The Silt – Earlier Ways of Wandering
Rat-Drifting(Rat-Drifting 6)
Toronto’s Rat-Drifting label has a house sound something like “Tonight’s the Night” period Neil Young broadcast through a cheap megaphone or Brazilian MPB slowed down to 16 r.p.m. The label’s various acts are mostly permutations of a group of the city’s improvising community, including Eric Cheneaux, Martin Arnold, Ryan Driver, Marcus Quin and Doug Tielli, recording under a variety of names including the Draperies, the Reveries and The Silt, whose Red Whistle, a surprising, melancholy set of avant-ballads and folk rock is the label’s biggest hit so far. Although Toronto itself feels like an East Coast city, one can drive west for 24 hours and still be in Ontario, and the melancholy of those vast spaces informs many of the city’s acts, including current break out stars like Broken Social Scene. Earlier Ways to Wander, The Silt’s second effort, is more rocking than their first, but still has that aching sadness found on some of the labels other releases, including ex-Crash Vegas singer Michelle McAdorey’s beautiful Love Don’t Change, recorded last year with Chenaux. The Silt sounds hushed against that vastness, and unlikely, gorgeous pop songs like “Sloppy Ground” and “One Day Will come” loom out of the dark like a human settlement suddenly seen on the prairie at night.

originally published in Signal to Noise.

The Reveries
Matchmakers Volume 1: The Music of Willie Nelson
Rat-Drifting CD

The Reveries are one of the core configurations of improvisers who record for Toronto’s Rat-Drifting label. Composed of Ryan Driver, Doug Tielli and Eric Chenaux (whose mutant folk stylings have recently appeared on Constellation), The Reveries are a woozy jug band that sing and play songs under conditions involving various physical and acoustic handicaps and distortions, notably tiny “mouth speakers” places inside their mouths that act like natural wah wah pedals for whatever sounds are transmitted through them. The result is a necessary drift towards what is called improvisation, a hazy psychedelia where their sweet harmonies and Neil Young guitar playing go gently off the radar. Previous recordings such as Live in Bologna and Blasé Kisses have explored standards such as “Moonlight in Vermont” creating eccentric drifting lines between Frank Sinatra and Captain Beefheart. Matchmakers vol. 1 consists of versions of a number of Willie Nelson songs – the group have also done remarkable sets of Nick Cave, Sade and Prince songs live. The concreteness of Nelson’s songs means that they are strong enough to support all manner of improvisation and digression, meaning that the pleasure of song structure and narrative are never far away, no matter what kind of spluttering storm the “mouth speakers”, “street sweeper bristle bass” and chattering guitars, which collectively sound like a drunken orchestra of mouth harps, are cooking up. In fact, the personal and lyrical apocalypses found in songs like “I’ve Just Destroyed the World I’m Living In” or “Crazy”, are almost waiting to be stripped gently but lovingly of the country and western generic shapes that they are usually wrapped in. “Matchmakers” implies an unlikely but timely and happy event of love, a moment of recognition, and the Reveries love for these songs is obvious. In this, their finest recording so far, the biggest surprise is how much the songs love them back.

Originally published in The Wire, 2008.

The Dawn of Indian Music in the West: Bhairavi
Peter Lavezzoli
Continuum hardback, no price listed.

In April 1955, Indian sarod master Ali Akbar Khan and tabla player Chatur Lal gave the first full performance of Indian classical music in the USA at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. For Peter Lavezzoli, the event, which was soon issued as the first ever LP of Indian classical music as Music of India: Morning and Evening Ragas, marks The Dawn of Indian Music in the West. Classical violinist Yehudi Menuhin introduced the duo, John D. Rockefeller and a variety of socialites, classical music big names and others attended, the New York Times and New Yorker applauded. The recording would inspire La Monte Young and many others, setting off waves which, as Lavezzoli documents in this substantial book, later manifested in minimalism, fusion, world music, jam bands and a catalog of other late 20th C musical forms.

Lavezzoli sets out an impressively rich history, in a series of chapters focused on individuals, with extensive Q and A interviews and a broader historical narrative woven throughout. Khan, Ravi Shankar and tabla player Alla Rakha emerge as the key figures, meeting up with an impressive and exhausting percentage of the key western musical performers of the 1960s and 1970s. It is a history of hybrid forms, as “Indian classical music” mutates in a rapidly shifting global political environment in which authenticity is revered, even as film, radio, western spiritual seekers, rock and jazz musicians tear it apart and repackage it for their own purposes.

