Crow’s Nest 81: 022325
Who knew that pronouns in your email were so powerful that their opponents would want them vanquished immediately
I’m not sure it feels right or appropriate to open this with a fake-positive affectation that things are ok at the moment. Work for me sucks, and seemingly everyone I know in the area has some type of SAD-adjacent winter blahs. The corporate bigwigs at my company, while acknowledging that the disruption the new regime administration has caused so far is ‘unprecedented’ outside of what happened early on in the pandemic, also claim that the ‘real’ show has yet to begin, when Congress takes up a budget bill in the spring. Fun!
Nevertheless, here you are, reading this, so thank you for doing so. Hopefully you enjoy something within. Let’s get to it:
Last issue I highlighted a 1968 bossa nova/big band jazz fusion record with traditional Japanese instrumentation from somewhere within the 180g label. It left enough of an impression on me to dig a little deeper, and that record is but the tip of the spear for SOUND FUJI, a sublabel reissuing the King Records catalog (which goes back to 1931). Guided by the phenomenal curatorial prowess of Yusuke Ogawa, I’m most taken by the 3rd sampler volume Ogawa has assembled, highlighting 70s fusion records from the catalog. By the time the compilation picks up, a number of incredible tracks have gone by, including a surprising number of vocal cuts. Lest you think the compilations contain all worth listening to, the track from Singers 3’s Foliole #2 left little impression on me in its slot, but the full record is a magnificent piece of jazz-rock fusion running into space-y areas that can give anyone in that realm from Floyd to Floating Points a run for their money. This series is running on a weekly schedule, surely I have a few more records in my inbox that will wind up in future issues, and I’m confident I might drop everything to listen to any Martha Miyake records that come out from this.
If the number of pictures in recent issues has seemed low, I have been in a little bit of a slump for going to events where taking pictures seems appropriate or might get something decent. (Sorry, nothing from seeing Annea Lockwood at Elastic Arts on Wednesday. Good show though.) Things have been a bit light on my schedule, yet conflicts still come up. I was intrigued by the undercard to an Empty Bottle show headlined by unknown-to-me act Tunnel; a name like that seems to promise post-punk or egg punk, just as the latter has also been devastated like its namesake. I didn’t go as I won a pair of tickets to see Julianna Barwick followed by a screening of The Tree of Life. (Sound off if you’d be interested in me joining Letterboxd and writing about movies there I guess.)
Listening to Tunnel’s record after that show, I’ve fallen for them heavily, and they’re a bit better than most groups taking all their cues from Devo. The sound is old-school psychedelic with plenty of krautrock-indebted repetition, which combine with the orange-and-black color scheme to reinforce central themes of being coerced into enduring the results of decisions made for you that you have no control over. This surfaces in attempting to have fun on a tight budget, pest control, and even the big metaphor of being stuck in traffic—yes, in a tunnel, therefore having no way out but through without possibility of a detour. The record itself isn’t exactly compact nor does it sprawl too much, but nevertheless the quartet keep things texturally interesting in a masterful way. Surprisingly, no one has yet given them the 40% of the cover price they lament for this on Bandcamp—yet. If you’d like to beat me to the punch before I do so on the next Bandcamp Friday, go ahead, or perhaps you’d be interested in catching them at their next gig at Cole’s Bar this Thursday? I’m not familiar with any of the other acts on it but it’s shaping up to be a great but under-the-radar evening.
Jules Reidy’s microtonal guitar has always felt singular, but new album Ghost/Spirit levels up their work well beyond where they were on their last few releases. Inspired by a breakup and the transmogrifying potential of mysticism, the album is dense and noisy, with fractured, heart-wrenching songwriting at its core; the second track is an interlude, which feels appropriate for determining how far in to this you want to go after the first track. Loveless and Laughing Stock both feel like appropriate predecessor references, if Liz Harris were at the helm and filtered through an American primitivist at their noisiest and most futuristic. The Quietus has a pair of features on Reidy’s process for this record, which I highly recommend reading, as is grabbing a ticket for their performance at Constellation next month, which I have zero regrets about doing even before I realized this record was coming up.
‘Experimental folk’ and the various genres associated with it have been a significant influence on my taste, first getting into music during Obama’s first term after the early 2000s boom, with Animal Collective highly formative in said mix. I’ve gotten a reminder of this through some of the underground legends Plastic Crimewave Syndicate’s Steve Krakow manages to book locally, but still, none of the 23 artists on this compilation curated by Paul Hillery ring a bell. That’s by no means a bad thing, as the quality throughout this compilation is top notch. While the sounds are wide-ranging within, overall it’s a reminder that psychedelia doesn’t need to be heavy to be substantial. If you’ve ever been surprisingly satiated by seemingly light fare at a fancy restaurant, you know this feeling, and oh boy do we have a feast on our hands.
