#robert millis

The original Indian Talking Machine might not have changed how we understand our world, but it did provide reliable transportation to a couple of them. First, it enabled a listener to steep in the sounds of musical traditions that had been around for centuries, but had not yet been transformed by capture and reproduction. Second, it introduced its audience to the surviving Indian 78 rpm culture. The album came as a 245-page hardcover book that presented both reproductions of sleeves, labels, gear, advertisements, and ephemera from back in the day, and color photos that Millis had taken of the places where you can still find them and the people who make that possible. It was possible to treat its two CDs tucked into pockets in the cover as accessories, which was a shame given the musical riches they contained.

That won’t happen with Indian Talking Machine Part Two. It contains the same number of sides as the first volume, this time on two LPs. The transfers subdue most of the 78s’ noise without compromising the sounds of the instruments. While it does include a booklet with a dozen pages of images of records, players, and the animal byproducts used to make shellac, the annotation is much more bare-bones, conveying only the names of the artists and the instruments featured on each track.

And what music! By narrowing the focus to instrumentals, Millis has foregrounded two elements of Indian music of the early 20th century. One is the concentrated power and beauty of the music that made it to disc. Reproducing hour-long ragas and other musical forms that had evolved ungoverned by the small amount of music that a 78 could contain was out of the question, so these tracks capture foundational themes and climactic moments; just the good stuff. The other is the spectacular virtuosity of the playing and the easy but focused rapport between the musicians (usually just a couple per performance); in a culture where music was made mainly by people playing every day, they got really good at playing it.

Indian Talking Machine Part Two is not a musicological enterprise, and anyone looking to be told anything about what they’re hearing will be disappointed. This volume presents the music as something you listen to, period.

Robert Millis—The Lonesome High (Abduction) 

Some people can sum up their lives on a business card; Robert Millis needs a whole deck, full sized, both faces of each playing card, and you’re still liable to miss something while he shuffles. Filmmaker, photographer, guerilla ethnographer, collector and sharer of 78 RPM records, weaver of multi-layered ambiences, improviser, annotator, jokester, traveler — and now comes The Lonesome High.

It turns out that Millis is also a sardonic troubadour, quite capable of bending verse/chorus song forms to his will. While he’s definitely played plenty of tunes with Climax Golden Twins and AFCGT (that’s the A-Frames + Climax Golden Twins), his commitment to working within that form sets this record apart from anything else he’s done. Millis sings them with a gruff and knowing delivery that effectively imparts the faithlessness, guilt, and befuddlement of his protagonists. He sounds like Howe Gelb might if he weren’t so comfortable with desert spaces. There’s something rather claustrophobic about these tunes, a sense that the characters are closed in, and even the guitar solos that punch through the songs’ walls can’t knock them down.

The record’s production plays up the entrapment described in the lyrics. Millis uses Foley artistry, musique concrete backdrops, and some good old-fashioned echo to imply that beyond his character’s myopic enactments, there’s a lot of less-bounded action going down. But the people in the songs don’t know that; they’re as trapped as some mope in a Twilight Zone episode.

Bill Meyer

Waldemar — Visions (Self-Release)

Another missive from the northern woods that produced Bon Iver, Gabe Larson’s Waldemar builds big anthemic songs around personal reveries. This four-song EP is mainly about his grandpa, and yet, its layered vocals hint at shared euphoria, its giant rock crescendos lift off towards universality. “Brotherly” stirs to life in misty threads of drone, cymbal rolls, silence and Larson’s voice cresting upward with a Jonsi-ish mix of religious chant and pop. Folksy jangle intersects with mysticism, a la fellow Wisconsites in Megafaun, and, as you may have come to expect from Eau Claire outfits, there are infusions of brass and band instruments from the jazz talent nearby. “Visions” is, maybe, the most striking of these four cuts and the one that will remind you most of Justin Vernon. It takes shape slowly and sparely, mostly mournful vocals at first, then bursts into locomotive life with drumming, guitars, counterpoints and brass. This is the biggest, most fully realized, most ready for prime time self-release I’ve heard in a while.

Jennifer Kelly   

John Lindberg Raptor Trio—Western Edges (Clean Feed) 

Despite the album’s name, this trio has deep roots in New York City. Bassist John Lindberg first encountered baritone saxophonist Pablo Calogero in the 1970s when they were both teenagers eager to break into New York’s loft jazz scene. Lindberg has gone on to accompany Billy Bang, Anthony Braxton and Wadada Leo Smith, as well as lead his own ensembles, but he hasn’t forgotten his old mate. Calogero moved to Southern California, so when he moved to San Diego to teach at CalArts he called up his old buddy and the drummer who played next office over from his. The combination of 40+ years of friendship between two members and utter newness between Calogero and drummer Joe LaBarbera likely contributed to this session’s combination of empathy and freshness. Both old buddies contribute compositions, and they cover a fair bit of ground. On “Ashoka” the trio adopts an early 60s Coltrane stance, stately and heavy; “Twixt D and E” is an intricately tied post-bop knot; and “Raptors” flies free, but with oft-glimpsed melodic intent.

Bill Meyer 

Pari San – Frozen Time (Pari San) 

“Pari San symbolize [sic] a collision of two worlds.” This is how Iranian-born, Düsseldorf-raised vocalist Pari Eskandari and Berlin synth hound Paul Brenning collectively describe the Pari San project; the worlds presumably colliding here are Eskandari’s rural singing styles and Brenning’s thoroughly urban European electro influences, though it’s also worth mentioning the contrast between Berlin and Parisan, a town that consisted of 37 people for the 2006 Iranian census. Working in the capital for their self-released Frozen Time EP – the duo’s first official release as best I can tell – Eskandari and Brenning revive a strain of mid-2000s electronic music almost singularly cornered by The Knife’s Silent Shout. This shouldn’t feel noteworthy in 2016-17 given the wide-open landscape FKA Twigs, Aïsha Devi and even The Knife’s own Shaking the Habitual have pillaged since, but Pari San succeeds in part because its two members aim for a more pop-oriented sound – each of Frozen Time’s five songs is in the three-minute neighborhood and the hooks are plainly evident, even addicting, despite the substantial electronic gimmickry. “In the Smoke” is the most brazen Silent Shout descendent and “Polyhorns” features co-production from Bpitch Control and Monkeytown Recs vet Robert Koch (aka Jahcoozi’s Robot Koch) for a spot of relative star power, but “Two Perfect Lovers” is the duet to die for here, a slow-moving serenade gracefully threading the needle between 1960s teenage love ballad and contemporary electronic abstraction. Extremely promising EP from a group mining territory you might’ve previously thought exhausted.

Patrick Masterson

Hexa — Factory Photographs (Room40)  

FACTORY PHOTOGRAPHS by HEXA

Hexa is Xiu Xiu’s Jamie Stewart and Lawrence English, who after meeting in 2009 decided to collaborate in ways which would take them beyond their usual musical practices (which, yes, means this sounds little like Xiu Xiu or English’s drone work); Factory Photographs sees them issue a “sonic response” to David Lynch’s photographs of, well, factories. All three artists have distinct enough oeuvres that you can pretty much tell whether you’re interested just from the resumes, but Stewart and English have definitely offered a distinctive and worthwhile slate of roiling industrial noise, whether it’s the more overtly aggressive likes of “Ring Bark” or the slower building waves of “Sledge.”Factory Photographs is consistently bracing but climaxes with the best and most interesting tracks here; first the restless, anxious washes of “Over Horizontal Plains” and then “Body”, which just barely lets some sort of brighter melody peek out from behind the relentless grinding of the rest of the song. 

Ian Mathers  

Warhaus — We Fucked a Flame into Being (Self-release) 

We Fucked A Flame Into Being by Warhaus

Arch, urbane, a bit decadent, here’s an album that slithers in on the scent of foreign cigarettes, insinuates sex, betrayal, bare shoulders and drunken tangos to late-night jazz combos. It’s an album that makes you feel like a blockheaded rube who’s been let in on a joke, still hopelessly literal and stupid but for once seeing irony and ambiguity and the primacy of style over sincerity. Warhaus, you should know, is the solo project of one Maarten Devoldere whose main gig, the band Balthazar, has sold a surprising number of records in Belgium (without raising much of a ripple outside Northern Europe). Here he sings in a voice that makes everything sound like an indecent proposal (and honestly, some of it is). A younger, less whispery Leonard Cohen with a slightly wider range might be the best point of reference, and like Cohen, he’s found of spare yet varied accompaniments, a Sinatra band pared down to essentials, a choir of bored girls singing something like gospel. The single “The Good Lie” with its twitchy guitars, tense hand drums and murmured imprecations is good, sexy stuff, but my favorite remains “Against the Rich,” which both is and isn’t a rallying cry contra income inequality. Instead it finds ambiguity in a life that has acquired the trappings of success, an accountant, a nutritionist, a girlfriend with a law degree, and asks, “When my friend did I make this switch, how I tried to be against the rich.”

Jennifer Kelly

Council Estate Electronics – Arktika (Glacial Movements)  

Arktika by COUNCIL ESTATE ELECTRONICS

Riddled with implication, Godflesh and Jesu lifer Justin Broadrick teamed up with frequent collaborator and Jesu bassist Diarmuid Dalton under the Council Estate Electronics banner for the first time in four years this past October to pay tribute to the Russian nuclear-powered Arktika class of icebreaker (helpfully, the liner notes clarify that this is for the new LK-60YA Arktika class rather than the outgoing Arktika ships first launched in the 1970s). The eight songs herein are a rusting hulk of open arms for crudely constructed boats in two halves – “Urals” opens with nearly 11 minutes of minimal dub-techno throbbing and the kind of immersive (submersive?) white noise with which Jesu fans will no doubt be accustomed. It continues through songs like “567 foot 33,500 ton” and “Rosatom,” which could easily double as field recordings of the vessels’ construction from inside the hull. Reminiscent of material you’d find on Blackest Ever Black or Janushoved rather than Milan’s Glacial Movements, a label that’s served up Loscil and (most recently) the celestial sonic icescapes of Aria Rostami and Daniel Blomquist, this seems headed for a dark, industrial turn into the far reaches of the frigid north... But with “50 Let Pobody,” the vibe of the record suddenly shifts to a still-unsettling yet considerably more subdued tone. By the end of “60 megawatts,” you’re left thinking this release is most in line with the eerie, engrossing electronics of Pye Corner Audio. Chilly and chilling, Glacial Movements has hit another one out of the dry docks.

Patrick Masterson 

Tommy Jay—Tommy Jay’s Tall Tales of Trauma (Assophon) 

You can’t live down the past, so you might as well blow it up, and in the case of Tommy Jay’s Tall Tales Of Trauma, more turns out to be more. Harrisburgh OH resident Jay is a longtime mate of Mike Rep and Nudge Squidfish, and he shares with them a contradictory aesthetic. On the one hand, his homemade recording and unexpurgated song writing are serious barriers to any sort of mainstream success. But his reference points, as indicated by covers of Joni Mitchell’s “Dreamland” and Lou Reed’s “The Ocean,” are ambitious ones, and he does his best not to dishonor them. Sometimes, anyway — Jay’s muse might inspire him to make a low-rent, early Who-style epic about the Battle of Fredericksburg one moment (“I Was There”) and a cheap rhyme-stocked portrait of a “Village Idiot” the next. If early 1990s Guided By Voices tended more towards finished songs and uncomfortable truths, they might have made a record like this one, but James made it instead. In 1986 he could only get it out on tape, and it took two decades for it to make it to LP. That first pressing is long gone, so Assophon has stepped in with a 30th anniversary edition that includes thirteen more songs close enough to the first 12 that collectors sitting on an early copy will probably want  this one too.

Bill Meyer             

Brandon Can’t Dance — Graveyard of Good Times (Lucky Number) 

Graveyard of Good Times by BRANDON CAN'T DANCE

Brandon Ayers is the classic lone wolf bedroom troubadour, a Philadelphian who works nights as a security guard, cares for an elderly relative during the day and lives a rich creative life within his own head and home recording space. Brandon Can’t Dance dabbles in fuzz-rock, lo-fi disco, anti-folk, regular folk, synth pop and noise, refusing to settle anywhere, yet all reflecting a highly individual talent that has not been sanded down too much by contact with other people. Sequencing feels a little haphazard, so that the superlative shoegaze romantic blare of “Headspace” sits right alongside an excruciating dance-pop falsetto cut called “Smoke-Drive Around” (which, weirdly, is one of two downloadable singles, so it’s probably not a parody). Much of the album gives off a 1990s lo-fi aura – GBV is the obvious reference, though “Fuck Off and We’ll Get Along,” has the undercooked poetry of certain Sic Alps songs, the synthier bits recall Blank Dogs and “Freak of the Freaks,” sounds fragile and surreal like a Tobin Sprout off-track. “Angelina,” the other single, has a country swagger to it, a brash, abrasive acoustic vamp with a fuzz guitar solo bursting through it. It feels like the most finished, structured song on the disc, and so stands as a highlight. That’s not to disparage the beautiful fragments, half-pursued ventures and jotted messy impressions that surround it; these are integral to experiencing Ayers’ alienated, discontinuous but intermittently lovely world. If you flipped over Car Seat Headrest or just harbor a fondness for melodic hiss and fuzz, you’ll like this.

Jennifer Kelly 

Andrew Pekler — Tristes Tropiques (Faitiche) 

Tristes Tropiques by Andrew Pekler

Pekler’s work here feels like some deliberately uneasy mix of remix, field recording, the kind of ethnographic forgery that Can used to do, and abstract electronic music. Certainly the cultural history of white people playing/homaging/being fascinated by the music of other cultures, whether it’s called exotica or ethnography or anything else, is a tricky one. Pekler titling this album of original compositions (which just sounds like it’s maybe the products of aliens messing with and bouncing back various jungle-based music and natural sounds, although it’s really just him working with what he calls “the electronic means that I have at hand”) after Claude Levi-Strauss’s ambivalent and searching book that’s as much about the author’s own methods and engagement with the natives he’s studying as it is about the study indicates that he’s aware of that, even if the work doesn’t directly engage with that history. Pekler’s more interested in getting something interesting and evocative and he’s constructed a rich, broadly constituted stew to do so with (as a song title like “Humidity Index/Khao Sok (Chopped and Screwed)” indicates).

 Ian Mathers 

 Greg Kelley/Bill Nace —Live At Disjecta (Open Mouth)

Now here’s a name we don’t see enough these days. When trumpeter Greg Kelley (nmperign, Heathen Shame, and Cold Bleak Heat) moved from Massachusetts to Washington State a couple years ago his touring profile east of the Mississippi took a hit. But this proved to be the West coast’s gain, since this record is an artifact of an eight-date tour, which is a substantial number for any noise combo these days. His partner here is guitarist Bill Nace (Vampire Belt, Body/Head), and the zones of broad amp protest and brittle brass fatigue that they explore together will likely awaken pleasant memories of Heathen Shame’s hellish squalls. But while the sound is similar, the dynamic is very different; where even the Shame’s most free-falling moments embraced rock gesture, this set’s energy is more elemental. At some points the two men’s waves of sound attract and repel like magnetic fields, at others they arc like two bolts of lightning headed for the same weathervane. The jolts are welcome indeed.

So let’s not measure his success in terms of adulation and glitz, right? Doing so would likely get in the way of appreciating the charms of this humble document. Millis’ side kicks off with an artifact of his adventures in India. Apparently his way of winding down from interviewing 78 collectors of the southern hemisphere was to go back to the hotel and write a bleak ballad in English. Under such circumstances, his main instruments are voice and guitars; you won’t hear many of the field recordings or 78 captures he’s used with Climax Golden Twins. But you will hear some sounds from an old friend, Matt Shoemaker, who passed unexpectedly in 2017. Shoemaker’s piano and Millis’ electric guitar and beatbox seem to creep around each other, doing their best to catch one another unawares on the instrumental “Elusion.” Millis sounds bluer without him, mulling over the lure and wages of sin. The vibe overall is much more late night and lonely than the already Cage-ian (Nick, not John) bitterness of Millis’ last LP, The Lonesome High.  

With Millis, strangeness always lurks around the edges, even when he plays it straight. Wica Intina, on the side, can register that strange times are happening around him, but he does not evoke them. He strives to sound wise beyond his 24 years. Maybe it’s just a genetic gift, or maybe he grew up listening to a much older person’s record collection; the one non-original is a cover of Dylan’s “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door.” He sounds like a mid-20th Century troubadour trying to figure out how to drift to Greenwich Village or Nashville, but stuck in a town where the trucks don’t stop and the object of his affection has already moved on, leaving him to sing his blues into the cassette deck.