Much like his more droning work with Loren Chasse as The Blithe Sons, Orchards & Caravans takes flight around delicate guitar melodies and pensive vocalizations, incorporating bowed oud, bells, toy accordion, Wurlitzer, harmonium, bouzouki, banjo, keyboards, and occasional drumming. Packaged in a highly saturated collage of birds and butterflies, a gaping Venus flytrap, distant trees, prehistoric flora, and the half-human birds found often in Egyptian mythology, the album combines experimental instrumentals, magisterial folk, and lengthy drones.
Evoking the delicate dance of pine needles when they catch a breeze and disappear over a horizon line, "White Sundials Faced the Sun" is a segment of subdued Loren Mazzacane-esque guitar noodle: Maintaining a slow-drip tempo, the carefully spaced guitar strums are held together with fragile vocal sighs. Assuming the properties of its title, "Pillar of Clouds" is a shimmering Middle-Eastern drone punctured with bells and the plucks and strums of various stringed instruments. The darkest excursion on the record, "The Marsh" mucks Goosewind-styled noise with scuttling contusions that build to a distant drone; overlaid with birds, wind and hisses, the manmade sounds ultimately consume the silvan calls of its backdrop.
Surprisingly poppy at times, Donaldson goes beyond these incidental bits, managing also to pen some solid folk hooks. In his hands (and without Bob Dylan's backup singers), the traditional "Mary Ann" emerges wrapped in hoarfrost, a stark ballad whittled to the high-gloss atmospherics of Galaxie 500. Hopelessly catchy, and perhaps Donaldson's most straightforwardly appealing song to date, "Everyone of Us a New Leaf" features rattling drums by Steven R. Smith, a minimal organ line, talk of ghosts, and a distant vocal intonation most reminiscent of Black Heart Procession.
Like Ben Chasny during his most patient work as Six Organs of Admittance, Donaldson is also adept at incorporating loose structures that allow for the creation of songs within songs and asymmetrical pieces that sprout into unexpected directions. Unlike its dreary name, "Black Rainbows, Part 1 & 2" is the acid folk cousin of The Temptations' "My Girl"; halfway through, the sweetness uncoils into a fractured organ rumble, a distant thunder or grayscale prism. Moving in an opposite direction, "The Lost Sun" emerges amid a noisy flight pattern but gives way to poignant strains of melodic guitar, half-shaken jingle bells, a lost war, and a lost sun. Here, the jangling instrumentation contrasts with the track's ingrained melancholy.
I've looked for holes in the armor but Donaldson's too fastidious. Prior to this, he came closest to reaching these heights on The Blithe Sons' We Walk the Young Earth. Here, though, he manages to top that effort, distilling the best attributes of his naturalist psych and patiently building a fully realized dreaming hill, something that fellow Terrastock travelers, in even their most transcendent work, have only been able to hint at.
PitchforkMedia
sold out visit Last Visible Dog
1-01 PorousThe back cover of Pariahs Sing Om, a massive three-disc set by London based New Zealander Peter Wright, bears the scrawled addendum "collected drone poems 2000-2003". That lowercase subtitle may seem casual but Wright's pieces (all wordless save for the minimalist elegy "Some Words For The Dying") are certainly verse-like. His mix of abstract music and field recordings evoke poetry's hybrid of sound and sense, and his layers of drone reflect each other like rhyming lines.
Pariahs Sing Om collects CD-Rs previously issued by Last Visible Dog, Apoplexy and Celebrate PSI Phenomenon. The first, a repressing of 2003's Pariahs Sing Om, uses the widest range of sound sources. "Moutere" turns reverberating guitar chords into waves of oceanic drift, while "Hanging Bottles" melts metallic rattle into electronic noise. On the disc's peak, "Esoteria", shimmering drones and acoustic strums evoke Fursaxa's tonal hymns.
Wright often uses volumn as an instrument. His sounds appear at varied distances, approaching and retreating in gradual shifts. That's clearest on disc two, culled from 2001's Catch A Spear As It Flies. "Strumming Rotunda" draws rumbling guitar forward until Wright's strings seem to escape the speakers, while "Rotunda" buries chirps under hypnotic hiss, and the epic "Low Ground" sounds like a gamelan performance blurred by fog.
On disc three, an amalgam of 2000's Duna and 2001's A Tiny Camp In The Wilderness, Wright's drones (mostly recorded on the streets of Christchurch) have a more primal appeal. The granulated chime of "Miasma" becomes a sandstorm, while the growling "Sierra" and the squawking bleat of "8 Minutes & 6 Seconds" conjure Tony Conrad's violin attack. Here, Wright's work feels most distinct. His dense drones may owe a debt to artists like Phill Niblock, Flying Saucer Attack, and much of the Kranky roster, but their unpolished power makes Pariahs Sing Om inimitably personal.
The Wire
1-1 Reversing Spiral Galaxies (27:54)Un motel sur le bord de la route, à l'entrée d'une petite ville de Nouvelle-Zélande. Les passants ou rares touristes s'arrêtent parfois à la vue du cadavre exquis formé par la superposition des deux panneaux, celui indiquant le nom de la ville, et celui indiquant le motel. Au même moment, quelque part ailleurs dans le pays, une maison de banlieue, une cabane de jardin. Un professeur d'arts plastiques de lycée s'y est enfermé en silence, et se balance, envoûté, au-dessus de sa table de mixage, casque sur les oreilles, enceintes débranchées, pour ne pas réveiller les voisins. Occupé à engendrer quelques larsens pour essayer son nouvel ampli, il venait de se rendre compte qu'il tenait là la clef d'un univers sonore inoui.
