Irene Rible (FMA Admin)

So after a long Free Music Archiving hiatus I was happy to discover that Angels in America released their album Narrow Road to the Interior and made a WFMU appearance!  If you're new to them, Angels in America are two people going by the aliases of Moppy Pont and Merv Glisten.  They started making music in 2007 while going to high school in New York.  At their most noisy and distorted they resemble no-wave and industrial acts from decades past, with occasional shoegazing quieter moments, but mostly they create nightmare soundscapes that are wholly other.

They sent their first two cassette only releases to WFMU in 2009 and chose The Free Music Archive as their sole public presence.  You can get a sense of their cultural taste from the books and newsletters they distribute as part of the Pleasure Collective which includes an impressive mélange of arcane, debauched influences while Merv's weird and wooly Free Music Archive reviews expose the musical diet being fed into in these sonic regurgitations.  And then there is Moppy’s performance art, including her role in Smile Stealers, a student film that looks like what Matthew Barney would create if he directed a Sid and Marty Krofft production.

More contradictory to their music is their “public persona” (by that I mean their twitter page and one interview).  Their twitter page exhibits the kind of banality media studies professors rail on about during fiery tirades regarding social decay and the decline of Western Civilization.  You won’t glean any insight into their music from this, but you will learn that Merv likes donuts. They also named their first album Cunt Tree Grammar (like that Nelly album - they love puns!).  When I ordered some tapes from them Moppy’s package came wrapped in adorable Hello Kitty stationary while Merv’s included a complimentary Limp Bizkit keychain.

So yes, they can be willfully and perplexingly retarded.  But aren’t nonsense and absurdity just fun, distracting road stops along life’s frightening, existential highway?  Merv and Moppy may laugh, but their music doesn’t.  Rather it cries, and screams, then breaks some stuff, gets driven to the hospital to get a Demerol injection so that it calms down, and passes out.

It’s hard to say what the x-factor is that makes this band so unique.  Maybe it's the sense of dangerous excitement you feel, like you've discovered a little keyhole through somebody's skull and you’re nervously eavesdropping in on their internal dialogue.  Or maybe it’s how Ms. Moppy’s soft, sultry voice and sad, heavy eyes make her like a dreamboat sailing towards a maelstrom.  Her half-sung/half-spoken vocal delivery is forever vague and ineffable, much like a dream, by the end of an album you can only pick up small glimmers of meaning, and you're left anxiously scrambling for resolution.  At times her voice can hypnotically lull you to sleep (“Tooth Hound Sand”) and other times she writhes and aches with a physicality resembling erotic death throes (“The Akkursed Share”, "In Spades").  The Mazzy Star comparison in the Digitalis review seems strangely appropriate. She’s like Hope Sandoval’s younger, punk sister Hopeless Sandoval (these guys are getting to me - I couldn’t resist a shitty pun!).  Songs such as “Free Galaxy” and “Follow Me Out” are pretty enough that in a more indie-rock friendly incarnation she could be making melancholic make-out music à la Ms. Sandoval…except she might chew off your tongue and spit it in your face.

Premonitions of something sinister haunt most songs with Moppy usually sounding like a borderline psychotic waiting to unleash her vengeance upon a cold, cruel world.  Angels in America almost make me yearn for the kinds of frantic fits and panic attacks that would enable me to fully partake in this masochistic unhappiness.  When you stop listening it’s like shedding yourself of an abusive lover, but then being sad that the bed is empty.

But why Angels in America succeed as a band has nothing to do with feeling good, it's about being truthful which is why I feel some sense of comfort listening to these broken, distorted songs that always hover on the brink of collapse.  Much like the romance of watching any manmade artifice slowly wither and cave in to the elements, the beauty of these songs is that they seem to have breathed a sigh of relief and given up the struggle against entropy.

The FMA returns this year with more legal downloads for the Halloween holiday.  This time around we've got some sinister classical favorites, 8bit Dario Argento film scores, Peter Lorre interpreted via twisted circuit benders, and some frighteningly bad tunes from America's premier mass murdering folk troubadour.  Be sure to check out the Halloween mixes from 2009 and 2010 for more copylefted Halloween spookiness.  Big thanks to the FMA community for all the great suggestions!

