#grrawr

I was invited to do an hour long radio show on 00185fm. I decided to make it about a collective approach to making and distributing music, taking Discreet Music, Midnight Mines and Mystery Plane, C/Site and Xpressway as examples. The program consists of mostly music with some quick spoken introductions in Italian.

Do explore the rest of the contributions to 00185fm as they will provide you with an awesome portrait of what they call New Weird Italia.

Kenji Kariu, Sekai (Bruit Direct Disques, 2020)

It’s not easy to come across information about Kenji Kariu. I just know he plays guitar in a band called OWKMJ, which, from what I can tell from the videos I found online, is a completely bonkers math-prog-jazz DMT trip of a band. Sekai, though, his 3rd solo album and his debut on French label Bruit Direct, has a very different vibe.

The first feeling you get is that the record isn’t even meant for you to listen, such is the intimacy and fragility that emanate from the songs. They’re all built on very essential drum machine beats and a few, sparse chords played on synths or guitars. The star of the show is Kariu’s voice here. Everything revolves around simple, almost childish, melodies that are sung in an understated, middle-of-the-night hush tone. Then there are layers of more vocal sounds, used as back up for a 60s pop vibe, or mangled by weird effects for a more contemporary and slightly eerie left-of-center feel.

The more you listen to the record, the more you realize it’s not as low-key and demure as it seems, and you really appreciate Kariu’s depth of vision: for example, “Atelier” is really an amazing pop song of the 80s throwback variety, shimmering with chorus-laden guitars and with a bassline that’s as simple as it is groovy. But then you have stuff like “Birthday”, with its very raw home recorded feeling, or “YanaKotori”, sounding like a children’s TV show theme. I can’t help being reminded of Kevin Ayers when I think about this approach.

To add to the weirdness, the record is complete with a lyric sheet translated from Japanese. I didn’t read the lyrics through the first few listens, but when I did I was really fascinated: they all seem to operate through a dreamlike, hallucinatory state (dare I say hypnagogic?) with a lot of synesthesia and sometimes funny connections: “The rabbit came out of the ATM / I left the line, I was confused / It was a good old day, I used to have a centipede.” Maybe there’s a cultural barrier there, or maybe Kariu is just a genuinely strange and very interesting guy.

Click here to listen to “Atelier” on Bandcamp or buy the record from Bruit Direct’s website.

Triple Negative, God Bless The Death Drive (Penultimate Press, 2020)

I’d been thinking about this record lately. I’d bought it on a whim in the Summer, and after listening to it a lot for a month or so, the Triple Negative LP had fallen to the back of the pile as I kept accumulating new purchases. And I missed it. So when I saw it in some year-end best-of list (things I peruse riddled with anxiety, thinking I suck for not having listened to enough music this year) I immediately went to the shelf and put it back on the turntable.

Triple Negative sound like a radio playing in a comic book. Fragments of sound pop up like fishes’ mouths in a pond of static and tape hiss, sometimes speaking the language of a 1930 Greek folk standard, or of tortured muzak mixed with trance-like chants and the sound of banging on metal, or of a sweet ballad for voice and a weary, huffing organ.

It’s one of those impenetrable sort of records, one could only tentatively connect it to a vague atmosphere, a Russian novella feeling, a quiet, composed sort of tale of black magic, the nautical theme of the comic on the record’s sleeve only adding to this impenetrable narrative fog.

Having been recorded on tape over the course of 15 years, God Bless The Death Drive sounds like layers of dusty recordings on top of older, dustier recordings. Tape loops, winds, things that squeak, grind and squall interact with muffled vocals, guitars, and percussions building trembling, precarious songs that are as unpredictable as fascinating.

I wasted a lot of your time on GRRAWR trying to understand why I enjoy free, abstract music, and there isn’t a real reason, at least not a fixed one. Maybe today I feel like listening to God Bless The Death Drive because I want to be challenged. Or I want to close my eyes and feel like I’m on a ghost ship, floating on a sea of tape glistening with shards of punk sensitivity. Or I just feel like annoying my partner. In any case, this is a challenging, freeing, puzzling and inspiring record. Dive in.

