Dear PR who sent me the album by Mikaela’s Fiend,

I can’t remember which PR you are, but I think you’re one I trust, and that your CDs come in foreign-stamped packages, and I like those. Anyway, you sent this through in good time for last issue, and I put it on the albums list and no one picked up on it or reviewed it, the fools! I should have done it myself, but I was super busy and I thought maybe someone else would do it. I described it as: “Two teenage boys who are like some kind of baby Lightning Bolt from Seattle. Sick riffs and fake-jazz-metal drumming and some occasional samples and an audience of shy noise kids with their arms folded.”

I think that last bit of the sentence put people off, so maybe it should have continued “…watching while the band fling themselves around and go nuts and bounce off stuff!!!!” Anyway, my fault either way, but now I’m doing a ritual cleansing of all the music from my desk, and the best things I’ve found/refound so far are a new album by Metalux, and this Mikaela’s Fiend release (We Can Driving Machine on SAF records. It is definitely the most fun of the two. It’s one of the most truly playful albums I’ve heard in ages - pretty much every song works on the premise of “OK, so what happens if we…?” and then the premise of “YAY!!! That’s what happens!”, and it doesn’t matter that much if other people have made that discovery already, because it’s so fun trying stuff out, and it sounds great.

Mikaela’s Fiend are basically a pretty good guitar-and-drums-and-ring-modulator representation of the sound of how it feels when you’re in a moshpit and you fall over but it’s OK, times a million, in a few different time signatures, at full volume, wildly distorted and all sped up. Thank you for sending me their album, it is loads of fun.

FMMxx

Posted by Frances May Morgan on Thursday, June 1st, 2006
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It’s like I know by now that there will be a frill of cymbal-shimmer and a ripple at the edges of everything and that I will leap up and down and laugh because I’m so excited. I know what Boredoms are going to do, pretty much, at least to start with. I know the way in which they’ll unfurl their sound with the upward seeping and sweeping of queasy intergalactic fairground chords and an outward spiral of drum-rolls and percussion mutterings, upwards and outwards until the music spreads to touch every sonic nerve ending in your body and light appears from your fingertips and your toe-tips and your nose and the clouds open and swallow you into the space between them and then they get going, after that. I know because I’ve seen Boredoms play pretty much the same set four times in four years - with some differences, sure, like tonight’s acid house disco bit in the middle - and I wonder about this and then I stop wondering and start leaping and laughing again because it’s OK, it’s not the same it’s totally different, it’s like weather is always different and like how the seasons are always a surprise when they change, and it’s OK too, using all this hippy talk, because it is Boredoms, and they are what most out-there music only promises to be. They are body music for the mind to do iridescent aerobics to.

Last night they retained the high of their last few performances and were also more lyrical and unashamedly pretty than usual, sounding more like Yoshimi’s OOIOO in places. They aimed for triumphant, anthemic prog peaks, too, and (duh, obviously) reached them easily, finishing off with a stately march, a national anthem for a planet run by giant cats and carnivorous plants. And there was the aforementioned disco-acid-house breakdown bit, expertly dropped on us after a galloping, thundering motorik. When things got too sweet, Eye cut loose with a swoop of noise that whistled past the head like a circus knife-thrower’s blade and travelled thence downwards much further than it ought. He leapt and yelled and pointed and conjured with glowing orbs in the encore, hinting at the chaos that surrounds the drumming and could always overtake and swamp it. Of course we know that won’t happen, but the intimation that it will is part of the tension and the fun and the sacredness of Boredoms: that they - at their best, which is like most of the time - sound like they’re holding everything together, holding the whole of music in their hands for an instant, passing it round, passing it on, passing it over the heads of the audience, and then throwing it out into the world and letting someone else have it.

Posted by Frances May Morgan on Tuesday, May 30th, 2006
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Hurrah for the lovely BARR, who’s playing at lovely Bardens, which has RE-FUCKIN’-OPENED at long last, after almost a year of not being open and forcing us to go to all sorts of weird places like Kilburn instead. So hurrah for all of that, and you should all go see BARR and get made happy, because he’s ace, and because I won’t be there, most likely, because I’ve got meetings, deadlines and a head full of worry and woe and a most unseasonal hibernation instinct enveloping my head like an itchy wool snood, so I want everyone to go for me and ENJOY.

OK?

They’re showing films too. It will be good.

