Every now and then, a song turns up in my inbox from a band I’m unfamiliar with, and it turns out to be really lovely. And lo and behold, it’s happened again! Snow & Voices — who, as it turns out, are an LA band who have recorded three albums of moody, emotive pop — turn in this soft, sensitive take on The Cure‘s “Disintegration” — itself kind of soft and more than a little sensitive. Symmetry! Anyway: it makes for a warm, stirring start to your Friday.

Disintegration by Snow & Voices

Get it here

Cruel Sister, a half-hour instrumental suite by Bang On A Can co-founder Julia Wolfe, is a cheery little number about jealousy, sororicide, and harps made from human bone. The grim story behind the music comes from an ancient English ballad of the same name: two sisters — one “bright as the sun” and one “cold and dark,” as these things always seem to go — are courted by the same gentleman. The dark sister, consumed by jealousy, pushes the fair one into the sea and claims the man as her suitor. Wandering minstrels, who happen upon the dead sister’s floating body, fashion a harp from the dead sister’s breast plate and appear at the dark sister’s wedding, playing music. Struck with an uncanny chill of recognition at the harp’s notes, the dark sister, overwhelmed by grief, begins to weep.

It is the kind of terrifically ghoulish tale that reaches out of posterity to grip your imagination with a bony hand. It has snagged others before Julia Wolfe decided to fashion this loosely programmatic work: the Brit-rockers Pentangle, for instance, recorded a cover for their 1970 record of the same name. Wolfe’s version, meanwhile, has no lyrics, no obvious references to the broadside ballad. But from the outset, it’s pretty clear that she’s waded into dark, icy waters. The work opens on pins and needles: strings pulse quietly in the lower register, a nervous thrum of eight notes. It might sound like the post-minimalism that Bang On A Can has made its calling card, but immediately, it serrates itself, separating into nerve-jangling, irregular intervals. Then, less then two minutes in, a blood-freezing tone cluster drops in from the sky, a cancerous cloud of amassed dissonances that recalls Ligeti. In a strikingly short time, Wolfe submerges us completely in the poisoned mind of the dark sister, who is working herself up to commit an unspeakable act.

In case it hasn’t become obvious, Cruel Sister isn’t easy listening: don’t put it on in the background unless you really like being startled out of your seat. But it is a bleakly beckoning work, one that draws upon all of Wolfe’s considerable evocative powers. At the moment when the fair sister has drowned, a terrible calm sets in, a baleful double bass groaning a single low note while strings whisper hackle-raising nothings in their highest registers. The final section, a frenetic cross-stitching of bird-pecking pizzicato, evokes the bony harp, and the cruel tweaking it plays on the dark sister’s nerves. Listening to Cruel Sister with this programmatic knowledge, in this way, makes for morbidly absorbing fun, but it is just as collar-seizing as a pure instrumental work. Ensemble Resonanz, under the direction of Brad Lubman, pounces upon the score with relish, drawing out every shade of black.

In the age of social media, it’s easy to share our thoughts, our opinions, our pet peeves and our dinner menus, our take on the Charlie Sheen situation. But social media hasn’t allowed us to share our voices until now. Yesterday, a new startup called Broadcastr launched in beta. Broadcastr allows its users to listen to stories and post their own, all of which are pinned to an interactive map. So, for instance, you can click on New York or Seattle or Boston and in an instant you’ll have hundreds of stories (anything from humorous pieces to travel tips, restaurant reviews to social criticisms)that take place on nearly every street–each one is pinned to GPS location. Broadcastr says its mission is to build a layer of narrative and memory in the real world, kinda like what Alan Lomax would be doing today if he had access to a smart phone and a GPS.

I was lucky enough to be invited to contribute a few stories to Broadcastr early on. So, click here if you wanna hear about my awesome 5th birthday on the beach long before the Jersey Shore was the home of Snookie and The Situation, or click here to hear about a sweet yet painfully uncomfortable date I had with a tortured musician-type. Other early contributors include Michael Showalter, Fodor’s Travel Guides, Human Rights Watch, and The 9/11 Memorial. It’s an exciting and fun new venture that I hope you’ll enjoy as much as I do.

