Emote Control

This is a new mix of moody music from the past, with a decent amount of ambience and some guitars. Light on the mixing. Just over an hour.

2020 note: all mixes taken down for now to re-post at higher bitrate on Mixcloud in due course. If you’re at all keen for me to do this, please let me know and I will try and get anything specific you want to hear moved over ASAP.

Depeche Mode – Sibeling [Sire Records]
Mara Carlyle – Pianni [Accidental Records]
Aphex Twin – Lichen [Sire Records]
A Small, Good Thing – Flamenco 1 [Soleilmoon Recordings]
Björk – Amphibian [One Little Indian]
Tortoise – Gamera [Thrill Jockey]
The Cure – Closedown [Fiction Records]
New Order – Doubts Even Here [Factory]
Tones on Tail – When You’re Smiling [Beggars Banquet]
Laurie Anderson – O Superman [Warner Bros. Records]
Steve Reich – Proverb [Nonesuch]

Vladislav Delay featuring Lucio Capece at Union Chapel

Before I delve in, I have to say how delighted I was to return to such a beautiful and lovely sounding venue – particularly when the stage was flanked with two proper stacks of Funktion 1 sound. We’re lucky to have a chance-taking venue of this calibre in London, particularly when it has to share its time with religious duties. But to get to the point without further delay (geddit?), here’s my report on Vladislav Delay‘s visit to Union Chapel.

Sasu Ripatti and Lucio Capece performed about an hour’s worth of material from Tummaa. It was very live. Most of the music originated from an alto saxophone without a neck, with various mouthpieces attached to it and a bizarre assortment of bespoke mutes on the other end – to the extent that there was hardly ever any recognisable saxophone in the mix. When the mouthpiece wasn’t being used for blowing, Lucio Capece made odd clicks and other percussive noises with it. He also abused the mutes for all manner of unexpected output.

These were strange mutes. One looked like a hollowed-out telephoto lense attached to a paper towell roll. They were variously tapped with mallets, bowed and things were shoved in them. In one of the oddest perversions of instrumentation I’ve ever seen, he covered one of the mutes on a bass clarinet with a circular piece of paper, balanced a tiny ball in the middle and kept it levitated with constant exhalation. The ball rattled around atop the floating sheet next to a microphone, but it’s hard to know exactly what this sounded like relative to the final output. I imagine he must have been breathing circularly to pull this off. Indeed, a lot of the time he seemed to be producing constant sound, so that he was achieving something more like a bagpipe or a didgeridoo than a saxophone/clarinet.

Not that you could really hear what it sounded like, since all of this was sampled, effected and often completely removed from the mix in its unadulterated form. It was basically the source of almost every sound that came out of the Ripatti’s laptop, save some bizarre percussive pops/clicks that looked like they were coming from the naked skeleton of an autoharp and some other pad thing he was tapping on from time to time.

What was amazing about this was how much it resembled the sounds of the album, since nearly all of it seemed to be generated, modified, sampled, sequenced, arranged and dubbed in real time. It seemed like Ripatti had some kind of Kaos pad type of thing that he would tremolo things up with as they were recorded and he would actually play a lot of the percussive bits himself. In short, it’s hard to know who made what at which point. I’ve seen similar performances where a lot is left to chance and improvisation, which can be excellent, but I was unprepared to hear something so similar to Tummaa, achieved in such an imaginative, unusual and genuinely live way. It was captivating.

There did seem to be a couple of pre-recorded bits, but from what I could tell they were just the bits that would have come from a keyboard, and there was no keyboardist. This was about .1% of the total music played, and no slight on what they did. Oh, and on the last or next-to-last track Lucio Capece had some bizarre arcane wooden box with some vaguely accordian-esque properties, routed through his own tiny mixer. This was really cool too. I’d love to know what the front of the box looks like and what the hell it was.

