The third cassette release in the Bibliotapes label’s pairing of iconic books to music finds Norwich’s adaptable electronic sound artist Audio Obscura (Neil Stringfellow) providing a soundtrack to George Orwell’s chillingly accurate Nineteen Eighty-Four, released to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the its publication.
To be clear, this is not an opportunity for Stringfellow to cover, or even offer an alternative to, the (controversial) soundtrack put together by Eurythmics for the movie released in the year that the book was set in; this is about interpreting the actual text through the medium of completely newly-imagined music, and, a bit like a media-controlled slogan in Nineteen Eighty-Four itself, for the purposes of this we should profusely deny the existence of said film.
What that means is that his accompaniment to the daily, mandatory ritual of venting and screaming in collective anger on ‘Two Minutes Hate’ is presented as a bleak, primal, dissonant noisefest set to a insistent post-industrial beat; the pieces soundtracking the scenes depicting Winston, the book’s protagonist, and his attempts to wilfully evade surveillance and the controlling hand of the Party are freighted with both a pastoral, naturalistic serenity and a sort of nagging tension, filled with mournful strings and birdsong; the scenes set inside Room 101 are laced with a nagging, slow-motion sense of foreboding (and the displaced voice of Frank Skinner).
In Stringfellow’s hands, the haunting familiarity of ‘Oranges And Lemons’ is presented twice, first as a shimmering, gauzy memory resplendent in childhood innocence, and later laced with harshly-processed impending operatically-voiced doom, a vestigial scrap of something that didn’t get fully processed in a memory hole.
Something about the way that Stringfellow has crafted these pieces seems to simultaneously remind us of the unflinching horror of daily life that Orwell predicted in his dystopian musings, while also presenting a sense of resignation and dismay that this is the world we currently occupy – and one that we have willingly submitted to.
Nineteen Eighty-Four by Audio Obscura is released on June 8 2019 by Bibliotapes.
Neil Campbell, Alexander Tucker, Daniel O’Sullivan
Plasma Splice Trifle pairs together Vibracathedral Orchestra member Neil Campbell’s Astral Social Club project with Alexander Tucker and Daniel O’Sullivan’s Grumbling Fur. Consisting of four lengthy, many-layered, pieces occupying the electronic music’s most eclectic hinterlands, Plasma Splice Trifle was recorded over the course of three years, each piece overflowing with ideas and a constantly-moving inner turbulence.
Ahead of the album’s release, Further. spoke to Neil Campbell about the collaboration.
You hadn’t worked with Daniel or Alexander before this album. How did this collaboration come about?
I honestly can’t remember! I think we were probably hanging out after a Grumbling Fur or Vibracathedral Orchestra gig and it was mentioned by one of us – probably either Daniel or Alex – and it seemed like a good idea, in as much as none of us could imagine how such a collaboration would turn out. No better reason than that for me!
The four tracks on the LP were started in 2015 and completed last year, and involved time spent in three different recording settings. How did the process of writing these pieces work? Was there a plan for what the pieces would be like, or was each track conceived and developed relatively spontaneously?
I don’t think of it as ‘writing’, more ‘doing’, always in the present, without much of a plan. I really like how Grumbling Fur work – they’re really open to quick decisions and where they may lead you with a good sense of play / fun too.
Most of the record was generated from a day’s recording together at Tower Gardens, with three of the tracks having their genesis in an open-ended hour long live jam. We then each took the recordings away and sculpted them into four very distinct shapes and worked from there, adding and editing where appropriate, passing sounds back and forth through the e-aether. We then pulled the tracks into their final form with another studio session together at the end.
‘Back To The Egg’ And ‘Toejam Boxdrum’ are very busy pieces, with lots and lots of layered detail. I’m always intrigued with very densely-packed tracks as to when you know you’re finished versus a temptation to just keep adding details – more and more layers, more and more sounds – and with three musicians that feels like it could be a challenge to know when to stop. How did that work?
Strangely, ‘Toejam Boxdrum’ is actually a really simple construct, with most of the sounds all coming from this initial jam, which was all recorded live to 2-track. We then added very little. So I guess it’s not always the way it seems.
