Angst

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september 2013 nr 1 a word about disturbing music

This month’s Issues

WHAT HAPPENED TO JACKSON?!

What’s wrong with jackson and his computerband p.1

Man of METAL, story of Christopher Lee p. 2

Marvellous Chis Clark and even more astonishing new “Turninig Dragon” p. 3

Which drugs was using Circlresquare while making his new album p. 3

Alexis Tylor mixes up a little the Beatles p. 4

Cute song from super cute Nite Jewel p. 4

Massive interview with Gregg Gills (spoiler alert: he talks a lot about girls) p. 5

Múm’s new delicious track p. 7

WU — TANG — storytelling time! p.7

New Deluxe Queens of the Stone Age p. 8

Interviewer y Chaz — Toro y Moi boy talk p. 9

A review of new Jackson and His Computerband album “Glow”

In case you forgot, “Smash” still has jams for days.

When Jackson Fourgeaud released his 2005 debut album as Jackson and His Computer Band after years of prodigious singles and hot-stove development, it was a delirious tangle of ideas that just got messier the more you tried to pull it apart.

It was an agile mixture of glitch, electro, left-field hiphop and early French Touch that was less a blend than a collision. Everything sounded like a remix of a remix of a remix of a seventh draft, the odd paradox of something so fussed over that it shuddered into chaos as some kind of survival mechanism. Yet you could still move to it despite its apparent disinterest in locking into an easy-fit groove. That his public work post-Smash was limited to a string of remixes by electro/house acts that could be considered his less-outlandish usurprers -- Justice (“D.A.N.C.E.”), Kavinsky (“Pacific Coast Highway”), Planningtorock (“Living It Out”) -- seemed, for a while, like one of dance music’s more perplexing mysteries. What the hell happened to him?

Eight years later, “Glow” retains the same question but shifts its target -- not to Jackson’s absence, but to the diminishing returns he brought with him when that absence ended. If there’s one overarching flaw to “Glow” that covers all the little accumulated ones, it’s that Jackson’s genre-pastiche seams are starting to show a bit more. Instead of hacking pieces

away from a solid block of beats to create something jagged and slippery to grasp, he comes up with a riff or a figure -- something easily identifiable as neonew wave or caricaturized electro or half-hearted gabber -- and scuffs the surface a bit so it looks dingy. Not enough to be challenging or do anything surprising with its corrosion, but enough that it makes it difficult for his production to breather.

Worse still, it feels like he’s spent so much time pulling remix duty that he can only find ways to channel his own sound through other artists’ work.

“Orgysteria” and its cheesily grandiose android-love ooze is a few Hz short of Air’s 10,000. “Dead Living Things” is the mushroomy analog sludge of Black Moth Super Rainbow with an ill-advised Random Access Memories budget and a nasal falsetto whine that could use a dirtier filter or three. And the aluminum-rattling haunted house throb of “Pump” takes the giallo sensibilties of Justice’s † and waters its art-horror aspirations down to third-rate directto-VHS splatter.

It gets worse. The unpleasant surprise of “G.I. Jane (Fill Me Up)” -- where gastric hoovers fill in for power chords, mock-Phoenix backbeats tick away rotely, and vocals are handled by a choir of distracted Mark Knopfler A.I.s-- doesn’t work as either a sendup of arena indie or an embrace of it. And overdriven opener “Blow” and late-album churner “More” try to punk it up with quirky noise and noisy quirk, but can’t stay focused long enough to keep their dopey momentum going before beatless interjections of droning synths let all the air out. Eclecticism and unpredictability used to be what made Jackson’s work so exciting. But it’s gotten so out of control that even the bits that almost work (“Seal” as bass-music flirtation; the swooning, dreamlike synthpop of the Classixx-ist “Vista”) still fail to come across integral threads in a new phase of his style. Instead, they feel like the pieces that stuck to the wall when he threw everything at it.

I don’t envy whoever has to clean up that mess.

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http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18435jackson-and-his-computer-band-glow/

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christopher leea mind of metal Charlemagne: By the Sword and the Cross album review

Christopher Lee has done… questionable things.

Yes, I learn from his website that (his website claims that) he was the only member of the whole Lord of the Rings film project who’d actually met Tolkien.

Yes, Count Dooku is one of the only characters in the new Star Wars films played with any genuine irony.

And no less lamented an ex-blogger than Jennifer Lynn Jordan has proclaimed, “I would break a lot of rules for Christopher Lee”; that’s a fanbase, ladies and gentlemen.

This was, indeed, reported in the post where Jenn and I had this conversation, and Jeff Sypeck at Quid Plura was on it soon afterwards, but unless I’ve just failed to notice, no further reports emerged.

But someone who shall remain nameless got the album for me as a birthday present, and well, you deserve to know the truth. I used to do album reviews quite a lot in my underspent and hairy near-youth, so I’ll try and do the music in my old style and then I have to say something about the history under the new dispensation.

This has been described as a metal album wherever it’s been plugged, but in Jeff’s words, it’s likely that your city’s water supply has more metal in it. What we’re looking at here is something much more like Deep Purple’s Concerto for Group and Orchestra than even, for example, Metallica’s Slaves and Masters; there is a metal band here, or at least some people with those instruments, but they turn up only sporadically and the synthesizer gets all the biggest parts. The Mighty Riff is conspic. by its a.; this is mainly an orchestral album. Lee’s website reveals, as well as the fact that via a Carandini ancestry he himself claims descent from Charlemagne, that the guy who did the composition, Marco Sabiu, is “best known for his

collaborations with Kylie Minogue, Take That, Ennio Morricone”. These are words to fill the strongest heart

with fear, surely, but actually he’s no slouch with an orchestra. The arrangements are fairly simple but lively, energetic and rarely dull. If anything, the album’s natural tendency to melodrama makes it harder listening than it might be because it is usually off after an impact moment before any theme has had time to become established. Only with the bonus track ‘Iberia’ does the whole thing break down into movie soundtrack. On the other hand, the other bonus track, a version of ‘The Bloody Verdict of Verden’ (yes, really) without vocals does a good job of showing that really, there is music in here.

