and began programming away. A unified idea [A unified idea split into meaningless pieces, 2012, reviewed here] came out of several one evening sessions with Alex during his breaks from school. While happy with his guitar work on A unified idea, Alex is a metalhead at heart and chose to leave Barren Waste shortly before the release of A unified idea. He has gone on to join Forest of Remorse and will be part of a new project called Tomb Legion which will feature me on baritone guitar, Alex on seven-string guitar, Max on vocals and Forest of Remorse mastermind Tyler Blake on drums.

At the moment, the release of Voices Lost in The Dead Air, our first Barren Waste album as a duo, is imminent and we have been slowly constructing a record label dubbed Fat Negative Creep Records.

Barren Waste seems to embrace two quite distinct musical practices, one loud and guitar based, and the other electronic with ambient tendencies: could you explore the relationship between these two approaches?

Scott: We like to look at all forms of music as different elements that we can utilize. Ideally, we want to draw together the world of sound and filter it through our aesthetics to create something amazing.

Max: it just seems natural.  I want direct, aggressive, primal elements to the music and that’s what the full band releases tend to be.  Scott is more inclined to explore a sound and see where it takes him, thus the amount of drone and ambient releases.

Your guitarist Alex Silverman recently left the band: will this lead to a reduced emphasis on the rock elements?

Scott: Speaking generally, Alex tended to hone the noodley progressive bits, while I was more of a riff writer. These roles occasionally shifted, but Alex’s favorite guitarist is Chuck Schuldiner and he tended to focus on musicians like Paul Gilbert and other shredder types, whereas I was trying to smash Mötörhead, The Jesus Lizard and Fugazi into every tune. Alex has since tightened up his rhythm playing and joined the cult of Django Reinhardt, making him even more beastly of a guitarist. Post-Alex we will still be able to rock just as hard, but we will diverge from rocking a bit more often. Our new album Voices Lost in The Dead Air is psychedelic and  spacey, but we plan on bringing more of a rock edge to our next album.

Max: No, in our hearts we will always want to rock.  We tend to fluctuate our writings between arty as all hell and rocking as all hell.

Many musicians would be tempted to release these under separate project names: the fact that you don’t suggests to me that you want us to understand them as aspects of the same creative process. Am I on the right track there?

Scott: You are on the right track, however I initially started releasing electronic albums by remixing Barren Waste recordings. This eventually led to me adding more original compositions. The transition was slow enough that there was no clear cut off point. Also, I was simply too lazy to make another Bandcamp page, make another Facebook page, promote a new project etc… At this point I have made enough electronic albums, that they do have a particular sound that makes them Barren Waste albums. I have begun working on a solo album that will feature vastly different music than the electronic music I have released under the Barren Waste moniker.

Max: I never put a lot of thought into why it happened.  It just seemed like a good idea when Scott first brought up the idea.  Why not have a wide and diverse catalogue of music?

It does seem as though that your releases adopt either one approach or the other; do you intend to integrate the rock and electronic sounds more completely in future releases?

Scott/Max: Yes! Voices Lost in The Dead Air and future full band EPs will be a joining of the two ideas.

Could you outline your composing process for us? Do the two of you work together at the same time, or do you pass work back and forth? 

Scott: For proper, ‘full band’, releases Max writes the lyrics and gives me a general outline, then I write the music. Arguing commences. We change the tunes accordingly prior to recording vocals. Once the vocals have been recorded we sit down together and add them in. Then we walk away for a week or two and listen to the music independently. Eventually we get together and finalize everything. For my electronic releases I lock myself in my bedroom and pump them out. It typically takes one or two sessions to complete a full release.

Max:  We do a combination of both on a full band release.  We tend to talk beforehand about what kind of sound we both want from a release, then I’ll write the lyrics and send them to Scott.  He then writes the music.  We’ll listen to the instrumental tracks and make edits.  I’ll record the vocals, and Scott mixes them in.  We’ll listen to the “rough” mixes apart and then get together to make the final edit.

How does your division of labour work?