So the minute-long little cello and piano interlude before “All of The Lights” on Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is one of my favorite moments on the album. I’m a sucker for a cello. (Whoever plays on it goes a little flat about three-quarters of the way in, but whatever.) The song itself is the most unabashedly grandiose moment on the album, and no matter how many times I listen to it, it still manages to absolutely bulldoze me into submission.

Well, now the Portland Cello Project (about which I am just learning; and about which you can learn more here) has decided to cover it. They do a pretty spectacular job. Watch it above.
–Jayson

By Richard Gehr
Tabu Ley Rochereau is more than just one of the greatest singers and composers in African popular music. He’s also the master politician of the Congolese dance-band nation, which has splintered, fractured, revolted, imploded and rebuilt itself more or less continuously over the course of three generations while producing some of the world’s most beautiful and sophisticated music along the way.

Born Pascal Emmanuel Sinamoyi Tabou in 1940 in Banningville, a port town in the Banandu region of the Belgian Congo, Tabu Ley was raised in Léopoldville. He acquired the nickname “Rochereau” as a schoolboy. Teenage Tabu Ley was a prodigy, and the Lingala, French and pidgin-Spanish songs he submitted to Joseph “Le Grand Kalle” Kabasele eventually earned him a gig with Kabasele’s African Jazz, the city’s top band. Rochereau enjoyed his first hit in 1958 with “Kelya,” the dulcet rumba that appropriately kicks off The Voice of Lightness, a marvelous Sterns anthology of Tabu Ley sides released between 1961 and 1977 — with volume two carrying us to 1993.

Continue Reading The Incredible Lightness of Being Tabu Ley Rochereau

Hello there! It’s been too long. One of the most fun parts of each day — as I’m sure most of you here can attest — is combing through Freshly Ripped here at eMusic, seeing what weirdnesses and grand, exciting discoveries showed up. I have pulled so many things blind from Freshly Ripped — by bands I’ve never heard of on labels I didn’t know existed — based on nothing but “hey, I like that cover art,” that I started keeping loose track last year. Sometimes, the band I click on is a Karaocake. Sometimes, it’s a limited-edition Ed Kowalcyk single. Win some/lose some. In any case, I thought it is high past time I shared some of these curios — some treasures, some novelties, some just weird growths — that came out of the Freshly Ripped primordial soup. Sean suggested the name yesterday, and something clicked, so today the series begins. Follow along, and watch your step.

**Caveats/Disclaimers: Not all of these are what I would comfortably call “good.” Sometimes my interest in stuff has a slightly perverse side. Sample liberally. ***

Jumprope, The Lost Album – Diffident, wispy indie with a slightly jazzy swing to it, boy/girl vocals, a few a capella-nerd choruses. RIYL: Orange Juice, Camera Obscura, diffidence.

Holly Stanton, Temptation – Gum-popping, tough-chick new wave rock and roll, released initially in 1981. RIYL: The Shivvers, Joan Jett

Olympus, Bold Mould – Tinny, squalling little indie-pop songs with berserker-twee keyboard freakouts. Kinda obnoxious, kinda cool.

Hillside Heroes, The Good Times Are Killing Me – Terrible cover art, generic artist name, modest Mouse-referencing album title, ready to dismiss it, but I click on the samples and…hey! This is nice! Perky, well-mannered, strummy British indie rock.

Crazy Rockers, The Story Of – The secret missing link between ’60s surf rock and ’70s power pop? What is this stuff? Where were these guys? RIYL: The Rezillos, rockabilly, Link Wray, Little Steven’s Underground Garage

Staring Problem, s/t — Sean and I both clicked on this one individually yesterday. Got that dead-eyed, affectless, art-school-chick-in-a-punk-band thing with the vocals that either thrills you or makes you grit your teeth on contact (I am mostly the latter). They have a song here called “Pictures of Morrissey In Jake’s Locker.” RIYL: Vivian Girls.

Casino Demon, “Teenage” – There is nothing more than I love than the scare quotes around this album title, intention or no. Broken-English, Japanese-pop take on C86? This is exactly as charming and delightfully off-kilter as you might gather from that description. Like if the 5,6,7,8s were all dudes and really into the Field Mice instead of the Mysterians.