You will gather then that when there are vocals the music is not so successful. I believe Lee’s website when it claims that he is a classically-trained singer, I do, because the way he sings indicates that someone did their absolute best with him, but really, that must have been a long time ago now and his vocals are not what is needed here. Not only do some of the pieces really stretch his range too far (‘Starlight’, one of the few pieces without HUGE DRAMA scored into it from the bottom up,

is especially bad for this) but he delivers everything, everything, in deeply ponderous tones as if every line were of world-changing seriousness and had to be delivered with Absolute Solemnity.

Now, OK, there are some heavy events here; the album’s big schtick is the dying Charlemagne looking back over his life and wondering if he did well, and especially, whether the massacre of 4,000 Saxons at Werden in front of their families wasn’t going a bit too far. I am open to the idea that Charlemagne

silly their serious lyrics sound in English because it’s their second language. (Iron Maiden know, they’ve always known, come on, just look at them. Jury’s out on Metallica, for this as for everything else.)

Here the guilty party is one Marie-Claire Calvet, who as well as managing to make a rhyme between ‘Pavia’ and ‘Saviour’ into assonance gives Pope Hadrian (who, marvellously, is sung by an Italian) these lines:

Encroaching closer upon Rome Their leaders wanted to capture it for their own And now King Desiderius Has started to harass us

really did have good occasion to think, quite often, “I am about to embark on something that will change

the face of Christendom! Third time this year too! Phew!

What would Carloman say if he could see me now? Oh my poor brother!” etc., it is possible. But the musical

result is that the album listens like one long national anthem, and not for a country that could afford Hadyn or Elgar either. And with lyrics like:

I forgive, for you were young, ambitious for your people And your court was advising against me on principle delivered at maximum stentorian setting, or

Defiant of baptism on pain of death Tough measures call for me to be ruthless To set an example to the rebels Draconian for their worship of devils I’m not really feeling it.

You don’t believe me? It has a Youtube channel, a MySpace site, you can hear for yourself. This is probably the most metal thing about this album, in fact: certainly proper metal suffers incredibly from people who don’t realise (or perhaps don’t care) how

Scansion, sense, just not metal enough: all will fall before the force of that rhyme! The singer actually nearly manages to carry this mouthful off, but one’s final reaction still has to be in words that Michael Berube once misattributed to Auerbach, to wit, “ew, ew, ew, ew”. You cannot listen to this straight; it would kill off all your higher language centres. These are the worst lines Lee has ever had =to deliver, and he does so in such a way as to make them seem still more egregious.

So, in short: the artwork is impressive (is that map of Europe behind Lee on the cover burnished, or burning?

I can’t tell but it’s great), the music, while not very metal, is not bad, but anything to do with the words here will make you want to switch it off unless you like real carcrash awfulness in entertainment. This is a Mystery Science Theatre 3000 sort of album in that respect. I think a metal album probably could be recorded about Charlemagne, probably by Mastodon who have done less likely things already (and would probably, given their name, feel obliged to mention the elephant ), but this certainly lowers the bar, and indeed poisons the well, empties the fridge, spoils the broth, etc..

What about the history, then? Well, they are careful to set out right up front (in fact, back of the booklet, but you see it as soon as you open the case) that:

“Charlemagne: By the Sword and the Cross” is a musical concept album based on historical events.

While the producers have tried to keep as close to history as possible, in all creative works some literary license is usually present. The contents of this album in relation with certain events and personality of the historical characters are not necessarily the opinions of the producers and all other participants.

Actually, though, they don’t really need to: the history here is remarkably clear and unmucked-with. Just in case the album weren’t ponderous enough, each act is introduced by a narration setting the historical context, and there is very little in these that I would mark wrong in an essay, for example, though I would probably add some notes about toning down the dramatic style at the end.

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The narrations threw me for a short while, however, by being in slightly-accented English by someone called Christina Lee. Now, I’ve met such a person, and so may others of you have: she does Viking studies at Nottingham and I wondered for some minutes how on earth she’d become involved in this before getting deep enough into Lee’s website to find that he has a daughter called Christiana, whom I suspect is more likely to be responsible.

But we have a reasonable progress: calling for Einhard at his deathbed, hearing the voices of father Pippin and brother Carloman, of Pope Hadrian rhyming Desiderius, etc.; we get a brief reference to Aquitaine, then the Lombard campaign, the wars against the Saxons culminating in ‘The Bloody Verdict of Verden’, the forging of an Empire and a final look into a then-future with Fastrada.

This is all real Charlemagne, not the legend, except for an appearance by the sword Joyeuse (which does take us into a further complication: Calvet appears to think that Charlemagne spoke French, and indeed called himself ‘Charlemagne’, a name that Lee’s character uses of himself many times in the course of the album—but I guess there is a need to use the name people know). The legend does turn up rather harder in the bewilderingly playscript-like ‘Iberia’, 12 peers and so on, but that is as I say only a bonus track, in which respect its position is actually fairly typical of the field of study, he says with studied bitterness.

All this is an interpretation of course. Specifically, and consciously, it is an interpretation of Charlemagne as an almost fanatical evangelist and one not afraid to put the sword behind what he feels to be ultimately necessary to build a better world. I’ve seen essays with no argument more sophisticated than that, and they certainly run with it to what would be good effect here if only the words weren’t so terrible. But it makes its own sense, and perhaps it is the strangest thing that on a metal album on which the lead singer is a man famous for playing a Bond villain, a wizard and a vampire, it is not actually the history that lets them down.