The book’s strength – its attention to detail – is also its weakness. Lavezzoli’s musical worldview is rather mainstream. The most well known names are covered exhaustively: George Harrison, John McLaughlin, The Grateful Dead, Terry Riley and John Coltrane, with Cheb i Sabbah tossed in at the end. The focus on these names means that many of the more original interpreters and students of Indian classical music are ignored, including Henry Flynt, Charlemagne Palestine and Arthur Russell (who studied with Akbar Khan). The use of raga in folk music by musicians like Davey Graham, Sandy Bull and John Fahey in the 1960s (much of it predating its use in pop and rock) is absent – as are the new folk raga sounds of Matt Valentine or Pelt. Italian born dhrupad singer and student of the Dagar Brothers Amelia Cuni, to my mind the greatest Western master of Indian classical music performing today, is not mentioned at all. Nor for that matter are influential sarangi master Ram Narayan or hippie trickster Bhagavan Das. Bizarrely, Pandit Pran Nath is tucked into a chapter on Riley, while David Crosby and Roger McGuinn get 26 pages to themselves.

There are real questions about the historical focus too. While MoMA in 1955 was no doubt a key moment in the popularization of Indian classical music, surely reports of raga must have appeared somewhere in the long history of the British colonization of India. Certainly there were scholarly accounts: French Indologist Alain Danielou is brushed aside as a purveyor of substandard street musician recordings, yet Danielou spent 20 years in India beginning in 1932, wrote prolifically about Indian music from the 1930s on, was appointed director of a college of Indian music in Benares in 1949, and his Religious Music of India recordings were issued by Folkways in 1952. His recordings of the Dagar Brothers and others are among the jewels in the history of recorded sound. Which is all to say that the story is much more remarkable than Lavezzoli suggests. Nevertheless, omissions aside, Lavezzoli’s book remains a useful introduction to a key current in 20th C musical history.

Originally published in The Wire, 2006.

The Boredoms
Seadrum/House of Sun
Vice (Vice 62309)
Seadrum comes from the now infamous recording sessions conducted by The Boredoms on a beach in Japan, in which they play with as well as in the sea, allowing the waves to reach the drums, placing mikes underwater and so on. If this conjures visions of surging, roaring surf, or swelling wave formations in the style of Nurse With Wound’s remarkable Salt Marie Celeste, the result is somewhat different. Building on the tribal drumming styles and psychedelic rhythms of their wonderful Vision Creation Newsun, Seadrum features speedy, shifting batucada style drum rhythms over which Yoshimi P-We sings in a freeform style that reminds me of Sun Ra’s June Tyson, while a harp-like piano improvises in a way that recalls Alice Coltrane. It’s exhilarating stuff, made for a dancefloor that doesn’t yet exist (but which surely will do soon!). And the sea? The sea is in the mix, a static-like spitting surge of sound that pushes up through the mix at irregular interviews, giving the music sudden highly focused pulses of noise-energy. After all that oceanic drive, “House of Sun” is a gentle tambura drone and strings driven mix of a thing composed by Yamataka Eye – sustained, repetitive: more like watching the ripples created by rain in an otherwise still lake.

originally published in Signal to Noise.

Sandro Perri
Plays Polmo Polpo
(Constellation)

Marcus Boon

Sandro Perri’s music navigates a unique path between several of Toronto’s musical communities: the folk/jazz/improv of the various Rat-Drifting ensembles (many of whom appear on this disk), the experimental end of the dance music scene (Perri’s Polmo Polpo project often DJs or performs on techno lineups around the city, and his label Audi Sensa puts out adventurous slabs of beat driven sound), and the city’s ever-expanding indie rock scene (Perri also plays guitar on occasion in The Great Lake Swimmers).

This disk, which features reworkings of songs from Polmo Polpo’s Like Hearts Swelling is something like Polmo Polpo unplugged, with the former disk’s bubbling electronica transformed into guitar driven songs. Perri has a sweet but strong voice and the mixing of his falsetto with folky guitar strumming, quirky brass and electronics and occasional beats brings to mind John Martyn’s folk fusions. Another reference point is Arthur Russell: Polmo Polpo’s finest moment remains a twenty minute plus instrumental reworking of Russell’s dancefloor opus Kiss Me Again, and Perri’s synthesizing, expansive vision of dance music, displayed to good effect on this year’s Glissandro 70 disk, marks a refreshing continuation of the early 1980s avant dance scene’s explorations – and one that is not just nostalgic or retro in orientation.