#1-4  It was good to see Angels in America return this year with some new tracks from Welcome to Miami and E.M.S. and side project Laura Warholic.  I missed them on their 2009 tour, but they seem to have gained a higher profile this year performing at Pop Montreal.  To preserve their mystery, I prefer not to see them live…well maybe I would, but only if they performed here.  I can listen to both bands repeatedly; the songs travel effortlessly like a soothing lubricant for some worn in cerebral groove of obsessive thoughts and creepy, ambivalent desires.  They’re weird and desperate and beyond the pale, but still come off as sensitive and tender to me.  Please Angels in America, upload more before I start heating up your tapes and mainlining you.

 #5-7  Wm. Berger’s My Castle of Quiet reintroduced me to the mind-bending powers of Excepter via several Excepter members who performed on his show this year, including Telecult Powers featuring Lala Ryan, Hex Breaker Quintet, and SSPS. I’m very excited to get started on the Ten Films to Watch Telecult Powers By and check out the hundreds of hours of Excepter’s live streams available here and here.  I'm not sure why I need this much Excepter, maybe it's just this lingering suspicion I have that if I listen to them long enough I just might levitate.

 #8-9  I discovered a plentiful amount of haunting, experimental music from around the world on the Clinical Archives page here on the FMA as well as much more to be found on their website.  Kerim Safa's otherwordly wails particularly stood out.  Girilal Baars is somewhat similar but moans in a lower register.  I don't know what this guy is saying but he sounds something like an institutionalized Fester Addams or a dying moose...painful!

 #10  Found this great theremin album by Turkish electronic musician Meczûp while looking for Halloween tracks for my mix.  I can't find out much about this artist, but his Myspace page includes several tracks not found on his album. Hope to hear more soon.

Having drained the FMA of CC-licensed spookiness for last year’s Creative Commons Halloween mix, this year I prowled the net-label databases of the internet in search of fresh mp3s.  My ears were satiated with an aural smorgasbord of horror film soundtrack tributes and audio collages, eerie theremins, bewitching women, and countless cookie monster voiced death metal front men warning of the impending zombie apocalypse.  Click the "i" for more info about the artists and CC licenses. Have fun, and remember to be safe.

Už Jsme Doma (pronounced oosh-smeh-dough-ma, Czech phrase for 'Now You Got It') are one of the Czech Republic’s most notable alternative rock bands.  They have been releasing their genre-hopping, mutant strands of everything since 1985.  Last week they stopped by WFMU to play a few songs from their new album Caves before making their appearance at New York’s annual Czech Street Festival.

Years ago, my exposure to Czech music didn’t extend much further than my mother’s old Supraphon records (in Communist days, the one and only state approved record label) which consisted mostly of Czech classical standards and lots of Karel Gott (the Czech answer to Tom Jones).  You may remember some of these artists if you followed WFMU’s 365 Days project, which featured Karel Gott 45s and The Best of Country Beat (a country revue album that sounds like a Czech Lawrence Welk Show. You can almost hear the polyester).  Let’s just say I was a little underwhelmed by the record collecting opportunities. 

Fortunately, I was able to discover the fertile Czech underground at Prague’s wonderful avant-garde venue the Archa Theatre, where I caught Iva Bittová, Psí vojáci, and members of The Plastic People of the Universe, as well as a special 20th anniversary show by Už Jsme Doma.

This was one of the most confusing concerts I've ever been to, like drinking a glass of grape juice that turns out to be cold coffee, my expectations and reactions could never quite align.  Is it punk? Ska?  A John Zorn parody of punk and ska?  Unlike nearly all American rock bands, Už Jsme Doma’s music doesn’t seem to be rooted in blues, but sounds more like they use classical compositions or jazz as a base, but then it's electrified, distorted, and twisted beyond recognition, making it oddly uncomfortable to listen to – like I can feel it soldering together new neurological connections in my brain. The closest American comparisons are probably Mr. Bungle and the Residents (who Už Jsme Doma played with in their 1991 theater performance and accompanying album Freak Show.)

