doncbruital (FMA Admin)

An all-timer of avant-garde creation myths is the one, apocryphal though it may be (all the good ones are), that tells of a conversation between Brahms and Mahler held along the Danube’s Vienna banks, wherein the former, decrying the state of contemporary composition, lamented for the lost spirits of Mozart and Beethoven and the long-gone golden age, in response to which der Mahler merely pointed to the river, noted it was impressive, sure, but that its flow ensured new waters for every consequent glance, so that one could never greet the same river twice. The Danube, yea though it may be immortalized time and again in story and song, doesn't even really exist, not as a changeless constant at least. Heraclitus, probably talking about a different river, nonetheless sez it best: "the river is never the same river, nor the man the same man."

Then there are those who get in on the river-flow act in different ways, not content to fight the current or transform with it or get dumped out into the Black Sea of time or, uh, wherever. Nah, some folks might be better thought of as prowling the edges, like a 'Big Ole Bear' of song on the lookout for prey, poaching discrete ideas and forms from the ever-shifting waters of musical tradition like a grizzly poaching those salmon from the river. And like poached salmon, the result is often weird and tasty. One such practitioner of a timeless mixture of musical forms is LITTLE HOWLIN' WOLF, whose presence on the FMA enables you, lucky listener, to get in touch with some of your own time-animal tendencies.

Little Howlin' Wolf's work is somehow simultaneously junkyard cutup from the American Folkways archives, noisy outstrumentation, and wild animal sound that'd be equally at home nowadays as in the days of neolithic river worship. There's lots of essential stuff on that FMA page, including the 2006 set from Brian Turner's show to which you had better just listen--I'll stop blathering, as I can't compete with the essential indescribability of these riverrun fragments--just start prowling 'em yourself.

The real wonder of WFMU, the nurturing freeform motherwolf to the Free Music Archive's enthusiastic internet pup (which loving parent happens to be, ahem, having its annual fundraising marathon at the moment), is that it offers listeners the opportunity to map his or her own constellations of musical reference points. It starts out acousmatically enough--you hear a completely off-the-wall track, and well, you just may love it but still, the connection to your musical world seems more or less nonexistent, and, well, you're not sure, the whole thing's sort of new, maybe a little nerveracking but wait--suddenly you hear another track, one which connects the referent-less one you just heard to one of your preexisting favorites, and behold: you've got a new beloved song, set in place like an armillary sphere's realm of the fixed stars, and drawn into your very own burgeoning network of celestial giants--a constellation of jams.

The Free Music Archive, in this conception, offers the listener a 21st century map of the skies as useful as any that's guided previous generations of humanity. If the genius of radio is that it can pinpoint a specific coordinate in the musical universe and cast it in brilliant light--a forgotten song streaking across the sky like a comet--well, then, the genius of the FMA is that it can refer you at a glance to the solar systems and galaxies of which each mysterious body is an indispensible component.

I've been thinking a lot about this while navigating the FMA of late--with all the content it's been building up over the last year, it's really taken on an astonishing complexity--and noticing that artists I've seen here before have reappeared in various guises, uploaded labels' worth of audio or otherwise tripled or quadrupled their presence here on the site. It's really inspiring to see the Archive--whose ravenous wolfcub dream is to be a reliably great depository for the varying currents at work in music today--beginning to really map out previously uncharted galaxies; looking at previous blog topics alone, we've Providence's Free Matter for the Blind, which, in addition to the extraordinary audio zines already mentioned, has presided over a label curatorship packed with full albums by the likes of Leif Goldberg and Area C and, well, just see for yourself. So too have the works of previously-spotlit Montrealers brought plenty of new work to the table--check out tapelabel Campaign for Infinity's steadily-growing list of great bands. Lots of incredible WFMU Fest sets from last fall are now up--including that of Talk Normal, about whom I wrote in November.

You get the point--as the site grows, so too do the complexities of the constellations on our trusty and ever-richening charts. As we listen, so we discover. Keep it up.

The realm of home recording may be a pretty righteous place, full of patron saints and young apostles and the whole liturgical bit, but it's no dour zone of straight-faced worship; in other words, no dress code in this cathedral, no way--home recording is really more of this paradise of impish subversion, where the boring mainstream is reliably mocked, slandered, and taken to task. Using tried-and-true guerilla methods, the underground can really make a go of winning the hearts and minds of the listening population, and though alright, the mainstream may occasionally push back, these losing-battle efforts usually look sort of dumb. Of course there's no doing away with home recording--it's the advancing industry's pace-keeping mischievous twin: for every Garageband, there's a Garbageland, and U CAN UNLEARN GUITAR, satirist saint in the ever-growing pantheon, will have the last laugh.

