“(Step Into The) Brite Lite”

In November of last year, a little-known Chicago pop band by the name of The Fake Fictions played their final show.  Why did they thrown in the towel? The official reason was to free up the band so they could go to the moon; this made sense, for The Fake Fictions constantly hit stellar heights with their ridiculously rambunctious brand of pop, and it’s only natural that they’d retire to the higher spheres.

The Fake Fictions were the modern day equivalent to the garage and basement new wave bands of the 70s, just a bunch of friends (or in this case husband and wife and friend) banging out a joyous noise for no one’s benefit save themselves.  In this noble pursuit The Fake Fics welcomed incorporated many sounds;  slap-happy drumming that boils down punk rhythms into an infectious bounce: bass lines that alternately fizz with the hooky sweetness of the best bubblegum pop and motor forth with a chugging relentlessness; and the wild card, Nick Ammerman’s guitar, careening from freakout solos to angular melodies back to needlepoint atmospherics.  Neither Nick nor wife Sarah will be winning American Idol with their singing talents, but the amateur enthusiasm that fuels their yelps conveys more happy release than any well-mannered singer is capable of summoning.

Magic Infinity, the posthumous E.P. that is the band’s final missive to the world, closes out their brilliant career in incandescent style.  Punky opening cut Parallel World (included in this week’s Monday Mixtown) layers guitars both jangly, spacey, and fuzzy over relentless bass and drum bashing. The chorus of  ”Ahyahyahyahyah/It’s a Parallel World where I belong!” is one of the catchiest in the band’s catalog.  Brite Lite, the track accompanying this post,  skews more towards the post-punky side of things, with its scribbled guitar reverb and misappropriation of the Be My Baby beat. At it’s core, however, the track is still pure pop; the songs “uh huh/oh yeah” chant will be more than happy to set up residence in your brain.

The quintessential Fake Fictions songs boast can’t-slow-me-down tempos, singalong vocals, and demand to be blasted as loud as your ears can tolerate.  Their music was made to soundtrack summer days spent speeding down the highway; one summer in Chicago their third full-length album Krakatoa became my default driving-down-Lakeshore-Drive selection. Though the band is now gone, my many happy memories exceeding the posted speed limit with their music endure.  Fake Fictions, you are remembered.

You can download everything The Fake Fictions released while they existed from their website here.

“900 Miles”

“Cotton Eyed Joe”

Although Friends Of Modern Music exists primarily to champion new music, on occasion I’ll feature an album from Way Back When than either suffers from lack of contemporary appreciation or simply merits continued discussion.  Continuing the week-long celebration of all things Chicago, the first entry in the Way Back When’s series is a record that was underappreciated in its own time and remains so today, yet one that encapsulates the creative foment and fertility which ran rife through the music of Chicago’s African-American artists in the 1960s: The New Folk Sound Of Terry Callier.

Although a collection of traditional folk standards (not uncommon for the era), Callier stamps each song on this record with such highly individual character that they become irrevocably his.  More than anything else, this is achieved by the deadliest weapon in Callier’s arsenal: his heartbreaker of a voice. In many ways, Callier serves as a mirror to similarly folk/blues oriented singers like Nina Simone and Odetta; where the gravely, low tones in their vocals convey not just the long roads of their lives but also a kind of masculine imprimatur on their femininity, Terry Callier’s high, tremulous voice possesses a feminine sensibility, at once both vulnerable and assertive.  Like Simone and Odetta, Callier’s voice is the blues, the concurrent tumult of defeat and indefatigability, of hardship and perseverance, capable of welding pain and sweet joy in simultaneity.

Moreover, the songs on The New Folk Sound set the ideal backdrop for Callier’s vocals.  Spare and somber atmospherics dominate, as Callier fingerpicks delicate melodies from jazz chordal voicings over a backdrop of doubled contrabasses (John Tweedle and Terbour Attenborough, about whom I can find little information). The instrumentation betrays an obvious familiarity and fondness for ‘Trane and Ornette, in other words the vanguard of African-American musicianship at the time, but is in practice not at all jarring or confrontation but rather subtle, almost ethereal. Typically one bassist deploys vaguely jazzy pizzicato figures while the other creates hazily emotive backdrops by bowing his instrument.  Though the diaphanous and nuanced affect of this instrumentation can be best appreciated on vinyl (indeed this is a record where the sound of the needle in the groove adds exponentially to the experience), one can find themselves transported to a highly personalized and emotionally rich interior headspace even listening in mp3 format.

