G_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END!—Godspeed You! Black Emperor

The latest Godspeed LP feels significant for several reasons. With its release, the band’s post-revival albums now outnumber their original run of three, solidifying this second phase of their discography as un-ignorable. The album also marks Godspeed’s return to shortwave radio samples and field recordings—largely absent from their music since 2000’s Lift Your Skinny Fists…. Most importantly, it’s been heralded as a return to the impossibly high form of their early work.

That last point is both dubious and subjective—and I’d contest that the maligned “Luciferian Towers” and Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress are far from the duds naysayers would have you believe. Asunder… is especially overlooked, replicating the fury of Godspeed’s live sets in a way that no other studio effort has quite managed.

What G_d’s Pee does do is interrupt the one-upmanship (and one-notemanship) of their discography. Revival albums have been incrementally louder and more bombastic—at the expense of nuance, variety, and that tremulous half-hope that suffuses the old stuff. Many listeners like a band’s discography to feel in conversation with itself; elaborating, contradicting and offering something fresh with every release. It’s no wonder the fatigue had set in for those guys.

G_d’s Pee touches on new territories and unexplored moods. It’s the first LP they’ve released that feels properly post-Bush (don’t ask me how—it just does). Considering Dubya stepped down in 2009, that’s a long sulk to come out of. The album responds to contemporary concerns, feeling right at home in a world where the response we must offer to global health emergencies is to sit around in our pants for a year. Committed to “waiting for the end”, as Godspeed put it, we can only look with bemused distance and seek a unifying light in the darkening hours of our species.  

The band still don’t arrange pieces with the intricacy they used to—but their grander and more direct recent style rouses without being hokey. You may have long dismissed Godspeed as ‘crescendo-core’—but that reductive take is informed by twenty years of shite imitators. This band remain among the best in their field and, twenty-five years down the line, are yet to significantly compromise.

G_d’s Pee is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

The Microphones—Microphones in 2020

For Microphones in 2020, Phil Elverum resurrects a long-dead nom de plume under which he recorded much of his most enduring and beloved work. Elverum has been a bold and restless artist throughout his decades-long career, which arguably came to a head with the passing of his partner Geneviève Castrée in 2016. In the wake of that loss, Elverum disparaged the mystic introspection that characterised his early work and turned to raw, brutal realism. A door had been opened, or closed, it seemed, forever.

The title of Microphones in 2020 is consciously absurd. If Elverum has outgrown soul-searching, why resurrect the project? And what place does it have in a year which has seen far greater focus on community action and the collective good than personal stability and mental health?

It’s a welcome surprise then, to find The Microphones’ sound almost unchanged from its past life 17 years ago. Very little has been ‘transformed’ or ‘modernised’; Elverum’s warm and melancholic guitar has the same old tone, his bass still buzzes and drums clip uncontrollably. The waves of distortion feel like an old friend. This plays into the lyrical content of the album rather neatly, as Elverum lists off production techniques, inspirations and aspirations of his early twenties. It’s a kind of straight-faced self-parody, almost like an experimental exercise; “can I return to this point in my life? Does it still exist?”

There’s a security that comes with age; an assured voice, confidence, balance, the ability to assert, relax, listen, make plans. Old Microphones feels like raw nerves kneaded by brass knuckles, born from the fire and confusion of troubled youth. In an edition of the podcast Song Exploder, focused on his track ‘I Want Wind To Blow’, you can almost hear Elverum’s cringing and wincing as he tries to reconcile his twenty-year-old voice with that of his late thirties. But perhaps that’s where Geneviève comes in, albeit indirectly. It’s only human to treat companions as vessels for your own stability, your own sense of self, to the point that when “the beast of uninvited change” visits, an entire life falls into disorder and must be radically reshuffled. Old doubts, fears, uncertainties and modes of expression wash back ashore, suddenly as acute as they felt all those years ago.