Posted by Frances May Morgan on Tuesday, May 9th, 2006
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I’ve had a few of these experiences lately where I’ve found a recording of something I have no recollection of actually doing. Usually it’s on minidisc, but I just found a tape of myself that I just can’t place. It sounds like me, that’s all I can say, but it also sounds like I am playing an electric guitar (or more accurately a semi-acoustic I think, but it’s definitely plugged into something), which is something I never do, and haven’t done except in bands in a purely textural way for about five years. But it’s definitely me. And I can hear my voice too, really quietly, and then some kind of horrible noise in the background that sounds like the tape fucking up, but as it goes on I realise that it’s actually a synthesiser or something, droning and then swelling and then dying down, something really primitive. But I don’t think it’s either of my synths. I know what they do, and this is not what they do, and I also know I haven’t played an electric guitar since around the time I got them. So what is this, when did I do it, and why? I have no idea. It sounds like a ghost. Maybe I was a ghost when I made it. I don’t sound very happy. Maybe I couldn’t sleep.

Maybe it’s the old ring modulator that broke, and I have somehow rigged it up to do something synth-like. Before I got the synths I was pragmatic like that.

What’s weirder is that it’s not a 4-track recording, so I guess I recorded it on the dictaphone that I am now listening to it on. But I’ve had a minidisc for years and years, and I don’t think it’s pre-minidisc. So what - when - why?

Then it stops and it’s a Beach Boys mix tape that - again - I don’t remember making. Which places it before I got a computer and therefore a CD burner. Which…fuck…I have no idea.

Posted by Frances May Morgan on Friday, April 28th, 2006
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God bless WFMU. Seriously. Not only did the guy just play one of the most completely insane-sounding Tom Ze tracks I’ve heard (’Pagode-enredo dos Temp do Medo’?),apparently a new one, he’s right now playing the first track off Scott Walker’s new album, which I have just spent the last few days wrestling with, trying to write something that does it some kind of justice.

Finally sent Daniel the review today - too long, but look, if you can’t break a word limit for Scott, well - and got the fear that I’d written about it so hard that it wasn’t as good as I’d made it out to be, or that I’d written more passionately than I’d listened, which happens. But then the WFMU guy played the first track, ‘Cossacks Are’, and right from the first notes I could feel myself sitting up straighter, stopping what I was typing, zoning into listener mode. I knew it was something petrified and amazing, like yesterday when I was writing the review and pausing to look into the garden and the most enormous crow was perched on the fence-post against the grey empty sky and I felt good and scared and like everything was filtered through a dark lens.

Posted by Frances May Morgan on Wednesday, April 26th, 2006
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I was being really whatever about No Bra, but this new single is kind of compelling. It’s monged and ambivalent-sounding and there’s a cool twittering sound. I like its quietness, in contrast to the hectoring b-side, which is called ‘No Woman No Crime’. What is it with the hectoring in this kind of music? Like as if you’re going to listen to something any harder just because someone’s shouting it at you in a queeny voice. Maybe it works for some people, but I must have gone to too many performance art shows and parties in the late 90s and permanently over-sensitized my hectoring receptors or something, as they are just not having it these days. Anyway, ‘Noise Pollution’ is as close as No Bra will probably come to actually making a song that works as a song and not as some oroborustic hipster joke that’s only funny if you make sure you don’t hear it more than about once (cf ‘Munchausen’). They edge around the idea of a song as if they’re ashamed to have made one. I like the sound it makes as they furtively skirt the edges of good and bad, effort and effortless: ominous, fluttery, tired.

Posted by Frances May Morgan on Monday, April 24th, 2006
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First time I saw Boris it was like ether and chloroform inhaled off cotton candy: beautiful. Enormous valleys of drone and riff, cut through with the soaring solos and vibrato howling, all rendered with a sense of unashamed melody and drama; rock history glimpsed through an endless neon prism kinda thing. Darkly crystalline, and the rest.

Next time I saw them, it wasn’t loud enough. I got drunk and asked the soundwoman to turn it up and she gave me the look of death. By the time the band got going, I felt like I could have stayed at home and listened to their records turned up halfway, except that there was a teenage metal girl being sick on the floor a few feet away from me. I ended up being more fascinated by her insouciant puking (she didn’t move away, or try to go do a sick elsewhere, just sicked at her feet, while her boyfriend looked after her. It was almost cool, she was so unbothered) than I was transfixed by Boris. Then I started feeling sick too, like she’d started a sick chain. It wasn’t the best gig.

Tonight, I don’t know what I was expecting. I hoped at least for the effect of that first Boris experience, its dizzying beauty;I hoped it would be loud at least. I was expecting a codeine moment or two. I wasn’t expecting FUN. Enormous, head-shaking, boinging stupid FUN. But it’s fun that I’m having, here at the Underworld, the best kind of Underworld fun, and Boris are having enormous fun too. They start with a sawing drone, and then proceed to bang out four or five thrashy, Blue Cheer-style numbers with more bounce and groove than on any of their recordings. It’s the best kind of preparation for their real speciality: the enormo-drone anthems, which are all the more beautifully molten as a result.

