| #616 |
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2002 |
Perilous 616 There’s been some very interesting moves recently in the local independent electronic music scene. Quite a number of local labels have picked up distribution overseas and a few acts are soon off overseas on tour. From Adelaide, Superscience leaves shortly to tour the USA, Europe and Japan with Anticon supergroup Themselves (Dose One and Jel) and Alias. Now calling himself Clue To Kalo, Mark Superscience takes his fey introspective electronics on what will be a pretty gruelling tour schedule of 24 shows in 31 days in the USA alone. Leaving his former home at Surgery Records, Clue To Kalo is signed to the US label Mush after a couple of cds passed onto Dose One at last year’s Sound Summit ended up at the Mush offices. His second album has been on the shelf ready to go for the last 12 months awaiting the deal and it should be out very soon now titled Come Here When You Sleepwalk. It is a stunning release and delves deeper into the vocal territory of his Surgery debut, Love Like Life In Minature. Shy and melancholy, the new album has elements in common with Boards Of Canada, Radiohead, Buck65, and is a disarming listening experience. Surgery’s own Tim Koch is also off overseas. To Europe in fact for a short tour. Tim, also known as Thug, has been getting a lot of attention overseas helped by wider availability of his albums on Sydney label Aural Industries as well as his ‘retrospective’ for UK label Defocus. Tim has also set up another label too – Tundra Music with the US-based Pietro da Sacco and their first 12” is out and it’s a split single with two tracks from the UK-based maps & Diagrams and the flip from Adelaide-based Tim Jackiw. Order from www.tundra-music.com. While you are on the net take a look at Yo La Tengo’s new website at www.yolatengo.com. Only available directly from the band via the website, their latest release is an all-instrumental soundtrack to a French underwater documentary collection, The Sounds Of Science which brought together a series of films by Jean Painlevé. These films were made between 1920 and 1978 and apparently are full of then-state-of-the-art camera techniques and strange natural imagery. Titled The Sounds of the Sounds of Science, the album runs to 78 minutes of some very organic and slightly psychedelic post-rock (Shrimp Stories, Hyas & Stenornychus) moving into sharp dissonant muted noise experiments towards the middle (The Love Life Of The Octopus, Liquid Crystals). Very much in the vein of releases on the Canadian label, Constellation (Godspeed You Black Emporer and Do Make Say Think), Yo La Tengo performed these soundtracks live to the films at Sonar in Barcelona this year and with such interesting backings I’m keen to catch the visuals. Elsewhere, from Columbus Ohio, producer and DJ, RJD2 releases an excellent album of largely instrumental hip hop called Dead Ringer on New York label Def Jux. Like Anticon’s Jel and DJ Shadow, RJD2 is obsessed with trawling record bins for old rock, funk and soul form the 60s and early 70s and then recombining their elements into new structures. In fact, Dead Ringer shares a lot with Shadow. Drums covered in a thick layer of dust, offkilter guitar loops, and a cut & paste aesthetic that revels in the audible age and deterioration of the sample sources. And like Shadow, too, there is a very real awareness of song structure – even when there is no song, and a sense of narrative when they are no words. The few tracks with guest MCs feel as if they are there to please the hip hop fraternity which is a bit frustrating but I guess that’s one of the limitations of being a New York label – expectations. Nevertheless, track Dead Ringer down – Next Level should have or will have copies, it will remind you of what instrumental hip hop can be like. And, finally, at Frigid this week we have John Chantler. An Australian now living in Japan, Chantler runs Inventing Zero Records from Japan and has two 7”s out to debut the label – one from Frost and the other from Prop both in handmade covers that will remind you why mass-production is not so good. John is joined by the amazing Qua from Melbourne. Qua has a superb album of processed electronics and subtle guitar out on Surgery and is very much worth checking out. And then on the 18th its Frigid’s 6th birthday so make sure you come down then and wish us happy birthday and pick up a copy of our new magazine, Cyclic Defrost, which launches then too! Anyone who reads the column needs a copy . . . Yellow Peril  Goto
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