Michael W Woodring

Norscq - 5 Streams CD

'5 Streams', the newest offering from French musician/producer Norscq on the Optical Sound label (http://www.optical-sound.com), is a world away from its dance-drenched predecessor, 'Lavatronic'. Or more precisely, it's a few thousand miles away -- borrowing, remixing, and adding to his soundtrack material for two performances by the art initiative Compagnie Faim de Siecle. One of the performances, 'Baburnama,' used ancient Islamic and Hindu text for a meditation on world conflict and shared histories, while the other, '5 Streams,' employed sound, video, and installation to illuminate the complex cultural polarities at work in modern South Asia.

Maybe it's due to the duality in the source of the material -- or the duality in the sound of the material -- but there are two veins of sonic art flowing through this disc. The first is more abstract and electronic, and it runs stronger toward the beginning of '5 Streams'. The disc opens with 'Fall After Flight', which furtively bristles with static electricity, halting whispers, disembodied voices, and office-machine ambience. These qualities continue in 'As a Warrior, I Could Have Danced All Night', except that the mood becomes darker and murkier; the whispers become more like Diamanda Galas holding in her power before unleashing it upon all eardrums in range, while the machine whirling becomes more screechy and aggressive.

The second vein -- more visceral than cerebral -- is exposed toward the middle of the disc, and it is exemplified in the track 'The Man With a Plan'. The song starts in the midst of a 'junglesphere', with tropical animal noises resounding in the air, but it quickly travels toward an interplay of hypnotic guitar and chimes, like the interior ambience of some sultry, overgrown post-rock temple. Both styles run together seamlessly in 'The Holy Cow'; plucked guitar strings -- thick, slow, and reverberating -- overlay a series of drones crackling with wasp-like intensity until the recorded bustling sound of a New Delhi street drowns out the previous affair.

This vacillation between styles might suggest that '5 Streams' offers a disjointed listening experience. On the contrary, even with these shifts, there is a pervasive foreboding and anticipation throughout the tracks -- that the music could suddenly explode into indiscriminate violence or culminate into some kind of larger unity or reconciliation. The fact that it remains entirely in the purgatory of uncertainty and anxiety says much about Norscq's understanding about how art can mirror the real world.

Optimo 'How To Kill the DJ (Part Two)' 2 CDs on Kill the DJ/Tigersushi

Finally - a two-CD DJ mix for the ADD generation. Optimo's 'How to Kill the DJ (Part Two)' is a breathless adventure through numerous music genres and styles. It mashes up R&B and industrial, purees porn disco and rockabilly, drinks down experimental and pisses out classical - and the whole thing works, brilliantly.

The first disc is the most genre-blending. You have the persistent, threatening bass of the Revolting Cocks' 'On Fire' clutching at the electro-techno throat of 'Flying Turns' by Crash Course in Science. The Cramps 'New Kind of Kick' snorts coke in the club bathroom with Germany's Liaisons Dangereuses on its 'Los Ninos Del Parque', while the prog-rock funk and feedback of Nurse With Wound's 'Two Shaves and a Shine' rips into the late-night new wave of Blondie's 'Atomic'.

There are a couple moments when a song crashes into the next instead of merging into it. One such instance is when the CLS track 'Can U Feel It' smacks into the head of Gang of Four's 'Damaged Goods'. The change is startling and takes you out of the flow for a few seconds. But, frankly, it's easy to get back into the groove with such an eclectic array of music.

The second disc plays out more like a compilation; the tracks stand alone, not segueing into each other. But Optimo's versatility and taste are evident here as well. The first half of this CD could have easily been the weeknight background music at the One-Eyed Jacks roadhouse in 'Twin Peaks' - apropos, considering that Angelo Badalamenti opens the disc with his 'Mullholland Drive Theme'. The quiet nouveau classical of Arthur Russell's string and voice duet on 'Another Thought' and The Balanescu Quartet's cover of 'The Model' prefaces the smoking, sultry 'Some Velvet Morning' by Lee Hazelwood and Nancy Sinatra and Nouvelle Vague's scorching cover of The Clash's 'Guns of Brixton'. Soon after, the sludgy rockabilly of Big Ned's 'Final Steps' takes a booze-addled walk down a back alley with Andre Williams, Hasil Adkins, and The Monks.

The mood does lighten a bit after this rock 'n' roll purging, getting back to the disco and glam with tracks by The Bush Tetras and The Only Ones, whose classic 'Another Girl Another Planet' closes the disc. Given how predictable and stale most DJ mixes have become, this set by Optimo may be from another planet as well - a world that has been collecting our musical miasma for years only to finally communicate with us using a deliciously skewed interpretation of our language.

Thank You (TRR50)

It's around mid- to late June when people start to talk about the year's crop of perfect summer pop songs - what to play in the car when driving out of the city to the seashore, or to have cycling on the iPod when walking home from work. Although the Temporary Residence label released its 'Thank You' compilation - a collective thanks to the faithful devotees who have helped the label reach its 50th release and eight years of operation - in early May, it's a disc that should be savored at the beginning of September. This is music for when the evenings cool down, shadows grow long, and the public beaches go back to the locals.