Opening cut and instant knockout 900 Miles sets the pattern; first Callier’s plaintive fingerpicking swiftly followed by  the doubled contrabasses, carving out a bleak, ruminative sonic space.  Then Callier’s vocals enter, all heaviness and weariness, and the popular “vagrant song” of ’60s folk contrivance (900 Miles was originally popularized by Woody Guthrie) is transformed into tour-de-force of longing and determined return. Callier begins to strum insistently on his guitar and Tweedle and Attenborough increase their activity on the bass as well, plucking just slightly out of phase from one another, echoing the runt-a-tunt of an accelerating railcar. But there is no true return when one has lost their home, and for the first but not last time Callier is able to recontextualize a traditional American folk tune into the striving for permanence that marked the Civil Rights era. “I hate to hear that lonesome whistle blow,” Callier nearly howls at the songs end, and we know for all his declarations he won’t be finding home anytime soon.

More than any other track on The New Folk Sound, Terry Callier’s complete ownership of Cotton Eyed Joe marks his ability as an artist to forge interpretations of existing work imbued with a new meaning. For anyone whose sole exposure to Cotton Eyed Joe, a song that predates the American Civil War, is the execrable eurodance rendition by Rednex, seemingly ubiquitous in 1990s, Terry Callier’s interpretation will be a revelation.  Once again beginning with a subdued fingerpicked guitar figure, Callier’s voice carries a weight of sadness that feels almost unbearable.   This is a song about losing the love of your life, and depth of that loss is palpable in Callier’s vocals (as well as the fragile interplay between plucked and bowed bass). Yet the song carries a hint of something beyond sadness. One of the widespread interpretations of Cotton Eyed Joe is that the narrator, presumably white due to the songs popularity in white Southern dance halls, has lost his woman to a man who’s eyes appear like balls of cotton in his face; in other words, a black man.  In Callier’s hands, the racial undertones inherent in the folk song’s history are thrown in stark reflect, but are also subverted. This is the black man reclaiming his identity as a human being from the caricature of minstrelsy, locating a social dignity even in his personal loss.  With the barest of tools, Terry Callier has completely flipped the song in on its own tradition, and in doing so making it all the more potent.

Although recorded in the early 1960s at the height of the folk revival (the record should be thought as contemporaneous with early Bob Dylan or Odetta’s “jazz” period), The New Folk Sound Of Terry Callier languished until 1968, and Callier himself would not record again until 1972 when he began a string of deservedly lauded jazz-folk releases for the legendary Chess label’s Cadet subsidiary.  Today, though he has been subject to a modest revival in stature, Callier’s earliest work remains relatively overlooked in terms of his catalogue; The New Folk Sound was not remastered until 2006, and one could argue that the effort was not quite sufficient. Still, nothing can diminish the very human power captured in the grooves of this record, and few serve as better soundtrack to an evening of quiet introspection.

Buy it from Dusty Groove on CD or LP.

“Aaron”

This week marks the 173rd birthday of my much beloved former home, Du Sable’s famed city on the lake, the one and only Chicago!  Okay, technically the date of Du Sable’s  founding of the original Chicago trading colony is unknown, but for convenience’s sake we’ll recognize the March 4th anniversary of the city’s incorporation as Chi-town’s birth date. What makes this city so great?  By and large, my love for Chicago stems from the panoply of amazing bands that call the Windy City home, who not only all happen to be incredibly nice people but who also produce some of today’s most exciting music; and in honor of Chicago’s 173rd, this week’s posts will showcase the best of the many insanely talented artists operating therein.

