Drop of Blood in the Bucket - Les Vamyprettes

Outside of "Thriller" there's not much popular music geared towards Halloween, though I'm probably forgetting a ton of stuff as I'm not a fan of Metal music and don't have much time to investigate.  Last year I focused on Slang's album The Bellwether Project, and while that's a really good album its not exactly horror-based.  Greetings from Burkittsville was closer but wasn't always creepy (though that last track was pretty chilling).  Luckily I combed the bowls of my computer and found a group not only explicitly horror-related but also expertly creepy, the enigmatic one-single electronica project Les Vampyrettes.  A one-off collaboration between Holger Czukay of the seminal Krautrock group Can (whose solo electronic projects were already pretty stellar) and producer Conny Plank (who did production on most of Kraftwerk's stuff and Devo's album Q: Are We Not Men...), Les Vampyrettes only existed long enough to release one 12'' single, putting them in the class of Karen Verros and Geechie Wiley who didn't even release a whole album before fading into the night.  As per the oblique moniker, it's not only common but practically industry standard for electronic artists to work under pseudonyms, such as Aphex Twin and Boards of Canada, but in the case of Les Vampyrettes the lack of a human face only furthers its cause.  Not that the deliciously unsettling music needed any help, though.

Side One has the song "Biomutanten" which gets things rightly foreboding right away with metallic drumming and a slow bass flange, making me think that tomandandy had the song on their mind when writing the soundtrack to The Mothman Prophecies.  This continues steadily throughout the track, with random sirens, klaxons and screeches peppered along for good effect.  At the center is a deep, reverbed voice incanting what is apparently nonsense, though I can't understand him and wasn't able to find the lyrics online - but does it really matter what he's saying?  He might as well be reciting a lasagna recipe and I'd still have to order express delivery on several pairs of brown pants.  The best information I've been able to find on the single comes from the excellent mp3-distribution goldmine Egg City Radio where, as you can see here, he includes both tracks for download.  The guy who runs it is usually really good at unearthing info on super-obscure artists but he was at something of a loss, aside from a hilariously translated paragraph I won't spoil for you.

"Menetekel" swaps out metal for a swamp, the bass slow-marching along on two notes while underwater beasties burp into your ears.  Somebody forgot to turn of a metronome in the other room and Plank is having a lot of fun warping record scratching and radio noise with the bend dial.  This results in the song being shorter and a little less spooky but nonetheless not something you'd like to meet in a dark alley adjacent to a discount chainsaw store.  Once again I haven't the John Carpenter's The Fogiest what the singer (?) is droning on about, so I'll just have to assume it has something to do with wearing someone's sideburns as coattails.

If there's one thing this record really reminds me of, especially "Menetekel", it's "There's a Planet in My Kitchen", one of the two B-sides on the 12'' single of Siouxsie and the Banshee's cover of "Dear Prudence".  My Dad had this single and the song remains one of the most goofily enigmatic LP's I've come across, but I'll let you make the decision with this handy YouTube recreation:

It's funny how the digi-processed ramblings of potential serial killers can bring back the memories.  The problem with assessing Les Vampyrettes as a group is that they only have two very similar songs to their credit, though that may have been their intention anyway.  Perhaps some questions are better left unanswered, such as how a pair of such spooky tone slabs escaped from the bathouse, and since every re-release of the single has gone under we may never know for sure.  I'm thankful once again that YouTube exists so obscure wonders like this can go straight for the jugular.

