Tír Na HiFi

An Experimedia (green) vinyl special and a firm favourite of mine.....






Stereophile:

Stephen Mejias
Keith Freund: Constant Comments
By Stephen Mejias • Posted: Aug 29, 2011


While listening to Keith Freund’s lovely Constant Comments, it’s often difficult to discern whether the sounds are coming from inside or outside the listening room. Voices, birdsong, honking horns, barking dogs, the opening and closing of doors, ocean waves and rainfall mingle, freely and happily, with crystalline and gently strummed electric guitars, synthesizer sounds, electronic burps and gurgles, tape hiss, and more.
The result is a comforting and thought-provoking ramble. Listening to Constant Comments is like walking down 3rd Street, between Coles and Monmouth, late at night, glancing into the glowing windows of strangers’ homes: I can’t help but make up stories for these scattered shards of song. The 12 tracks of Constant Comments, then, are glimpses into other worlds, at once foreign and familiar, and altogether compelling.

Song titles are sometimes strange, sometimes straightforward, but add depth and mystery to the music. I can’t come up with a story to match the distant voices and tinkering of “He Noticed I’m Alive…and Other Hopeful Signs,” but “Deep Shit Sunburn” easily sounds like a summer sun rising over the giant blue-green ocean, the waves curling into little mounds of white foam. While most of the album’s tracks are brief—several clock in at around two minutes or less—“The Ortzi,” at nearly eight minutes, is the album’s centerpiece: a gentle, meditative soundtrack to a foreign film, a stroll through a European city.

Weaving throughout Constant Comments is the sound of children at play. (Or maybe it's just the sound of children. Often enough, there is no difference between the two.) It's a sound that invariably conjures feelings of freedom—freedom from responsibility, freedom from worry, freedom from nostalgia. Heard through adult ears, however, it seems impossible to separate those freedoms from a nagging anxiety. Now, too, Constant Comments sounds like a child who knows summer is about to end. A screen door left to flail in the wind, the passing of a ghost or memory.

Altogether, the album has a hypnagogic effect. The artwork—a basketball backboard and hoop surrounded by a thick growth of ivy—suggests a childhood’s resistance to the passing of time. There is a longing, a recollection of something, heard even in the looping and reversing of the brilliant guitar notes—something that reminds me of Matt Mondanile’s Ducktails (but without the lo-fi haze) and also of Mark McGuire’s excellent Living With Yourself.

Though some might object to the sections of heavy tape hiss, the sound quality throughout Constant Comments is very good—present and alive, in the best possible way, and with good dynamic range. Freund’s wonderful guitar tone is an anchor—round, vibrant, and radiant—and unmistakably Fender. (A Jazzmaster, I think.)

The closing track, “Is Anything Too Hard for God?,” features the sounds of birds, the whir of electricity, and that gorgeous guitar; and it concludes with a child announcing into a recorder: That’s the end for now, Eli.

It’s impossible to avoid the feeling that this is, in fact, the beginning.

Strangely, more than ten minutes later, as I sit on the orange couch, reading and thinking, I notice the sounds of cars passing by, bicycle tires spinning, balls bouncing onto the sidewalk, children playing on Monmouth Street below my apartment windows, and, for just a moment, I’m confused into thinking that the record is still spinning.

Constant Comments is a success.





Amazingly still available here And the vinyl is half price too!!!

Mp3 download with vinyl to follow :) Have a chuckle at the review below. BOOOOOO!






SVARTE GREINER – BLACK TIE
Posted On: March 25, 2013
Posted In: Erik K. Skodvin, James Catchpole, Miasmah Recordings, Svarte Greiner, Svarte Greiner - Black Tie
Comments: One Response


Miasmah have a chilling history when it comes to cutting the lights. A renewed fear of the dark embraces all conscious thought, breathing life on fiery, doomed wings. Experiencing a release from their enviable roster becomes exactly that – an experience, and it’s one that you’ll remember long into the night. Phobias writhe when the dark comes, and it isn’t just a primeval instinct that saved our ancestors on more than one occasion. Now, with Black Tie, it’s made very real, so real that it sits right in the midst of our presence; you just can’t see its face due to the dark. You might not think you need rescuing after the first couple of seconds; a profound pride might stop you from making the emergency call and shutting down your stereo system. If you’re still not afraid, you will be after listening to the dark ambient of Black Tie. Black Tie heaves the suffocated breath of untrustworthy oscillations, dripping from above like black icicles forming black pools. If music is reflective of certain environments, then Svarte Greiner, the alias of Erik K. Skodvin, pulls in the cold, stark beauty of Norwegian imagery and clouds it further with sharp air. Black Tie is most definitely black. This isn’t a highway at night, where stained light sources beam through the windshield every other second. On Black Tie, there is no light.