As always, Boris look awesome and incongruous: Atsuo on drums, in white blouse and Kate Bush radio mic, Takeshi all earnest and yodelling in his ‘HEAVY’ t-shirt, and Wata, the only guitar goddess worth speaking of right now in the current drought of guitar goddesses, dressed in a top that looks like it’s from Dorothy Perkins (neatly bobbed hair, deadpan face, impressive forearm muscles) and casting notes like they’re goddamn runes. My god. As always, too, they play beautifully, note-perfect and influences just-so; but tonight it’s like some ancient mischief festival they’ve got going on beneath and behind the music, some secret knowledge they’ve finally gained. It’s as if they’ve finally figured out that if they let us in on how much fun it is to be in Boris, we’ll have fun too and we’ll bounce the fun off them and the end result of all that bouncing can only be more sound, more harmonics, more stomach-dropping-out riffs, more iridescent soloing, more everything, more fun, more more more.

They end on a stately, ear-pummelling high, gongs included, and then they come back on and do something that sounds like Soundgarden. In Boris-world, quite clearly, anything goes, as long as it’s heavy as fuck, and for that alone it already feels like it’s gonna be a great birthday after all.

Posted by Frances May Morgan on Tuesday, April 11th, 2006
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The album is Formula and the song is called ‘Amoeba’ and iTunes calls it Industrial, but iTunes does not really understand genre. I suppose it is industrial in that it’s all hard edges, manly, echoey, pylon-sounding, but whatever.

This isn’t a post about OLD, about whom I know about three facts: two of them went on to form Khanate, who are fucking brilliant because you can feel yourself getting swollen tonsils and nasty rashes and cold sores and bad circulation just listening to them, and how many bands can you say that about? Exactly. Two, they were Earache’s worst-selling band ever or something. Three, my boyfriend really likes them (hence knowledge of fact two, and possibly even fact one, although I maybe did find that one out for myself, I mean I am not totally stupid). Anyway, this is a post about the fourth fact I know about OLD, and this isn’t actually a fact, it’s a point of conjecture or discussion or something. It’s just that, well, this ‘Amoeba’ track reminds me enormously of a 60s Caetano Veloso track called ‘Equanto Seu Lobo Nao Vem’.

And I am wondering if this is just me, or if anyone else has ever noticed this. I noticed it first, a bit drunk after a few weeks’ straight-edge living (recommended) and my boy noticed it too, and said actually, it wasn’t such a weird comparison to draw, but didn’t really explain why, like he wanted me to figure it out for myself or something. This is about as far as I’ve got.

I am also wondering if there’s a word for the feeling of noticing one piece of music reminds you of a completely other piece of music - not that thing of, oh, that’s been nicked off that. There is a word for that, and it’s YEAH, SO WHAT? I think I mean more the enjoyment of incongruous connections. Loving the wrong. That’s what I mean.

Re: the OLD/Caetano Venn diagram, I am still not sure, even though there’s this orchestra-tuning-up bit in the middle, which brings to mind ‘Panis Et Circensis’ by Os Mutantes. What the fuck? Industrial Metal Tropicalia? Could it possibly be?

I should try leaving the house sometimes.

Posted by Frances May Morgan on Friday, April 7th, 2006
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It was sunny on Sunday and I opened up the windows and got out of bed late and finally figured out how to listen to Tim Buckley’s first, self-titled album, which I’ve had for ages ’cause it’s on the same CD as the more mature, more experimental and thus supposedly ‘better’ Goodbye and Hello, but had accepted for once the received muso wisdom that it was a curio, a debut that’s really only interesting in the light of what Buckley did next and had decided that my addiction to the piano part in ‘Song for Janie’ was more of a Van Dyke Parks problem than a Buckley problem, and that actually, you know what, I don’t even have much a Buckley problem in the first place, I’m not altogether convinced by the guy, I’m sorry.

So anyway it was sunny and I was on my own, which are the ideal conditions for listening to Tim Buckley by Tim Buckley, and I flitted around the upstairs of the house catching bits of each song, and it was then I figured out that the only way to listen to it was to forget it was by Tim Buckley, Tragic Songwriter, and just tease out bits of the music surrounding him and marvel in them for a few moments. Forget who the boy is who yodels the unintentionally hilarious lyric “Just for you, with your open hands/Waiting for the touch of man…” The dude’s just another instrument, in this instance he sounds like a clarinet; right now he’s going all strident at you but in a minute everything will break down and he’ll just breathe some soft notes out of it while an electric piano burbles around him. He’s the soloist only in that he’s higher in the mix than anything else. This album’s all about fragments and hints. It’s all about the edges and corners of the songs and the beauty that can lurk in such places.