And what better way to begin than with White Mystery?  Alex and Francis, the siblings White, embody all the above described qualities that define Chicago music: humble and approachable,  pursuing the higher calling of their personal muses while leaving behind mighty slabs of wax as artifacts of their journey.  Anyone familiar with Alex’s past work with The Red Orchestra will know that she possess THE most powerful, knock-your-socks-out-your-shoes incredible voices in rock n’ roll today, and with a guitar sound just as big to match.  In fact, what undermined much of her previous work was that her voice and guitar simply overpowered the rest of her band, and her tunes wound up at odds with themselves because of it.

Enter her brother Francis, perhaps the only other human being who could match the musical bombast of his sister.  The addition of Francis’s thunderous rhythms (and perfectly complimentary backing yelp) completes Alex’s vocals and guitar; on their self-titled debut longplayer, White Mystery create a storm of sound more cacophonous than ensembles with quadruple their numbers.  Opening cut White Widow is the perfect distillation of everything that’s great about the band; Francis beats out a frentic, galloping rhythm, his manic cymbal smashes counterpoint to Alex’s elemental guitar riff.  In comes Alex’s skyscraper of a voice, laying out what should be evident form the get-go: “You can’t tame me!”  Then somehow her guitar sound gets even fatter and fuzzier, and Francis swings back around with a rejoinder in his own mad yelp, not as powerful as his sister’s but perfectly complimentary: “You can’t tame me!”

White Widow is there and gone in 75 seconds, with all the brute suddenness of a tornado or flash flood.  In fact, only one song on the LP runs past the 3 minute mark, but White Mystery’s songs don’t need more than a few seconds to imprint themselves on your brain.  The tracks on the record mostly flow, or perhaps spontaneously combust is the better term, in and out of one another, leaving the impression of having witness the band’s incendiary concert.  In between  fraternal exhortations (“I stand here with my brother,” “C’mon Francis!”), Alex declares herself an undeniable force of nature, self-empowered (Respect Yourself, Don’t Hold My Hand) yet most concerned with quotidian pleasures (as in Farmer‘s lyric: “you feed all the pigeons on the way to the park,” or in all of Take A Walk).  While Alex’s riffs are mostly brutally simple, they are infectiously catchy and given far greater depth by Franicis’ manic drum patterns the choice backdrop for vocal pyrotechnics.

Aaron, the track selected to accompany this post is, like much of the cuts on White Mystery, wholly representative of that at which White Mystery excel.  Another primal yet catchy riff, rumbling drums setting the stage for Alex’s playful dominance, as she entreats Aaron  to “pretend to love ourselves.”  The song is rife with an undercurrent of self-incrimination, with references to “my mistake to do cocaine” and “my mistake not to communicate” underlying the desire of pretending to love oneself.  Though this tension gives the song a strange poignancy, it’s breakneck hurtle (130 seconds in length) and undeniable exuberance locate the joy even in such self-criticism.

White Mystery is simply a sheer joy of a record, just as White Mystery are simply a sheer joy of a band; and I give it my highest recommendation. Check out another cut from the LP in the Monday Mixtown below.  You can buy it from the band themselves here, or catch them at one of their killer live shows (I plan on attending their performance at the SxSW HoZac Showcase…if you’ll be in Austin, you should too!).

2010 is already shaping up to be quite formidable for new releases.  Two months in and the young year has already graced us with albums that seek to force their respective (and at times staid) genres into new territory, by artists like composer Daníel Bjarnason, orch-pop maestro Owen Pallet, minimalist jazz groovers Jaga Jazzist & the schismatic noise-pop of Night Control.  2010 has also served to display the power still latent in old forms when their potential is realized, as can be heard in the mondo-garage of White Mystery, the jangle-pop of The Art Museums and Fake Fictions, and the synthscapes of Robert AA Lowe.