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http://tenthmedieval.wordpress.com/2010/10/13/ christopher-lees-charlemagne-album-review/

intelligent music sense of clark Turning Dragon album review

One of 2008’s best efforts seems limited at first, but Clark manages to blend his strengths with a previously ignored aspect in his music.

With a simple electronic wave and the turning of the radio station “New Year Storm” kicks off with a fantastic beat that mixes in with more electronic fuzz. With each cycle the beat gets heavier and

trudges through uneventfully. Surprisingly “Hot May Slides” feels like an Aphex Twin contribution from his ‘I Care Because You Do’ album and doesn’t feel like it belongs. The one gripe I have against this album is that it doesn’t manage to stick with one area, whether that is in ambient or electronic/IDM (if you really care to separate the both). The ambient tracks are fantastic and so are the few heavily electronic tracks, but finding the median would have been appropriate.

I recommend you grab this if you can; it is quite beautiful in an ambient and electronic sense. The closer “Penultimate Persian” sums the album quite nicely.

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more brooding. Cymbals rush in the background to add some depth with static noise that isn’t chaotic, but holds much rhythm. You would think with such songs as “New Year Storm” ‘Turning Dragon’ would feel hollow and cold, but Clark adds some ambient atmosphere with all of his electronic grooves and static pulses to give it much warmth, something you wouldn’t expect.

Without looking at your track list you most likely wouldn’t notice “Volcano Veins” would be a separate track from “New York Storm”, not from its lack of variation, but for the seemingly great continuation from the previous song. The beginning of “Volcano Veins” feels like an extension from “New Year Storm”, but soon turns into an electronic infused techno beat. With its entirely different approach Clark still manages to keep up with the pace and style.

Clark manages to add a dance feel within the album although he is notoriously known for adding IDM within his albums like his previous effort of Body Riddle, he instead expands his musical variety with the warmth of electronic, and cuts somewhat a large amount of ambient and IDM material from his work in the beginning. Still the results are fantastic.

“For Wolves Crew” clocks in at 7 minutes, but the pulsating rhythms and IDM beat garners it through quickly and at a pace of skillful manner with ambient stops throughout the song it still retains your enthusiasm throughout. “Violenl” starts oddly, but retains the albums nature with its sheathing background and electronic waves.

Clark manages to fuse the best elements of his music from his previous works while adding electronic warmth throughout. Although it isn’t relatively new to him, he brings the electronic fuzz within the music that he previously did not do. The ambient stages within some songs like “Gaskarth / Cyrk Dedication” are impressively structured while still adding small noticeable beat breaks that keep the listener interested. The upbeat beginning to the largely slower middle area is perfectly blended. The heavily electronic tracks like “New Year Storm” and “Volcano Veins” are weaved into a slower, less electronic middle region of the album. Clark strives for a more ambient feel to the album and he succeeds while not hindering the atmosphere of the album. “Ache of the North” is truly the best mixture of ambient waves and electronic minimalism; it is quite beautiful and relaxing. There are a few problems within the album; “Mercy Sines” doesn’t bring anything new to the table within the album and

http://www.sputnikmusic.com/ review/27689/Clark-Turning-Dragon/

circle square’s bent visions ”Songs about Dancing and Drugs” review

The title of Circlesquare’s second full-length is direct and accurate, but it’s also something of an understatement. Dancing and drugs are indeed mentioned in nearly every track, but, as subject matter for pop songs, they’re well-trod territory. What makes the record interesting is the way Circlesquare mastermind Jeremy Shaw uses dancing and drugs as a starting point for exploring his larger themes, i.e., the constant mutation and evolution of subcultures, and the rapid acceleration of science and technology.

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Fainting By Numbers Watching the Wheels’s new single

Alexis Taylor starts another side project, teaming up with a German techno producer on a John Lennon cover In Shaw’s work, which extends from his music to his parallel career in fine art, dancing and drugs are salvations in and of themselves, and desperately needed coping mechanisms in a fast-moving culture that can leave us feeling disconnected and disoriented.

If one can assume a consistent narrative voice on the album, the protagonist of Songs About Dancing and Drugs is a man who feels as though culture and time itself is out of synch with his reality, and that celebration and narcotics have become his way of either finding his footing within the moment, or slipping outside of it.

The sound of the record reflects its lyrics’ sense of temporal dislocation. Even the most danceable numbers have a sluggish pace and somnolent tone, and lighter compositions, such as the drifting, semi-acoustic “Timely”, suggest a state of permanent jet lag. Shaw’s most effective tracks present epic, sweeping songs on a miniature scale, expressing the grandiose sentimentality of U2 or Arcade Fire without either’s bombast, and with a far greater sense of implied intimacy. “Stop Taking (So Many)” is essentially an arena-rock ballad turned inside-out. The beat is rendered as a simple pulse, a handful of plaintive piano notes carry most of the piece’s emotional weight, and the strum and noise of guitars are replaced with abstracted electronic hums, whirs, and beeps. “Hey You Guys”, the opening track, is slightly more traditional in its gradual build towards catharsis, but even its most dramatic moments are underplayed, and its words are sung in a cool, aloof voice that recalls Depeche Mode’s Dave Gahan at his most sedate. In these songs, Circlesquare achieve a rare, truly successful synthesis of rock dynamics and the aesthetics of minimalist electronica. Whereas most attempts to bridge the gap between these styles yield gardenvariety rock songs in bleep-beep drag or vice versa, Shaw demonstrates a fluency in both genres that

leaves his hybrid music feeling organic instead of dilletantish. He is somewhat less successful when he moves away from that stylistic intersection, resulting in the interminable, drowsy space folk of “Music For Satellites”, or the appealing yet slightly too familiar slow-motion disco groove of “Dancers”.