Charity music compilations have been on an upswing recently after a few years. They have their benefits and drawbacks, as I’m sure you’re aware, which would be beyond the scope of this issue and esp. this blurb to get into, but there have been two that have caught my ears in the past few weeks. Land 01 covers experimental/noise/ambient etc. sounds from Lebanese artists, raising funds for those displaced during armed conflict and war; only 1 name on this is familiar to me, but many of the talents within are doing excellent work even were they not experiencing war up close. For LA Vol. 2 is an ambient affair curated by Helios, raising funds for those impacted by the wildfires in the Los Angeles area recently; this one features some unreleased material from Ryuichi Sakamoto among its tracks.
Here, I feel obligated to note that I have listened to everything in this issue at least once, usually at least 3x. My usual m.o. of writing almost all of this up on Sunday and listening to the records within as a reminder/refresher, when combined with the reality of 4 hours-long compilations means I haven’t gotten (back) to it all by time I hit publish. Plus everything else going on in the world both personal and general … apologies if my writing seems especially vague. Going through a lot as you can imagine.
For all my knowledge and love of music from New Zealand, I can’t actually recall any shoegaze groups originating from there … until Leather Jacket reissued this gem for its 25th anniversary. Barnard’s Star’s 45-minute EP—what a deliciously 90s phrase—isn’t by my ears a noisy guitar record. It’s quite ambient and droning, slowly developing, with tones more reminiscent of the work of peers like the late Dean Roberts and Roy Montgomery, or first-wave post-rock in general, than its British Isles originators, Seefeel excepted (perhaps). Never turn down a(nother) trip to the land of the long white cloud, as always.
Visiting somewhere as a tourist can be disappointing if you go hoping for an ‘authentic’ local experience but can’t find one satisfactory to you, to the point you doubt the ‘real’ X location actually exists. I don’t doubt Kyoto has an underground scene with talented folks like ODDLY; I just didn’t discover it when there like a year and a half ago. The name is fitting for this group, by the way: they mix up genres in a way that feels refreshing, from the wide-screen grandeur of The Cure to the underground fury of your local punk establishment, and of course stuff that falls in between those two. They’re on the same label as other Asian rock acts with Western appeal like Otoboke Beaver and Say Sue Me (and Wussy), which makes me optimistic that they might play around here at some point.
Spend enough time considering high-concept records from (listed) far-flung locales without a strong personal grounding, and it’s easy to distend from reality a smidge and believe the output to be feverishly, terminally online. Or, that’s often how it feels to be presented with material from the Discrepant label family. Rob Mazurek, who I’m reasonably confident does exist, has turned up on Tenerife-based sublabel KEROXEN, so I guess this is in fact a real-world thing. Like sometimes peer Sam Prekop, Mazurek primarily builds this record off of modular synths, but eschews almost-dance grooves for a spikiness, throwing trumpet blasts and spiritual chanting on top as the lengthier compositions build up. While many modular synth records come across as more interesting to the performer than listener, Mazurek’s end result is an exciting and even at times scary listen.
Fred P takes a celestial turn with this collaborative record with French producer SMBD. It’s not his latest—I have another 9 of his records waiting for me in my inbox at the time of writing—but it remains worth highlighting here. While you may feel as though you’re levitating or high in the sky while listening, it’s still as deep as anything else in his catalog.
Of all music publications currently in existence, The Quietus feels like it can be the most insular of them. When one of their favorite groups, Liverpool’s Ex-Easter Island Head, put out a new record, I was moderately intrigued but not overly so. When they crowned it AOTY, a bit more, but I didn’t feel compelled to spin it again (if I gave it more than 1-2 upon release). When they released a live recording of the group at Acid Horse, the festival they co-curate, for subscribers, I gave it a spin and was blown away by the results. It’s a beautiful mix of ambient, post-minimalism, post-rock, experimental shimmers, something that transcends any descriptor I could attempt to give it here. That live recording (at least for now) is pretty strongly intended for subscribers only, though the studio recording packs a similar punch. I’m not sure I’d necessarily call it AOTY myself, as its positioning in this issue attests, but it’s worth your time if you’ve ever found beauty in wind or the otherwise indescribable.
Has it really been a decade since Ash Koosha broke out? I can’t say I’ve followed him closely for all that time, but his latest release F0 has been a great reminder of how his glitchy, beat-oriented material has few close imitators. We’re still in the realm of synesthetic, post-language-y sci-fi material that, when not as compelling as this, can feel like pseudoacademic babble. But thankfully his material is a step above that.
Well, that’s issue #81 of Crow’s Nest then. As always, thank you for reading and listening, hopefully something within (perhaps multiple things?) has captured your fancy. Until next time.
