/daily/core - Part 3

Them Airs - Doped Runner Verse

2020, Self-Released

by r

Connect it to the cut, flashed on the arc and nestling into some sort of Haven, new in name but ancient in desire - no heaven here, just the stomping grounds for some heathens. We rouse up the charlatans hidden in our ears to do the twist with twisted sentiments cuz the Fellers are back in town (except they ain't - there's no longer any town to return to!). Take 'em outside, cuz they'd never talk to you inside - will you take them by the hand, will you take them by the hip? Will you allow yourself a little dip? Go down to the water o sentinel soul, submerge yourself in faux-baptism - friendly fire in the eye of your reflection, a scattershot scatter plot of Rambo suffused rambles, whimsy transmuted into fury and back again.

Light as feather but without flight, walk on down them jagged waves - air is a fluid after all - a drunken boat doing the shipwreck amidst landlocked sunshine. O Sentinel is our soul! watching the horizon draped in an eternally modulating negligee, eternal in the cascading conflagrations of that smoldering Rambo-like intent. Right here is the intersection of our outside and our inside, a search party hot on the hunt, and we can't stall one moment lest we lose the trail. In the pall of a pail of rocks it is found again - what? Ethan! Ethan!

Les Rallizes Denudes - '77 Live

1991, Rivista

by notacop

Les Rallizes Denudes is a band that exists largely in bootlegs (and now, post the probable death of frontman and only consistent member, Takahashi Mizutani, in 2019, “official” reissues on the Temporal Drift imprint). This is because (of course) of events surrounding the band related to the 1970 hijacking of Japan Airlines Flight 351, it's subsequent hostage crisis - did you know the Director of Pepsi America and a future Catholic Cardinal was on that flight - and the further flight to North Korea, where founding bassist Moriaki Wakabayashi lives to this day (allegedly). Like Mayhem, it is impossible to talk about this band without mentioning the circumstances of certain members' felonious actions. This is a shame, as the legend looms large over any discussion of the music.

What's there is astounding. Drenched in feedback, analog (meaning fiddly, hard-style) tape-delay, reverb, and a truly huge-sounding fuzztone (internet says probably a modded Big Muff), the guitar pyroclastics on this album are a truly impressive achievement especially considering the live setting and the reclusive nature of the band. A close friend once said that delay is a bitch of an effect because if you make a mistake, the audience hears your mistake repeated several times back to them, you really have to commit to the bit; LRD does it for an hour and a half, an impressive feat of musicianship. This recording manages to make this sound tender and brutally punishing at once. Lightyears ahead of its time (perhaps coterminous with bands like The Velvet Underground and White Noise), Les Rallizes Denudes laid the blueprint for noise and shoegaze guitarists like J. Mascis and Kevin Shields, whose music I dearly love and aspire to sound like. Like the legend then, the bands influence is clearly evident.

Kevin Shields once described his sound as like an infinite horizon in a youtube video floating around the internet. Unlike an actual horizon, like a seascape which has a limit on what you can perceive due to the curvature of the earth, you can imagine this horizon of sound infinitely stretching away. The effects on '77 Live achieve this effect, the feedback and reverb and the bends scratch away at the infinite in a way that few other musicians could hope to achieve.

This album was absolutely OP in Tourneys on the OG threads. I was largely responsible for recommending it in that setting - it was the absolutely nuclear option. Nigh on a guaranteed 8+ - can you blame me, who doesn't like winning?

Women - Public Strain

2010, Flemish Eye

by booshnaw

It's hard to focus with all the noise around us. Mundane interactions and intrusive thoughts act as ultimate distractions in our lives. Ever-present in our experience - this noise. It exists over our spectrum of senses in a way that excites and conceals.

Is this about to happen? What is this I'm hearing, tasting, experiencing?

Ultimately we can't be so certain. But out of the distressing noise, exists melody -- satisfying songs of life and structure.

From the album art to the music itself, the melancholic take on life portrayed on Public Strain has always struck me. Following the melodic through-line with these songwriting beats is the foamy dissonance that washes over the listener - It's cold, but provides a path to get through it. I can't think of a better example of this on the record than the closer, "Eyesore". The burned vision of those lost appearing at the most selfishly inconvenient, if apt, moments. The quarter-note snare drags the tune along, simplistic beats of time forever. Embracing the moments of lull in a noisy situation to connect with someone, before the pure image is gone.

More than a decade later, this record has struck a chord with time's developments. The noise seemed to sort of peak in the past few years for a multitude of reasons. If for anything else, I feel many connect to this record for the almost comforting wash of noise and drone. It's quite reflective of the noises that occur (e.g. nature on the walk to the store, weird things your neighbor is doing) while you are trying to focus on the here and now. Sitting in that light dissonance can weirdly pull you out.

In our music circles, Public Strain holds an incredible crown. It is the only modern Indie Rock record to stand timeless. It exists in its own plane of existence, very ethereal. But its mood-setting is unmatched, able to pull countless into a genre so filled with imitators and quick songcraft. At the end of the day, this record feels very at home as a core record for this community. A stamp in time where many had recently begun their musical journey.

