There are some wonderful concerts coming up over the next few months, none more so than the one this column is about – a unique occasion, the first ever appearance in central Europe by the American singer and musician Jandek. In case you’re wondering “who?”, let me tell you his fascinating story. Over the past 30 years, Jandek has released about 50 albums of strange, unearthly folk/rock/blues music. The albums come from a PO Box in Houston, Texas, and are never accompanied by any kind of biographical information. In all that time, Jandek has never given a single interview or made any kind of public statement. Until 2004, he had also never played any concerts or appeared in public. In that year, he surprised quite a few people by playing a short, unannounced set at a festival in Scotland, and since then he has evidently caught the touring bug, having played about 40 shows mostly in the US and UK.

Those 50 albums, taken together, represent a serious and intriguing body of work. At first listen, the music is alien and offputting. Jandek sings in a raw, pleading voice, and his guitar playing sounds untutored, as though he has only recently picked up the instrument. The lyrics are rambling, free-associative and often disturbing (sample lines: “I got my knife/If you want to breathe, baby/Don’t paint your teeth”). On some albums, Jandek plays harmonica and piano; other players include a female vocalist, a second guitarist and a drummer, all of whom are similarly untutored and, needless to say, unnamed. Others just consist of Jandek’s voice. The music sounds like it’s been recorded in a room at home, not in a studio. It has been aptly described as “sounding like the music found on an unlabelled tape left in a deserted house.”

The covers of the albums are an important part of the Jandek mythology and tell their own, fractured story. Many of them look like carelessly taken snapshots. Some of them show Jandek at different stages of his life (he’s in his mid-60s now), although until he began playing live, no-one could actually be sure that the man on the covers was the man playing the music. Others show the interior or exterior of houses, presumably where he was living at the time; the curtains in the windows are always tightly drawn.

Every one of Jandek’s shows is different, ranging from solo acoustic guitar to piano recitals and noisy, free-form rock. Sometimes he performs on his own, but more often than not he finds musicians from the city he is performing in and produces a concert of music especially written for each performance. For his Vienna début, he’ll be joined by two of the finest musicians from Vienna’s thriving avant rock/improv scene: Eric Arn of Primordial Undermind on bass and DD Kern of Fuckhead and Bulbul on drums. The unexpected is to be assumed…

More handy bite-sized reviews of recent shows I don’t have the time or the will to write more about.

Christian Fennesz, Vienna Radiokulturhaus, 2 November 2009

Very strong evening of guitar and laptop improvisations. The reason I love Fennesz so much is that he gives the lie to the idea that noise has to be ugly and atonal (not that that there’s anything wrong with atonality, done well). On the contrary, Fennesz’s music is dreamy, shimmering, and uplifting. And yes, it’s still noise. Beautiful.

Akron/Family, Vienna B72, 4 November 2009

A strange outfit, this. Their set was basically a long, free-flowing mix of dusty Americana, rabble-rousing vocal harmonies, eerie noise and guitar-driven progressive rock. Given this unusual blend, I can see why Michael Gira was so taken with them that he drafted them in to be his backing group. The great thing, though, was that the group allowed these disparate elements room to breathe and merge seamlessly into one another.

A pleasure to find that my first visit to Warsaw coincided with a show by the highly innovative and talented Carla Bozulich. The Powiększenie is the place where folks like Brötzmann play when they hit town; indeed Sonore had just been there, and Ken Vandermark will return there soon with Paal Nilssen-Love. The upstairs bar was very cool but the performance space downstairs was kind of inhospitable, too long and narrow and on this night, bizarrely, seated. I grabbed a seat in the front row, which meant I had the pleasure of being in close proximity to Bozulich when she took a walk around the first few rows during the stunning “Baby It’s The Creeps”. In fact, she fell into my lap and pulled at my shirt, one of the many heartstopping moments that evening. Bozulich’s sound was driven by her extraordinary vocals, her aggressive approach to the guitar and by her group’s atmospheric cello and organ (the drums, I felt, were too lumpen and intrusive). I could have done without the occasional tedious dadaist tactics (bits of metal held up to the strings, a toy voice distortion box), but other than those, this was a hugely satisfying concert.

