list.co.uk/music EXPERIMENTAL FAUST j US t (Bureau B) ●●●●●
Like a little army of trolls marching out of the shadows, this latest opus from the Jean Herve Peron / Zappi Diermaier version of Germany’s veteran, kosmische, hippy Dadaists creeps up on you slowly. Peron’s looming bass and Diermaier’s martial drums set a moody tone before exploding into the extended guitar wig- out of the album’s opening assault, ‘Gerubelt’. After more than 40 years in the saddle, Peron and Diermaier have styled this
new release as j US t – pronounced Just Us – a set of 12 semi-improvised, bare bones, rhythm-driven sound sculptures designed to be rebuilt by anyone who fancies a bash at adding their own touches to it.Whether the end result will find Krautrock copycats indulging in fantasy wish-fulfilment / hero-worship or inspire something more interesting remains to be seen. What’s left in the meantime is a group of miniatures far less formless than mere backing tracks. Stripped back to basics, the same rush of primal physicality best captured in
Faust’s live shows rushes through a series of tunes that sometimes resemble mediaeval ragas pulsed by the makeshift mechanics of a sewing machine metronome or else what sounds like the entire contents of the duo’s toolbox.
Elsewhere, ‘Nur Nous’ is a minimalist sketch for piano and drums, while onomatopoeia permeates other titles, including the magnificently named horn-led cacophony that is ‘eeeeeeh . . . ’ There are vocal tracks too, like the surprisingly understated finale of ‘Ich sitze immer noch’, its pretty guitar melodies punctuated with what sounds like a dog barking and the endlessly insistent sound of rain.
With plans afoot to repeat the album’s exercise in de/ reconstruction in the live arena by collaborating with local musicians wherever they tour – a move not unlike former Can vocalist Damo Suzuki’s neverending solo sojourns using local ‘sound carriers’ at each date – Faust’s strategy is both economically viable and potentially gloriously unpredictable. (Neil Cooper)
Records | MUSIC
PSYCHEDELIC ELECTRONICA PANDA BEAR Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper (Domino) ●●●●●
Just as Avey Tare’s Slasher Flicks turned out to have little in common with the trusty sound palette of horror soundtracks, so the latest solo offering from Tare’s Animal Collective right hand man, Noah ‘Panda Bear’ Lennox, is neither some schlocky B-movie pastiche nor solipsistic Bergmanesque reflection. If anything, Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper is a life-affirming encounter with an imaginative and engaged musician. Daft Punk felt that they had found a kindred questing spirit in Lennox when they asked him to guest on Random Access Memories, although his use of electronica tends away from the dancefloor towards the experimental, even lysergic, making Spacemen 3’s Sonic Boom the ideal production partner for this disarming album. Lennox sounds like he’s drawing on his days in the high-school chamber choir on opener ‘Sequential Circuits’, a devotional mantra rendered on hypnotic synths. For all its hymnal qualities, there’s something slightly off-kilter and unsettling about its composition, like a Magic Eye picture about to reveal its hidden image.
Lennox keeps up the distorted intrigue throughout the album, using cut-up melodies to create a sound like a choppy, partially comprehended duet with himself on the compelling single ‘Mr Noah’ and again on ‘Boys Latin’, while never losing sight of a beguiling tune on the beseeching poppy judder of ‘Crosswords’. The swooning, undulating ‘Tropic of Cancer’, with its heavenly harp effect and
Lennox’s melancholy croon, sounds like it has been beamed in from a more innocent era. Elsewhere, his pure, resonating vocals are set to a haunting 80s electro pop backing on ‘Selfish Gene’ and Aphex-style glitch on ‘Acid Wash’, while the dream pop number ‘Butcher Baker Candlestick Maker’, embellished with all manner of electro-psych touches and trippy breaks, sounds like the work of a 21st- century Brian Wilson tinkering away on his captivating synth symphonies. (Fiona Shepherd)
EXPERIMENTAL JEAN-LUC GUIONNET / ÉRIC LA CASA Home: Handover (Potlatch) ●●●●● TECHNO K-X-P The History Of Techno EP (ÖM) ●●●●●
To describe this ambitious, four-disc, multi-stage collaborative project in any detail would require a far larger space than the one this review inhabits. In brief, Home: Handover is an exploration of sanctuaries and private lives and acoustics, with each disc divided into four distinct phases. In Phase I, a Glasgow resident describes their home, captures its sounds,
listens to their favourite music, and talks about the experience of being recorded. Phase II, recorded live at Tramway in 2010, consists of an improvising ensemble (Aileen Campbell, Neil Davidson, Gael Leveugle, Lucio Capece and Seijiro Murayama) interpreting and abstracting the content of the original recording through strictly specified roles: vocal and instrumental mimesis, narrative description, sustained sound. In Phase III, musician Keith Beattie (of The Red Ensemble) improvises in response to elements of Phase I, in the process describing his participation and recording a sonic map of his own home and the surrounding environment. Finally, in Phase IV, the first three Phases are taken into a studio and combined into a real-time collage.
With more than four hours of spoken word, field recordings, structured
improvisation and sound art, this project demands a lot of the listener. But there’s something curiously compelling about it. Perhaps it’s the sense of trust and intimacy it entails – its post-John Cage acceptance of all sounds as equally valid demands intimate attention to what would normally be unnoticed background
Finnish people, as we have learned from studies and movies by the miserablist, laconic filmmaker Aki Kaurismaki, are totally cracked so it makes sense that that the country’s bands err on the side of bedlam. Here we have cosmic rock demagogues K-X-P obliging by flagrantly breaking the Trades Description Act with their History Of Techno EP, which does, to its credit, contain techno, just not quite techno in all its many facets.
As the Helsinki-based foursome have shown on their previous two albums, K-X-P, fronted by provocateur Timo Kaukolampi, are musical shapeshifters who flit between genres with a showy insouciance, but generally remain on the right side of murky, dynamic, danceable motorik dirges. There remains a hint of that dirtpool swagger on ‘The History of Techno Parts 1 & 2’, the long, indulgent and, has to be said, pretty compelling opening track. It’s a 15-minute slinky stonker, which, in truth, wouldn’t be the most obscene or menacing bosh you would have ever heard – it might be slightly on the mild side for hard techno purists – but it does go on at a nice clip and lures you in with its relentlessness. You get the feeling that if K-X-P could have somehow magicked three hours of this same throbbing beat onto one side of a 12”, they would happily have done it.
‘The History Of Techno Parts 3 & 4’ kicks off with some motorik drums, backed
by ominous buzzing drones and channels the band’s penchant for all things krautrock before evolving into a floaty Caribou-esque bit of delicate euphoria.
noise. The listener becomes hyper-aware of the home of a perfect stranger. And with each subsequent interpretation, response and processing, the encounter becomes abstracted or subsumed into someone else’s perspective, which raises intriguing questions about the extent to which we prioritise the vividness of our own experience and how we relate to one another. Big, clever and thought- provoking, but probably not one to play at the office Christmas bash. (Matt Evans)
The EP’s closer, ‘She Time Travels In Every Direction Whenever She Wants’ takes the BPM down a notch with its slowly pulsating and spacey strut, backed by some shimmering guitar noodles.
As history lessons go, the
educational value of this EP is moot. But as a reminder of K-X- P’s talent for celestial beat-driven sorcery, it’s a pretty good one. (Mark Keane) ■ facebook.com/kxp.official; soundcloud.com/k-x-p/history-of- techno-parts-1-2/s-So5uw
11 Dec 2014–5 Feb 2015 THE LIST 95