I’m also just remembering that during the first track there were a lot of people walking back in to the chapel from the bar and some of their footsteps and a cough from the audience were captured by on-stage microphones and wound up in the mix. This was really intriguing to hear, as they were just building up the sounds that would form the beginning of the set and it felt like the acoustics of the building were becoming a part of the music itself.

My only complaint is that I couldn’t recognise Toive in what they played. It’s my favourite song from the album (one of my favourites of the year full-stop) and I was really looking forward to hearing that kick come in, as it has a huge impact in contrast to an album’s worth of ambience. It’s possible that it was played, but I didn’t spot it, for whatever that’s worth. Anyway, this is a very minor complaint and we left very happy. It was a great performance that will sit nicely beside my other great memories of the Union Chapel.

Hip hop catch-up

Got some new loot from the home of the Lootpack:

DOOM – Unexpected Guests [Gold Dust Media]
J Dilla – Donuts [Stones Throw]
Madlib – Beat Konducta Vol 1-2: Movie Scenes [Stones Throw]
Madlib – Beat Konducta Vol 3 & 4: In India [Stones Throw]
Madlib – Beat Konducta Vol. 5: Dil Cosby Suite [Stones Throw]
Madlib – Beat Konducta Vol. 6: Dil Withers Suite [Stones Throw]

It’s criminal that I haven’t bought Donuts yet.

Vladislav Delay stuff

I’ve been meaning to write up this album for a while now, as it’s not leaving my mp3 player any time soon, but I’ve just caught up on some reading and noticed that it’s already received an excellent treatment from Toby @ Bleep 43.

In case you missed my tweet the other day, there’s also a fantastic video for Toive up on Vimeo that is totally worth checking.

I’ll surely have more to report on Vladislav Delay later this month, following their gig @ Union Chapel on 12 November (tickets still seem to be available).

Steve Reich, Bang on a Can + London Sinfonietta @ RFH

Earlier this evening I returned to the Royal Festival Hall for the first time since its major refurbishment a couple of years ago. Steve Reich was performing in person, as he did when I last saw Music for 18 Musicians at the Barbican three years ago. At 73, I’m stunned that he can still manage to play such demanding stuff, but he seemed to have no problem on the piano and also performed Clapping Music to open things up.

The show properly got going with Mark Stewart‘s performance of Electric Counterpoint – one of my favourite Reich compositions. It’s a piece that Reich wrote for Pat Metheny in 1987. It’s performed by recording up to ten guitars and two electric bass parts, with the 11th part added live. The song is most notably sampled in The Orb’s “Little Fluffy Clouds” and it’s quite ear-opening to hear the work in its entirety if you’ve only heard the sample of it before. What really surprised me about seeing it live was the remarkable amounts of bass in the delayed swoops of guitar that return throughout. This also revealed how good the acoustic refurbishment has been. It sounded great.

Next up, Bang on a Can All Stars played Sextet, which I’ve not knowingly heard before. I’m very surprised it’s not on the 5-disc Phases box set, but I suppose that’s already pretty full of good stuff. I’m rectifying this presently by picking up the mp3 release (can’t go wrong for $6).

Sextet is quite melodically complex and he does some unconventional things like bowing vibraphone to produce slow attacks and longer sustains from percussive instruments (see 2:15 in the video below). Who’d have thunk of bowing a percussive instrument? It must take a great deal of skill. It’s crazy to watch and sounds great, particularly when one bowist starts a beat or two behind the other, adding depth and duration. They also bang mallets together, use two enormous bass drums and generally do stuff to make a six-person performance produce a much wider range of sounds than you’d typically get from six instruments. I can’t wait to hear this again and feel lucky to have heard it in such an excellent acoustic space.

It’s all been said before about Music for 18 Musicians. A “joy machine” is exactly right. It’s nearly overwhelming hearing and seeing it performed live. Unfortunately this time I got a bit distracted towards the end so it lost some of its impact, but the first half of it was an intense, immersive, moving experience like few others. It’s without question one of the best pieces of music ever written.