Despite the fact that Songs About Dancing and Drugs is an exceptionally slow and languorous set of songs, Shaw’s arrangements are consistently dynamic, albeit in rather subtle ways. Even the most ambient compositions on the record continuously add new rhythmic hooks and textures, and just when a song seems to drift out into deep space, he will toss in a surprising new element, as with the lonely trumpet solo that turns up at the end of “Bombs Away, Away”. This approach is especially apparent in 13-minute finale “All Live But the Ending”, which cycles through all of the album’s primary moods and textures while essentially summarizing its lyrical content.

Though everything that precedes “All Live But the Ending” is more or less an expression of elliptical ambivalence, Shaw lets the song build to a genuine emotional climax, complete with a digitally warped horn fanfare that shifts into a quiet, sober resolution in which he offers the album’s one moment of total certainty in the form of a simple motto: “In the end, after all, all that anybody really needs is art and music.” That line can be taken as the moral of the album, but even more to the point is that in its final seconds, after repeating his maxim a few times as if to emphatically underline it, Shaw invites the listener one last time to “come along.”

Ultimately, the album is about the value of participating n culture through the communal aspects of art and music, which is sort of ironic given that this is a record best suited to being heard alone, with a good set of headphones.

The last single to be released from John Lennon’s Double Fantasy album, Watching the Wheels – inspired by critics who questioned his decision to retire briefly from music to help raise his son, Sean – opens with the line “People say I’m crazy”.

Following his death, it was recontextualised as the line repeated by his killer Mark Chapman after he was held in police custody on murder charges.

In the hands of Fainting By Numbers – who are made up of German techno producer Justus Köhncke and dance music polymath Alexis Taylor from Hot Chip – the opening lyric is given a kind of blank, almost robotic monotony, with the perky piano of the original replaced by the cold thrum of synths and electronic percussion. Released via Moshi Moshi, whose co-founder Stephen Bass first made Köhncke aware of Taylor’s work in 2003, Watching the Wheels is a double a-side with the elongated sigh A Stone in the Ground, which you can listen to here. It’s not clear yet if there will be an album or if this is an ongoing thing, but considering Taylor’s got his main band, improv merchants About Group, a solo career and collaborations with the likes of steel pan enthusiast Fimber Bravo to be getting on with, there may be a bit of a wait.

http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12767-songsabout-dancing-and-drugs/

http://pitchfork.com/reviews/tracks/12541-shes-

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2013/ mar/20/new-music-fainting-by-numbers

nite music She’s Always Watching You a new singiel

This track from Nite Jewel (newly signed to Secretly Canadian) finds vocalist Ramona Gonzalez’s voice in a more diva-like state than usual atop some synth-heavy production. “She’s Always Watching You” appears on a 7” in advance of Nite Jewel’s forthcoming sophomore LP, which is scheduled for an early-2012 release. Stream the track below.

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always-watching-you/

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girl talk talkin’ about music and girls

Girl Talk interview witch DJ Ron Slomowicz

His tour t-shirts accurately proclaim “I’m Not a DJ,” since Greg Gillis, better known as Girl Talk, is not onstage playing other people’s music -- not directly, at least. Using sampling technology and software, Girl Talk builds new music based on samples from many genres, best described as an advanced musical version of the mash-up. After bubbling in the underground for years, a Pitchfork review of his 2006 CD Night Ripper brought him to the limelight and acclaim from Rolling Stone, Spin, and Blender. While his CDs are measured and precise, Girl Talk’s live shows are the ultimate party; one that simply must be experienced to be believed. When an electronica act can sell out a Tuesday night Nashville show with tickets going for ten times the face value and a line of 100 people an hour before doors open, you know it’s going to be a major party.

DJ Ron Slomowicz: Welcome to Nashville, have you been here before?

Greg Gillis: Yes, I’ve been here a bunch.

RS: And when was the last time you were here, do you remember?

Greg Gillis: I played this spot on February 9th

of 2007.

RS: That was after the Pitchfork article. So do you think the article make a big shift in your career?

Greg Gillis: Yes. Prior to that I spent six years playing

shows to between 10 and 20 people every night, and then after that a kind of cult following, things kind of launched to this very ridiculous level.

RS: When you were playing to 10-25 people, what were you doing as a day job?

Greg Gillis: Biomedical engineering. This started

in 2000 when I was in college, so it was like the first four years pretty much just touring when I could, going to school sort of thing, and then after school I traveled for like six months strictly touring. Then I just did a job for about two and a half years while still just doing the music thing, it was always just intended for fun.

Why Girl Talk?

RS: Where did the name Girl Talk come from?

Greg Gillis: When I started, I was very involved

with the underground avant-garde electronic music scene -- very experimental stuff. I was fascinated by it, and it was something I had done for a long time with my band prior to Girl Talk. A lot of the ideas with the difficult music being progressive and challenging, were being recycled, using distortion and having crazy loops. and since it was what everyone’s expecting, it became stagnant to me.

So when I started this project the initial goal was to do a lot more far out music, most avant-garde stuff, using pop as a tool of rebellion. I picked the most flamboyant, over the top name so people would feel like ‘this name or band is completely inappropriate’ for the contemporaries I was playing with at that time. What can I call this to make this sound like a ten year old girl’s band?

RS: How did the concept transform from being something really difficult into something that has such a party vibe?

Greg Gillis: I’ve always been a fan of pop and

always followed plenty of styles of music. There’s

two components, there’s one that is understanding the software and I was doing well with that.