Scott: Max is the big idea guy. He is great at creating a concept and laying out how he wants it conveyed. Max doesn’t play any instruments, so it’s up to me to execute the concept. We don’t step on each other’s toes. I get to do what I want on my electronic albums and Max more or less has final say on our full band albums.

Max: I like handling the abstract things like lyrics, concepts and leaving all the concrete work like writing the music to Scott.  I envision what kind of monster we should make, Scott makes the monster real.

Do ideas have a long gestation between initial concept and finished recording?

Scott: It varies greatly. Some songs need a long time to ferment, while others just leap out of us. We would probably release more full band stuff if not for the time restraint of having to book studio time to record vocals.

Max: Not really. I never bring half-finished ideas to Scott, so since we start with a complete idea we can hammer them out quickly.

In both sides of your practice (rock and electronic) you adopt a distinctly experimental approach, with often high levels of dissonance and other unconventional elements. What are you thoughts on musical aesthetics, and the relationship between the music’s meaning and its accessibility or otherwise?

Scott: The audience for various forms of music changes so much it’s difficult for me to tie an album’s level of experimental material or the significance of its content to its accessibility. I don’t find the concept and output of our band to be that experimental. Max’s lyrics supply a concept. My sounds and Max’s voice convey the concept. Then again, I approach writing for Barren Waste less like I am writing for a band, and more like I am writing orchestral music.

Max: I can only speak about this band.  Aesthetically, we just want to make something original.  Because we are constantly trying to push ourselves in our expression, which often makes the music more challenging since there’s no point of reference for it.

You are unusually prolific: is the high rate at which you release music the consequence of a backlog of ideas, or is that the rate at which you create?

Scott: I can turn my creativity on like a switch. I can sit down at my computer and write a new album in two to four hours. Unlike a lot of creative people, I don’t have any kind of regime or rituals surrounding my writing, it just comes out.

Max: Rate at which we create.

Do you perform live? If so, how does your live work relate to your recorded work?

Scott: We play shows when we can. There aren’t many venues near us and other than people in bands we tend to confuse/frighten/annoy most concertgoers. For live shows, we build a backing track of our recorded material mashed together with samples and other debris. I hang out on stage and dance the guitar pedal dance, while Max gets in the audience and wreaks havoc. We have a pretty unique presence and I would love to bring that to an audience outside of New Hampshire.

Max: We play when we can get bookings, which is rare.  We don’t have a local fanbase thus are useless to promoters. Our live shows tend to be our full albums magnified and sped up. We play for ten minutes with Scott making his guitar belch noise and me doing my best Iggy Pop meets Reverend Jim Jones impersonation.

What does the future hold for Barren Waste? Do you anticipate continuing to release (on average) over a dozen recordings a month, as you have this year?

Scott: It’s hard to predict, but my guess would be three or four full band releases a year with varying levels of electronic releases and other projects. I go through phases where I am very adamant about recording and releasing my own material, then I will get sick of it for a few months. A large variable is my job. I use a lot of my creativity at work, and I am often too tired and cranky to motivate myself later in the day. Max is also my best friend, so we often end up hanging out instead of working on new material. Plus, whenever I start to go too deep into music-land my girlfriend feels the need to remind me she exists and enjoys attention.

Max:  Hard to say.  We tend to go ‘I’m burnt out.’ Then a week later we’ll have 5 new songs ready to be worked on. We’ll probably slow down a bit, but expect plenty from us.

$14.99 (CD) $9.99 (DD)

http://www.nohpoetryrecords.com/order_info.html

http://astralfish1.bandcamp.com/album/far-corners

http://www.nohpoetryrecords.com/astralfish.html

Labeling this record as ‘space rock’, as I have above, is a bit like an American telling you that they’re Italian, or Polish or Armenian. I don’t have to write anything after the title, and I’m never trying to ascribe any particular set of characteristics when I do so, but it serves as a useful guide to those among my readers that are utterly convinced they have no interest in anything that could be labelled ‘metal’ for example, or ‘hip-hop’. That is, it serves a mainly negative purpose, because if you are likely to enjoy it, a genre label tells you virtually nothing about a piece of music. Far Corners  is a space rock record in the way a fifth-generation suburban American realtor from Hackensack, New Jersey might be Irish. Space rock, that hard-edged, drugged-to-the-eyeballs, watermelon-pupiled land of ‘Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun’ and ‘Silver Machine’ is the old country, that mythical hinterland whose cuisine is still their comfort food, but Astralfish are living in the melting pot.