Black Tie stands on its own, but the title track was originally featured in an installation by fellow Norwegian Marit Følstad. Deaf Center’s sound cannot be replicated, but Skodvin, as one half of the duo, should know a thing or two when it comes to bad omens and haunted atmospheres. In reality, there are only surface-similarities between the two, and they’re the ones that you’d expect – the bleak power of Black Tie lies dormant, but it is always very, very close to the surface. Greiner’s music is a potion all of itself, still carrying the cut-throat threat of nature but incredibly aware and sensitive to the beauty of the dark. Even though Black Tie is the darkest of dark ambient, it isn’t always obvious in its intent; it’s subtle and conniving, conspiring inside the drones with a malevolent intelligence. Greiner lays into Black Tie with a crushing atmosphere that isn’t without a unique slant of beauty, but it is one that requires caution to approach. Caged inside Deaf Center’s music there exists an icy abandon, resentful of its forgotten state among the cold forests, pale ravines and secluded, barren caves, where the scraped incantations on the inner walls enter into the music, absorbed completely. Resounding in pitch and appearing in Greiner’s own bowed strings, the unnatural atmosphere blends with the natural environment until they are one and the same; an uneasy couple. Greiner’s atmospheres are laden with the pitch-black regions of the soul, without being soulless.

A nerve-shredding atmosphere clasps you, but it never becomes unbearable; there’s an unhealthy, guilty pleasure in the unfolding horror, like looking through private windows, or the car crash caused by the pitch-black sections on a midnight road, the blink of a second where no light is found on the highway. Black Tie also has its contrasts; the deliberate, evil planning and the act itself. The cello resembles a carved, wooden timbre dusted by a thousand statues, still and silent. The stark cello scrapes through the cold air with no prospect of morning’s hope. Advancing to an explosive, imposing point, a series of sonic booms shudder outwards, sending distorted, gritty shockwaves echoing through the catacombs of the decimated imagination.



Every repetition adds another trickle to an increasing pool of restraining tension. Erupting suddenly, the seeded thought settles into a psychotic mind, in a horror film that has not yet been thought of, let alone begun shooting. And then, the original, black thunder possesses the track once again, removing the threat of the advancing music, strangling what-was-to-be and forcefully reaffirming complete control of its own destiny. A slow moving progression only makes the atmosphere even more foreboding; the lack of pace acts against our ability to run, like the exit that never gets any closer during a nightmare’s finale. A barren panorama reveals itself, waiting for a climax fit for the flood that you know is coming; it will happen, and nothing can prepare you for it. Nothing can stop it. Always amplifying, all the time, the sense of dread is infused with a slight sliver of paranoia that instantly raises the hairs on your neck and sends little shivers down the back of your spine. Is the presence in front, or behind you? Despite the fear, it’s tempting to turn around and see for yourself.

‘White Noise’ is truly cold-blooded, penetrating deeply, past the zone of suggestive dread and into full-on ambient doom, where the unmasked face of fear lives and breathes amid disillusionment and suffocation. It digs into your skull, through the psychological shutters that otherwise repel any horrific thought. Through the violence, the final scene is left unedited. Like the final, cautious walk through a trail over blood-stained floorboards. The rumbling bass subsides, but it isn’t just a bass frequency – it’s intrusive and invasive. Ascending and then falling, like disfigured phantoms hiding in a dark sky covered with black cloud, the once-subtle doom arrives on voices that used to be angelic; now they retreat down below, crying their mutated song of brutality and agony as they descend into the depths. This kind of fear doesn’t wear a mask; it may not be the prettiest, but it doesn’t hide its looks either.

And then the shivers return – the cold will do that – encapsulating the Norwegian chill under the cover of darkness. Full dark, no stars. You find yourself faced with unstable shudders that hide your worst fears; and yet, it’s impossible to look away. Transfixed, the unhealthy light behind the door becomes addictive. Sliding across the speakers comes a rustling entity, creeping ever closer underneath a rising, dissonant drone. Just when you thought it was safe, you discover that the aftermath has knocked out the electricity – the one constant that previously kept the spirits away. Now, the surging, black mass of squirming water has destroyed the reassurance of the safety in light that used to emanate from the now-useless power supply.