But it’s a good question – all three of us like to work that maximal / minimal dichotomy, so there is a danger of, ahem, over-egging it. I guess someone says, “Enough!” or, “Too much!” and we trust each other to go along with their vision. ‘Toejam…’ would have been even simpler if it was left to me, but Daniel and Alex each had small additions they wanted to add underneath the initial jam, so we tried them and they worked. But, equally, if they hadn’t worked then we’d have left them out.
In contrast, ‘Three Years Apart’ is more sparse, though it also has a denseness when the drones and fluttering tones start to mesh together. To me it sounds a lot like some of John Cale’s work on the first Velvets album – urgent and expressive, but also possessing a dark spirituality.
Conversely, that’s quite a dense track from our point of view, with myriad layers of strings and processed strings.
‘Ozone Antifreeze Intelligence’ seems to be channelling the work of various celebrated groups emerging out of Germany in the 70s. Are those groups a major influence for you all? The vocals on that track are mesmerising – I like the interplay between the main vocal and the bassier voices.
Sure, I’ve enjoyed loads of those German bands for a long time now, and I’m sure the same goes for the other two. Some bands chime with me more than others though, and I’ve got a particular emotional attachment to the whole Cluster / Neu! axis. I think ‘Ozone…’ is my favourite track on the record.
After the initial sounds went through the Grumbling Fur mangle / spanglemaker, it was a very pretty instrumental that I added some sounds around the edges to. But I think we all thought it needed just an extra something, probably to create a more direct human connection. So when we met up for the final session we each brought one line of resonant text with us and sang them one at a time, pretty much first take, and the whole song unfolded from there.
As I said, I like to work quickly, and Grumbling Fur naturally work like that too. We’re all happy to take the germ of an idea and just go with it to see where it leads. Added to that, I love how those two naturally, effortlessly harmonise with each other when they sing together on their own records, like it’s the expression of a deep friendship you’re hearing, so I really wanted to get some of that on the record just for my own kicks.
You each created a piece of artwork to go with the album. How integral to your music is that visual accompaniment?
The initial idea was to each create a piece of collage art so we could layer them all on top of each other for maximum confusion/density. When we had each done out piece we realised this probably wasn’t going to work as well as just letting the pieces breath on their own. An example of someone calling, “Too much!”, and us not being too hidebound by our original concepts to throw them out the window when they weren’t working. Improvisation / praxis!
Plasma Splice Trifle by Astral Social Club & Grumbling Fur Time Machine Orchestra is released on June 7 2019 by VHF Records. Read the Further. review here.
Since arriving in 2009, LA’s Sweatson Klank (Thomas Wilson) has played around with hip-hop’s ever-flexible template, veering from heavily sample-based cuts to those built up from his own mastery of vintage synthesizer sound programming. For Super Natural Delights, this musical polymath offers up a sun-drenched series of twelve relaxed pieces showcasing his enduring ability to mix instrumental dexterity with engaging rhythms.
‘Walking On Air’ is the first of many highlights on the album, built up as it is on a bed of rich, elastic basslines and 808 beats, all carefully overlaid with gauzy strings and languid flute hooks to present a crisp, carefree, summery simplicity. Elsewhere, ‘What A Night’ captures a jazzy, 80s atmosphere with squelchy synth lines, snatches of vocals and uncluttered drum machine rhythms, while the sedate ‘Island Life Calling’ sounds like the kind of sultry, inoffensive jazz muzak played on the porch at a branch of Bahama Breeze, replete with the sound of ice cubes rattling around in a Mai Tai and a crisp beat prised straight from a vintage Sadé number.
Towering above everything else is the chunky, all-too-brief slowmo disco of ‘Fat Cookie’, containing a groove so infectious it could literally cause a musical pandemic.
Super Natural Delights by Sweatson Klank is released June 7 2019 by Friends Of Friends.
Plasma Splice Trifle pairs together Vibracathedral Orchestra member Neil Campbell’s Astral Social Club project with Alexander Tucker and Daniel O’Sullivan’s Grumbling Fur, and follows the duo’s collaborations with organ and stuffed toy enthusiast Charlemagne Palestine.