~PNK

Recalling My Eves Through Slang

There isn't much Halloween music out there, aside from Thriller and Monster Mash.  There are some great horror-themed classical pieces but they're reserved for another pair of blogs I run - and aside from that the only thing left is horror movie soundtracks, which are largely free from the pressures of repeat listening.  I'm not sure why there isn't much of a market for scary popular music, and there haven't been too many groundbreaking hits from the past few decades to sway the market in its favor.  I guess it makes sense in the same way it makes sense there isn't a lot of Thanksgiving music - the holidays that have their own music are Christmas and Easter, and they have the ancient and bottomless liturgical repertoire at their beck and call.  Halloween's origins are much more distant to modern celebrators, and the concept of scary music evolved in its own enclosed space.  That being said, many people associate certain artists, albums and swaths of music with Halloween for various personal reasons.  Arbogast on Film, one of my favorite movie bloggers (now sadly finished with reviewing), did a post many years ago on a short-lived 90's band named October Project whose two albums he played every Fall.  He admitted that some may feel the music was too "precious or pretentious or twee"*, but it perfectly captured the moods and textures of Autumn in his heart, and inspired a particularly beautiful piece of descriptive writing:

"...they really do communicate for me the exquisite electric sadness of Fall in general and October in particular. In their harmonies I hear the scratch of dead leaves swirling on the upwind and sense a bit of wood smoke in the air."

In trying to come up with a good Halloween post for this blog I was struck with the fact that Halloween is primarily an anchor of memory, much like Christmas and Thanksgiving.  Most of the proceedings revolve around children who, being drawn from the existential drudgery of school with the lure of the fantastic and unnerving, inhabit a unique state of wonder wrapped up in macabre make-believe and pageantry.  Much like the subject of the cover of October Project's debut album, the magic of Halloween lies not in what it is but rather what it infers, in the moment and in the recollection of all the moments prior, and a child's costume can't possibly communicate all the emotions and sensations the Eve has to offer.  No two Halloween histories are alike, and mine doesn't have as strong a connection to a particular music as Arbogast's, but there are a couple of things that spark my synapses this time of year.  One is David Darling's incredible album Journal October, but the one I'm going to write about today has a certain distant, lost feeling about it that has endeared it to me - Slang.

Slang was the brainchild of Layng Martine III, an engineer and mixer based in Nashville, and the album's music was created by him and Widespread Panic bassist David Schools along with a large cast of Not Ready for Dick Clark Players.  Though the liner notes to their first album, The Bellwether Project, say next to nothing about the genesis of the group, it's easy to see from song titles and the sound palette used that their inspiration draws from the music and landscape of the South.  Martine's father, Layng Martine, Jr., was a country songwriter who scored some Top 10 hits in the 70's, and the influence of the Down Home is hard to miss, though filtered with a great deal of taste and restraint through modern electronica techniques.

The Bellwether Project holds a special place in my heart as it was an album that, much like Seks Bomba's Somewhere in this Town, my father purchased after hearing about the group on NPR, probably the most press they ever got in their seemingly short lifespan.  I've had some trouble finding detailed information on Slang as they only released two albums across four years (the latter release, More Talk About Tonight, dating from 2004) - as with many electronica entities, such as Autechre and Boards of Canada, maintaining a personal face for the music isn't a priority.  I feel that electronica is a genre that feeds off the relative anonymity of its authors, a mystique of distance and unnatural inception, and the often eerie and haunting music of Slang is drenched in this fuel while keeping an Earthy tangibility via acoustic sampling.  It's also music very much of its time, taking cues in digital technique from late 90's/early 00's chillout and lounge electronica, somewhat like the briefly successful group Ivy** but much more cock-eyed and funky.

If I had to pick a genre for this kind of music, aside from the overly broad and slightly irritating Electronica moniker, I'd have to settle with the vaguely-defined Chillout genre that includes such disparate groups as Zero 7 and Bonobo.  Slang never felt a need to raise their voice or break their grooves, and while many groups thrive on that crisp energy it may have kept Slang from breaking farther up than they did.  However, that implies that they had any interest in that, and I can't make a case that Martine and Schools wanted anything more than a small-scale project to experiment with the fractured side of a back porch.  I wouldn't have it any other way, as a lot of past albums survive on their inception in the minds of the Lone Inspired, such as Vyto B's Tricentennial 2076.  The album art is a superb counterpart to the music, a recollection stuck in between moments of waking life, as electrifying as it is unanchored from context.  It's connection to my nostalgia is impossible to describe fully except to hold up nostalgia on a pedestal, and in that way holidays like Halloween will survive for as long as its celebrators raise children of their own.  If you decide you don't connect with Slang as deeply as I do that's just fine - everybody's got their own October Project and the variance of those memory touchstones*** is what makes human life worth remembering.  Your Halloweens will always be yours to keep, and if you let Slang in you can consider it a small gift from me to you on this finest of Eves.  I'm going to spend this Halloween holed up with some of my favorite horror flicks, including the unbelievable Eyes of Fire, so if I don't see you I wish you a very Happy Halloween.