Writing ‘space’ instead of ‘space rock’ would just have been confusing, but there’s relatively little here that sounds distinctly like rock (a noisy romp of an exception like ‘Cloud Gather’ notwithstanding). There is the occasional outbreak of distorted guitar, but it’s rare, and far from dominant; there are, however, a ton of sounds that are frequently to be heard in such bombastic company. Rock itself is a peculiarly eclectic meta-genre, able to assimilate more or less any musical language, and that magpie sensibility is a powerful force here. There are elements of jazz; some distinctly Celtic melodies (and echoes of Afro Celt Sound System); moments of a modern classical flavour (‘Riding The Seasons’, more so than the wonderful Richard Wileman’s contribution, surprisingly); a concern with the atmospheric that sometimes brings the music to the fringes of ambient; and several grooves that verge on funk. It’s hardly unusual for accomplished musicians (and these are nothing if not accomplished) to have a wide range of stylistic interests, but there were a large number of creative minds involved in this project. The core of Astralfish consists of Don Falcone (synthesiser auteur and veteran of San Francisco’s 1980s club scene) and Bridget Wishart (one time Hawkwind vocalist), but on each track they collaborate with one or more additional musicians, both as composers and players. The best known of their collaborators is doubtless Daevid Allen, but all of them seem to be very active in the arena of psychedelic/ progressive/ spacey music, and I’ve even heard of a couple of them (including the aforementioned Richard Wileman, whose band Karda Estra is the name attached to some of my very favourite music); one of them, Jasper Pattison, is the bass player on some my favourite music from another field of endeavour, the anarcho-punk/ ska of Culture Shock and Citizen Fish.

I often valorize music that is edgy, challenging in an abrasive way, or psychedelic in a brutally overwhelming way (like sludge metal), but there’s more than one way to skin a cat, and Astralfish (to over-stretch a singularly inappropriate metaphor) are able to skin all kinds of animals in many different ways. Their music sounds coherent across the whole album, which is partly due to the use of a consistent vocabulary, and certainly owes something to Falcone and Wishart’s instrumental voices, but also has a lot to do with a distinctively warm and smooth production. The sound of the record is not at all spiky or angular, but expansive and inviting, and when it kicks off, as it does in ‘Key Rings’, ‘Seeds At Night In A Trickster’s Yard’, or especially ‘Cloud Gather’, it is imbued with a powerful drive and excitement. Lead guitars sound entirely appropriate to the space rock idiom, as do many of the other sounds, while the basses and Wishart’s EWI frequently reference jazz fusion, sonically if not rhythmically.

The terms of this vocabulary are so long established that, although they retain their capacity to signify, and have indeed gained much connotative value over the years (as with the synthesizer’s long and torrid affair with electronic dance music), there’s very little about them that sounds inherently transgressive now. As a kid, when I heard Steve Hillage or Here & Now (for example), there was something subversive about the sound, something intrinsically connected to the small squares of cardboard we were all so keen on, a sense of shared countercultural secrets. Nothing strikes me as particularly ‘druggy’ about this musical language nowadays, but Far Corners continues to mine a vein of compelling visual narrative in the complexities of orchestration and timbre that their musical resources enable. This is a deceptively complex, very hospitable and absorbingly atmospheric recording.

The inner gate was shored up with heavy boards and timbers, and he knew from his last sight of the barbican that the outer portal was similarly braced. He took in the situation methodically, silently mouthing the terms in which he would report. Around four score  heavy foot mustered by the gate, apparently as a final reserve, looking fresh, helmets off; behind them, around two score medium horse, some injured, but not recently, also battle ready; six or seven score medium foot to the left near a postern, looking tired and afraid, with many injuries. Irtain supposed it was a contingent of these last troops that he could hear in combat beyond the wall.