Explosions in the Sky captures this essence of a season slowly dying with its contribution, 'The Long Spring'. The song has that hallmark Explosions' approach - building and layering melancholy guitar meanderings on top of slow, almost military-like, percussion, twisting the mix into knots with persistent doses of adrenaline, and then tearing the whole structure down again. It aurally paints the portrait of the last holdout, the vacationer who defiantly waits until the last moment to turn his back on the ocean and head home, not wanting to return to the real world of rent and responsibility.

Kammerflimmer Kollektief's 'Eiderdaunen (Version)' shares this same sense of transition, though with a more experimental bent. Guitars caw like distant seagulls, an insistent tinny chiming along with added electronic effects play out like sounds heard in a boardwalk's broken-down penny arcade - all backed up by the lonesome draw of a slide guitar and deliberate drum patter.

Bands like Rumah Sakit, with its ferocious math-rock outbursts, and Sybarite keep the mood from getting too sentimental, but the compilation does end on a flawless sunset with Sonna's 'The Closer' - a warm, sheltering guitar ambience like the last few rays on the horizon radiating against your back. Before you know it, both track and disc are shimmering and fading away like the summer season - postcard-perfect post-rock for the post-summer.

An Accidental Memory In The Case of Death by Eluvium (TRR66)

Fatigued shoegazers who tuned in, faded out, and found solace in the kaleidoscopic grandeur of Eluvium's (aka Matthew Cooper's) guitar and piano drones on 'Lambent Material' will not find the same relief on his latest release. While Eluvium's previous CD inspired comparisons to Stars of the Lid and to an ambient Kevin Shields, 'An Accidental Memory in the Case of Death' is more likely to conjure up connections to John Cale's soundtrack work for the French films "La naissance de l'amour" and "N'oublie pas que tu vas mourir" or to the delicate romanticism of Erik Satie's 'Gymnopedies'.

The music on 'An Accidental Memory in the Case of Death' is solely piano - just Cooper sitting at the bench with one microphone and no overdubs, editing, or postproduction. And like the aforementioned compositions, Cooper's seven tracks on this CD are graceful and defenseless, stately with a touch of melancholia - but never spiraling into maudlin despair. There is a dignity in his approach to the piano, most notably on 'Genius and the Thieves' and 'Nepenthe'. It is as if he gives a musical presence and weight to the most overlooked actions in our day - getting ready for sleep, putting on our clothes in the morning. Listening to his work in this way, you are forced to pause and actually think about how you go through the task of everyday life, rather than trying to simply match your mood to his notes.

This quality makes his compositions feel almost out of time or place. The disc definitely feels like a memory, like something nearly forgotten - something that seems so insignificant that it doesn't even require remembering - which is given new perspective and meaning when suddenly considered in a different light. On 'An Accidental Memory in the Case of Death', Cooper didn't come up with a radical, dynamic new release; he simply and elegantly created one that matters.

The Complete 10-inch Series From Cold Blue by (CB0014)

For those of us hunkered down on the East Coast of the US, the start of 2004 has been an endurance test of Arctic proportions. As I sit in Boston with the baseboard pipes gurgling, I just read in the local paper that this past January was the most brutal on record for the city since 1888. There is little that gives relief when the winter grows to be this icy gray and desperate. However, for this season there is 'The Complete 10-Inch Series from Cold Blue', a three-CD retrospective compilation that offers some medicinal warmth without soaring prematurely into the sticky, suffocating humidity of the New England summer.

Seven composers are represented on this collection, which began life in the early 1980s as a string of 10-inch albums put out by the Cold Blue label to showcase the diverse, airy soundworld coming out of the West Coast at the time. Among the most compelling pieces are two that have no music at all. Read Miller's 'Mile Zero Hotel' and 'The Blueprint of a Promise' are based on the text from postcards found at garage sales. In 'Mile Zero Hotel' multiple voices read the material in a monotone, almost somnambular, fashion, producing a kind of haunting, echoing construction. 'The Blueprint of a Promise' only has one singsong voice directing the flow, but with equally hypnotic effect.

Chas Smith's four offerings for pedal steel guitar and 12-string dobro (a mechanically amplified guitar) are the warmest of the bunch, probably because they come the closest to the traditional sound of Western heat and loneliness - the ambient resonance of the desert. On 'After', 'Santa Fe' and 'October '68' Smith pulls the country twang of guitar strings like taffy, stretching the sound into a nighttime, folksy drone, full of starlight and sand. His final piece, 'Scircura', is more playful than the rest, relying on a cadence of repetitive, melodious guitar plucking that builds into a shimmering dance over a 12-minute period.

