A Year of Music

Some things happened, and then they stopped happening, and here I am, back again, with a huge pile of new music to hear and perhaps the cleverest recording I’ve heard in a long time currently on the stereo. I’ll get to talking about the huge pile in a little bit, but I wanted to urge anyone who likes their out-rockin’ both clever and loud to go check out this awesome Nurse With Wound / Spasm split 12” at The Thing on the Doorstep (yet another way-too-awesome MP3 blog I’ve discovered).

Its ability to be musical and strange in equal measure frankly confuses me. One side features Steven Stapleton’s / Nurse With Wound’s usual high surrealism (although more linear and rhythmically coherent than usual), and the other is a slab of slowly building, hard-rockin’ tribal psychedelia that reminds me of the Krautrocked heaviness Julian Cope tries so hard to harness, or maybe Electric Wizard in a particularly blown state of mind. It gets genuinely heavy, and Stapleton’s predictably unpredictable interventions just ratchet up the intensity by throwing things in new directions every few phrases. It remains curiously unadorned and unsentimental for all that, and so it stands pleasantly outside of time, sounding like it could have come out at any time in the last 40 years. Nurse With Wound makes this kind of mercurial mutability seem so easy, but I know it’s anything but.

I’m going to have a terrible time trying to find a copy of this for myself (United Dairies vinyl is deeply collectible and hence tough to find), but I’d really like one.

There’s a small circle of musicians making a very specific kind of drone music that sits somewhere between processed field recordings and pure electronic ambient. It’s never quite clear what made the sounds you’re hearing, and this mystery, as well as the way that elements shift, emerge and disappear keeps it from being sonic wallpaper. Most of this artists in this circle (Andrew Chalk, Jonathan Coleclough, Colin Potter, the modern-day Hafler Trio, Andrew Liles, Christopher Heemann) know each other, and they all cultivate their indifference when it comes to finding an audience: Mirror, one of the most talented of these groups, spent a long time putting out 2-500 records at a time (and I do mean records). There’s something weird about buying a record with sides that are more silent than not. It’s somewhat disquieting and anonymous.

Andrew Chalk was in Mirror (along with Christopher Heemann of HNAS), and right now I’m listening to his Shadows from the Album Skies, which has a peculiar name but is a beautiful record. It’s more static and mysterious than most of these lowercase drones, with the only recognizable sound on the whole release being some microphone feedback subtly woven into the first track. It’s subtle and unchanging enough that it draws you in, forces you to listen closely to hear the variations and textures. Moreso than most ambient music, it creates a numinous aura of sound. It is quietly sacramental.

Chalk’s stuff can be hard to find, but it’s worth digging up. Without really meaning to, I’ve collected 7 of his releases and find them all beautiful, soothing and deeply strange.