The second started at 18 and it has faded over the years – the epiphany that it’s not the worse thing in the world to make music for people who can actually enjoy it. Based on my experiences as a teenager, the bands I’ve seen, and the sort of acts I was surrounded by in Pittsburgh, it always seemed lame to try to be successful, that if you’re not really freaking people out then what are you doing?

That’s cool, I’m still with that, but I just grew older and was like, ‘well, it’s not so bad to really have fun

with it.’ Even in the earlier shows when I was trying to do the experimental music, I was always playing the laptop and playing a lot of other experimental guises, and I always wanted to make the show fun.

I was always screaming at people to loosen up and dance but I wasn’t really making dance music.

So I think it just slowly started, working on doing some stuff with beats a little bit and it just grew and grew and grew and then it just got to a point where it’s like well I want to make pop out of pop now rather than making noise out of pop.

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Playing with laptops RS: On the laptop, what software are you running?

Greg Gillis: I use a program called Adobe Audition

to make beats and sample things, and then to perform live and do all my arrangements I use a program called Audio Mulch.

RS: Your laptop on stage is a Mac, correct?

Greg Gillis: No, it’s a PC. RS: Has it ever crashed on you?

Greg Gillis: I’ve had it smashed on me. I’ve had

the computers broken, but never, never like a crash.

I broke three laptops last year and it wasn’t software, it was more physical damage.

RS: Do you have a specific controller that you use?

Greg Gillis: At home, I use one, but live I can’t. I’ve

played at a lot of different venues and usually I like to interact with the audience to some degree and get in the crowd and get people on stage and this and that. It’s gotten crazy enough so that with any piece of equipment up there, if it’s not the laptop, it usually will just get broken, so I’ve just minimized it as much as possible.

RS: If you’re in the crowd, how do you trigger your samples?

Greg Gillis: It’s all loop-based. So when I leave the

computer you’re going to get the same loop, so I feel like that’s an OK sound. I didn’t ever have an album sound like that, whereas if it was a band it would have to be pretty much straight from the album.

So I feel like it’s taken the show to a whole different balance, where occasionally it’s OK to just step out and just play. I think it almost gives people a really good physical kind of feel of how life it actually is, so from that they just hear the same loops.

RS: From night to night, how different is your show?

Greg Gillis: On this tour, I haven’t had much

time to work on music between shows but I have arrangements and a lot of the ideas are set beforehand. Even if I go through the same exact source material, the set cannot be replicated night to night, it’s just like every sample is possible.

Even if I go through the exact same source material, one night the set could be forty-five minutes and another night it could be an hour and

forty-five minutes, it’s just kind of how I delay it,.

I’m almost writing songs beforehand and trying to perform them.

Live vs CD? RS: How difficult is it for you to take this live experience and translate it to a CD experience?

Greg Gillis: To me, they are two different worlds.

I think they’re both very valuable and I would never want to say one’s more important than the other.

The live show’s a bit more functional and it’s a party for the people and it’s dance music. I even draw out the samples a little bit more to give them more room to breathe.

For the album, I’m not really trying to make a functional album where it’s not necessarily based around being at a party or a dance record. I want to make an album that you can sit down and listen to on headphones, something you can dive into any time.

Playing with samples RS: With all the samples you’re using, how do you get around publishing and licensing and things like that?

Greg Gillis: There’s a doctrine called Fair Use

in the United States Copyright Law and it allows you to sample preexisting works without asking for permission if your new work falls under certain criteria. So if you want to use a sample and you think your work is transforming and you don’t think it would have negative impact on the potential sales of the source material, then you can release it, but you really don’t know whether it’s legal or illegal unless you were taken to court, it’s like a grey area.

RS: Have you been challenged on it yet?

Greg Gillis: No, not yet.

Playing with others

RS: But you have been approached by bands to remix their work? What was it like the first time that happened?

Greg Gillis: Oh, it was cool. I’ve done beats for

people way back in the day and collaborations, but after the record came out people started reaching out. I think the first person who asked for a remix was Grizzly Bear and I wasn’t that familiar with their work at that time. They sent me a CD and it was amazing; Yellow House, it still blows my mind. It was cool, but I have stopped doing a lot of that work because it always takes time away from this.

RS: I’ve noticed a lot of the big name DJs going in that direction as well, focusing on original production rather than remixes. Working with Illegal Art, has there been any interest from a major label in your work?

Greg Gillis: Yes, I’ve been contacted by a handful

of majors but no solid deals to do production work – more like remixed catalog stuff. It’s interesting, I was just thinking ‘oh, I’m not very prolific at this, it takes me a long time, I’ll have to sample a lot of music to get something to happen,’ that’s why it takes me two years to do an album.

What’s next from Girl Talk?

RS: Is there a new CD coming?

Greg Gillis: I don’t know. All my albums thus far, they’ve usually taken about two years to put together, so I finished Feed The Animals just a few months ago. I’m always working and I never really have a vision of where to go and to make a beat today, I’ve no idea when that’s going to happen. Whatever I’m feeling, I’ll chop up a sample today and I’ve no idea what that’s going to be like but maybe it’ll make it in to the set, maybe it won’t, maybe I’ll start playing it every night, maybe I won’t.It’s less of making a decision on the spot and more of just throwing out tons of ideas and then seeing just what sticks.

In a weird way, I’m disconnected from the decisionmaking as to where this is going to go, especially because I’m heavily influenced and informed by people coming out of the shows, friends, and just life experiences. I could never make an album again or I could make five next year, it’s just like just whatever happens that’s where I go.

RS: When you sell your CDs you actually ask people what they want to pay for it. Where did that concept come from?