Adding another attraction to the Už Jsme Doma carnival is their "court artist" Martin Velíšek.  Since 1994 Velíšek has been the mastermind behind Už Jsme Doma's surreal album art, posters, merchandise, and even a pop up book, before branching out into set design for animated film (check out Velíšek's excellent work on Fimfárum uploaded here).

Perhaps I am a victim of musical repetition compulsion, but Už Jsme Doma's unpredictability and eclecticism still baffles my ears.  I think Czech-American Robert Zverina’s comprehensive Už Jsme Doma fan page best sums up their plethora-genre approach:  "UJD has visited every musical church in town but refuse to worship at any one altar. And why should they? The possibilities open to a sax-keys-bass-guitar-drums combo are endless and UJD is intent on exploring every angle, from mellifluous jazz to grating hardcore to hopped up ska, they combine genres willy-nilly. Picture ballerinas on a tarmac directing jumbo jets with flashlights and you're getting somewhat closer to understanding how UJD's alchemy of sound will set your spine a-tingling and open that long dormant third eye."

The Comfort Stand netlabel has released a compilation of Joe Meek demos, exposing the songwriting process of one of rock’s most innovative producers.  Eccentric, possibly schizophrenic, and homosexual, Meek was an outsider in the music industry both for his lifestyle and for his unusual recording techniques.  Rather than working out of a studio, he recorded in his kitchen and was one of the first engineers to purposefully distort sounds by utilizing heavy echo and intense compression techniques.  Obsessed with the supernatural, when Meek was looking for inspiration he would summon the ghost of Buddy Holly via Ouija board.  Meek even claimed his first number one hit “Johnny Remember Me” was written by Holly from beyond the grave.

Meek is most remembered for the hit song he produced for the Tornados “Telstar”, which predated the British invasion when it topped the charts in America in 1962.  More fascinating than Meek’s pop hits are his lesser known projects, such as his involvement with the shock rock pioneer Screaming Lord Sutch, who became famous for terrorizing his audience with his song “Jack the Ripper”, which he performed cloaked in Victorian garb and covered in chalky face paint.  I Hear a New World was Meek’s most personal recording – an outer space fantasy album that only saw partial release in 1960.  Backed by the spacey sound effects that became famous on “Telstar”, the album stars the Chipmunk-voiced Dribcots, Sarooes, and Globbots – the creatures Meek imagined would inhabit the moon. 

In 1967 Meek fell into a deep depression due to financial struggles and his increasing paranoia that his recording sessions were being secretly tapped by producers who wanted to steal his songs and ideas.  One such paranoid episode resulted in Meek killing his landlady before putting his rifle in his mouth and taking his own life.

Perhaps only a footnote in rock ‘n’ roll history in America, Meek is still highly revered in England, inspiring the BBC documentary The Very Strange Story of the Legendary Joe Meek and the play Telstar, recently turned into a movie starring Kevin Spacey and the Libertines' Carl Barât, among others.  Adding more insight into the mind of Joe Meek is the yet to be distributed American documentary A Life in the Death of Joe Meek which can be previewed here.

>> Joe Meek demos

Marianne Dissard is a native of France who has been living in Tuscon, Arizona for the past two decades.  She came to America for film school in the early nineties, a time when she began filming Drunken Bees, a documentary about the Tuscon band Giant Sand.  In Tuscon she found a musical kinship with artists such as Naim Amor of the Amor Belhom Duo and Joey Burns and John Convertino of Calexico, who helped write and produce many of the songs featured on the Paris One Takes compilation of Dissard’s work. 

Aside from her French collaborator and contemporary Françoiz Breut, the closest musical comparison to Dissard is Lhasa de Sela.  Both artists make the unlikely fusion of Calexico’s alternative mariachi music, with the sultry, brooding tradition of a classic old world chanteuse.  My heart sunk when I discovered that Lhasa de Sela died at the beginning of this year.  Perhaps unfair to Dissard, but as I listened to this album, I couldn’t help but feel Lhasa’s spirit haunting in the background, like watching an actor bring an icon back to life in a biopic.