Black Tie awaits you in the darkness – and there aren’t any second guesses as to who’s behind the blackout. Lights across the street flicker back to life, but not here. The wires have been cut in a primitive act of vicious fury. The feeling of invasion breathes down your neck and your heart races along the afterburn of rhythmic drone, spilling out the last drops of blood in a red fountain, destined to produce a new kind of flood, as it traces along the boards as a river traces the Norwegian landscape. The power cut was just an illusion. It’s too late to discover the lights were already out.

- James Catchpole for Fluid Radio

http://www.miasmah.com

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Jim says:
March 29, 2013 at 8:15 am
I listened to this on one of my midnight walks and it went down a right treat. I was tempted to take a short cut through the cemetery, but I bottled out, because this album already gave me the creeps.
Great review. ;)





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Watched this earlier..really good!!

Clocking in at around three hours, Kraftwerk and the Electronic Revolution is probably as comprehensive a history of late 20th-century German experimental music as you're ever likely to need. The fact that the documentary only starts to get to the band that is supposed to be its main focus after almost an hour should tell you something about how gargantuan and glacially paced this movie is. I am holding out for a prequel that takes us back even further to the invention of the light bulb and the piano, because I'm not sure we've yet gotten enough of a foundation for where electronic music comes from.

Yes, I'm being facetious. For fans of krautrock, drone, ambient, and electronic music, Kraftwerk and the Electronic Revolution is a fascinating history of how some of the most influential music of our times emerged from the boredom and hopelessness of 1960s Germany. The filmmakers take the subtitle of their movie very seriously, and they want to crawl back to find the Big Bang of cultural influences that would make something as innovative as Kraftwerk possible. It's not an unimportant question, since the ideas the electronic musical collective would establish in their 1970s output would influence everyone from glam rockers like David Bowie and Brian Eno to early hip-hop pioneers and New Wave bands like Duran Duran, and on into today, where techno and arty experimentalists like Radiohead still borrow from the German group's bag of tricks. Even wuss-rockers Coldplay lifted the hooks for their song "Talk" from "Computer Love," somehow achieving the impossible and proving one could actually be bigger nerds than the pasty originals, Florian Schneider and Ralf Hütter. And that Kraftwerk core duo likes to dress up as robots, so you know they're plenty nerdy.

Kraftwerk and the Electronic Revolution traces the rise of German music back to the influx of British bands that went to the European country to ply their trade in the early 1960s. (The Beatles most famously cut their teeth in Hamburg nightclubs.) At that point, German youth were looking to establish a new identity that embraced the freedom of the West and finally unshackled them from the shame of their country's past--much in the same way Pete Townshend has argued that British rock stood in direct defiance of an older generation in England who were always rubbing past glories in the faces of their children. Though German musicians initially copied their British idols, who themselves were copying African American blues musicians, eventually they would want something that was more in tune with their own experience. As Karl Bartos, one of two former Kraftwerk members to participate in this unauthorized film, put it, they knew they weren't from the Mississippi Delta, so why pretend they were?

From this sprang a free jazz movement and experimental musical groupings that started to look at emergent technology as the key to establishing a national musical identity. Building on ideas put forth by early electronic composer Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Schaeffer, the inventor of an embryonic form of industrial music dubbed "musique concrete," young German musicians embraced rock, improvisation, and primitive synthesizers to seek something rhythmic, escapist, and Teutonic. Out of this came bands like Amon Düül, Tangerine Dream, and Ash Ra Tempel, as well as Kluster, most of whose members--Dieter Moebius, Hans Joachim Rodelius, and Conrad Schnitzler--sit down in front of the cameras to share their stories.

Amidst this, a band called Organisation appeared, and they would eventually become Kraftwerk. Pulling in iconography from Germany's past but pushing ambient rhythm and otherworldly soundscapes toward a more technological future, Kraftwerk created a brand new sound, exemplified by their breakthrough hit "Autobahn" in 1974. By celebrating the great German roadway, they were also celebrating their country's efficiency and proficiency of design, invoking the highway as a musical metaphor leading to whole new areas of sonic liberation. From there, the band continued producing music steadily through the early 1980s, and have intermittently reformed in the decades since for tours, reissues, and even new music.

Purists should get a lot out of Kraftwerk and the Electronic Revolution. The mammoth documentary features lots of old photographs of krautrock bands and rare footage from the different periods of music. In addition to the musicians already mentioned, the film also talks to one-time Kraftwerk member Klaus Röder; Klaus Löhmer, the engineer for their first album; and Wolfgang Siedel and Klaus Schulze, who have played in Tangerine Dream and other bands. They are joined by a slew of journalists and commentators, as well as musician David Ball (Soft Cell) and taste-making DJ Rusty Egan, the man on the decks at the infamous Blitz Club in the early 1980s. They all talk at length about the music and what it meant to them, and just as much focus is spent tracking bands like Tangerine Dream and Can as Kraftwerk themselves.