CAN - Tago Mago

1971, United Artists

by notacop

The first of a trilogy of legendary albums also including Ege Bamyasi and Future Days, Tago Mago is when Can came into their own as musicians, becoming arguably the biggest and most critically acclaimed German band of all time (with the exception of maybe Rammstein). Foundational to the “Krautrock Sound”, Tago Mago is probably the finest of their trilogy of most-known albums and was enormously influential to the development of rock music going forward.

CAN started after Irmin Schmidt traveled to New York during the late 60s, coming into close proximity to the minimalist and avant garde artists active at the time (most importantly, Andy Warhol and likely The Velvet Underground) and became inspired by the potential of rock music. Prior to this, Schmidt had studied European modern classical music; his dream for CAN was to combine the European tradition of classical music with the American traditions of jazz and rock music. On returning to Cologne, Schmidt formed a core of four dweeb multi-instrumentalists; himself on keys, Michael Karoli on guitar, Holger Czukay on bass, and Jaki Leibezeit on drums. This squad, alongside a revolving cast of other misfits, became CAN. Original member Malcolm Moody apparently suggested the name due to the positive connotations that the word carries in Turkish - only later did Leibezeit (ironically) suggest that the name meant “Communism, Anarchism, Nihilism”, after an English magazine erroneously claimed this was the case.

Crucial for the sound of this particular album and the two that follow it are the vocal stylings of Damo Suzuki. After Malcolm Mooney departed the band on the advice of his psychiatrist (not, as is assumed, as a result of a psychotic breakdown), CAN were in want of a singer. Suzuki was busking in Munich when he was approached by Czukay and Leibezeit, who asked if he would join their band for a performance that night. Suzuki agreed and thereafter was a signature element in CAN's sound. Suzuki, a Japanese immigrant in Germany, sung in multiple languages and improvised many of his lyrics in the studio. The effect is rather impressionistic. Suzuki's free associative lyrics are only strange on paper, however, while listening they seem to be the perfect fit.

The eighteen-minute Halleluhwuh closes out the first half of the album, and is rightfully considered a masterpiece. Leibnezeit and Czukay work so well together as rhythmic counterparts, they dwell in the pocket.

Duster - Stratosphere

1998, Up Records

by notacop

This album is my favourite way to feel bad. Let me explain.

In 2019, following the submission of my honours thesis and graduation from university, I traveled to “mainland” China to teach English to grade schoolers. I say grade schoolers, but it was an after school tutor company preying on middle-class people hoping to give their children a leg up by studying English with native speakers (set aside that almost none of us expats had teaching experience: even in “so-called” communist countries, the grindset is real) - all of the content that we taught was freely available on the internet. I was part educator, part child-entertaining clown. No wonder the company eventually folded when the owners pissed off to Macau to gamble everybody's money at the casinos. My first class was with three-year-olds. I sat (on the floor) in a classroom of screaming (as in crying) toddlers for over an hour desperately trying to run exercises on numbers and letters. Nobody in that room spoke a lick of English other than me and all of the other tutors (including those who also spoke Mandarin) were busy with their own classes. The manager of the facility frantically talked to parents and attempted to appease the kids with plush toys clearly purchased from a vending machine. Afterwards, I hid in the stairwell, chain-smoking Marlboro reds, and I listened to Duster, wallowing in my own self-pity with a zeff gangster from the Johannesburg boondocks who had just had a similar experience.

Being a monolingual foreigner is an alienating and infantilising experience. I'm a ruminating sort of guy, and placed in that situation, I was forced to ruminate harder, deprived of communication save gestural, languageless encounters like smiling at an old lady doing her shopping. It's a profound isolation, is the point I'm making. Throughout my trip, music from bands like Duster, Carissa's Wierd, and Horse Jumper of Love were the soundtrack to my aimless wanderings through city streets (along with Big Thief, Alex G, and Chad VanGaalen, but those projects, while I deeply love them, are slightly offside vibe and sound-wise for this particular review).

For many of us, Duster holds a special place among the music that we used to listen to during “interesting times”, to use a Chinese proverb Slavoj Zizek is fond of. Like much of the guitar-music that I listen to (and that is a majority of my taste, I've discovered), Duster can deliver on the fuzzed-out, shitheel shoegaze sound. One only need listen to the track “Earth-Moon Transit” off this album, or “Orbitron” from the Transmission, Flux single or the astounding “Me and the Birds” from the follow-up Contemporary Movement. However, Duster is perhaps best in a more contemplative, clean-toned, “spacy” register with songs like “Inside Out”, “Topical Solution”, or the masterstroke “Constellations” from this album, or “Cooking” and “Unrecovery” from Contemporary Movement.

A not insignificant portion of the success of this band's sound is the low-fidelity nature of a lot of the recordings. I believe intentionally so, the lo-fi aesthetic “dates” the recordings, so tracks like “Gold Dust” or “Stratosphere” hit just right under sodium light and light sleet. It's evocative of nostalgia in the same way that Mark Fisher talks about Burial or The Caretaker evoking “lost futures” in his writings for K-Punk and elsewhere. Duster's Stratosphere encourages rumination on the potentialities of the past.