The reed thatch roofs of three houses near the wall were alight, but bow-shot from beyond it was occasional at worst; to the west of the gate, on Irtain’s left, there were a number of men, nearly a score, lying dead before the wall; it was impossible to distinguish defenders from attackers by their gear, but he guessed it was a mix of both, and some appeared to have died from falling rather than weapons. Near them three sets of wooden steps climbed to the parapet, guarded by frightened peasants in leather with makeshift spears; the parapet was manned by archers, who were shooting regularly, and further to the west was a tower, at the top of which more armoured foot were mustered, ready to defend the wall in either direction; to the east of the gate the defences were similarly arranged.

Irtain had kept his horse walking as he observed the scene, and he turned to the left, towards the horse pens that held a score of the Blackswords’ destriers as well as the city’s herd; he guessed that Dorna had more cavalry left than the forty odd he could see mustered here. The pens seemed intact and well tended, and there was nothing he could do there; he could see plenty of feed, and a groom. The horse he rode, and those his company had with them at the Water Tower, were fresh; those they had managed to save from the battle yesterday were in the pen, and there they would have to remain, for the moment at least. If the city fell, they’d be well treated he supposed; this was horse country, and the Suluf mercenaries the pretender had employed were said to love horses better than women. He didn’t like to think of the gold they would cost to replace if they were forced to abandon them; that would be Captain Ukhand’s worry, but he had more urgent concerns.

The square was a chaos of messengers and deliveries, small units continually arriving and being despatched to other parts of the city; Irtain could see that the inn on the south side of the square was the epicentre of the traffic, and supposed that was where he’d go to request orders. First though, he needed a look at the battle.

As he turned his attention back to the parapet, the top of a ladder appeared between two crenels, and then another a little nearer to the barbican. An archer shoved ineffectually at the ladder nearest him, then leaned over to shoot down, but withdrew hastily as arrows clattered around him. Irtain spurred his horse across the square, letting messengers and water carriers scatter as they could, dismounting at a leap and handing his reins to one of the peasants that guarded the stairs. Another had already lit a torch from the brazier that stood nearby: Irtain dashed it from his hand.

‘You’ll know in plenty of time if you need to fire the steps,’ he snapped, ‘and you’ll do it when someone gives you an order to fire them! Understand?’

The young man nodded, terrified. Irtain drew his sword, brightly polished edge outlining dull black flat, and ran up the steps as fast as his mail would let him, leaving his shield hanging from his saddle.

The first man up a ladder took an arrow in the throat and fell forward onto the parapet with a gargling roar, blood spraying like a fountain. Archers below focussed their attacks on those above, and two fell from the wall, one screaming, one in silence. Then more men topped the ladders, and Irtain was on them before the troops at the tower could reach the position.

He cut one man’s legs from under him, sending him windmilling to the market square, and drove the next back into the wall with a mailed fist to his unarmoured face; standing too close to swing his sword or draw his knife he grappled the man and smashed his head against the stonework until he bled from the eyes. As he released him, he saw that the troops from the tower were held back by two archers, who were swinging their shortswords wildly to fend off the jabbing spear of another attacker who had climbed the further ladder. Not wishing to waste his edge on the man’s mail he swung the flat of his blade against the side of his head, striking heavily with the forte and sending him crashing to his death below.

An arrow glanced off his capeline, and he ducked behind a crenel, but by then the archery sargeant on the barbican had directed his men to suppress the bowshot from below. The tower troops used long poles to push the ladders away, and Irtain realised the attack was no more than a distraction, to keep the defenders on the walls, rather than sallying out to disrupt the preparations outside. One of the archers, a very young man, was shaking too violently to resheath his sword; he’d shat himself, and the stink of it filled Irtain’s nostrils as he leaned in to help him. He patted his shoulder and gave him a grin.

‘Well done, lad; you’re doing fine. Keep those arrows flying now. And mind your footing.’

