and thanks to piekoz for the rec
It's soo good. Album of the year. The tracks are all clearly in the microhouse tradition (can I say that now?), but the compilation has this extraordinary range. I wouldn't have thought it was possible for microhouse to sound this fresh. Sometimes when it's really hitting I get this fuzzy idea that, yes, this album is important. Which is one way of saying that Kompakt's whole transparent+intoxicating formula is in full bloom. Good list even though there are things about it which make Hulk VERY FUCKING ANGRY.
Holy shit. The thermonuclear version of "five cds to introduce you to [60s bubblegum pop, new orleans brass bands, metal, rave, etc]".
Insanely detailed mini-essays on Beatles songs.
including one by Alex Ross (of the New Yorker)
I hear he's a really excellent dj. Damn.
Can I just say: I think this whole idea that music fans want to keep their favorite bands underground is total bullshit. All of the music geeks I know spend their time shoving their favorite music at anyone within range: friends, lovers, strangers, everybody gets the pitch; we're worse than Amway distributors. Why do you think so many of us are djs?
I probably am a music snob, but it's not because I want to feel special. The couple times I've been to places where I'm not special, where I'm just another face in the joyful crowd...I liked it. A lot.
Like what he has to say about the Streets, though.
I want to take a stab at explaining why I enjoy piekoz's album narrativestructurez so much, and why I think it's a great idm album. Creator Dave P was nice enough to send me the cd gratis, which doesn't often happen, so you're entitled to believe that my judgement is clouded -- but keep in mind that I have plenty of cds given to me by artists that gather both dust and moss. (Oh, not yours.)
On first listen, narrativestructurez may sound more like a downtempo album than an idm album. piekoz uses real instruments, human voices, and digital tweaking to create dark, smoky tracks about the speed of the human heartbeat. Really, it is a downtempo album, but there's more going on here, a restlessness that expresses itself as constantly evolving sound and melody. Every track, even the weaker ones (and the album does lose some intensity in the second half) keeps reaching to break out of cliche towards actual feeling. Nothing is static here, everything is morphing, moving in and out, varying.
The real achievement of this album is that it doesn't come out sounding prog. Somehow piekoz manages to have his cake and eat it too, twisting his sounds as much as any idm purist without destroying the delicate noirish atmosphere he starts out with. Calling something downtempo isn't a slam, necessarily, but if idm fans don't claim this album for their own, they'll be missing a beautiful example of sonic experimentation as a vehicle for emotional expression.
The obvious example of a group that's dared to evoke an environment that isn't industrial or mechanical is Boards of Canada. narrativestructurez is more subtle, though, and doesn't go for the cheap insights of psychedelia. It's just as good at putting a dizzying array of sounds into a coherent whole, but the song structures are freer (and I'm a total sucker for multipart songs). narrativestructurez hardly ever sounds self-indulgent, though, it just sounds, well, self-contained, self-defining, sui generis, new not for the sake of being new but because there's something new to express here, and I know it's a lot to lay on an album but that alone is almost enough to justify the existence of a genre focused on new sound.
piekoz's site is here, and you can buy it and listen to sound samples here
update: it's now, I dunno, six months since I wrote the above. I'm enjoying the album at least as much now as I did then. It's fucking great.
I think we can trust that someone who creates a new page design for every album review cares about what they're doing.
I've been listening to piekoz's album. Don't have a full review yet, but I will say that he makes it obvious how little imagination the idm crowd has been exhibiting recently. These are people that have the tools to create literally anything, and yet they seem unable to come up with anything that isn't either a variation on or a reaction to what's come before. If "narrativestructurez" is a reaction to anything, it's the general crappiness of the current idm scene.
To be fished through later.
On one of the lower echelons of the British music hype machine.
Which means: expect many music-related rants in the future. Starting, tonight, with why Luomo's Vocalcity is the Alpha and Omega of micro-house.
Here's a simple home experiment to see if you'll like it: Run your television through a delay effect and put on the Classic Movie Channel while simultaneously playing Brian Eno's "Apollo" on one CD player, Massive Attack vs Mad Professor's "No Protection" on another, and Funki Porcini's "Love, Pussycats, & Carwrecks" on a third. Sporadically run around the room pausing a CD player every now and again.I've actually always wanted to have a party where the soundtrack was provided by dozens of cheap tape players playing on autoreverse, each tape player playing something different - jazz, rock, ambient, street noise, white noise...I'd need more likeminded art-wank friends to do that though.