The rest of the compilation displays the same disparate, alluring inventiveness. Other highlights include Michael Jon Fink's fragile compositions for piano and cello; Peter Garland's six Mexican-infused dances for violins and gourd rattles; and Barney Childs' lively yet at times dissonant 'Clay Music' for clay wind instruments. There is a lot to take in here, and even after many repeated listens you can still find arrangements and melodies you didn't notice before, most likely because the discs pull you in immediately, seducing you to simply listen and experience. It's a nice change of pace to let something so comfortable and inviting wash over and envelope you, soothing the effects of the bitter cold and emotional frostbite. Thankfully, 'The Complete 10-Inch Series from Cold Blue' helps make the wait for spring less oppressive.

The Donca Matic Singalongs by Xploding Plastix (COL 512977 2)

'The Donca Matic Singalongs' is Xploding Plastix's second long-player since their 'Amateur Girlfriends Go Proskirt Agents' CD, and, frankly, the band had a monumental task in living up to or surpassing the sultry menage a trois of spy-jazz fingerstrokes, sweaty cinematics, and head-throbbing breakbeat breakouts found on their 2001 debut. While this latest release is an all-around solid album, the band has both trumped the sensuality and volatility of its earlier outing and come up short at the same time.

Let's begin with the positives. The arousing urban noir of Xploding Plastix's 'Amateur Girlfriends Go Proskirt Agents' is back with a vengeance, albeit on fewer tracks. For example, slightly dark and surfy guitars and a rollicking drumbeat slather 'Geigerteller' in camp and mystery, while the bass-heavy 'Tripwire' reels like a stormy ocean or untamed hips while what sounds like a kettle drum rumbles through the track. The obvious keeper, though, is 'The Famous Biting Guy'. It starts out innocuously enough with a solitary piano, but then it erupts as if a marching band bumrushed the studio - brassy, energetic, and loud. If you've seen the old TV show 'The Prisoner', imagine the closing theme but with synthesizer and more on the side of celebration than on escape. Buy 'The Donca Matic Singalongs' for this track.

Where Xploding Plastix get a little off-track is when they aim for pure electronic melody and collage. Their tracks are still good, but they just aren't distinctive enough to stand out. 'Dizzy Blonde', with its cartoonish, whimsical feel, would make a great soundtrack for a kid's video game in Japan, but it's overshadowed by the disc's jazzier selections. 'The Cave In Proper' sounds like it could have come from any number of bands on the Warp label's roster. Finally, the mix of breakbeat overload and digitally sweet washes on 'One Bullet Fits All' makes for a tuneful and hectic song, but it still doesn't quite satisfy.

The issue is one of comparison; while these latter tracks would warrant unquestioning praise if they were in almost anyone else's catalog, they aren't as explosive or gripping as those in which Xploding Plastix invoke the demons of John Barry, Jack Trombey, or Piero Piccioni at their swarthiest. First-timers should first purchase 'Amateur Girlfriends Go Proskirt Agents' - right away - and experience what all the fuss is about. If they like what they hear, they, and longtime fans, should check out 'The Donca Matic Singalongs'. You'll be sure to enjoy it; just don't listen to the CD expecting a sequel.

Motion: Movement In Australian Sound (PRE003)

As global communication and cheap air travel help diminish geographic homogeneity in the arts, there's less of a need to showcase music based on national identity. That being said, the Preservation label has done an excellent job of assembling a compilation of Australian names and soon-to-be names. Its
artistic decisions on which musicians to include and the ordering of their tracks create a mood ranging from low-key and lulling to pensive - like the sound of an abyss just starting to crack open beneath your feet.

One of the most noteworthy artists on the set is Alan Lamb, having built his reputation on a series of CDs using the interplay of telephone wires and the variable Australian environment. While his track, 'Fragment of the Outback', doesn't pioneer any new stylistic territory, the gut-chilling ambient terror that his work always evokes - the monolithic drones and high-tension explosions emanating from wires cracking and reverberating in the wind - is welcome.

Other well-known names include Pimmon and Oren Ambarchi, but many of the delights on 'Motion' come from artists whose names aren't yet familiar to the international music scene. Qua's 'Stranger Comforts Have Slipped By' opens with a ping-pong irritation ricocheting across the speakers, only to be joined by a blanket of warmer, comforting electronics and plucked guitar strings. Pretty Boy Crossover's 'In So Far' is the closest thing on these discs to a pop song - imagine the shoegazing band Slowdive being remixed by Jetone or Mitchell Akiyama.

Minit closes 'Motion' out with the 11-minute 'IJmuiden', a slow-motion dream with broken piano and keyboard bits traveling through radio transmission static. If you use your imagination, you can almost hear the deep whooshing sound of a didgeridoo in the mix as well. Probably an audio hallucination caused by some latent desire to link the music back to the country - old habits are difficult to break. In the end, though, the success of 'Motion' is based not on where the musicians reside but on one simple thing: the engaging choices that they all made in their compositions.