A Year of Music

Stuck in my head this morning: two things, actually. At first it was Severed Heads’ “Kittenette” (from Op 2.0), with one of the winding, sinuous melodies Severed Heads have specialized in since Rotund for Success. It’s delicate and fey and I like it a lot.

Of course, by the time I made it to the shower, Turisas’s “Battle Metal” (from the album of the same name) had rambunctiously elbowed its way into my frontal lobes, and there it remained for the rest of the day. Turisas make cheesy, self-consciously epic Viking metal – it is utterly bereft of any awareness whatsoever of irony, and I’ll leave it to you to decide whether that’s desirable or not. I could have handled something a little less generic sounding, myself.

Writing this blog is leading me into interesting terrain, as this recent batch of additions to my library shows:

• The second half of Mordant Music's The Tower has been banging its way into my head far enough to make me take a leap of faith and buy the rest of their diverse and aggressively eccentric catalog.
• I realized that I was entitled to download a bunch of Severed Heads' Op series outtakes due to having bought Op 2 a while ago, so I grabbed those.
• Talking about Surgeon's awesome DJ sets reminded me to check his site to see if he had a more recent set than the ones I have, and indeed he did.
• Finally, I've been accumulating a pile of crud from Mutant Sounds, so I added all that to my iPod so I could get to know it better. There is some amazing music that's been dug out of obscurity by that blog:
  • Tappi Tíkarrass, Björk's first foray into the post-punk sound that she refined in Kukl and the Sugarcubes, before she decided to become the most avant garde pop star ever;
  • a bunch of long out of print Hirsche Nacht aufs Sofas (HNAS) records from a parallel universe where Nurse With Wound were actually German, instead of merely being obsessive fans of Krautrock;
  • a whole pile of European art-damaged gothic post punk (Claustrofobia, Dark White, Epitaphe, Tango Luger);
  • some early records by the fucking tremendous Wall of Voodoo, whose Call of the West combines the miserably American, empathy-drenched humanity of Raymond Carver or Robert Stone with Ennio Morricone's expansive sound and Kraftwerk's electronic pulse – anyone who thinks the Wall of Voodoo story starts and ends with "Mexican Radio" is very much missing out;
  • a couple completely sui generis Japanese electronic / prog / jazz / avant garde records from the 70s, one of which was a collaboration between most of Yellow Magic Orchestra and the one Japanese Pop artist whose work I know well (Tadonori Yokoo – there was a semi-exhaustive survey of his work up at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo when I was there);
  • and a pile of random singles from the Mutant Sounds archives, including an awesomely out of character John Duncan track and a deeply weird couple of tracks by Duppi, a Japanese band I'd never heard of and will probably never hear from again. Mutant Sounds is so awesome that there's no way it's going to last.

Here's the full list. I've appended links to sources for most everything. Downloading the albums posted by Mutant Sounds requires you to deal with quasi-filesharing services like Rapidshare, Zshare, Bodongo and Megaupload; these services' wack-assed stabs at business models make getting at the archives a pain, but I assure you that if you like boundary-pushing music, it's worth jumping through the requisite hoops. A lot of this stuff is begging to be put back into print, if only by somebody like Hyped2Death.

• Claustrofobia: Arrebato (Fobia) [ms]
• Dark White: The Grey Area (private) [ms]
• Epitaphe: Syndrome (private) [ms]
• HNAS: Melchior (United Dairies / DOM) [ms]
• HNAS: Music für Schuhgeschafte (Dragnet) [ms]
• HNAS: Willkür Nach Noten (Dragnet) [ms]
• Haruomi Hosono & Tadanori Yokoo: Cochin Moon (King) [se]
• Mordant Music: Baud With You / Shot Away (Mordant Music) [bk]
• Mordant Music: Carrion Squared (Mordant Music) [bk]
• Mordant Music: Dead Air (Mordant Music) [bk]
• Mordant Music: Fallen Faces / Dead Air (Mordant Music) [bk]
• Mordant Music: Filthy Danceheng (Mordant Music) [bk]
• Mordant Music: Petri-Dish (Mordant Music) [bk]
• Mordant Music: The Tower: Parts I-XVII (Mordant Music) [bk]
• Mordant Music: Travelogues: A Beautiful Vesta (Mordant Music) [bk]
• Severed Heads: Op 1 (sevcom)
• Severed Heads: Op 2.3 (sevcom)
• Severed Heads: Op 2.9 (sevcom)
• Surgeon: Neck Face (www.dj-surgeon.com)
• Tango Luger: s/t (Invisible) [ms]
• Tappi Tíkarrass: Bítið Fast í Vítið (Spor) [ms]
• Tappi Tíkarrass: Miranda (Gramm) [ms]
• Wall of Voodoo: Ring of Fire / The Morricone Themes (Index) [ms]
• Wall of Voodoo: Two Songs by Wall of Voodoo (Index) [ms]
• Wall of Voodoo: Wall of Voodoo (Index) [ms]
• Tsutsui Yasutaka & Yamashita Yosuke: IE (Fiasco) [ms]
• whacked-out singles from the Mutant Sounds archives:
  • Drinking Electricity: Shaking All Over / China (pop:aural)
  • Duppi: Velvet Night / はつねつのみやこ (Night Gallery)
  • Électric Max Band: Mick and Max / Knives, Feathers and Fire (Reprise)
  • Electro Static Cat: Lethologica (Freedom in a Vacuum)
  • Eskaton: Musique Post-Atomique (Eskaton)
  • John Duncan / Andrew Chalk & Christoph Heemann: The Elgaland-Vargaland National Anthem / Old Hive (Die Stadt)
  • Kevin Dunn: Nadine / Oktyabriana (dB Records)
  • v/a: Earcom 3 (Fast Product)