A truly blistering night of free jazz and improvisation from five of its finest exponents. Consisting of a series of combinations of the all-reeds trio Sonore (Peter Brötzmann, Ken Vandermark and Mats Gustafsson) and Scandinavian power trio The Thing (Gustafsson plus Ingebrigt Håker Flaten on double bass and Paal Nilssen-Love on drums), the evening showed up the rock and noise crowds’ frequent claims to ‘extremity’ and ‘intensity’ for the empty boasts they are. With no guitars, no electronics and no amplification, these five gentlemen conclusively demonstrated that there is no music in the world more extreme and intense than the cry of a saxophone being flayed from the inside out, and the thunderous rumble of a drummer assaulting his kit into submission.

The concert began with a beautifully balanced set from Sonore, followed straight after by an incandescent duo set from Brötzmann and Nilssen-Love. Next up, Vandermark and Håker Flaten varied the mood and pace considerably. Vandermark showcased his sheer versatility, foregoing his usual Ayleresque attack with a bout of cerebral blowing that reminded me of Anthony Braxton. Håker Flaten remained onstage for The Thing’s set, during which Mats Gustafsson played sax with a jaw-droppingly physical ferocity. The inevitable conclusion saw all five men come together in a breathtaking show of mutual understanding, improvisational flair and deranged sonic attack.

This fourth album from Peter Rehberg and Stephen O’Malley finds the duo upping the ante considerably in terms of grim, hellish and agonisingly slow guitar- and electronic-led drones. Moonlighting from his day job as half of Sunn O))), O’Malley turns away from that group’s relentlessly sludgey twin-guitar attack in favour of more silvery, melancholy tones. Rehberg, for his part, makes scalpel-sharp electronic incisions to take the music ever deeper into uneasy listening territory.

Much as I admire Rehberg’s solo work as Pita, I have to admit that this collaboration lends a powerful extra dimension to his music. The icy fog of O’Malley’s guitar provides a queasy counterpoint to Rehberg’s programmed and sampled sounds, as though breathing malevolent life into some great, superintelligent machine. Nowhere is this effect made clearer than on the 21-minute epic “Paratrooper”, which despite its title sounds less like a crack soldier and more like a menacing, threatening beast. Guest drummer Atsuo (of Boris) weighs in with dark, claustrophobic percussion, the beats hemming in the guitar. As the drums subside the music briefly becomes lighter and more aerated, before Atsuo picks up where he left off and the whole thing descends once again into some infernal swamp.

Jim O’Rourke’s production job is suitably glacial, investing “Benbbet” and “Eternal Winter” with icy, doom-laden atmospheres. On the closing “Natural Trouble”, meanwhile, Rehberg allows his more playful side to come through, as his trademark spacey effects are for once given room to breathe amid the unusually restrained lines of O’Malley’s guitar. And given that ritual is one of the key elements of O’Malley’s work with Sunn O))), it hardly comes as a surprise when Atsuo returns on the gong, adding a ritualistic aspect to proceedings that is wholly in keeping with the sombre and devotional air of this fine record.

Nad Spiro is Spanish electronica artist Rosa Arruti, and this is her third album. I was very taken with her 2000 début, Nad Spiro vs. Enemigos de Helix (reviewed in The Sound Projector 9), but Tinta Invisible is, I’m sorry to report, weak and uninvolving by comparison.

Arruti’s principal instrument is the guitar, which she subjects to heavy processing and sequencing. The resultant sounds tend towards the minimal and abstract, with occasional vocal interjections woven into the mix. Arruti’s voice is warm and seductive, but it can’t prevent many of the songs from coming across as sterile and cerebral exercises in sound manipulation.

“Soundhouse” and the title track both sound as though they have attractive melodies struggling to be heard, so it’s frustrating to hear them being denied room to flourish amid a plethora of deconstructive strategies. “Obauba,” meanwhile, is subtitled “Lullaby,” but if I wanted to soothe my son off to sleep I certainly wouldn’t play him this array of juddering bass sounds and twitchy electronic effects.

There are only two pieces here that recall the sparkling energy of Arruti’s début. “Interruptus” is quality IDM, with its shuffling dance beat energised by spidery scrawls of guitar noise. And the closing track “Eye TV” (featuring a guest appearance by American noise musician Kim Cascone) brings a welcome blast of harder and more livid electronic textures. Cascone’s presence seems to inject elements of risk and excitement that are in scant evidence elsewhere on the record.