Thus, the first entry in The Friends Of Modern Music’s weekly series Monday Mixtown: a retrospective of new music I’ve enjoyed from the first two months of 2010.  The mix is available both as a downloadable zipped file or as a stream, both of which are below. Full tracklist below the jump.

download: http://www.mediafire.com/?mxmtexz3gzg

stream :

Tracklist:

1. Robert AA Lowe & Rose Lazar – Fantomoj de la Vitro Domo (from the Thrill Jockey release Eclipses)

2. The Art Museums – Oh Modern Girls (from the Woodsist release Rough Frame)

3. The Fake Fictions – Parallel World (from their free, self-released swan song Magic Infinity)

4. Parenthetical Girls – Evelyn McHale (from the Slender Means Society release Privilege, Part One: On Death & Endearments)

5. Harlem – Pissed (from the Matador release Hippies)

6. Jaga Jazzist – Prognissekongen (from the Ninja Tune release One-Armed Bandit)

7. AFCGT – New Punk 27 (from the Sub Pop release AFCGT)

8. That’s The Wizard That Stole My Powers – Forget Everything I Just Said (from their free, downloadable e-release I Shelve You, Ornament)

9. White Mystery – White Widow (from  their self-released LP White Mystery)

10. Night Control – Take Apart (from the Kill Shaman release Life Control)

11. Owen Pallett – Flare Gun (from the Domino release Heartland)

12. Daníel Bjarnason – Processions III. Red-handed (from the Bedroom Community release Processions)

13. Bonus Cut

One of the more interesting threads to follow throughout music criticism in 2009 was the back and forth that centered about the New Yorker’s Sasha Frere-Jones assertion that 2009 was the year hip hop died. With respect to mainstream vitality, I can only say “I sure as shit hope so!” The death of hip hop as the commercial sound de rigueur would be an incredible boon to the music itself; as I see it, freedom from the confines of commercial media would allow the artists to explore more personal and idiosyncratic approaches to the art form without feeling the need to kowtow to ephemeral trends in pursuit of a hollow, and increasingly fleeting, “success.”

Indeed, the further you got from the major label marquee, the more you’d find hip hop to be just as vital and far-ranging a form of expression in 2009 as ever. Case in point: on Technicolor the Indianapolis-by-way-of-NYC trio Holistic prove that as long as there are great beats and rhymes there will be great hip hop. Emcees Iz Inferno and Rad Nice bring the same blend of complimentary cadences and intuitive verse-trading that was the hallmark of vintage A Tribe Called Quest, and both also display a talent for blurring the deadly serious with the silly to devastating effect. The same attitude of studious irreverence further marks the production work of the Iron Sheik, who stays mindful of the genre’s roots while packing Technicolor with enough globe and genre-spanning samples to give The Ecstatic a run for its money. More importantly the production creates the bizarrely perfect backdrop for each song; African guitar licks and hazy sitar samples set the scene for a dubbed out square dance on ‘Ho Down,’ and while the schmaltzy strings and crooner sample set the introspective mood of ‘Yesterday,’ the unease and uncertainty in Inferno’s verses is echoed by the bed of washed out scratching which ebbs and flows beneath the song like an undercurrent.  Yet for all its wit and brains, the real thing that makes Technicolor great is how much fun it is to play at incredibly loud volumes, and how insistently its songs will rattle about your head long afterward.

Check out more jams here, buy it here.

“Folkanization Act III”

“Blue Lute”

Without a doubt, my happiest discovery in the year 2009 was Porter Records. A Florida based label that began five years ago reissuing long out-of-print 70s spiritual jazz, Porter has since gone on to release some of the finest contemporary avant-jazz (see yesterday’s post), experimental improv, deturned hip hop, expressionist free rock, hyper idiosyncratic singer-songwriters and, in the case of Francesco Giannico, stunningly gorgeous sound collages that finger-paint with Fennesz-inspired electronics, field recordings, found sounds, and snippets of lute, piano, trapkit and guitar.