~PNK

*Allmusic's entry on the group was somewhat suspicious of the whole thing, slapping them with the unfortunate label of MOR (Middle-of-the-Road) Goth Pop, terms that cause a blistering of the skin among savvy critics.  My favorite sentence is the final one: "The trick to enjoying October Project is to simply not take it nearly as seriously as it takes itself."

**This might not count for much, but the song I've linked here was used in the opening credits to the Stephen King-developed 2004 TV miniseries Kingdom Hospital.  It's more a mark of the times than anything else but I still get a healthy wave of nostalgia every time I hear their Long Distance album which features this song.


***This really doesn't count for much, but I'll always remember the word "touchstone" as being introduced to me by Touchstone Pictures, the studio behind The Nightmare Before Christmas, and if there's a stronger force of nostalgia in my psyche than that movie I don't know what it is.

I Hairpsrayed Your Mom’s Remote - The Fuzzed-out Dreamland of James Ferraro

It’s happened. For the past few years we’ve been living in a world of manufactured nostalgia. And why shouldn’t we? We all like snuggling in the big, fuzzy blanket of cloudy memories that is our old VHS tapes and sing-along CDs. Maybe that’s the real impetus behind the hipsterist trend of thrift store scouring, the eternal quest for semi-baffling artefacts from a not-so-distant past (for hipsters my age that past is apparently the mid-80’s to the mid-90’s). That way we can pop in our very own VHS copy of Space Mutiny and laugh ourselves into nostalgia, even though only a handful of us actually saw that particular movie back in the day. It’s not about actually reliving memories; it’s about the feeling of dumb relics, those fetishistic objects that allow us to shake our heads and say, “Man, things sure were goofy and loveable back then.” It’s this same mentality that has brought mid-fi electronic music to the fore, whether via actual synthesizers, 8-bit compositional programs, or revving an Irish folk tune on an old Hot Keyz.

Obviously these things become tedious after a while, as irony keeps about as well as bananas. However, some electronic artists have made sweet ecstasy in Casioville, and I have yet to find one more creative than James Ferraro. Based out of the Bronx, Ferraro’s palette is very wide, and he’s covered a lot of ground in his more-than dozen albums and his work in the avant-garde duo The Skaters. I first got introduced to his music through the favorites list of an experimental video artist on YouTube. And boy, if nostalgia is like watching your favorite show through TV snow, then this song is like the best NY-post-punk-band-recreation-of-a-50’s-soda-fountain-dance track I’ve heard through a bad Walkman:

It’s all here: the gorgeously crappy fidelity, the adventurous feeling of flipping TV channels at 3 in the morning, and utterly gooftacular synth jamz. Other track titles from this album and others include “Buffy Honkerburg’s Answering Machine”, “Find Out What’s On Carrie Bradshaw’s iPod”, and “Jet Skis and Sushi”. I think the closest analog to his sense of humor in a band people may have actually heard of would be Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet, the people behind the Kids in the Hall theme and creators of instrumental tracks with such titles as “Cheese in the Fridge” and “Plastics for 500, Bob”. And in case you’re wondering if his humor makes it to his Skaters work, here’s a track that comes with a free picture of hanging meat:

Obviously not all his tracks are jokes, and I wouldn’t even call “Moonshocked Dudettes” a joke, either. Even though he employs expert comedic presentation, his sound sculpting is top notch and his song have a great sense of construction and arc, not to mention a huge range of sonic components which make the whole albums worth it. When paddling through the algea-ed rivers that is modern electronica, variety is a huge and somewhat uncommon plus. For example, another mid-fi artist called Com Truise has a few albums out, and I liked them. Then I realized that every single song had the same tempo. Every. Song. You might not notice it at first, but when you do your heart sinks with each passing beat. Ferraro has a lovely awareness of his work that keeps things like that from happening, and his more recent work seems to have moved on from the crappy fidelity altogether, perhaps sensing that his music would attract the wrong kind of fans (those who decoupage Markey Mark onto their Biker Mice from Mars lunchboxes, which carry iPhones instead of lunch). And even though he has managed to actually grow as an artist (which is always a bummer for shallow fans), don’t worry: his new stuff keeps the wonderful and endearing sense that you’re filming a promo video for an 80’s office building:

~PNK

Thus Spake Pianola - Superhuman Music for Player Piano

Special thanks to YouTuber “playerpianoJH”!

It’s odd to imagine machines playing music beyond human capabilities before synthetic sound and computers. This of course wasn’t the first time we had performable music played by non-human entities (mechanical orchestras, anyone?), but the whole culture of musique concrète (music that exists as a single “performance” by a machine or recording) developed around tape manipulation and analog synthesizers, and flourished when digital techniques became advanced and accessible (see my previous article on Easley Blackwood for examples of this era). However, there was a remarkable predecessor to this and all electronic music that must be discussed: the player piano. You can probably remember the player piano from period pictures of the late 19th century, a relic of la belle époque, quaint and lacking in depth. While it’s true that the majority of music for the instrument was either transcriptions of popular classical works of the day or forgettable dance music, it contained a secret power. Beginning in the mid-1910′s (with the above piece by Stravinsky) modernist composers started to see the instrument for what it was: a vehicle for superhuman music, unplayable by normal people.

The Three Pieces by the Italian composer Alfredo Casella are a beautiful demonstration of the new capabilities of this mechanical beast. The Prelude features fast chord jumps that would be impossible to play by three people at the speed required, and also has a chord that would require hands as wide as your legs are long to play. The Waltz uses a melody that stretches across several octaves. The ragtime seems more fitting for exploding cars than dancing people, or maybe somebody attempting to swat flies with a refrigerator door. In a way these pieces are musical jokes, because anybody listening to them would scoff at their byzantine player requirements and the loud and abrasive tone of the instrument, which was attractive to composers at the time because of how it fit into the current craze for “grotesque” music. Casella was no stranger to massive stacked chords, either, and these pieces are chock-a-block with gigantic piles of notes. In the same spirit but taking the unplayability (and some would say unlistenability) up a few levels is this absurd piece by Hans Haass, who I had never heard of before finding this piece:

I personally feel that the work is better art if one looks at the piano roll than if they listen to it (I imagined a scenario where Haass glanced at his patterned wallpaper one day and declared “This is the future of music!”). There were many other pieces (all availabe on the same YouTube channel) but it is necessary for us to jump ahead a few decades. Enter Conlon Nancarrow, an American composer who had been exiled to Mexico after some time tinkering in the murky waters of modern music. Unsatisfied with musicians’ inability to play his exceedingly difficult music, he discovered the player piano and its ability to play extremely complex rhythms very quickly. He got himself a manual piano roll punching machine so he could make his own pieces, and then proceeded to write some 50 studies for the instrument during the next 40 years, entirely in seclusion in Mexico. When he was rediscovered in the late 70′s he was lauded by the likes of György Ligeti as one of the greatest composers of his time, and it’s pretty hard not to appreciate his work, in its intellectual aspects and its emotional and entertainment qualities. All of them are worth investigating, but I'll feature my current favorite right here:

The use of harmony, the captivating and totally original approach to rhythms, and a number of truly miraculous moments make this piece a real joy, and is a great showoff work for the instrument. As the description notes, all modern player piano compositions stem from Nancarrow’s work, and the channel features a number of contemporary works by many interesting composers. Because of the many wonders to behold on this channel (you really should get cracking on the Nancarrow studies) I’ll leave you with a particularly funny piece by virtuoso pianist Marc-André Hamelin that transforms a moldy oldy piano lesson staple into something wholly sinful. Have fun and don’t bang on normal pianos too hard to replicate these works. You might hurt yourself.