Recorded over the course of three years, Plasma Splice Trifle consists of four longform pieces full of arresting sonic detail and overflowing with ideas, each one possessing an inner turbulence resulting in layer upon layer of engaging ideas. ‘Back To The Egg’ bespeaks humankind’s backwards motion rather than its enlightenment, moving forward on an unstoppable pulse across which all manner of textures are permitted to develop – vocal loops, percussive splinters, the sounds of babies crying and gurgling wordlessly. The piece is placed in direct contrast with ‘Three Years Apart’, its restless clustering of synths, strings, drones and stuttering non-melodies swirling with a kind of psychedelic elegiac rapture.
The standout piece here is ‘Ozone Antifreeze Intelligence’, which progresses on a muted, heavily-phased rhythm at the intersection of dub’s atmospherics and a mid-70s Germanic motorik groove, offset by beautiful, questioning, haunting vocals and a hypnotic, cinematic piano refrain. The effect is like staring at a distant horizon, the entire landscape taking on a hazy, amorphous, liquified otherness.
Plasma Splice Trifle by Astral Social Club & Grumbling Fur Time Machine Orchestra is released on June 7 2019 by VHF Records.
When I interviewed Brighton quartet Fujiya & Miyagi two years ago around the time of the reissue of their second album, 2006’s Transparent Things, singer and guitarist David Best expressed his admiration for Talking Heads and what he called their “awkward funk” sound. Perhaps more so than on any other Fujiya & Miyagi album, that reverence for that slightly off-kilter groove can be heard right across Flashback, containing seven of the band’s most precisely-executed cuts to date.
In the last couple of years, both Best and fellow F&M founder Steve Lewis have busied themselves with side projects – Lewis’s crystalline torch songs with Johanna Bramli as Fröst and Best with Fujiya & Miyagi bandmate Ed Chivers as the Terry Riley-inspired art-rock of Ex-Display Model. Surprisingly, none of that time out from their main group seems to have had any sort of influence on these new songs. You won’t find any fuzzy introspection here – just solid drumming from Chivers, elastic basslines from Ben Adamo and an effortless interplay between Best’s signature guitar styles and Lewis’s sinewy and infectious electronic patterns.
That tightness provides the backdrop to some of Best’s most oblique and deceptively humorous lyrics – a semi-political character assassination rant on the closing track ‘Gammon’, a bitter tirade against self-importance on ‘Personal Space’ and a brilliantly ironic (and astute) rumination on our modern obsessions on ‘Fear Of Missing Out’. The highlight among highlights is ‘For Promotional Use Only’, a low-slung, many-layered slow-builder that plays on one of the most mundane of piracy risk warnings and turns it into a hypnotic, restless epic, Best’s vocal taking on a distinctly paranoid hue as it progresses.
Flashback by Fujiya & Miyagi is released by Impossible Objects Of Desire on May 31 2019.
FRUM is the electronic pop project of Jenny Augustudóttir Kragesteen. Hailing from the Faroe Islands, an archipelago of nearly twenty islands between Iceland and Norway in the Atlantic, Kragesteen has quietly issued a handful of singles over the past couple of years that highlight her dreamy, gently heartfelt approach to pop.
Her latest single, ‘Ocean’, follows on from last year’s anthem to defiant individualism, ‘Beat’, a song that played with the rhythms and textures of R&B and hip-hop intersected by a buzzing synth riff and deceptively uplifting chorus. ‘Ocean’ finds FRUM racing headlong into euphoric territory again, blending springy electronics, chunky beats and a carefree, swirling vocal together in a mesmerising displaying of summery, emotional pop songwriting prowess.
FRUM’s debut album is expected to land in 2020.
What is your earliest memory?
I sometimes feel like I can remember when I was in my mother’s womb but I know that’s not true – I just wish it was. It’s actually probably when I was two or three years old, sleeping on my mother’s chest or maybe sitting outside on a swing, looking at the blue sky.
What’s the best piece of advice anyone’s given you?
Be honest.
When are you most productive or inspired?
Definitely when I’m out in open nature. I get overwhelmed by a powerful feeling that everything is a part of everything and that I am somehow connected to it. I’m also quite productive when I’m sad and when I feel lonely. Being creative always makes me feel better.
‘Ocean’ is out now on hfn music. Listen to ‘Ocean’ at Spotify.
Electronic pop singer-songwriter Niki Kand was born in Tehran but is now based in Liverpool.