Clorinde, The Creative Listener – Intriguing, found-sound-speckled mandolin instrumentals. RIYL: “intriguing, found-sound-speckled mandolin instrumentals.”

Jes Holtsø & Morten Witrock band, Jes Holtsø & Morten Witrock band – Captain Beefheart-meets-Dr. John bellowing — weirdo, gutbucket Delta blues.

Mischief Brew, Boiling Breakfast Early – Ramshackle country-folk – lo-fi? Cow-fi?

Matt A, The Lost – EP – Hammering, disjointed dubstep stuff, with punishingly loud drums and bursts of synth and a sense of ever-encroaching chaos threatening to completely overwhelm the pulse. If you are turned on by the similarly entropic sounds of James Blake, take a listen.

That’s all for now, but check those out…it’s a nice reminder that even on weeks when “nothing is coming out,” there is all kinds of interesting music bubbling away below your radar. Tune in next time!

I’ve been going on and on about this record for awhile now; it’s crazy and overblown and beautiful. It’s art-rock; it’s classical; it’s proggy. I love it. As I initially put it to my friends, “it sounds like Todd Rundgren, Ariel Pink, and Owen Pallett trying to make American Idiot.” I mostly got blank stares. I loved it so much, in fact, that I interviewed William and his cohorts about it last week at Le Poisson Rouge. Here is what Brittelle and co. had to say about it. Read on!

About the Album: William Brittelle’s Television Landscape

By Jayson Greene

What happens when a bunch of classical nerds get together and try to build an AOR-Rock Masterpiece? It sounds like the setup to a rather obscure joke, and the scenario might sound deeply unpromising. But this is exactly what composer William Brittelle set out to do. His new record, Television Landscape, out on New Amsterdam Records, is the result of an overwhelmingly cerebral attempt to make visceral, anthemic rock music as Brittelle knows and loves it from his youth. Brittelle, a dropout from the Graduate Center program in New York for Composition, couldn’t bring himself to do this in the more intuitive way other bands might. His Epic Rock Album, perhaps unlike most others, began with a scaled, computer model with every single guitar lick, drum fill, and interlude completely notated.

This might seem like trying to build a particle accelerator in order to grill a hamburger, but the shocking thing about Television Landscape is that it worked. Television Landscape is all the things one expects from an epic art-rock album: expansive, anthemic, all-encompassing, shot through with raw emotion. The warm, analog production feels bathed in cathode rays, and songs veer fluidly and seemingly unselfconsciously from AM-radio power-ballads to sustained passages of string writing that recall French composers like Faure and Debussy. And back again. “The idea was basically that I should just do everything that I think is awesome, all at the same time, all on one record, instead of compartmentalizing things,” Brittelle laughs. Recently, he sat down with eMusic’s Jayson Greene along with Lawson White, the record’s engineer; Marc Danzigers, the guitarist on the record and a member of the NOW Ensemble; and several other players on the record to discuss learning to embrace pop culture, trying not be weirder than Kid A, and finding your secret music.

On learning to stop worrying and just make a damn rock record already:


William Brittelle: I always tried to fit in at music school. I moved up here for graduate school, and I ended up dropping out, just because I could never fully engage with that way of thinking. I always felt like I railed against it. I grew up with classical music playing in the house, and then did classical piano competition and did that thing, and then went to Vanderbilt for undergrad and The Graduate Center in New York. While I was in grad school I made this rule for myself that I was only “allowed” to listen to jazz and classical music. So there was almost this religious approach to so-called “high” music, and then an ensuing allure to “low” music. But then I had this teacher David Del Tredici, and his whole thing was about, “Do what you wanna do.” He was about helping people discover their secret music. And, well, this is mine. Right before making Television Landscape, I was listening to Dark Side of the Moon and Purple Rain and all these anthemic concept albums that defined my youth — things like Thriller — and I just finally said, “What is the point of not trying to do this?”

On notating every single note and drum fill of a ’70s art-rock record without making it sound stilted:


WB: You get the right people to play it. That’s really all there is to it. Also, you have to use the right font. [Laughs]. There’s a good ’70s font that you have to use.