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3102 IV

7

20-Year Plan The history of Wu-Tang Clan

This year marks the 20th anniversary of a remarkable year in music. Over the 12 months of 1993, Queen Latifah, De La Soul, Snoop Dogg, A Tribe Called Quest and more than a dozen other rappers released albums that helped to change the sound of America. One of those albums wasn’t just a collection of songs — it was a business concept, too. The Wu-Tang Clan’s 1993 debut was the opening shot of an audacious plan to open the music industry to hip-hop made way outside the mainstream.

Back in the early ‘90s, Robert Fitzgerald Diggs looked around and saw the music industry betting on rap-lite — think Will Smith and Young MC, both of whom had won Grammys in the late ‘80s. Songs like “Parents Just Don’t Understand” and “Bust a Move” just weren’t for him, or his friends. “We were street kids,” he says, “guys that was more like felons, or high-

Greg Gillis: Illegal Art threw it out there, maybe

based it on the Radiohead model when they put out In Rainbows where they did the kind of ‘pay for what you want’ thing. I think that was the first time they discovered it, since then Nine Inch Nails and a lot of people have gotten into it. I loved it as I’ve always been very upfront with this project. I think if I make zero dollars off of making CDs it’s not a problem, I’m more interested in pushing this and seeing how far I can go.

Whether you’re selling a CD, selling mp3, giving it away for free, whatever, it’s a decision-making process, and it’s all donation-based. Like when you go to the CD store and buy a CD, you’re donating that money to the artist because you know you can go home and just listen to it for free on YouTube or on a filesharing network. So I thought doing the pay-for-what-you-want model is a way of acknowledging that reality.

RS: What’s the most you’ve been paid for the CD? Greg Gillis: A couple of people paid a hundred bucks straight out and so, and I think that was a nice mark up for it.

RS: Very cool. Is there anything you’d like to say to all your fans out there?

Greg Gillis: Stay in school, do your thing, never give up, and live forever.

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http://dancemusic.about.com/od/ remixersproducers/a/GirlTalkIntervi_2.htm

new Múm

Hvernig Á Að Særa Vini Sína new singiel

Múm has released a new video for “Hvernig Á Að Særa Vini Sína” (How to Hurt Your Friends) directed

by Máni M. Sigfússon, and new single entitled “0,000Orð.” Premiered with Stereogum, both tracks are taken from Early Birds, a compilation of 15 songs recorded between 1998 and 2000. Out on July 17th through Morr Music, the album comprises long-lost and extremely rare tracks taken from demo tapes and limited edition vinyl releases. Early Birds acts as a pastiche of the band’s formative years, but the soft electronic glitches, incorporation of traditional and unconventional instruments, and múm’s minimalistic melodies remain the common thread.

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http://www.morrmusic.com/news/item/id/632

school dropouts. Not saying this is a positive thing, I’m just saying this is the difference of our character.”

He saw an opportunity. “If you keep eating McDonald’s, you gonna get sick. You need a real home-cooked meal.

And I knew that, that would be healthier. And that’s what Wu-Tang was: It was a home-cooked meal of hip-hop. Of the real people.”

Diggs also saw that he was going to have to prove to the industry that the style of hip-hop he wanted to make would sell. “Because if you look at hip-hop at that time,” he says, “it wasn’t a lot of artists selling

gold or platinum albums. There was a lot of hip-hop artists, but they wasn’t going gold, they wasn’t going platinum.”

He knew the best rappers on Staten Island. They came to his house to watch kung fu movies and battle rap and study the teachings of the 5 Percent Nation, an offshoot of the Nation of Islam. Two were his cousins, one was his roommate, a couple were, technically, his rivals. So he had to do some convincing, but he recorded a verse by each of them, added one of his own and pressed up an eight-verse, grimy-sounding, no chorus, vinyl-only single: “Protect Ya Neck.”

Diggs set up a company called Wu-Tang Productions, named after the bad guys in a movie.

“I thought that Wu-Tang was the best sword style,” he says, “the best sword-style of martial arts. And the

tongue is like a sword. And so I say that we have the best lyrics, so, therefore, we are the Wu-Tang Clan.”He

changed his name to the RZA — an acronym that refers to his theological studies, asked his roommate’s DJ to make a logo, and he called a meeting.

“I used the bus as an analogy,” he says.“I said, ‘I want

all of y’all to get on this bus. And be passengers. And I’m the driver. And nobody can ask me where we going. I’m taking us to No. 1. Give me five years, and I promise that I’ll get us there.’ “ Us was the RZA, the GZA, Ol’ Dirty

Bastard, Inspectah Deck, U-God, Ghostface Killah, Method Man, Raekwon and Masta Killa. They all signed on to the plan. For Ghostface, signing wasn’t even a question. “This is what we loved to do. We rhymed all day,” he says. “Still now, but at that time, we really, really, really, really loved it.”

In the winter of 1992, some of them snuck into one of the few radio stations in New York City that was playing hip-hop — Columbia University’s WKCR — and tried to convince DJ Stretch Armstrong and host Bobbito Garcia to play it. Listeners called in.

And Stretch and Bobbito weren’t the only ones playing it. Ghostface Killah remembers the first time he and Raekwon heard “Protect Ya Neck” on the radio. “Rae, he jumped to the f- - -ing ceiling,” says Ghostface. “I remember that day. Me and him was

at the house, waiting for it to come on. Kid Capri played it. And it was on.” Club DJs, promotions people and

music writers all thought it was the hottest thing out.

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VI 2013

8

“The hook itself is the individual styles,” says Schott Free, a friend of the RZA’s who promoted “Protect Ya Neck” to radio stations. “Every four to eight bars

or so, you’re presented with a whole different style and sound on how to ride one particular wave, you know what I mean? That’s the thrill and the shock of it all — it’s just going on those rides.”

One of the first record execs to come sniffing around was Steve Rifkind, who had a new label called Loud.