Kand released two singles in 2018 and has just issued ‘Naughty Boy’, a subversive, slick track produced with Sweden’s Summer Heart (David Alexander Lomelino) that documents the messy collapse of a relationship thanks to infidelity.
Niki Kand will release her debut EP, Pinkish, later this year. While she continues prepping the songs for the EP, we subjected her to a handful of searching questions as part of our new 3 Questions micro-feature series.
What is your earliest memory?
I’ve got two sisters and I vividly remember the day my youngest sister was born. My aunt was looking after us and she was supposed to take us to the hospital to see my mum and my sister. I remember I cried all the way to the hospital just because I wasn’t happy with the way my poor aunt had done my hair. Now, when I look back, I can’t imagine how annoying I had been as a kid!
What’s the best piece of advice anyone’s given you?
My dad always tells me to do my best but forget about the result. I like that state of having no expectations.
When are you most productive or inspired?
Inspiration comes from everywhere for me, but I’m mostly inspired when I meet and talk to people I don’t know. My productivity drops when I’m hungry, my phone isn’t silent and my workload is overwhelming – any one of those would be enough to affect me.
New York is a fickle mistress: all are welcome (subject to having the right immigration papers), its charms are universal, but few are invited to stay forever. Each and every time I visit, I hope that at some point the city will just absorb me, cling onto me, plead with me to hang around for as long as I want, rather than sending me back to JFK feeling as rejected and unwanted as a cast-off, spurned lover; like I have no place there; like I just don’t have what it takes to make it there.
It was in that state of mind that I arrived back into London from New York on early Friday morning, and it was in that state of mind that I listened to I Am Easy To Find by The National. This was possibly a mistake. Notwithstanding the mood of this album which, like much of The National’s music, has a brooding, maudlin quality – if that’s what you’re drawn to, which I generally am, it seems – there’s one lyric on the fragile, electronics-laden title track that seemed to be intended just for me: “You were never much of a New Yorker / It wasn’t in your eyes.” To me, it reaffirmed how I felt right then: you just didn’t fit in; you’ll never completely fit in; feel free to come back, but don’t expect us to let you stay.
Even though that track arrives almost a third of the way into the album, it was that quality of emotional turbulence and displacement that I heard throughout I Am Easy To Find. I’m sure that tracks like ‘Hey Rosey’ (with guest vocals from Bowie collaborator Gail Ann Dorsey) or the stuttering, complicated trademark Bryan Devendorf rhythms of opening track ‘You Had Your Soul With You’ and ‘Where Is Her Head’, or even Kate Stables’ plaintive ruminations of the title track do have some sort of transcendent, euphoric quality to them – if that’s what you’re seeking – but for me I just wanted the darkness, and that’s what I found in this album. I wanted to feel shit about my lot and the non-linear rock gestures – processed and infused with copious synths and electronic rhythms with the assistance of Mouse On Mars’ Jan St. Werner – all sitting restlessly beneath Matt Berninger’s quietly expressive vocals, enabled that. Maybe one day I’ll acknowledge the sparse and tender balladry of ‘Kansas’ or the shimmering synth textures of the duet with Lisa Hannigan on ‘So Far So Fast’, or maybe I’ll forever associate this record with feeling jetlagged and empty.
If the album spoke to me in a way that suited my mood at that particular point, the accompanying twenty-five minute black and white film, directed by Mike Mills, left me with profuse tears running down my cheeks; tears that were years and years in the making.
The film charts a life, from birth to death; through joy and sadness; from innocence gained to innocence lost; the discovery and development of oneself; the anguish of relationships; the first meetings and last goodbyes; the endless, endless, endless arguments; the wanting of different things; the inexorable passage of time; the purposefulness and futility of existence. The central character, played vividly and sensitively by Alicia Vikander, never ages throughout the film, even though all those around her do, while the captions – acting as the film’s dialogue – are largely culled from tracks on the album, with the words of ‘Dust Swirls In Strange Light’ and ‘Hairpin Turns’ suddenly making infinitely more sense once coupled to the visuals.