UCUG began life as the shadow project of a four-track band (called, yeah, U Can Learn Guitar) which harnessed guitar, turntables, and the Suzuki QChord's bank of corporation-imposed sounds and samples in an effort to explore with hyperbolic bravado the straight-faced world of overblown music. Before long the push to Unlearn subsumed its twin impulse, and Garageband and other feature-rich DIY enablers found their way into the project's anti-aesthetic maw. Using these and other tools of the master, UCUG's library of noisy subversion grew--and found a handily righteous partner in communicating its message, namely this here Free Music Archive. Indeed, the album Garbageland is, by ringleader Andrew Unlearny's admission, a direct result of the FMA's existence, it having placed instant feedback from the sacred underground within easy reach.

So light your candles or get down with a sacrifice or affect whatever mechanisms of worship you deem appropriate; there are, after all, 59 U Can Unlearn Guitar tracks up at the FMA, and such a gift deserves some thanks. Below you'll find the tiniest of samplings; the songwriterly and elegiac "High for the Hogs," the lifealteringly NSFW touring-blues anthem "58 Days on the Road" and the epic Garbageland manifesto "Newest Zong, BuhBuhBaybeee." I'd urge you, reader, not to stop here, but I'm certain you won't, not once you've heard the good news. The gospel of home recording's here to counter that industry spiel--unlearn it, brother, and preach on.

Few musical outfits navigate the borderlands of spacetime as nimbly as EXCEPTER does; fewer still are those whose means of producing music (electronic improvisation--that heady universe of conceptual exercise) comment so groovily on that music's end. It's real simple: Excepter uses their futurist setup--the vast majority of which comprises synthesized sound, artificial-like--to get at something real primal, real natural. All well and good--shouldn't all music work on a primal level?--except these folks take it a little further: their synthwash grooves propel the listener, y-yes indeed, to realms animalistic, realms kind of, w-well, savage.

We all know and can recite by heart, for example, their simple ode from 2008's Debt Dept. entitled, even more simply, "Kill People" (there's a video too). We can thrill to fistpump remixtrax from industry juggernauts Carter Tutti and J.G. Thirlwell. We can access their backcatalog of tropical coverart and free podcast archives. Obviously these guys are no slouches on the tech end of things, and yet despite or perhaps by dint of this obstinate propensity for mechanized means, the group's rawness sticks out, wild and unadulterated--enhanced, in fact--by all the electronic spookiness. An Excepter show (for instance) means being confronted not with a clean, standardized exercise of technological prowess, but a rabid and insatiable one; a shaggy, wild-eyed (and wild-hatted) critter, all the more dangerous for those thunderous beats and synthattacks it seems so prone to pounding and howling into unholy existence. Unlike any other electroacoustic progenitors I can think of, Excepter takes hold of that staid improvised form, wrestling it from its button-down gallery atmosphere and installation hoitytoitiness, and it makes the thing scary.

Hours of this stuff is available on the band's FMA page, as well as via their own internet presence (go to their website, click around). They've a new album a scant two weeks away from release, and in a universe wherein noise-improv-ers stubbornly barrage the market with release after release after drab release, theirs is a prolificacy you can trust. So go for it, mirror Excepter's brave savagery-through-tech model, and take a computer ride into the wilderness.

Salut, folks, what say we get to celebrating, for the era of the Time Machine is evidently upon us. Sick, finally. History--having heretofore been little more than this pesky nightmare from which music and art proffer momentary awakening or at least distraction--might affect us in a healthier way, now we've got this time travel jam in our back pockets for the loosing.

We ought to consider, I suppose, what this development'll mean for our human archiving impulse, that primordial directive that's had us scrambling to save our Progress at every turn of civilization: you know, monks copied manuscripts, the National Film Registry inexplicably chose to retain a copy of Halloween, and oh yeah, Facebook copies all yer data. Obviously the Free Music Archive itself is a manifestation of this desire, one whose mission is, thankfully, to vouchsafe what's good and worthwhile and not just anything at all. But still, if we're gonna be rocketing up and down the slipstream at will at the controls of some sweet Time Vehickle, what'll happen to our collective desire to safeguard our great works? My best guess here is that we'll move away from the overkill, the obvious, and focus on the nuance. Another way of saying this is that in our era of unprecedented and rampant reproducibility, we won't need to take any special pains to protect some bigtime movie or seminal literary work from the maw of time, and will thus be freed up to really groove on that distant sidereal matter, the ephemera, the jumbled-textural-hisses and cassettedeck clicks, the pieces of sound that, whether by hap or design, only happened once.