All this retrospection could’ve been arrogant, self-serving, self-mythologizing. You only have to look to Mark Kozelek’s recent work for that. But Microphones in 2020 is too wry and objective to fall into those traps. It explores how seriously we take ourselves when we’re young, how earnest and impassioned we can be, discussing how goofily endearing and valiant that outlook is. Elverum sings of him and his friends, “we’d go on the roof at night and actually contemplate the moon”. It’s a refreshing counterpoint to the popular notion that idealism and imagination die before you hit double figures. They’re visible in most of us long after that point and never die, lying dormant but rumbling, waiting to squeak out of the cracks.

Microphones in 2020 is just as confrontationally personal as 2016’s A Crow Looked At Me. It’s actually helped by its distance from Geneviève’s death, Elverum’s laser focus given permission to roam rather than firing again and again on the same open wound. There are moments of ecstatic beauty here which 2016 Elverum would not have allowed in his work. And a long-dormant sound is resurrected, every bit as fresh as it was all those years ago.

Microphones in 2020 is available for purchase and steaming here. Watch the audio/visual presentation below.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

powerpoint karaoke slideshow lyric demonstration music display photo flip audio book

TENGGER—Nomad

The aptly titled Nomad, fifth album from South Korean/Japanese new age act TENGGER, moves with measured pace. There is something of the Tuareg guitar style in its hypnotic repetition; an inexorable march in which its short phrases loop relentlessly above a thick drone, like footsteps across an infinite plane. High-decay synths intermingle with lush vocal elements to provide a unique soundscape. The only sufficient description is ‘ringtones of angels’.  

Nomad welcomes the UK in the midst of a purging rain. This shredding of the stolid air provides a perfect backdrop for Nomad’s release. As suggested by its cover, the album brings a sense of expiation from above—a spiritual drenching. On ‘Water’, the album’s third track, sequenced synth blips fall with the messy musicality of raindrops. Synth work is so adept, and concepts so fully realised, that flow and movement fill every second of Nomad.

That TENGGER have been compared to Popol Vuh—as well as some less obvious touchstones like Neu—shouldn’t be taken lightly. It’s easy to hear why. Nomad produces the sublime thrill of Aguirre’s men descending from cloud to valley in Herzog’s Popol Vuh-scored masterpiece, Aguirre, The Wrath of God. It’s the soundtrack to an utterly unfamiliar landscape; too abstract, too alien, to be lumped into that dreadful category: ‘world music’. Aguirre’s mountains topped the caps of clouds, from above which you could be in any country. This is celestial music, in which worldly affairs have sense not to meddle.

In fact, ‘Eurasia’, the only track on Nomad with a geographical (rather than conceptual) title, is markedly different to its peers. It’s grander and broader, with hyper-metallic synthesised brass—but comes too with a rigid and artificial quality. It’s the only track on Nomad to feature a drum beat—a bold thing to introduce half-way through an album—and instrumentation percolates amongst itself less, with taut bass and an expansive mix. ‘Eurasia’ is no less hypnotic for these qualities, and shakes Nomad up at just the right time. It’s a shame that it comes at the expense of such delicately-constructed ambience.  

‘Flow’ reprises the melody of ‘Water’—with a rich and sonorous downshift in pitch—for a strong finale to the album. We slip in and out of the trickle and rush of a stream. This fading and fluidity represents new age music at its best; inducing a feeling of dispersal, and disintegration of boundaries. If you follow Nomad, you will arrive somewhere unmapped, far from home with a beautiful view and miles of clean, quiet space.

Nomad is available for pre-order here (releasing Jun 12th).

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

Machinefabriek with Anne Bakker - Oehoe

Oehoe is the result of a collaboration between electronic act Machinefabriek (Rutger Zuydervelt) and violin/viola player Anne Bakker. Sitting somewhere between melody and drone, Oehoe blends its numerous individual sound sources into an intimate collage. Bakker has already recorded in a similar style—entwining her vocals and instrumentation together with EP Vox/Voila—but Zuydervelt’s contribution on Oehoe is to push things much farther leftfield, and provide a great deal of sonic intricacy and experimentation.