The more traditional instruments are used as sparingly as an exotic spice, buried low in the mix to subtly manufacture ambience or else dropped in at key moments of emotional transition to tie the whole piece together with a lovely yet invariably sad theme. At times, Giannico’s work on Folkanization simply defies tidy classical categorizations like ‘composition,’ ‘song,’ or ‘musique concrete;’ over the course of one or more tracks Giannico carefully constructs an immersive world in sound, giving depth and character to each creation through all the means at his disposal. The sound of the street protest that opens ‘Prestal Som Fajcit Kolkokrát,’ the curtains of soft static that drape ‘Blue Lute,’ the digitally mangled sample of what sounds like Arabic fiddle that flits throughout ‘Jokio Pagrindo Mums,’ and the distant recordings of strummed guitars, family sing-a-longs, people in motion and rumbling machines that murmur behind the whole album; each of these and more people Giannico’s aural geographies, creating music so evocative as to be transportational. In a year where the unfortunate trend most feted by hipster cognoscenti was a retreat into the disturbingly hermetic safety of invented 1980s memories, the journeys experienced on Folkanization, as inscrutable and impressionistic as they are, redouble as intrinsically human journeys.

Listening to this music, one feels both removed from oneself and connected to innumerable others, a transcendent experience out of the individual and into our collective humanity. It is gifts like this album that made Porter Records my favorite record label of 2009…and 2010 is already shaping to be another great year for the label (I am eagerly waiting for the mailman to deliver my vinyl copy of this monster of funkiness).

Buy it here or directly from Porter Records here. More tunes at Francesco Giannico’s Myspace.

“Swa Swu Sui”

“Round and Round”

Well into it’s second century of existence, jazz is firmly ensconced in a period of creative ferment and vitality it hasn’t seen since the heyday of the Loft Era.  While largely driven by the most exciting generation of young lions in decades (centered mostly in Chicago and New York), the hoary masters of yore have also stepped up with a recorded output of immensely high quality, often in conjunction with their younger peers.  2009 alone saw justly heralded new releases from Bill Dixon (Tapestries For Small Orchestra), The Henry Threadgill Zooid (This Brings Us To, Vol. 1), and Warren Smith & The Composers Workshop Ensemble (Old News Borrowed Blues), but for me it was the same Warren Smith’s less touted work with Old Dog that was the greatest testament to jazz’s continued ability to excite and amaze.

A quartet featuring Smith on drums, Karl Berger on piano and vibes, Louie Belogenis on tenor sax and Michael Bisio on bass, the group synthesizes free improvisation with melodic and atmospheric imperative; I’ve described their sound to others as the Art Ensemble of Chicago playing it late 50s West Coast cool, but that doesn’t really do By Any Other Name justice.  The band develops their style in a variety of settings: the skeletal, heavily textural yet meditatively melodic takes on the title track which open and close the record; ‘Swa Swu Sui,’ fluttering into a boppy tenor head followed by a long, freely roiling middle section before closing with the head melody, inspired by Dolphy but hardly derivative; and ‘Round and Round,’ a miasma of squawking tenor and buzzing bowed bass which at length cohere around a spectrally minimal, nearly foreboding vibraphone figure.  Old Dog make use of the whole range of tonal, textural and compositional possibilities of free jazz yet combine it with such dynamic intuition and command of improvisational structures that the music they create can be as memorable as a pop song, inspiring as often as it challenges.  In a sense, the band hands out instant gratification in small doses, luring you into doing the heavy listening such intricate music demands.  If someone were looking for an entrypoint into the fertile artistry of contemporary jazz, I would immediately direct them toward By Any Other Name.

(PS: This record also happens to sport my favorite album cover of 2009. How can you deny a sad clown brass band? Answer: You can’t.)

Buy it here or directly from Porter Records here.

“Picking Scabs”

“ADP Blues”

If I had my druthers, every teenager in America would have a copy of this record in the music-playing-format of their fancy, ‘cause on their sophomore long-player the mighty T-Funk offer their voice to a generation that could sorely use it. Though it may be unlikely that the band intended it, In The Valley Of Sickness is as much social and political program as it is garage-rock record. Leadoff ‘ADP Blues’ simmers with the anti-authoritarianism that used to be rock ‘n roll’s stock in trade and of which present day pop culture is in dire need; a refrain of “the only good cop is a dead cop” is not so much a call for violence as it is a line in the sand, a drawing of sides.  ‘Day in the Shade’ follows like an alarm clock of agency and suspicious empiricism: “Stop believing what you see if you only see what you are shown!”  Then, on ‘Picking Scabs,’ Hunstville’s finest demand you choose either passively witness or participate in a simple, everyday quandry: “Are you gonna buy a record or what?”  The rest of In The Valley Of Sickness continues to both embody post-Obama American malaise as well as offer prospective alternatives through a solidarity of the marginalized and, awkwardly, tenderly, human affection.