The FMA has recently been bolstered by slews of noisy new material which, having likely floated unprotected down the near-frozen Connecticut River for some time, is basically mangled beyond recognition and so contains little to no extant connection with the recognizable world save for a possible origin point up in Brattleboro, VT. Yeah, surely any analysis of this most mysterious body of work is liable to be bewilderingly inconclusive and maddeningly equivocal thanks to the wild multivalence of the material, which runs the gamut from harsh radioclip soundcollage to enlightened decentralized forms of rock'n'roll libertarianism to autoharmolodic piano concerti to SNLian youth theatrics and back again. But some things are clear; namely, that these Vermonstrous acts--HEAT WILSON, HORSE BOYS, ROAN STARS, SORD--all seem to connect to a mysterious personnage by the improbably gristley name of NALS GORING. This much we know, no matter that the music continues to confound.

And you can rest easy on that last score, too, cause if Goring's work is a touch bewildering, it's all the more entrancing for this mystery element. Indeed, this doublepronged dynamic--bizarrdom-mit-newfangling--runs through the FMA-documented wealth of works solo and collaborative. In HEAT WILSON and ROAN STARS (in each of which acts Nals Goring's partner is apparently named, uh, Nals Gorman), cut-tape cs dissemblage is married with honest-to-God band antics, guitars, drums, the whole bit. Seriously! Meanwhile in HORSE BOYS, a project for which, despite its Quixote-flavored found manuscript form (for it seems to comprise found piano playing by one Zach Phillips) Goring is intent on taking credit, field recording weaves between brittley oldpiano strands of melody while someone, Goring only knows who, takes on the "Nancy Sings"-vibe vox. And of course there's more, lots, in fact; the author figures that you, reader, will take that icy Connecticut plunge and do some digging yerself.

Follow the links above to the respective Goring project FMA pages, or check out the tasty sampling tray I've prepared below. There's also the myspace, the hometown OSR Tapes/Dax Bills tape label website for all your Goring needs, and that reliable youtube option. That this material needs to be heard, riverripped and raggedness-wrought though it may seem, should then quickly prove self-evident.

Incredible as this recently-YouTube-profferred footage of 1927 London, shot in improbable and vibrant color may be [it is], the thing kind of gives me pause,  actually doling up some unease to go with all that vibrancy. The idea, after all, of truly inhabiting another time in history, short of making use of full-on Black Knight-style magically goof-affording time travel, is as false and hollow as the brightly lit footage that hides, behind its title cards, all the downer-aspects of London life circa 1927, not to mention those of the world at large: lookit, poverty, crime, those ubiquitous gray skies--they're all absent. What, then, do I get from such a furlough, a barebones visit to the gaudy trappings of a bygone era? Well, there's that texture, see--that the city, sure, but more importantly that of the video--which grants the listener an inimitably intuitive and above-all inclusive feel for the era, never mind all that's explicitly left out.

Texture is an arena in which THE COUNTRY TEASERS, that London/Edinburgh band of saintly cephalophores who, Denis-like, have been martyred again and again--for some 15 years now--at the twin rock and roll altars of bad lyrical taste and unhinged garagelick vulgarity, have always excelled. Their musical output, genuinely countrified and west-leaning as a London sun, affords, via reliably-deranged recording processes, an unwound sense of careening instrumentation unmatched, according to me, by any of their peers--except maybe THE REBEL, frontman Ben Wallers' solo-ish act. Perhaps befitting a band of such willful oddness and abrasively satiric bent, the Teasers haven't much of an internet presence--their official page is (pardon the necessary artist/commentator vulgarity mirroring) blank as a fart--but the FMA's got two great sets, one from each act, from each act's respective visit to WFMU. Go ahead, take a listen to these reeled documents and get in on that texture, hang with a glimpse of a world more fundamentally jarring, more intuition-stirring, more world-opening than any old footage, rife with vibrancy but short on truth, could ever hope to be.

full sets after the jump:

A bunch of fascinating/trippy and thoroughgoingly existential-spook-inducing recent news stories on issues surrounding Nevada's Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository--namely how to alert future-flung Nevadans, living in the year 12,000, of the site's radioactivity--have got me dwellin' on the old idea of just what our grimy civilization, all aspew with nasty fumes and bad TV shows and rotten wastefulness, will leave to future generations. Of course we have great culture out there, little diamonds in the rough tangle of lameness, to which hubs like the FMA are a testament, a proud archive of our civilization's worthwhile musical output. But, per the Rosetta Stone angle these scientists are taking with their "DON'T DIG UP OUR NUCLEAR WASTE" markers, I wonder what all will survive when English, or any spoken language, is no foregone conclusion. Sure, maybe future generations will have on-hand a copy of the useful multilingual phonographic canon of music up till 1977 rocketed into space on NASA's Voyager, but as that cutoff already excludes all the Kiss solo albums, how reliable a document can it be, really?

This hemisphere's shaggy mess of continental drift is hardly uniform, but one factor currently uniting its disparate elements is that of the setting sun, which, arriving earlier and relentlessly shortening the concurrently-coldening-days, seems to be perfectly pleased to lean over and confirm yeah, batten down, for winter's coming.