The stones were slippery with blood, but Irtain didn’t see any sawdust to scatter, so he squatted down and peered over the nearest merlon as he cleaned his sword, after a glance below to check his mare was still secure.

The defending archers were covering the last of the foot’s hasty retreat to the barbican’s sally port, although it looked as though they’d left a lot of their number on the ground behind them. It was hard to tell, since both attackers and defenders were from Dorna, and their insignia was well bloodied. He could gather a good impression of the order of battle from where he was, though.

The pretender had taken heavy losses to his own cavalry the day before, due in part to the Blackswords’ flanking charge that had prevented the retreat from turning into a complete rout; the horse around his banner didn’t seem to outnumber those mustered in the square behind Irtain, and he knew those weren’t all of the city’s reserves. The foot were the main issue: Irtain guessed he could see about a thousand heavy and medium infantry deployed around the field, and five hundred archers. Camped beside the pretender’s position, and seemingly uninterested in the siege, were the four hundred-odd Suluf horse that had carried the previous day’s battle. Beyond them, the company of Kherevekhi engineers appeared to be packing up and leaving; this suggested at least that the pretender had lacked the gold to entice them under the wall to mine it, but they had left him with some imposing siege engines. There was a well protected ram, near the centre of the line, on the fringes of bowshot, and two assault towers on either side. Looking closely, he could see rams in their bases as well. Behind them the foot were doing something with long wooden beams; assembling trebuchets, he feared. He’d seen enough.

As he led his heavy Herekhi mare across the square, several men recognised his insignia and saluted him informally, or said the name of his company. He guessed the Blackswords were thought to have acquitted themselves well the previous day; presumably in turning the pretender’s cavalry charge, an action he’d not been involved in, though he saw no reason to tell them so.

The inn was a prosperous building with a slate roof, and a new facade in the austere style the wealthy seemed to favour now. The door was guarded by two men in decorated armour with Lord Lusino’s badge, bearing three-bladed spetums, who exchanged a glance and waved him through. The common room was a bustle of officers and scribes, some sat at tables eating, others gathered around maps. Irtain was approached by a tall, pale looking young man, dressed as a noble, and armed with a sword, but unarmoured, and missing his right arm.

‘Good day, Lancer,’ he said. ‘I am assisting the Lord Gate Commander: he has ordered that any messenger from your company be shown through to his office.’

The Commander’s office was a private dining room: the large table was strewn with papers, and there were several officers and scribes in the room with him. They appeared to be packing the room’s contents away, rolling maps onto wooden spindles, stacking silverware in an open crate and stuffing brocaded clothing into a large sack. The Commander looked up as Irtain entered.

‘Good!’ he said loudly, pointing a finger at him. ‘I’ll speak with you shortly.’ He returned to the urgent discussion he was having with his staff officers, all of whom looked exhausted, and showed signs of having seen combat recently. He concluded his conversation in a few minutes, and sent the other men from the room, shooing out the scribes that were packing his belongings as well.

‘Would you like to sit , lancer?’ he asked.

‘I’d prefer to stand, sir.’

‘As you wish. Drink?’

He splashed wine from a cheap clay bottle into a silver goblet. Irtain accepted. It was rough, acid wine, well watered, but it was welcome.

‘The Blackswords are the only mercenary company in the city… what’s your name, soldier?’

‘Irtain Rakhil, sir.’

‘Well, Irtain, your company’s given us good service, and lost some good men. Every other soldier in the city is here because they have to be, but you boys have chosen to fight for us, and you’ve done it bravely, paid or not.’

‘Thank you.’ Irtain did not appreciate the compliment. He waited to hear the Commander’s point, thinking of the eight good friends that had lost their lives, out of twenty that come to Dorna, along with every last man of the two-hundred foot they’d hired.

‘So what can I do for you, Lancer Irtain?’

‘Commander Feldua requests orders and intelligence sir, and my own Captain… asks the same.’

‘I… I understand. That’s not what I meant, but no matter. I assume you’ve had a look for yourself?’

‘Over the wall? That I have, sir.’

‘And what did you think?’

‘It will be a difficult defence, sir.’

‘Difficult?’