Unfortunately, it's a lot of talking and it's a little dry. Though there are snippets of music from all the bands examined, including Kraftwerk, they are extremely short. I don't know for sure, but they may be just enough to allow viewers to get a taste of what some of this stuff sounds like while still sneaking in under the limits that fair use laws will allow without paying exorbitant fees. (The back cover loudly declares, "THIS FILM IS NOT AUTHORISED BY KRAFTWERK.") This is probably fine for audience members familiar with the music--and let's be honest, most folks picking up Kraftwerk and the Electronic Revolution probably won't be doing so by some casual accident--but it is a little frustrating to be told about the intricate switch-ups in an epic 20-minute track like "Autobahn" and only hear 30 seconds of it.

The unaccompanied talking heads make Kraftwerk and the Electronic Revolution a bit of an endurance test. Given that this disc is largely being sold as a piece about Kraftwerk, some of the tangents into other bands get a little tiring, too. Likewise, the effect of this "revolution" ends up being a footnote, and the film quickly wraps up once it lands in the 1980s, making cursory mention of the ongoing influence of Kraftwerk, as if the assumption is everyone knows this and it need not be laid out further. It's a big assumption, and indicative of the documentary as a whole. Though full of compelling information, Kraftwerk and the Electronic Revolution is more like a textbook than a compelling movie, which is fine if that's what you're after, but if you're looking for the music itself, it's best to look elsewhere.

jadarin wrote:
Watched this earlier..really good!!

Thanks for that John. Will have to check it out now :)

cybot wrote:

jadarin wrote:
Watched this earlier..really good!!

Thanks for that John. Will have to check it out now :)

You'll love this Dermot,all your lads make an appearance...There's a fella called Mark Prendergast contributing his piece,from Dublin and worked in a record shop
in the 70's,i'd bet some poeple around here knew him...

jadarin wrote:

cybot wrote:

jadarin wrote:
Watched this earlier..really good!!

Thanks for that John. Will have to check it out now :)

You'll love this Dermot,all your lads make an appearance...There's a fella called Mark Prendergast contributing his piece,from Dublin and worked in a record shop
in the 70's,i'd bet some poeple around here knew him...

Mark Prendergast! He really made a name for himself as a musical journalist. An absolute gentleman too! I clearly remember going into the Golden Disc shop where he worked in Mary St. and coming across loads of German stuff (Roedelius et al) in the shelves that had just come in that day. He was amazed I knew of all these bands and dead chuffed when I bought them too :) We used to have the most brilliant conversations! Couldn't imagine going into Tower and chatting excitedly about music these days....

You'll love this Dermot,all your lads make an appearance...There's a fella called Mark Prendergast contributing his piece,from Dublin and worked in a record shop
in the 70's,i'd bet some poeple around here knew him...[/quote]


Mark Prendergast! He really made a name for himself as a musical journalist. An absolute gentleman too! I clearly remember going into the Golden Disc shop where he worked in Mary St. and coming across loads of German stuff (Roedelius et al) in the shelves that had just come in that day. He was amazed I knew of all these bands and dead chuffed when I bought them too :) We used to have the most brilliant conversations! Couldn't imagine going into Tower and chatting excitedly about music these days....[/quote]
He knows his stuff..They're the people you want running a record shop.Mark has a book called The Ambient Century: From Mahler to Moby - The Evolution of Sound in the Electronic Age, might be interesting?

jadarin wrote:You'll love this Dermot,all your lads make an appearance...There's a fella called Mark Prendergast contributing his piece,from Dublin and worked in a record shop
in the 70's,i'd bet some poeple around here knew him...

Mark Prendergast! He really made a name for himself as a musical journalist. An absolute gentleman too! I clearly remember going into the Golden Disc shop where he worked in Mary St. and coming across loads of German stuff (Roedelius et al) in the shelves that had just come in that day. He was amazed I knew of all these bands and dead chuffed when I bought them too :) We used to have the most brilliant conversations! Couldn't imagine going into Tower and chatting excitedly about music these days....[/quote]
He knows his stuff..They're the people you want running a record shop.Mark has a book called The Ambient Century: From Mahler to Moby - The Evolution of Sound in the Electronic Age, might be interesting?[/quote]

I have it John :) Got slated to hell and back by the cerebral Wire crew :) I love it because it's written in an enthusiastic headlong rush and full of joy and excitement, if you know what I mean. As if he can't wait to share his discoveries. Sound like someone you know?