Which is really just a fancy way of saying it’s all about the arrangements, which are beautiful and unsettling. They’re unsettling because just as you squirm at the banality and obviousness of a vocal line, a stealth attack of strings swoops in from one side and knocks you for six, flutters around your ribcage for a very tiny moment, and suddenly the song is magic and it is saved.

Of course, fans of girl group music are familiar with the juxtaposition of the simplistic, teenage lyric or the nursery-rhyme-simple melody with the heavenly string section. I mean, duh. But on Tim Buckley it’s somehow weirder and more poignant. Maybe because he wasn’t a girl group; he was a troubadour type who probably wanted to keep it real and ended up with Jack Nitzsche’s hyperreal violins instead.

Maybe, also, because Nitzsche’s strings are not the of the schmaltzy variety that were often drafted in to sweeten Sixties pop music. Instead, they’re sparingly used, delicately so; they don’t merely follow the song and bolster it with lovely chintzy violin pillows, instead they have a diaolgue with it. But this isn’t to say they’re over-complex, or at odds with the fairytale naivety of this album. On ‘Wings’ he takes a chance with a really basic, folksy, descending string line dropped between Buckley’s vocals about flying free as seabirds or something, and it completely works, recasting the song as a candy-coloured pop-drenched lullaby instead of the wholesomely twee jangler it coulda been.

With lesser songs like ‘It happens every time’, it’s like Nitzsche knows there’s not much he can do with the song itself, because it is pretty bad, so he opts for using the strings as a sort of dreamy dynamic device: they follow the bass line, kind of, in melody, but their main function is to place this slightly uninspired song in a world of soft, shifting texture so that it’s no longer a simplistic expression of disappointment but something much more epic, much more cyclical. It sounds simulatneously like your first romantic let-down and all the romantic let-downs you’ll ever have: Buckley’s lyrics are dumb innocence; Nitzsche’s strings, bitter experience.

But really, I get the feeling Nitzsche would have done strings like this for anyone that paid him to, and so what this album’s about for me is Van Dyke Parks. Specifically, Parks’ piano on ‘Song For Janie’, which is also one of the album’s strongest songs as far as Buckley’s songwriting and performance goes (he actually sounds as if he’s enjoying the recording session, and that he might go for a beer afterwards).

Apparently Parks overdubbed most of the piano parts after the main body of the album had been recorded, and there is a weirdly lonesome quality to a lot of them, like they’ve been doodled on a page that’s already written and printed. But they’re the most awesome doodles, the scribbles of a stupidly talented compulsive musician who can’t resist turning a folk-rock song into a sort of vaudevillian baroque tapestry. And on this track, they’re both ornate and full of feeling and laid-back breezy sunny rightness, depending on the part of the song. Contrary to what you’d expect, the verse takes the big, fun-sounding chords in the left hand, and the chorus forefronts the high-up fiddly-diddly Fender Rhodes line, so that the chorus isn’t a payoff of any kind, it’s more of a little patch of musical uncertainty (”Janie, don’t you know?” asks Buckley) before resolving, taking a breath, and back to the verse again.

I remember the first time I heard it listening to it a good few times in a row, willing the verse to come back again one more time so I could enjoy falling into it again. It’s never quite long enough.

Posted by Frances May Morgan on Monday, April 3rd, 2006
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I can feel the man I’m next to sinking into sleep. With each breath he seems to drift further downwards in increments, yet really he’s hardly moving at all.

He’s a natural at sleeping attractively in public. He gets the sphinxy, poised look of a cat on a windowsill. I like being the one who gets to lean against his arm and study the way his hand relaxes, fingers uncurling, as he dips further into sleeping.

Amy is sitting on his other side, looking down at her hands, which she’s clasping together in different lattice shapes. Nite is on my other side and he is looking upwards, listening. It takes a lot to knock him out. A man in front places a hand on his girlfriend’s black-jumpered shoulder and she, too, leans into him a little. She has blonde hair swept up with clips and shiny in the dim light. I am looking at her hair and then my eyes close too, for a few minutes. I think about being outdoors in the rain in the summer in the nighttime.

The music makes the air a little fuzzy and thickened. Nite and I had been talking about ozone earlier on. I think about the way electricity smells. This music smells like a computer simulation of what it smells like after a storm. It is coloured grey and blue, mostly, cobalt blue with flickers of silver and a sort of very dark, metallic green. It feels like vapour, nothing to hold onto. I don’t know what it sounds like, exactly, but afterwards we all agree that it could have been quite a bit louder, and later that night I have a dream about Kensal Green Cemetery and a monument shaped like a giant black marble sewing machine and in the dream I’m saying (to the sleeping boy with the sphinxy face, who gets to be in the dream too), is this a monument to a woman who sewed a lot or is it just to some factory owner guy who ran a sweatshop?

Posted by Frances May Morgan on Saturday, April 1st, 2006
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