Stuck in my head this morning: “Psychic Squirt” by Severed Heads, from their recent album Under Gail Succubus, mostly because of the way it bastardizes the lyrics to a Carpenters song:

MVRemix: On the track, ‘Psychic Squirt’, you use lyrics from an older song. What was this all about?

Tom Ellard: It’s a bit of ‘Do You Know The Way To San Jose’ by Burt Bacharach. Listen to the original by The Carpenters and then, look at the city now. See how it changed, like a mutant growth. The track sings about mutant growths. Everything around the world now seems to be a mutation that has grown too big like the props from ‘Lost In Space’. The world is over ripe.

I had a hell of a time figuring out which of the nearly innumerable Severed Heads releases the song was on, having only the lyrics to go on, and when I was trying to narrow it down, I realized that my blithe assumption that Severed Heads’ music has settled down in the band’s old age was tragically, deeply wrong. They’re still at least as weird as the Residents, they just seem more normal at first because they use more recognizable samples and slicker-sounding instruments.

Severed Head’s last album with significant distribution in North America was 1991’s Cuisine (with Piscatorial), and their last album to be released at all in the United States was Gigapus, which was released by tiny indie Decibel all the way back in 1995. Severed Heads didn’t disappear, though, “they” – Severed Heads has been Tom Ellard alone for quite a while now – just moved on, without looking back to see if we were keeping up.

Back around the turn of the millennium, you could download low-bitrate MP3s for their entire catalog from sevcom.com. You could buy their albums as shareware, although the purchase interface was clunky. Then, once the rights to their recordings had reverted to them, Sevcom started selling CD-Rs of their albums, but still offered streaming audio for the curious or chintzy. Now, digital distribution has finally caught up with Tom Ellard, and you can buy a large chunk of their catalog through iTunes, most of it as “iTunes Plus” DRM-free AAC files. Or you can buy them as MP3s straight off sevcom.com and get, as a free bonus, Tom Ellard’s demented liner notes included as PDFs.

I highly recommend you do so, because there are few experimental pop musicians at the level of Severed Heads, and even their oldest, most primitive material still sounds pretty fresh. Also, I’m sure Tom Ellard could use the money. I’ve always thought of Severed Heads as being like Wire: both are artists who outgrew their original style (in Severed Heads’ case, tape-loop based experimental industrial), developed an ear for sickly-sweet melodies that play on in your head for days, write stream-of-consciousness lyrics that have no relationship with reality, and are driven by irascible eccentrics.

Severed Heads have released 9 albums since they last had a distribution deal in North America. Well, actually, that’s not quite right: they’ve put out 4 standalone albums, a couple remix collections, a side project (Coklacoma, a purposefully awkward electro-pop project which doesn’t do much for me), and one continually mutating, versioned release, Op.

The Op releases are intended to be sketchier and looser than the “full” albums. In reality, they’re also punchier and contain more of the loopiness and elusive melodies that have kept me a dedicated fan of Tom Ellard all this time. My favorite is Op 2.0, both for “Symptom Symphony 2.0”, with its Autechre Lite breakbeat (turnabout is fair play, and anyone who thinks Autechre doesn’t owe a huge debt to Severed Heads needs to hear more Severed Heads) and nonsensical lyrics, and the “Hank” half of “Pinagoal / Hank”, which is a disorienting, almost melodic looping blurt. It also features “Kern That Bembo Tighter 2.0”, which is about the nerdiest type-related title I’ve ever seen. They all have their moments, though, and Op 3 is free.

While you’re over there, grab Gashing the Old Mae West / Kato Gets the Girl (which is also free), and then buy some stuff. I recommend Come Visit the Big Bigot or Viva Heads!, but all of it is worth hearing.