‘A hard fight, sir.’

The Commander walked to the window and looked out into the inn’s yard. It was a large window, and its few large panes spoke of its owner’s wealth. The yard was full of horses, grooms and officers, milling around and shouting. He drove his right fist wearily into his left palm, once, twice, three times.

‘A hard fight, indeed.’ He turned back to face Irtain. ‘Yesterday, sixteen of your company and eight men of Dorna charged the flank of eighty cavalry, and thanks to that, I have an army left, of sorts. You lost five men in that charge, and how many foot on the field before?’

‘All of our foot, and three out of four sergeants. I’m the only survivor from that fight, sir.’

‘You’re a sergeant of foot?’

‘I serve as such when we hire foot, sir, but I’m a lancer.  Captain Ukhand has my thanks for that, sir: I was born a peasant, and first fought as a levy.’

Irtain was unclear why he decided to share such details with the Commander, but he felt that for all his obvious distraction the man was a good officer, and he was curious as to why he was sparing him the time to speak to him alone.

‘He’s a good man, your captain, not like many mercenaries… I… today…’

The Commander choked on his words, turned, threw his goblet violently into the corner of the room.

‘Today, Lancer Irtain, I am going to die.’

Irtain said nothing, but straightened his posture a little, and met the Commander’s eye.

‘Me, all of my officers, most of my men. There’s no winning this fight now. You know that as well as I do. I expect the assault to come in the next watch or two. The pretender will wish to spare the city from plunder, but his Suluf mercenaries will want gold and women, and they will want to help themselves to them, not have them doled out; it’s doubtful he could stop them if he tried. They are coming in whether I like it or not, and all that remains to me is to charge them as much as I can for admission.’

‘With respect, sir, wouldn’t it be better to surrender?’

‘That’s not my decision. Lord Lusino is preparing the defence of the fortress, and he has ordered me to hold the gate. I’ll hold it until they spill my guts.’

A silence fell, and Irtain glanced towards the door. It was painted white, like the walls, edged with a honeysuckle motif in blue and gold. A man was weeping and cursing loudly in the inn’s common room.

‘So, your orders. It would not be usual to release your company before the battle is concluded, and Commander Feldua would not believe you if you told him that I had; so to him I say, the situation is grim and he is to come and assist the defence of the gate. To your Captain, you will report what you have seen of the enemy disposition, and if you can find a ship to take you out of here, you have my blessing. Wait…’

The Commander squatted and pulled a small chest from below the table, from a stack of several similar boxes. He placed it on the table, and tried several small keys from a large ring in it. When he found the one that fit, he removed it from the ring and handed it to Irtain.

‘I won’t need to pay my troops again,’ he said sadly, ‘and I’d sooner you took this than let those bastards at the gate have it. I doubt you’ll get all your horses out of here, if any of them, but this should more than pay for them.’

He thrust the small chest at him; it was very heavy, but Irtain found he could hold it against his body with his left arm.

‘Thank you, sir.’ He searched the Commander’s eyes for any sign of malice or duplicity, but there was none. ‘Sir, may I ask your name?’

‘Sesaro.’

Irtain saluted. Then he extended his hand; the commander clasped it.

‘I hope you make a good death, Commander Sesaro.’

Commander Sesaro met his gaze levelly, and nodded in acknowledgement.

Irtain turned and left the room. He crossed the common room, not looking right or left, tightly clasping the treasure chest under his arm. He was able to strap it to his saddle by the scabbard laces, and mounted. He hadn’t looked inside, but he could tell from the weight, even if it was silver, he could live well for the rest of his life back home in Chokhal, and the cost of passage to Alkhehir wouldn’t lighten it by much. The roof of one of the burning houses had collapsed, and no attempt was being made to extinguish any of them. There was shouting beyond the wall. There was fighting on the parapet, to the east of the barbican this time. He took a last look to remind himself of the disposition of forces in the square, but it seemed unlikely he’d need the information now. Eighty dead men here, well rested and uninjured, with heavy armour; forty dead men there, with horses and mail hauberks, tired but determined; a dozen dead men with longbows on the parapet. He turned his mare towards the docks.