~PNK

Quixotic Harmonies - the Microtonal Music of Easley Blackwood

The 70’s was a time of prodigious drug use. I don’t mean to say that in any judgmental fashion, just as a statement of fact. The bomb had detonated and previous established rules of conduct were scattered across the floor. In this newfound, confused verve, electronic music was gaining a lot of speed. After a couple decades of cloistered experimentation there were a handful of electronic works that broke into the mainstream, chiefly records by two individuals: Walter Carlos (later Wendy) and Isao Tomita.

These are from 1971 and 1974 respectively, and if you recognize them (or not) it is their defining trait to be electronic recompositions of well-known classical pieces (by Henry Purcell and Claude Debussy, respectively). It was a stark contrast from the previous community of electronic composers, whose compositional devices were avant-garde and largely inaccessible to the general public. I think that these records became so popular chiefly because, rather than composing new music, they offered new ways to hear old music. Regardless of their creators’ intents, these works are much like walking out of your house while high: same shit, different glasses. These records may have also struck a chord with enthusiasts of progressive rock, not just in the shared use of synthesizers, but also in helping bring classical music to the colloquial drug crowd. Though never a drug user, my mother has admitted that hearing the Tomita record featured above (Snowflakes are Dancing) was her introduction to the music of Debussy, just as it can be easily said that the theme to A Clockwork Orange was probably most people’s introduction to Funeral Music for Queen Mary. Both Carlos and Tomita went on to make a number of best-selling records recomposing the classical rep, and the arts community started to notice.

In the late 70’s the National Endowment for the Humanities approached a dynamic composer-pianist named Easley Blackwood with the idea of exploring microtonal music. For the uninitiated, microtonal music that uses scales that contain more notes than the one most used in Western classical music, which has twelve evenly-spaced notes. Composers had been tinkering with microtonal scales since the beginning of the 20th century, but this was a new bag for Blackwood, whose previous works had been described as atonal and polyrhythmic, but formally conservative. His approach could have gone countless routes, including composing works like he had done for the previous twenty years, or adopting a different experimental style. What he chose instead was not only remarkable, but extremely timely.

What you’ve been listening to is from the 12 Microtonal Etudes for Electronic Music Media, released on LP in 1980. In what Blackwood likened to being a “sequel” to Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier, each piece is first composed in a traditional tonal harmonic language, and then filtered through a microtonal pitch set, a different one for each etude. Glancing at the sheet music moving past the viewer of the included videos will reveal music that would have fit in nicely at the turn of the 20th century in Russia, with the works of Scriabin and his ilk. The beauty of the use of scales is that the listener doesn’t need to be aware of each exact tone being used, or even how many there are in each scale. He simply has to be anticipating what normal music sounds like, and become swept away by the new quixotic soundworld Blackwood presents. The new scales don’t actually align to any of the notes in a traditional 12-note scale, but they’re often close enough to trick the ear, and listeners are taken on an aural roller coaster, following the tones up and down. It’s intoxicating, and the music by itself would be rich and lovely, pleasant to the ear. These new scales have the power to make good music even better.

The Etudes became some of blackwood’s most well-known works, and the record was reissued on CD in 1994 along with two other microtonal works: the Fanfare using a 19-note scale, and a Suite using a 16-note scale for a guitar with a modified fretboard. These works actually had such a profound effect on Blackwood’s composition that he largely turned away from atonality, instead focusing on sophisticated use of traditional harmony. It’s as if he went through the looking glass and came out even more conservative than he already was. Not that his soundworld is a bad place to be.

~ PNK