On this disk it’s “World of Echo” period Russell that’s relevant as on the gorgeous, acoustic “Dreaming” and “Circles”, which Perri has recently been performing around Toronto in Double Suicide, a remarkable guitar/synth duo with improvisor Ryan Driver. The serenity in these songs feels hard-won, and their delicate but determined emotional precision constitutes a quiet triumph.

Originally published in Signal to Noise, 2006.

Sam Shalabi — Eid (Alien8 CD)

Eid (Arabic for “festival”) is Montreal-based Sam Shalabi’s strongest work since his jaw-dropping Osama — a facetious, fiery and poignant reflection on what it means to be “an Arab” in North America post-0911 (“Sam” is short for “Osama” reflecting Shalabi’s Libyan/Egyptian background). Shalabi has explored lines between Arabic and other middle Eastern musics, psychedelia and folk with his touring band The Shalabi Effect for a number of years to considerable effect. Eid was composed during a year recently spent by Shalabi living in Cairo, but recorded in Montreal with contributions from many key figures in Montreal’s alt music scene. Although there are important traces of various musical forms heard in Cairo today, from Arabic classical music through to Egyptian pop and various rock mutations, woven into the complex sound-tapestry of the disk, the sound is experimental and modern, and Shalabi insists that the record is as much a meditation on North America, made by a foreigner living in Cairo, as it “about” Egypt today or “Egyptian music”. The exception that proves the rules here is the opening track, a strong, traditional sounding rumination on the oud, that gives little hint of the uproarious psych freakout of “Jessica Simpson” which follows, complete with a scorching guitar solo from Shalabi. The remarkable “Eid” mixes Arabic strings with a variety of unidentifiable voice recordings of people in varying states of distress and fervor, some recordings from films, others improvised within the studio, conjuring up both a sense of tradition and its violent distortion. There are a number of fine guest vocals too, including a fiery Evangelista style ballad “Billy the Kid” from Elizabeth Anka Vajagic, and strong appearances by Katie Moore and Nick Cave collaborator Lhasa de Sela. Shalabi does not indulge in any easy or obvious position taking when it comes to “ethnic music” or “East and West” — the distortion and collision of musical forms here is both exhilarating and frightening, rendering everything foreign and at the same time a monster entirely of our own making. Diplomacy is replaced by intelligence and the joy of sound: one minute, popular, alternative and classical musical traditions are treated respectfully, the next minute with a great big sonic fart.

Originally published in The Wire, 2008.

Various Artists: International Sad Hits. Volume One: Altaic Language Group.
Damon and Naomi, themselves no slouches when it comes to singing a sad song, are the curators of this brilliantly themed collection. At one and the same time a parody of the seriousness of ethnomusicological labelling of music from the non-western world in the West, and a homage to the kitsch marketing tactics used to package the CDs of local popular musics available in markets and on the street in many non-western countries, “International Sad Hits” compiles the sad songs of Fikret Kizilok (Turkey), Kim Doo Soo (Korea), Tomokawa Kazuki and Mikami Kan (Japan). Purportedly linked by a common linguistic family, the curators observe that “what truly links them is a love of melancholy”. Spanning 1971 to 2003, there are four songs from each singer, all of them brooding guitar led pieces in the mold, according to the curators, of Dylan, Tim Buckley or Nick Drake. All four are singer-songwriters with considerable followings in their own countries, but little known by the rest of the world. While I admire the revealing of a genre of music that doesn’t fit into conventional categories of traditional or popular ethnic music, I find myself slightly disappointed by the results. Undoubtedly powerful and serious, there’s a particular male kind of swagger and self-pity at work in many of the selections here that feels quite familiar (maybe from looking at ads for whisky in different parts of the world), and I’m only intermittently moved, let alone heart-broken, by the sad singing here. With the notable exception of Kim Doo Soo, the femininity of Drake or Buckley, the multiple layers of irony and vision of Dylan feel a long way away. The songs are sad, but this is not the saddest music in the world. Still, I await the selections from other Language Groups with great hope.

Originally published in Signal to Noise, 2006.