Of course, all this would be moot if the tunes didn’t burn, and that they do in fine fiery form.  The genre-dabblings that marked T-Funk’s ebullient debut Celebration have mostly fallen by the wayside on the follow-up, or rather have become wholly synthesized into a fully formed Thomas Function sound.  Josh Macero employs guitar licks both countrified and bluesy as well as single-chord strumfests, beneath which roils the ridiculously astute bass playing of Travis Thompson, who knows exactly when to stick to the root notes and when to bust out a hum-a-long melody (special notice should also be given to Zach Jefferies’ uncanny knack for both texture and tunefulness on the organ). An album packed with propulsive energy, subtle hooks, and pointedly timely themes, In The Valley Of Sickness confirms what anyone who was hep to their debut knew back in ’08: Thomas Function are pretty much the best.  So are you gonna buy a record or what?

Buy it on LP here, on CD here, or get it straight from the label here.

“Kamoutalia,” from Side A (The Dry Guitar Side)

“Issitchilane,” from Side B (The Wet Guitar Side)

I picked up Guitars From Agadez Vol. 2 the day it was released and not a week has gone by since in which that heavy, beautiful vinyl hasn’t graced my turntable.  Members of the nomadic Kel Tamajaq or Taureg people of Northwest Africa, Group Bombino play the style of kinetic Taureg guitar music popularized by the group Tinariwen, a combination of elastic guitar licks, traditional melodies, and pulsing rhythms.  What makes Guitars From Agadez Vol. 2 such a mighty slab of wax is the structure of the record and the dynamite charisma and creativity of Ghoumour Oumara Moctar a.k.a. Bombino.

The record’s first side comes from the band’s personal recording archive and showcases Bombino’s dry (a.k.a. acoustic) guitar skills and plaintive vocals.  Over staggered hand percussion and claps (and the grunting of the occasional roaming animal), Bombino unspools tightly wound guitar grooves which bounce and snap, punctuated by bluesy frills; he sings circular folk melodies with a supple voice that just barely betrays the worldy burdens shaken off by the song itself.  This music is personal and joyous, inviting the listener into the Taureg legacy of song with the intimacy of a small fireside singalong.

The undercurrent of subdued tension, which Bombino’s vocals just imply on the album’s first side, explode with release onto side two.  Recorded live by Sublime Frequencies’ Hisham Mayet, this is the wet guitar showcase, the scorching and intense electric guitar pyrotechnics of post-Tinariwen Taureg music.  The rhythms intensify, chugging with an almost krautrock insistency, and three guitars swoon in and out of one other, translating the folk melodies into a finely woven tapestry of psychedelic guitar boogie.  Bombino’s vocals, while less foregrounded on this side, are just as key; his expressive singing smears across the background of each song, creating a melodic context that connects the visceral impact of side two with the listener’s experience of side one. It’s an old saw that music can transcend language, and Group Bombino demonstrate the woeful inability of aphorisms to properly convey the truth they pupport to tell.  Words can simply hope to suggest what only experience details, and Guitars From Agadez Vol. 2 is most certainly an experience that rewards over and over again.  My personal favorite new release of 2009.

Buy it on LP or CD here, buy it on CD here ,or buy the download here.

The first week of posts (which will appear in slightly different form in the Winter 2010 edition of WHPK Magazine) will focus on some of my favorite records from 2009, which also happen to be fairly overlooked; few (if any) appeared on year-end “best of” lists that I’ve come across. The tunes begin immediately below this post. You can read this blog’s “mission statement” here…thanks for reading, and Welcome Friends!