The RZA got him to sign an unprecedented deal: For only $60,000, Rifkind got the Clan as a whole.

But the RZA also convinced him to allow each individual in the group to become, in essence, a free agent. They could sign a solo deal with any other company, and take the Wu-Tang name with them.

“When Def Jam wanted to sign Method Man, they wanted to sign Method Man and Old Dirty,” says the RZA. “And Old Dirty wanted to be on Def Jam —

everybody, that was like the dream label. But if I had Old Dirty and Method Man on Def Jam, that’s two key pieces going in the same direction, whereas there’s other labels that needed to be infiltrated.”

The RZA’s plan was to spread his group’s sound as widely as possible. And just a few years later, members of the Wu-Tang Clan were recording for five of the six major labels, back when there were six major labels. Sales from those albums enriched each label — which meant they saw more potential in hip-hop made by street kids.

At Loud, the group’s home base, Rifkind was happily taking a chance on a group that had been turned away from his competitors. But the RZA wasn’t one for chances. Both he and DJ Stretch Armstrong recommended Schott Free for a job at Loud. “[RZA]

said, ‘Look man, you one of the only educated dudes in the Clan. We need somebody up in the office, overseeing what these guys are doing with our records!’ “

And that’s not all. Getting to No. 1 depended on each artist growing the Clan’s fanbase. The RZA explains: “I recall telling GZA, ‘You’ll get the college crowd,’ “ because he’s the intellectual. “Raekwon and Ghost, all the gangstas” — their metaphors read like a police blotter — “Meth will get the women and children

— and he didn’t want to do women and children.

He didn’t know that, though. Method Man is a rough, rugged street dude, but all the girls love him.” Method Man is playful. “Myself, I was looking more like that I bring in rock ‘n’ roll,” says the RZA, whose rhyming

style is the opposite of laid-back.

The album was called Enter the Wu-Tang: 36 Chambers, and it wasn’t obvious that it would work. Everything the band had released so far was raw. Members contributed ideas and even some of their own money, but nobody knew how the RZA was going to pull it all together. He rented time in a Manhattan studio with the then-new editing technology Pro Tools and packed movie clips and old interviews into the music.

“It took me like a whole week or two to keep doing it,” says the RZA. “And the rest of the band didn’t know it.

They didn’t hear it until it was done.”

Five years after the group signed on to an idea, its 1997 followup, Wu-Tang Forever, debuted at No. 1.

It shipped 4 million copies in less than six months.

I asked the RZA if he actually had a 20-year plan.

“This may sound unbelievable to you,” he says, “but I told the crew in the basement meeting that from

my calculations, and from what I’m feeling, that this

will last 20 years. I said, ‘If we smart, we can plunge at that moment, or we could gracefully make a safe landing to 20 years.’ “

Safe is an understatement. The improbable success of the Wu-Tang Clan — their platinum plaques and world tours, alone and together — kicked open the door for other rap groups that wanted to make home-cooked music, for the real people.

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http://www.npr.org/blogs/ therecord/2013/04/08/176519640/the-wu-tang-clans20-year-plan

Queens of the Stone Age Rated R [Deluxe Edition]

Everyone needs a mantra. For Josh Homme, Nick Oliveri, and the rotating cast of Queens of the Stone Age, it was short, catchy, debauched: “Nicotine, Valium, Vicodin, marijuana, ecstasy, and alcohol.”

And for good measure: “C-c-c-c-c-cocaine.” Over and over again. Sixteen times. For the first song on their second album it was a rallying cry, the perfect chorus, a clever verse, and a sort of philosophical exposition. But it was also a misnomer.

Rated R was tagged as stoner rock almost immediately upon release in 2000, in part because of those seven substances, but mostly because the band rose from the ashes of early-1990s Palm Desert sun gods Kyuss. Homme, a plangent, riffobsessed guitarist, and Oliveri, a manic golem of a man and a mighty bass player, formed the backbone of that band with a mechanized sense of bang-andsmash structure. Studied repetition and precision are unlikely virtues for weedheads, but then these are unlikely musicians. When Homme formed the Queens after Kyuss disbanded, he carried that sense of exacting musculature with him but also brought a surprisingly seductive croon-- able to burrow low and also swing high into falsetto. After a modest, chugging self-titled debut, his frantic pal Oliveri joined the band.

What they forged was familiar but also wildly different from that stoner rock-- a term Homme has always rejected. In turn, they made one of the last great modern hard rock records and something deceptively tuneful, groove-bitten, and even melancholic. As soon as the mantra is laid bare, QOTSA begin to dance away, with things like

“The Lost Art of Keeping a Secret”, which amounts to a really great Blue Öyster Cult song, and the funk stroll of “Leg of Lamb”. Suddenly a pattern, from mellow grace notes to head-smash riffs, sometimes colliding into each other, begins to set in.

Homme has never been much of a lyricist, preferring to weave in fragments of thought and word puzzles.

Rated R is rarely about things, more often about feelings-- a chest-beating energy, a confusing head trip, or a dissipating sadness. Former Screaming Trees frontman and longtime Homme buddy Mark Lanegan began his relationship with the band on “In the Fade”, an intoxicating and solemn song that has gone a bit unnoticed as the years have passed.

Lanegan eventually became a full-time member of the band, but he was never better than the first time. When the song concludes, a reprise of the mantra kicks back in, a fitful reminder to shake the melodrama and remember the cocaine.

Ten years later, Rated R sounds vital, if a bit unusual.