Marc Dancigers: I have to jump in here and say that I want to give Bill a lot of credit for writing really idiomatic rock music. I have a lot of experience with this as an electric guitarist who reads a lot of music, and what I’ve learned, from having premiered fifty or sixty pieces with NOW Ensemble, is that it’s really hard to notate idiomatic guitar music. It sounds obvious, but it’s true. You just have to get that guitar impulse somehow in there, in the notation. Bill’s music is conceived in a way that makes sense, and that’s actually pretty tricky to pull off. The only moment he didn’t completely write out is the “Pegasus” solo, which is an entirely improvised moment on the record .But Bill really took the role of producer in the studio and had me do take after take after take after take, not because there were mistakes in them, but because he had something really specific in mind in terms of feel and emotional content and arc.

On intentionally setting out to make a Defining Statement:


WB: I made a to-scale computer model using synthesizers and samplers and all that, for the whole record, and that took almost three years, to do that. I chose amps and actually notated all the drum fills, which turned out to be a ridiculous waste of time, but oh well. The computer model, though, was really the key, instead of pencil and paper, which I’ve always done until now.

It’s sort of ridiculous, I guess, when you think about it. I was sitting there in Los Angeles by myself, in this apartment, writing of as what I’m thinking of as the “new Dark Side of the Moon.” It’s kind of crazy to do that, but at the same time, I felt like I just needed to put myself in that mindset and try to do something that was some sort of defining statement for myself at least, and to sound the way the records I loved sounded.

On the Ur-Concept Album that spurred Television Landscape:


I think there would be four or five, really, and they would be Purple Rain, Dark Side of the Moon, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, for some of the more sonic textures, and Pet Sounds. There’s just a lot of raw emotion and raw energy in Purple Rain that I really love, and a lot of honesty. There’s an emotional current through it. It’s not clearly programmatic, but at the same time, there are strains that run throughout it. Just the sense of power and drama in the title track: it’s the same kind of thing I was trying to go for with “Sheena Easton,” when the choir comes in. It’s not that it’s complex, it’s just powerful. It’s a simple, powerful emotional statement. Dark Side of the Moon has a sound world that is consistent throughout the record and you feel like you’re inside it.

I feel like Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is sort of a “sonic landscape” album. You get this backdrop of sonic fuzz in a lot of the record, and I wanted that at moments. Part of it was nostalgic; Lawson [White, the record's engineer] and I didn’t want it to sound like an “indie” record. We wanted it to sound like a big, dramatic rock record, a broad, expansive record.

On the record’s intentionally analog sound:


WB: It was great having worked with Lawson before, and knowing that he would know what I was looking for. We’re both Steely Dan fans, and Lawson would, like, A-B the record back and forth with Steely Dan. We wanted to make sure that this record, even though it’s fully notated and has classical instrumentation, had that theme to it and had that pop, AM-radio warmth to it, but also had the clarity of classical music, so you could really hear everything that was happening all the time.

On being true to yourself:


One of the things that I did with this record was I made a rule for myself that “it couldn’t get weirder than Kid A. That’s the weirdest, great, insanely popular record that I know, so I’m not going to get weirder than that.” And it was hard! I haven’t written songs in a long time, and I never considered myself really good at writing songs, so I’m like, that’s my bookend.

Lawson White: I feel like, when I’m approaching this, it’s like I know where I’m going, because we are — if I can include myself in that — trying to do something that is not like jumping between the lines but sort of getting there and staying there. It makes sense not because we’re trying to do something different, but because it’s a logical extension of who we are and the music that we like, and listen to, and know how to make. I guess there is a mission statement of sorts, a flag of sorts to be waved…

WB: I think it’s a flag of personal honesty, or at least that’s how I try to think about it. It’s about trying to be honest about who you are and what you like, and not allowing fears or any of that stuff to enter in. Just: if you were on a desert island, and you had this group of amazing musicians, and some money and a great recording studio, what would you make that you would want to listen to for the next twenty years?

In honor of Lenny Kaye’s epic retrospective on the MC5′s Kick Out the Jams and courtesy of the dearly departed former eMusic employee Patrick Lelli, here is an amazing clip of Rob Tyner, former lead singer of the MC5, performing his solo song “Grande Days” on an autoharp with a pair of Larry “Bud” Melman glasses and fingerless leather gloves on public access television. Patrick sent me the link the other day, and I’ve watched it three or four times since; it’s one of those amazing moments where the mundane slams unexpectedly into something transcendent. It’s basically why public access TV was invented. The original studio recording is a bit of a scowly cock-rocker; here, armed with nothing more than an autoharp and his quavering, 60s-rock throwback tenor, Tyner turns “Grande Days” into a trembling broadside ballad.