It takes a few short scenes to figure out what Mills’ story is showing us, but the gravity of what is unfolding becomes apparent when Vikander races abruptly into teenagehood, with the attendant and all-too-common hatred of her mother, despite everything she provided her daughter. There’s something about the duration of the film, and the way songs from the album – with all their evocative traits of unresolvedness – soundtrack Vikander’s passage through her life that takes its toll on you; if Mills had compressed her life into the length of a single three-minute song, you’d have no opportunity to adjust to what is inevitably going to happen to everyone she has ever loved or cared about, and then her own passing. Instead, by stretching this out over an intermediate length of time – too long for a promo video, too short for a feature film – the progress feels unswervingly, unbearably, savagely languid.
The film of I Am Easy To Find is thus harrowing viewing in the way extreme horror films are, and yet everything the camera shows you is utterly quotidian, unexceptional, unremarkable – reflections of your own life, maybe. As with the tone I was drawn to on the album, perhaps it was the mood I was in and my own vantage point from probably halfway along my life’s own twenty-five minute high- and lowlights reel – that point where you start to acknowledge your parents’ mortality, where your kids don’t idolise you anymore, where nothing that was previously carefree and innocent seems to be straightforward any longer – this beautiful film made difficult viewing for me. There is plenty of unbridled joy here, I’m sure, but I was mostly oblivious to any of that.
That’s all I have to say. Maybe the entire I Am Easy To Find package will affect you this way and leave an indelible mark on you like it already has for me; maybe it won’t. Maybe you’ll see the happiness in all of this that I can’t see. Maybe your eyes will suggest you belong in New York after all. Maybe you’ll brush off your teenage daughter’s disdain for you or the feeling that you’re exactly where you were yesterday, last year, a decade ago – just older. Take a listen (or a watch) and decide for yourself. I’ll still be right here. I am easy to find. I’m not going anywhere.
I Am Easy To Find by The National is out now on 4AD.
Radish is the second album by Brooklynite Nathan Phillips’s Big Bend. Here you find layers of guitar and piano combining with electronics, processing, backward effects and a mournful sheen, designed to evoke the inexorable passing of time and the development – then eventual collapse – of memories.
While it’s not necessarily an album in which you can identity much joy, the inclusion of vocals from Phillips’s mother on tracks like ‘Swinging Low’ creates a wistful, almost folksy contrast with some of the other pieces, her voice having a clarion quality that glides effortlessly over her son’s inventive musical tapestry.
‘1000 Ways’ and ‘Long Time’ are complex, tightly-woven pieces full of heartbreaking emotion, supported by an accompanying architecture of noisy, unpredictable sounds, while reversed guitar, meditative piano and a restless vari-speed synth loop allows ‘12’ – 15’’ to convey just as much as Phillips’s haunting vocal tracks.
The album’s central piece is ‘Can’t Get Around’, wherein whining guitar is blended with a vocal processed into pure texture; the track has a post-rocky, dubbiness where Phillips’s vocal seems to bespeak of everything from lethargy to demotivation to emotional helplessness. Even when the track approaches a sort of resigned euphoria, it is still fully laden with tension.
Radish by Big Bend was released by Ohie Records on May 10 2019.
Craig Leon cemented his reputation in the late 1970s by becoming the go-to producer for New York’s nascent punk scene, lending his control room nous to early releases by The Ramones, Blondie, Richard Hell and, in 1977, Suicide’s eponymous debut. Four years prior to that, Leon had discovered a book that outlined the theory that alien visitors had colonised Earth, inspiring him to create the cult album pairing of Nommos (1981) and Visiting (1982). The best part of forty years later, Leon decided it was high time for a sequel.
Crucially, though much has changed in the intervening years, for The Canon Leon decided to deploy more or less the same synthesizer kit that he’d used for Nommos and Visiting, as well as the voice of his partner Cassell Webb. That gives key pieces like ‘The Twenty Second Step As Well As The Tenth’ a retro-futuristic period continuity to its droning, layered tones and percussive high end, as well as a rich, mystical underpinning. The slow, haunting evolutions of the expansive ‘The Gates Made Plain’, and the Marty Rev-style unswerving sharp-edged synths of ‘The Respondent In Dispute’ stand out as pivotal moments in Leon’s overdue conclusion of his conceptual odyssey.
Anthology of Interplanetary Folk Music Vol. 2: The Canon by Craig Leon is released by Rvng Intl on May 10 2019.
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