Click here to listen to God Bless The Death Drive on Bandcamp.

Komare, The Sense Of Hearing (Penultimate Press, 2020)

This is not for everybody. Or any time. If you thought the music of Mosquitoes was indecipherable, brace yourself for Komare, a project involving two of the three members of the aforementioned band with an even more minimalistic, abstract and puzzling sound.

The ideal setting to experience The Sense Of Hearing, I guess, would be a sensory deprivation tank. The idea being that, as the title suggests, you would rely strictly on your sense of hearing to enter a completely alien world, probably similar to a fever dream or a particularly dark psychedelic experience.

While listening to this apparently meaningless mishmash of pulsating drones, electronic squeals and primitive, inarticulate voices in a daylit room, one might even find it occasionally funny. The two sound like children playing around with a couple microphones and various machines, breathing and clicking their tongues and mumbling and speaking gibberish over layers of static.

At the same time, there’s a whole different dimension to it: the idea of reaching the very source of sound and communication, a primordial soup of bubbling electronic chaos, taking away every foothold and letting your brain roam free between alternate universes. When the last, epic excursion between hissing blades of sound and distant calls on side B ends, you’re left confused, with a tangy taste in your mouth, as if you’d been licking a sheet of aluminum for the last forty minutes, and a new appreciation for the wooden, earthly warmth of music. It resembles an intense DMT trip, where the real sense of bewilderment and awe comes after the experience, when your brain starts processing reality normally again.

Like I said, it’s not for everybody. It’s a journey, an exploration and a reflection on the chaos that is life on Earth. It may also just be two people having fun with the raw materials of sound and I may be forcing meaning onto something that has none. It may be what we do all the time with everything. If everything is fiction, might as well take a trip into the grey, barren, but unique landscape of Komare.

Click here to listen to side A of The Sense Of Hearing on Bandcamp.

Oso el Roto, Pop de Cuchillo (Bruit Direct Disques, 2020)

Music is cool and all, but sometimes I get the feeling that we need something more. Not sure if it's the truth or just nostalgia, but I feel like until a couple decades back music used to be a much more collective experience. Well everything used to be a much more collective experience. Now it's so hard to talk to people, because you always have an escape pod in your pocket. And music’s in there. It’s just a great excuse. Eyes meet on the subway and they immediately go: sorry, can’t talk right now—I’m listening to something. 

So if you’re an artist that has had an oblique approach to music for a long time, like Oso El Roto, who’s been experimenting with sound since the mid-90s, you might feel the same uneasiness I feel and you might think to use that to make a record like this one here, Pop de Cuchillo. From what I understand, he composed these songs live on YouTube while people sent him suggestions about what to do. Most of the record is made of collages of audio messages from his friends or song ideas people wrote to him while he was doing it live. Now, you might think this sounds like a cool gimmick, but you don’t need to hear the record. Wrong!

This Pop de Cuchillo has bona-fide hits. The title track, a more or less straightforward hip-hop song with a mean sneer; “Amigo”, my favorite, which reminds me of Sun City Girls and Faust; and “Cerca de Ti”, a sweet sad song with sharp claws. And the rest of the record sounds really alive: just a messy bundle of leftfield rap, samples, found sounds, alien voices, things that sound like old traditional melodies and a unique weirdo sensibility.

In the accompanying notes, Oso El Roto says the subject of the album is “the comic absurdity of wanting to be a rock singer in poverty and capitalist horror of the Chilean reality”. Unfortunately no lyrics are included, but it’s fairly easy to infer Oso’s message. The grotesque landscape we live in makes it harder and harder to let your freak flag fly. Records like this are the bastion of weirdness we need to remind ourselves to be free.

Click here to listen to Pop de Cuchillo on Bandcamp.

New mix w/ Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band and more.