I caught Bristol, England based Malachai on the final day of SXSW. Composed of a vocalist, Gee, and Scott on a laptop etc. They were intriguing. Really hard to classify, definitely a bit of the Bristol sound in there but they’re true magpies, grabbing shiny and dark stuff alike, to create, well the metaphor falls apart here cause there’s nothing nest-like about them.

Reading around, it’s comforting to learn that no one else seems to know how to describe them either. Their PR release quotes Kasabian’s Serge Pizzorno, “it reminds me of Revolver-era Beatles but there’s this kind of early DJ Shadow vibe going on.”

If you’re in NYC you can hear them tonight at Le Poisson Rouge, opening for Ben Frost. Everyone else can check them out here here. Headliner Ben Frost is also available on eMusic.

Man, Jayson wasn’t kidding about today being a big day. In amongst the marquee stuff that’s dropped in, I noticed a bunch (a slew even) of great and/or interesting records that I figured were worth running down here. Even still, I’m sure there’s stuff of note that I missed. Feel free to drop some science in the comments.

V/A, The Minimal Wave Tapes: Volume One: Is 2010 the year of coldwave? Between NYT Salem hype, Cold Cave, the Wierd Records party/scene and now this Stones Throw comp, it’s time to stop being CHILL and start getting COLD. Ugh. ANWYAYYYY, this is pretty great. RIYL: Linn drum-fueled, cheapo ’80s synth sounds. And dreary things.

Side note: Can someone explain to me the difference between coldwave and darkwave? Kthnx.

Hannu, Hintergarten: A great record from last spring. Here’s what I said in October:

Hannu’s Hintergarten is quickly becoming one of my favorite albums of the year. Like a more somber companion to Four Tet’s Rounds, it’s a kind of crackly downtempo electronic album with lots of vinyl pops and piano plinks and, well, space.

Really, really glad to see it on the site! Four Tet definitely on the mind today with this coming in and the new record being pretty legitimately awesome. Also tweeting first thoughts RE: There Is Love In You at 17 Dots Twitter.

Infinite Body, Carve Out The Face Of My God: Some lax Googling tells me that this is one guy (Kyle Parker) who used to record under the name Gator Surprise. Mmmk. This is an interesting take on ambient in that it sounds overdriven. It’s warm and enveloping, sure, but it has this harsh aura. An impressive collection in a (micro)genre where it’s very hard to define your own space.

V/A, The Real Sound Of Chicago: Holy cow are there a lot of regional obscuro comps. This one is from BBE/!K7 so you know it’s at least legit enough to give a whirl. Pretty expansive at 25 tracks, Real Sound focuses pretty much on maximalist disco. It’s a bit too… splashy for me? But definitely of note for disco dudes.

Beach Fossils, Daydream / Desert Sand: We’ve been loving this guy Dustin for awhile now; it’s exciting to finally get some material on the site. I know the whole beach-chill-glo-wave-fi thing has become a bit of a rubbernecking disaster, but this guy has tunes. Seriously. I really like the kind of minimal two guitar interplay. Very optimistic about the LP (also coming through Captured Tracks, sometime in ’10 I hear).

Quail Lungs, Dumb Dadadum: Like Infinite Body, another artist on PPM, Dean from No Age’s label. Dumb is a pair of ramshackle, probably homemade songs. The A-side is completely falling apart — “Dumb Dadadum” sounds like it was recorded while stumbling home from a drunken night out. You know, slurred lead (and backing) vocals, occasional tamborine randomly showing up, yell-y pub-anthem chorus. The B is a more droning keyboard affair. It’s kind of a slight single, but it’s charmed me for some reason.

Ray Mang, Bullet Proof: NEW DFA, NEW DFA! [Insert Drudge siren] The B-side is probably the winner here — a slow-burning cosmic (overused I know, but it’s cosmic sounding!) disco number with some nice piano stabs.