Richard Youngs and Alex Neilson – Partick Rain Dance
VHF CD

Partick Rain Dance is the third collaboration between Richard Youngs and drummer Alex Neilson, following on from 2004’s Beating Stars and Ourselves. Youngs and Neilson also worked together as the rhythm section for Jandek’s recent visit to Glasgow, issued as Glasgow Sunday. Partick Rain Dance starts off with nearly ten minutes of freeform noise that makes the sweet folk melody that emerges five minutes into “Music of the Last Sun” all the more poignant. Then the track morphs into a magical echo-laden trance of drums and fluttering tones, like one of the Dead’s freeform beatless acid interludes. After that there’s a wordless almost acappella lament called “Noatak Beacon”, followed by fifteen minutes of electrified gongs and feedback on “Mountain” and three minutes of spliced psychedelia on “Big Aero Planet”. Youngs’ music achieves its poignancy from the fusion of various methods of production of sublime vastness, such as drones (see Advent and Festival), free form psych freakouts (see Ilk’s Ceaucescu) and repetitive, intense balladry (see Sapphie), all mixed with a lofi, DIY aesthetic and humility that is charmingly at odds with the epic sound forms. Less than a masterpiece but always interesting, Partick Rain Dance, the newest addition to a vast and ever expanding Youngs discography is something of a blend of the various techniques and styles that Youngs has made his trademark, especially in his collaborations. I prefer to take my Youngs straight, but the energy and invention here remains undeniable.

Originally published in The Wire, 2007.

Various – Big Apple Rappin’
Soul Jazz 2CD (SJR CD 125)

The birth of hip has taken on the status of a cultural big bang as enigmatic as the Eleusinian rites or Shakespeare’s England, even though it happened less than thirty years ago. Recent years have seen impressive contributions to an archeology of this remarkable moment: Experience Music Project’s oral history of hip-hop; the 2 DVD reissue of the pioneering 1982 graffiti doc Style Wars and ear-opening microhistorical CD collections like The Third Unheard: Connecticut Hip Hop, 1979-1983. Soul Jazz’s Big Apple Rappin’ doesn’t quite live up to that level of detail despite the 64 page booklet that accompanies it. Instead, it is another in a long line of extremely classy, tastefully selected dancefloor gems from particular times and places on the planet, post-punk Brazil and the UK; mid seventies Latino New York, early eighties downtown New York; various times in Jamaica. Still, for anyone other than total headz, most of these tracks, which go way beyond the usual Kurtis Blow, Sugarhill and Enjoy staples, will be news. Most remarkable here is Brother D and the Collective Effort’s “How We Gonna Make the Black Nation Rise” – a glorious throwdown over the “Got To Be Real” rhythm and arguably the first full on political rap (an accompanying interview with Lister Hewan-Lowe, who was responsible for the record’s original release points out that he took a “Maoist point of view towards music” and it shows!). Old Skool founding fathers like Cold Crush Brothers and TJ Swann are on hand (but where’s Grand Wizard Theodore?). And surprises like General Echo’s dub take on “Rapper’s Delight”, “Rapping Dub Style”. Highly recommended.

Originally published in Signal to Noise, 2006.

Pandit Pran Nath – Midnight (Raga Malkauns) (Just Dreams, 2003)

Kirana Hindustani classical vocal master Pandit Pran Nath’s teacher Ustad Abdul Wahid Khan was once asked why he only ever sang two ragas. The Ustad replied that if only the morning would last for ever, he would be happy to sing just one. A raga is not a song per se, but a specific matrix of notes and ways of combining and moving between notes, to be performed at a particular time of day or season. Within this framework, thousands of individual songs or compositions can be constructed. In this 1976 New York studio recording, minimalist composer La Monte Young cranks up the tambouras to Theater of Eternal Music levels of intensity while Pran Nath, at the height of his powers, conjures up Raga Malkauns’ sonic matrix and tale, that of a yogi meditating at midnight, beset by Asuras (evil spirits), which he is tempted by before banishing them and returning to his state of illuminated calm. What’s remarkable here is the sheer vastness of scale in this “song”: for a little over an hour, Pran Nath sings “He Krishna Govind Raam”, repeating the vilambit (mid-tempo) composition’s invocation of the Hindu deity, slowly moving up the scales to the higher notes, taking the listener through the various parts of the composition, into ever more intense and ecstatic realms of sound. As one listens, one comes to identify with these sound realms more than one’s own body and mind. One wants to stay there forever. If it weren’t for the morning …
Marcus Boon

originally published in The Wire.