Credible hard rock is a tough sell these days. It’s been three years since Queens released their last album, Era Vulgaris, and six years since Homme fired his old friend Oliveri-- a notorious party monster who consumed with vigor and often performed in the nude, his bass strapped across his crotch like a phallic totem. They grew bigger, recruiting Dave Grohl to play drummer and writing more riff beasts, but they’ve never been as fearless. To celebrate the decade since, the band has included the perfunctory bonus disc, with seven B-sides, including a goofy cover the Kinks’ “Who’ll Be the Next in Line”, an even sillier Carly Simon parody called “You’re So Vague”, and a surprisingly sly take on Romeo Void’s new wave classic, “Never Say Never”. They’ve also tacked on a nine-song live set from the 2000 Reading Festival that features Homme hilariously saying, “This is a song for you,” to the audience before four consecutive songs. Stoners.

But it’s the unlikely things about Rated R that stick with you: The bongos that open “Better Living Through Chemistry”; Lanegan’s existential wail on “In the Fade”; Rob Halford’s backing vocals on “Feel Good Hit of the Summer”. The gentle, acoustic interlude “Lightning Song” feels like a cold splash of sea water after Oliveri’s scorched-earth demon screech on “Tension Head”. There are no down or off moments here. “I Think I Lost My Headache” closes things with a squealing three-minute brass outro; it’s a typically unexpected move from a band making a surprising leap. Rated R didn’t defy convention because it didn’t seem to have a working text. Only a mantra.

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http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14515-rated-rdeluxe-edition/

3102 IV

9

toro y moi and me

As Toro y Moi, Chaz Bundick has been combining art-pop, funk and indie since 2001. His latest third album ‘Anything In Return’ has seen him develop his sound toward a refined, pop-influenced direction, with a wider range of influences from Arthur Russell to The-Dream.

Returning to Europe this summer, Toro stop off at Parklife as part of a huge Now Wave line-up on Sunday 9th June. We caught up with Chaz for a quick chat about his current projects and his approach to songwriting and production.

Angst Mag: How are things at your end? You just got back from South America right?

Toro y Moi: Yeah, it was awesome. Not crazy hot

down there, but it was cool. We were out there for about a week. I’ve done South America before – it’s a bit like the States meets Europe, or something. It’s a bit strange.

AM:You’re living in California now, having moved from South Carolina. How important do you think that’s been in your development towards a style of music that’s slightly different, with a bit more of a hook-based pop approach?

Toro: Yeah, I moved maybe a year and a half ago,

before the album was done. It’s way different – everything from the weather to the food to the aesthetic and feel of it. Overall, it’s a good vibe here.

I like it a lot.

That’s what I was trying to do, to make it a bit more of an R ‘n’ B, pop-based album. Really, I don’t think the move out here was the main factor. It’s kind of like me always wanting to make an album like this, combined with having the resources out here.

Being able to work in the studio like how I did with this album was definitely a big factor. I still sort of do everything at home and bring it into the studio to work on it later. My methods are still sort of the same. I’m not a big fan of working in the studio until it’s ready to be finalized.

AM: How’s it been being on the road, to places like South America, and consolidating the old and new material in the same set?

Toro: Overall, it’s mixed. Some of the new stuff is

really easy to do live and some stuff is a bit harder.

For this album, I really wanted the songwriting to be strong first and then you can see how the production can make it even stronger. So if we’re playing it live, it doesn’t have to have to have same arrangement.

That’s really one of the things that I learned from previous records, is that some of the songs weren’t that flexible when it came to playing them live; it just sounded like we were covering the song.

AM: Do you think that’s because of the music itself, or it’s you developing as a performer to become more comfortable to change arrangements and add an element of improvisation and flexibility?

Toro: I think maybe both. You sort of learn over time

that’s a combination of me feeling more comfortable and more ambitious with the songwriting and producing. A combination of those things makes it easier to be flexible and try new things, or even not do certain things; even if a song is a single, you might not play it because it’s not working live. I’ve been performing and playing shows since I was 15 now and I’ve always had that approach to where, if you’re not 100 per cent about it, then why are you doing it? No-one’s making you play the songs, so you don’t have to play it. The guys I’m playing with aren’t just studio musicians, they’re guys I’ve grown up with since I was in elementary school, college, middle school, high school, you know. We’ve done things together before this band, so we all make decisions to make the show as strong as possible

AM: You’ve done three albums worth of Toro y Moi material, and you’re now producing separately under the name of Les Sins. What is it that makes you desire a new project?

Toro: I’ve been wanting to write songs like these for

a long time and it just sort of came down to making time for it. These are very different songs – they’re producer-based and they’re not pop songs. The main motivation for Les Sins was to have a project that allows you to experiment without worrying about alienating any of your fans, and just sort of explore the whole electronic music genre. I think

that it’s always fun to experiment with stuff and when you keep it all under one name, it makes it hard sometimes because certain assumptions are made after you’ve made your first few albums. So it’s allowed me to do what I want.

AM: What’s it been like releasing material through Dan Snaith’s (Caribou, Daphni) label? Is he a good person to work closely with?

Toro: Oh, definitely. He’s an awesome guy and he’s

an idol of mine, for sure. I’ve always looked up to him. We went on tour back in 2010 and I just got to see how he worked, and how the band works. It’s pretty amazing, the work ethic they share. He’s such a smart dude as well. Working with Dan is great.

AM: How are you feeling about playing at Parklife this year? Are you looking forward to returning to Manchester?

Toro: I remember playing at The Deaf Institute. That

was awesome. We’ve never really had the chance to spend too much time in Manchester, but playing in England and Ireland, it’s got more of a stress-free feel, for sure. [In America], having to travel in a van and fly every day, it’s a little bit harder to get in the groove of things. I’m looking forward to it. The music scene and the way the crowd receives that genre of music, everyone’s a little bit more experienced and more into it.

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http://www.independent.co.uk/student/parklifeweekender/the-parklife-interview-toro-y-moi-8599583. html