Dix ans plus tard, un peu moins, aux antipodes, une dizaine de personnes reposent, allongées, bras croisés, yeux fermés, sourire aux lèvres, sur le sol collant d'une petite salle de concerts metal. Trois espaces-temps irrémédiablement liés par une même manifestation cosmique : le musique de Birchville Cat Motel.
C'est là d'ailleurs son plus grand intérêt. Indéchiffrable, irrésistiblement mystérieux, alimenté par des semblants de sens trompeurs (les titres, toujours superbes : Drawn Towards Chanting Hordes - voilà qui décrirait parfaitement BCM), l'univers de Birchville a toujours eu quelque chose de profondément cosmique, évoquant le lent mouvement muet d'astres lointains, solitaires, indifférents. En compilant six morceaux live enregistrés entre 1998 et 2005, Curved Surface Destroyer en documente l'évolution. Des drones hiératiques du début, illustrés ici par le premier CD, aux entrelacs sonores et métalliques les plus récents, avec leurs rythmiques décalées (comme sur Our Love Will Destroy The World, cette année aussi), Birchville est le parfait exemple contemporain du sublime kantien en musique : trop grandiose pour être rationalisé ou reproduit en mots. Une différence essentielle avec les projets electro-drone/no-input les plus ambitieux, ou signés des plus grands noms, embourbés dans leur condition de naissance trop simplement humaine, trop franchement fabriqués à la main. Rien, à part Birchville, ne peut vous faire douter ainsi de l'origine du son inscrit sur le disque. Du coup, s'ouvre un imaginaire absolument unique dans le monde de l'improvisation actuel.
Curved Surface Destroyer est, en quelque sorte, le troisième album de Birchville cette année. Après Our Love Will Destroy The World sur PseudoArcana (le label d'Antony Milton), qui comptait déjà deux morceaux réédités ; et les 6 CD des outtakes et faces B des trois volumes de Chaos Steel Skeletons, ce triple-CD marque le retour de Campbell Kneale sur Last Visible Dog, le vénérable label américain qui avait déjà sorti l'indispensable double Beautiful Speck Triumph il y a deux ans. Trois fois deux pistes d'une trentaine de minutes, enregistrés live en Nouvelle-Zélande, Suède, Japon et Danemark, trois heures redéployant la lente et sûre évolution du son Birchville. Qui nous surprendra lorsqu'il éditera un CD qualifiable autrement que d'indispensable. Et si on ne pourra jamais vraiment le décrire, il faudra continuer de parler du motel du chat de Birchville, pour inciter à venir le découvrir...
Webzine Mille Feuilles
To the person who has slapped you in the face with the "it all sounds the same" argument when they hear your fine wine drone collection: fucking listen to this 3 cd retrospective by Birchville Cat Motel and cry your eyes out at the sheer beauty and power of it. The good folk at Last Visible Dog have collected a series of Birchville Cat Motel live shows and created this massive slab of drone evolution courtesy of New Zealander Campbell Kneale, the sole inhabitant of the BC Motel.
1.01 Yesterday Love (8:00)
Catchier, darker, and less composed than their Iditarod forebears, Black Forest/Black Seas's diminutive freak-outs are surprisingly addictive. "Sevastopol", which reverences the Ukranian Black Sea fishing port, is an autumnal patch of creepy chamber-music woven with repetitious arpeggios, sturdy cello, backward loops, and the scent of a woodsy bacchanalia. The heavily-plucked "Blackbird on Gray Sky" employs female vocals and swirling instrumentation to lock into its groove, a straightforward troubadour piece until the vocals double and crunchy percussion begins to accompany what sounds like a warped singing saw, bird calls, spectral voices, and shimmering electronics. "Beautiful Here", meanwhile, is more trebly and compressed, a muffled sonic effect like the strains of Medieval bards leaking to your eardrum from someone else's headphones. The lyrics capture the deceptively simple remembrance of a forestal epiphany: the song ends with a field recording of birds, breezes, trees. Here and elsewhere, Black Forest/Black Sea tweak a silvan melancholy; even when the players are happy, it's depressing.
Though each song is successful in its own small way, on "Sunday Market", the acid-folk finally explodes outward with a jangling astronomy. Locating the bedroom version of Magic Hour's transcendent density, a quick Casio beat and snowballing of layered sounds-- alto sax, jarring spring reverb, and caterwauling feedback pretending to be a pack of crows-- catapult the listener into quaking treetops. If every track reached these heights, this record would be required listening; triple the length of "Sunday Market" and godhead is not simple hyperbole. The finale, "Lump in Throat", neatly brings the vibe back down to earth; its organ drones and synthesized drum beat lay a foundation for end-time stargazing, intuitively capturing the fragile rhythms of cracked branches: place a pillow over your head, grab your water-damaged copy of The House of The Seven Gables, and await your next personal witch hunt.
Regardless of the modest earlier tracks and the brevity of the whole affair, there's plenty of beauty shot through this old-world sleepwalk. Especially impressive as a debut, at this point Black Forest/Black Sea offers a gorgeous snapshot of the free psych underground, one of the purest spaces of otherworldly terrain in the current musical landscape. I look forward to future incantations.