(originally published in The Sound Projector 17)

Mary Hampton follows up her remarkable debut Book One with two further dispatches from the disquieting core of modern folk music. Book Two, as its title implies, is a kind of sequel to the earlier record, another self-released six-track mini-album. Where Book One carried the subtitle “six songs of refusal,” Book Two is labelled “six songs of hunger”: hunger as in desire, perhaps, an emotion which looms large throughout the record. Four of the songs are are traditional English folk ballads, while the other two are settings of poems by Yeats and Hannah Murgatroyd.

On these six songs, Mary Hampton again demonstrates her unerring ability to sing a centuries-old song and make it sound utterly, rivetingly contemporary. Sounding like the ghost child of Sandy Denny, she sings in a voice impossibly high and pure, yet possessed of great wisdom and the merest hint of evil:

“Well I had to tell him some things are secrets
All you can do is smash them to nothing” (“Silver Pebble”)

“Pretty Polly” is a deathly anatomisation of tragedy and betrayal, a murder ballad so epic and chilling it makes Nick Cave’s efforts in this vein sound like a night in the pub with Girls Aloud. Hampton accompanies herself on spiralling acoustic guitar and adds sinister threads of violin and cello, adding to the song’s unnerving sense of dread and loss.

Like the earlier collection, Book Two comes with a large lyric sheet that has been intricately folded down to fit inside the CD sleeve. Once you’ve unfolded it, it’s hard to get it back to the way it was. Likewise, Hampton’s treatments of these songs expose the listener to emotions and states of mind that run deep through history, but with that exposure become irrevocably closer and clearer.

The Drift CD is Hampton’s first “proper” album, a collection of ten self-penned songs. Inevitably, what impresses most is the way they sound entirely of a piece with the traditional songs on the earlier records, tracing bleak narratives of desire and longing. With more musicians at her disposal and, presumably, a larger recording budget, Hampton brings a richer, fuller band sound to tracks like “Honey,” setting a panoply of strings and percussion against her radiant, transported vocals. The witty “Ballad of the Talking Dog” strips things down to just acapella voices, handclaps and whistling, while on “The Bell They Gave You” Hampton turns to the piano to frame her dramatic, terrorstruck imagery:

“The eel cries out before it is skinned
A strange scream in the high night”

Throughout the album Hampton’s voice, her distinctive guitar work and the swooning rapture of her texts combine to produce an exquisite desolation that puts her far ahead of most contemporary acoustic music.

(originally published in The Sound Projector 17)

A denizen of upstate New York, Gregg Yeti once led a group called the Flashing Astonishers. Since they broke up in 2002 he’s been ploughing his own furrow, putting out five self-released EPs of which Heart Palpitations of the Rich & Famous is a compilation of bright moments, with a couple of new songs thrown in. Not nearly as scary as his Himalayan namesake, Yeti trades in generic lo-fi indie rock with enough distinctive elements to make this an album that easily bears repeated listening.

Vocal duties are shared between Yeti and Jessica Rudy, both of whom have attractive and listenable singing voices. Yeti’s is timbrally very similar to Gordon Downie, of Canadian alternative veterans The Tragically Hip. There’s a kind of bruised swagger to his voice that is nicely complemented on this record by Rudy’s earthier, lilting tones. She sings lead on two of the album’s highpoints, “Half On The Way” with its fuzzy, warm bed of 12-string acoustic, and the rippling Cocteaus-y atmospheres of “Colonize Your Eyes.”

Most of the other songs here are sharper than that, with chiming guitars bolstered by workmanlike, unobtrusive drumming. The music has a quirky, individualistic edge that is mirrored by the idiosyncratic song titles (“Laughter Be Your Slave,” “Body Like A Fever,” for example). This is a fresh, uncomplicated and enjoyable record.

(originally published in The Sound Projector 17)

On the back cover of this release Jeff Knoch, the American musician who goes under the name Eyes Like Saucers, poses for a photo with the tools that he used to make the album. These consisted of a VW camper van, a harmonium, a glockenspiel, a four-track cassette recorder, a few other bits and pieces and, crucially, a dog. Knoch’s dog Parmalee, to be precise, of whom he was clearly very fond. His website carries the sad news that Parmalee has recently passed on, and also gives a quotation from the French theorist Hélène Cixous: “Meeting a dog you suddenly see the abyss of love. Such limitless love doesn’t fit our economy. We cannot cope with such an open, superhuman relation.” In many respects Hélène Cixous needed to get laid, but back to the photo: whether consciously or not, it echoes the one on the back cover of Pink Floyd’s Ummagumma, showing the arsenal of touring equipment that the Floyd used to lug around. Knoch’s comparatively meagre set of gear is a nice reflection of the simplicity and directness of this record.