Lightning Dust is the side project of Black Mountain's Amber Webber and Joshua Wells.  I was first exposed to Webber’s voice after seeing Black Mountain at a summer music festival in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.  While most of the music was so light it immediately blew off my memory’s radar, Webber gave a performance with enough weight to stick with me years later.

When Webber took the stage she looked like a young Jennifer Saunders doing an impression of Grace Slick and like Slick’s classic performances, Webber’s stage presence was serious, distant, and aloof.  She never spoke to the audience and barely moved, all of her intensity was instead rerouted to her voice.  While Black Mountain’s churning classic rock riffs reveled in the hedonistic pleasures of all things psychedelic, Webber’s vocals brought out the vulnerability of those experiences, like a reminder of the ease with which laughter can turn to tears.

As Black Mountain began their performance, a cold wind rolled in off of the Pacific and fog flooded the park.  The trees rustled from the combined forces of nature and massively amplified power chords and by the time Webber’s dramatic vocals entered the sonic stew, I felt as if her voice alone had conjured these elements and summoned them to the stage.  Amongst the attractive, hip, inebriated onlookers peddling iPhone paraphernalia and expensive vegan smoothies, Webber felt like a damning primal force ready to wipe away all of this frivolity.  As the afternoon faded and night crept on I wrapped my arms around myself like a shivering deer wishing to retreat into a safe cave, which is an apt description for how Webber sounds throughout most of Lightning Dust’s debut record.

I’ll admit I am biased towards the sounds of women crying out into the indifference of the universe.  Webber is able to do this with an intensity many have compared to Chan Marshall, but Beth Gibbons seems a closer match, especially on songs from their first record such as "Take Me Back" and "Castles and Caves".  “Listened On” is another track from the debut that they performed for CBC radio.  “Never Seen” was performed for KEXP from their latest album Infinite Light.

Amish Records was founded in Pennsylvania and began releasing 7"s in 1994.  Since then they've moved to New York and have accumulated an eclectic catalog of music rooted in the folk tradition, ranging from Oakley Hall's harmonized bluegrass-inspired Americana to the spacious psychedelic soundscapes of Hall of Fame (Dan Brown/Samara Lubelski/Theo Angell); from Bird Show's electronic/jazz meditations to Black Taj's Chapel Hill-style classic rock reinterpretations.

WFMU has had the good fortune to host several other artists from the Amish label that are now available to download on the FMA such as Theo Angell's performance on Maria Levitsky's Show.  Angell began playing experimental folk music with Hall of Fame, but unlike Wexler his approach to folk is rougher, like something you might find on a field recording of primitive American music.  His music facilitates somber meditations, like the mist in an early morning forest, obsfuscated shards of light wrangle to wake up the day from the night, yet these songs feel as comforting as mate and oatmeal on a wood stove. I never would have guessed all this was emanating from a Brooklyn loft as his ethos still seems firmly planted in his rural hometown in Oregon. Some of Angell's collaborators have also made appearances on WFMU, including P.G. Six and Hall of Fame on Irene Trudel's Show and The Stork's Club, respectively.

I'll admit, my knowledge of Scandinavia in general doesn't extend much farther than my Pippi Longstocking veneration.  Although, given Pippi's penchant for ingesting magic peas, taking off in makeshift bicycle powered flying contraptions, and other hallucinogenic adventures; I can imagine her feeling very comfortable with the ethics of her Finnish psych-folk neighbors.

I think the Finnish psych-folk scene owes a lot to the spirit of childhood.  In a musical sense by their uninhibited manner of exploring the textures of sound within their songs without letting the restrictions of melody hold them back too far.  Each sound breathes freely, often droning on in fascination as if heard for the first time.  Often they even incorporate toy instruments and found objects into their milieu of traditional folk instruments and electronics.

But in a broader sense, there is something innocent about their music that is harder to find in America and makes the Finn's music particularly intriguing and I think novel for an American audience. Just like so many European children's television shows, their culture of childhood is rooted more in folklore and a natural wonder as opposed to our more commercialistic entertainment.