$10 (CD) $6 (DD)

http://www.mindflaremedia.com/releases2012.php

http://mindflaremedia.bandcamp.com/album/die-yuppie-scum-love-quest-ov-sick-shock-disco-destroyer

Noise, and the way it is employed in music, invites a whole array of speculations on the coherence and incoherence of communicative acts, and of the relationship between the meaningful and the meaningless, the carrier signal and the message, the form and the content. The word ‘noise’ is frequently used to label irrelevance, the continual influx of sensory stimulation of no direct value to the receiver, or scientific data of no importance to the experimental result, for example. In music, it is impossible to make a clear distinction between the medium and the message, and we must assume that everything we hear in a recording or performance is an aspect of its meaning: what it sounds like is what it means.

The history of musical technology has been a story of the pursuit of purity, a holy grail we finally achieved (arguably) with synthesizers, and discovered to be extremely tedious. Those acoustic waypoints at which we most closely approached the sine wave are another story however: the violin sounds so good because its pure, keening tone is embellished with the rasp and scrape of the bow, like a human being singing from a body of hair, gut and wood; similarly, the piano’s purity, clarity and even decay is initiated with a violent thud, and accompanied by the hollow ambience of the wooden box in which the string vibrates. It’s the noise that makes the sound into music; even writing harmony parts for pure sine wave tones exploits the noise that comes from the interference between the notes, and melody exploits the implication of that noise. If the pure note is similarity, then noise is difference.

At the other extreme, obviously, pure noise is as empty and as meaningless as a sine. That’s where Kylie Minoise starts this album: ‘Xxxeroxxx Ov Sicksicksick Shoxxx!’ does have some identifiable rhythmic markers, and there are layers to the noise, but essentially, it’s so distorted as to be formless. The manipulation of a-formal sound is an established methodology in modern music, but that’s not what this is about: the listener emerges suddenly out of that soup of timbral granularity into ‘Psychodelic Stunt Academy!’, a beat that is constructed from multiple distorted elements, but which has been contextualised so effectively that its textures sound as safe as an 808. From that beginning, we are led back towards a more pervasive distortion, and away again, and back again, multiple times. That’s why it’s important to listen to this album as an album; it follows a trajectory, like a psychoacoustic Vomit Comet, that enables (or even trains) its listeners to hear noise as musical texture, not as extraneous or erroneous.

The tracks on Die Yuppie Scum! Love Quest Ov Sick Shock Disco Destroyer! do not conform to the tight idiomatic constraints of powernoise, but there is a high proportion of dance- or stomp-worthy rhythm; this is music that obviously springs from a coherent intellectual position, but it is very much addressed to the listening body. That it is addressed to it in terms which the average listener will find transgressive, and that still hits the ears of the confirmed noise fan in a radically different way from more timbrally conventional music, is a token of that bodily address. The beats (which are often pretty funky) invite movement, the cyclical self-hypnosis of the dancefloor, and the textures invite submission, a cessation of the compulsion to interpret, and an abandonment of the self to the psychoactive currents of the music’s physiological impact.

The ‘ov’ in the title, and song titles such as ‘Great Celestial Truth Equals Perfect State Of Non Self Bliss!’ are an unequivocal indication that Kylie Minoise subscribes to Genesis P. Orridge’s  theories of transcendence through the disruption of linguistic-conceptual concensus. The album art is full of noise as well, from its garish colours to its pixellation and its refusal of conventional notions of ‘correct’ graphic design, and the song titles, all of which end in an exclamation mark, reference the shock and outrage of the tabloid headline, which is a classic example of noise in the sense of irrelevant linguistic input. This album is a well crafted tool, a tin-opener designed to pry open our mental defenses and force sound into our bodies. It might seem perverse to compare this to the placidity of ambient music, but it invites immersion and abandon in the same way; and although its surface textures might seem to offer a rather more angry and aggressive experience, that’s just a culturally conditioned response to noise. Embrace this, and (something I obviously had to finish the review before I could do) let it switch off your bullshit circuits.