Turning next to the front cover, we find images of four plants which, it may be assumed, sustained Knoch during the making of the record: coffee, tea, tobacco and opium. The useful sleevenotes (of which more later) relate how Knoch and Parmalee set forth for the desert in the aforementioned camper van, even though Knoch “did not know how to drive, did not have a license to drive, and was severely epileptic.” It’s perhaps fortunate, therefore, that he not only returned from his expedition in one piece, but did so with the music that makes up Still Living In The Desert safely on tape.

The rich pickings provided by the cover don’t end there, either, for Knoch also reprints a quotation by the late Velvet Underground singer Nico: “I don’t know how I can live… I live like an exile.” Knoch adopts Nico’s chosen instrument, the harmonium, as his principal sound source, and makes lyrical reference to her Desert Shore album in the record’s final cut, “Desert Song (Where Land And Water Meet).” This song is dedicated to “the one person who has always made sense to me”; the person is not named, but Nico would be a reasonable guess.

What’s clear from all of the above is that Jeff Knoch (formerly of prog-psych outfit Urdog) is not the most socially gregarious fellow in the world. And this impression is reinforced by the music, which evidences extreme, willed introspection with its extensive use of wintry harmonium drones. It’s this sound that dominates the record – wheezy, chilling and filled with an icy permanence. Knoch adds organ, toy piano and glockenspiel to some tracks, but these never manage to shake off the sense of solipsism and foreboding.

The album feels indescribably moving through its doomed attempts to arrive at a zone of functional communication with the listener. Buried deep in the mix, the vocals on “Fruhling der Seele,” “Desert Song” and the Robert Wyatt cover “Sea Song” are only partly audible, reaching out in the hope of understanding. On the lengthy “Numinosity,” spacey oscillator effects sound like efforts to tune into the right frequency, as if trying to find some means of escape from the lowering presence of the harmonium. Ultimately the drone and its host the desert win out, enveloping the listener in clouds of monophonic dust and cementing the final words of Knoch’s sleevenotes: “Those who return must sacrifice their former language – that is, the language of everyday communication and worldly affairs – so in a sense, there is no return.”

(originally published in The Sound Projector 17)

I’m of that dwindling, unfashionable mindset that still rates Radiohead’s OK Computer as one of the best albums of the ’90s. As is well known, Thom Yorke was so confused and overwhelmed by the massive worldwide success of that record that he deliberately turned away from its epic, widescreen style and steered Radiohead towards a series of anodyne follow-ups, short on inspiration and long on anaemic electronica. Those who still hanker after the expansive, anthemic qualities of OK Computer and its predecessor The Bends could do worse than to seek out Threads, the début album by Danish trio Virak.

Of course, there’s nothing here to match the vast, glacial movement of “The Tourist” or “No Surprises.” But a song like the seven-minute “Something Strange Happened As We Stood By The Lake” possesses a real sense of unfolding drama with its layered, spacious guitar work and busy drumming; likewise, the slow incremental pulse of “Violence” makes an immediately strong impression. It’s a shame, then, that vocalist, guitarist and lyricist Martin Ejlertsen’s singing voice is so pale and undistinguished, rendering the instrumental tracks on the whole more satisfying than the vocal ones. The lyrics, however, manage to stay just the right side of bombastic. They’re printed as prose in the CD booklet, a nice typographical technique that I’ve also enjoyed on records by artists such as 10,000 Maniacs and Okkervil River. Take this, from “Desert Storm”: “When we rise, we fall to higher hopes than we ever thought possible, like a desert storm, we’re out of reach.”

Virak bear strong comparison, too, with the dusty instrumental post-rock of groups like Scenic and Explosions In The Sky. On the excellent “Song of Everything,” for example, Peter Dyring-Olsen’s furiously precise drumming intensifies the impact of Ejlertsen’s rippling guitar lines. There’s nothing startlingly original about Threads, but it’s still recommended for those who like their rock music dramatic and refreshingly free of bluster.

(originally published in The Sound Projector 17)