This intricacy isn’t obvious straight away. Elements are disguised within one another, and the sheer craft of Oehoe only reveals itself when you consciously seek it. Composition and instrumental voicing have a comforting traditionalism—but, to find it, you must blindly stumble through a mix of obfuscated, elongated and inverted natural sounds. Zuydervelt raises thick fog of modernity; a sort of urgent ambience. Bakker shatters through with strains and squeals that possess a wonderful, tense fragility. It feels as though the strings of her viola—or throat—may snap at any second.

It’s an elegant dance of two very different styles, but these two performers remain in service to one another’s work throughout Oehoe. As with any good collaboration, it’s impossible to pinpoint where either’s influence begins or ends. It’s a case of one aim being sought from several radically different, yet complementary, starting points.

Oehoe straddles many years and regions of musical tradition, flitting between touchstones of Swedish folk, modern classical, concrète and noise. It’s unique and brutal work, like half-disintegrated sheet music exhumed from an archaeological dig and digitally reassembled by an AI.

Both Bakker and Zuydervelt rile against the sterile clarity which normally surrounds chamber music. The duo finds truth in scuffiness. That truth: what we actually hear when a tone is produced is a scream, the scream of bow and string slowly shredding each other to pieces. It’s the same sort of cool cacophony as Björk’s Utopia, which made liberal use of the screeching of tropical birds. Oehoe more clearly states its aims though, with neither the ego nor eye-watering budget to follow its artists’ every grandiose impulse. While musically, it may bear superficial resemblance to Björk’s latest, it has the spirit of her earlier (better) work; smudging the line between play and stern efficiency so well you forget such a thing exists.

Oehoe is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

Benjamin Finger—Less One Knows

Less One Knows, the latest album from Norwegian composer Benjamin Finger, is an anthill. It’s subdued, humbly tucked into cracks in the patio; solid, impossibly intricate, and huge from the inside. But it’s also delicate enough you feel you could put your foot right through it. Stripped-down and intimate, this album commands attention precisely because it does not ask. Think Godspeed side-project Thee Silver Mt. Zion and you’re halfway there. But Less One Knows dodges Efrim & co.’s pomp for something far smaller in scale; an icky, paranoid chamber piece riddled with delays and sustained atonal squawks.

‘Open Phase’ is a stark opening which sits on the brink between melody and noise. The track constantly threatens to succumb to itself and feedback indefinitely, but never quite reaches that terminus. Instead it stretches the tension out through several minutes. The tone which backbones the track is reminiscent of the opening of Bowie’s Station to Station; a primer for the oddity and discomfort which will follow.

The same technique is deployed at various times throughout Less One Knows. We transition between ‘Head Fading Blues’ and ‘Worried Sick of Echo’ with elongated, piercing tones as our guide. Like with the iconic one-note solo of Talk Talk’s ‘After the Flood’, we think we’re hanging in stasis—but we’re really shifting gears abruptly between warring anxieties. The transition between these two tracks marks the first of several times on Less One Knows that we are forced to reprogram and re-orient through a feverish, depressive soundscape.

‘Bothered Earwaves’ is a similarly foreboding instrumental; screaming in rhythmic ire like a siren—the collective breaths of a wasps’ nest.

The tension of Less One Knows does occasionally submit to warmth—a switch signalled by the appearance of Finger’s vocals. The album’s title track is the first instance of these; fretful, desolate, brief and near-inaudible—crushed by instruments soon after they appear. The last is ‘Once Upon a Dirty Sound’: a song which is half-shoegaze, half-Jandek. A dissonant piece of blues improv, the track is at once this album’s loneliest and most welcoming piece.

On ‘Crushed At Sea’, vocals are performed much more confidently, and bloom into Clear Moon-era Phil Elverum confessionals. The track is almost like a mission statement for Less One Knows. Lyrics are at first buried beneath a wash of hopelessness. After growing more naked and audible as the track progresses, they appear most clearly with its final lyric: “…vanish”. The sound of a human voice feels like cresting out of a dark, wide sea after struggling to the surface. Then, it’s gone.

Less One Knows is available for pre-order and streaming here. Releasing April 17th.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe