Marnie Stern – Marnie Stern

Marnie Stern - Marnie Stern

Echoing the sentiments expressed by Laura Snapes in a recent interview with The Quietus, it’s always seemed unsettling and perhaps even vaguely sexist that Marnie Stern is typically pigeonholed as ‘that guitar virtuoso girl’: critical discussion tends to centre on how unusual it is to find a female guitar player with her sheer levels of technical ability and invention.

While that may largely the case – it’s hard to say, really, as someone’s playing within a band doesn’t necessarily showcase their full musical ability – it tends to distract from the issue at hand, which is that she writes triumphant, multi-faceted, fists-pumped-in-the-air pop songs that really ought to be as well-known and loved as the likes of Sleater-Kinney or even Joanna Newsom (with whom she shares a beguiling ability to weave webs with words). The fact that she shrouds those songs in layers of incandescent guitar noise merely serves, as far as these ears are concerned, to elevate them even further to that wondrous zone where music and lyrics blur into one single, mind-altering sensory whirlwind. … Continue Reading

Mount Kimbie – Crooks And Lovers

Mount Kimbie - Crooks and Lovers

When I interviewed Mount Kimbie’s Dominic Maker a couple of months ago, we discussed the hypnotic, loop-heavy nature of the duo’s music, and how their sound developed into the distinctive creature it is on their debut album. Far from being a melancholy process, Maker explained, the strongly defined sense of space and distance their music evokes came from the use of field recordings, heavy clouds of reverb – to obscure the fact that “neither of us are particularly technically advanced at the guitar” – and the process of working their productions into a form suited to live performance. It shows throughout the length of Crooks & Lovers, which takes the shape of a seamless live show, built with layers of microscopic loops stacked upon one another. It’s a fascinating direction for a group nurtured within the dubstep(ish) community to take, and the first high-profile full-length from that scene to splice the genre’s tonal and rhythmic tropes into a form recognisable as the work of a ‘band’, as opposed to that of a lone bedroom auteur. … Continue Reading

Short Circuitry 008

'Good Morning Hammersmith’, by Nico Hogg: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nicohogg

Keeping it simple and straightforward this month; Short Circuitry’s been swimming through a boundless ocean of heady delights, and inevitably any attempt to whittle it down is going to end up grossly inadequate. Still, top marks have been going to tunes that defiantly refuse to pander to the sheer heat and humidity that’s reduced this wasted copper wiring to little more than a weakly sparking wreck. In particular, regular injections of Rhythm & Sound’s seminal With The Artists CD and the veritable dose of sonic frostbite that is the Moritz Von Oswald Trio’s Vertical Ascent have kept these drums rattling in some form of delicate equilibrium. Just about, anyway. Right, onward… … Continue Reading

Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti – Before Today

Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti - Before Today

Is it okay to like slightly tacky soft rock if it’s performed with a knowing wink by a bedroom popster, rather than by a group of painfully earnest young men with bad hair? I couldn’t love Ariel Pink more for forcing people to answer that question.

It’s tempting, when writing about Pink and the legions of new(ish) artists that have followed in his footsteps, to start gushing about the usual tropes attached to chillwave and its ilk. Y’know, ‘half-remembered sounds from childhood’, chatter about hauntology as applied to pop music, obligatory mention of lo-fi as an intentional aesthetic, et cetera. … Continue Reading

Short Circuitry 007

Mount Kimbie

After another one of those hiatuses – in typical style, a case of life imitating art and hitting the wonky flex – Short Circuitry returns, and it’s hit the magic Bond number. As seems to have been the case an awful lot lately, it’s proving to be a consistently exciting time to be a follower of electronic music. There have been a whole raft of releases in recent weeks setting the bar high for the dancefloor, not to mention a couple of upcoming ones looking to kick down the walls of the mainstream entirely. … Continue Reading

Flying Lotus – Cosmogramma

Flying Lotus - Cosmogramma

At the risk of adding to the already considerable hyperbole trailing Steven Ellison’s latest long-player, it’s probably best just to go ahead and cut to the chase: whatever way you look at it, Cosmogramma is a remarkable achievement. To qualify that statement further: even a casual listener initially put off by its labyrinthine approach to form and function would find it difficult to deny Ellison’s sheer breadth of vision. But to anyone even remotely versed in Flying Lotus’ ever-shifting world it should come as little short of revelatory, a vindication of the conceptual approach he has taken on each of his Warp releases and a timely reminder of his weighty family history. It certainly raises a lighthearted nature versus nurture debate – as the nephew of Alice Coltrane, it seems only right that Flying Lotus should end up exploring similar cosmic modalities. … Continue Reading

Erykah Badu – New Amerykah Part 2: Return Of The Ankh

Erykah Badu - New Amerykah Part 2: Return of the Ankh

As someone only properly acquainted with Erykah Badu after the release of her (deservedly) lauded last album, New Amerykah Pt. 1: 4^th World War, the wait for the follow up has been characterised by both excitement and trepidation. That record was a bold statement in all senses of the word, standing out from both her own past work and that of her contemporaries like little else. Its frequent brilliance was largely due to context – here was an album that seethed with righteous anger at the state of a world increasingly polarised by a series of hugely destructive wars and ideological rifts. 4^th World War was striking in that it both accepted these harsh truths and casually dismissed them at once; her voice couldn’t have sounded more languid than on ‘The Healer’ as she reeled off an alternative mantra, “Hip-hop/Is bigger than religion… Hip-hop/Is bigger than the government”. … Continue Reading

Short Circuitry 006

Ikonika

There’s something inherently reductive about the concept of genre. Ask any musician what they think of the latest term to describe their sound, and the answer will usually be preceded by a wince. It remains largely an academic concern – for many music writers, naming and constraining is a large part of what they do. It provides a rough conceptual map, a basis for understanding the nature of general trends as well as sudden, rapid shifts in sound. Discourse to indulge the inner geek, essentially.

Bass music provides ideal fodder for genre-junkies, with both dubplate culture and ongoing advances in technology ensuring that emergent sounds swiftly ripple outward from their epicentre. But it also poses a problem in terms of definition. UK bass producers are largely magpie-like in nature, grabbing good bits from wherever they can be sourced and creating dubious regions where one neatly defined style begins to bleed into others. … Continue Reading

Short Circuitry: January 2010

Night Slugs

Since this month’s sudden thaw fucked our already frayed wiring, Short Circuitry’s been in slow recovery on top of the kitchen radiator and has taken the opportunity to catch up on over a month’s musical backlog. Thankfully, we’re now back to our usual shepherd selves, rounding up and processing the usual herd of electronic releases into pre-shaped, bite-size portions – now with an added ‘free stuff’ section. … Continue Reading

The Ex + Brass Unbound + Zun Zun Egui – Bristol Fleece

The Ex

January 29th 2010

There’s a keenly felt sense of anticipation in the Fleece this evening. As well as being the first of The Ex’s performances with the formidable Brass Unbound roster – Mats Gustafsson, Ken Vandermark, Roy Paci and Walter Wierbos – the bill also features local firebrands Zun Zun Egui, a band that sorely deserve the increase in status this tour should hopefully bring. 

On paper, Zun Zun Egui are impossible to define. Try to explain their sound to a prospective listener and the sentence almost inevitably becomes tangled between brain and mouth. This evening their impact is dented a little by slightly muddy sound, at least from where I’m stood, but it does little to diminish their furious energy. Zun Zun’s frequent brilliance is hard to pin down, but partly lies in the tension between frontman Kushal’s glottal yelps and keyboardist Yoshino’s sweet, breathy vocals. Their interplay provides a consistency that allows the band space to snap seamlessly between spazzy blasts of guitar and four-to-the-floor tropical funk. Without that anchor – and indeed, without their drummer’s impressive chops – their music would run the risk of heading off in a hundred different directions all at once. Perhaps that’s a part of the appeal.

… Continue Reading