Sleeping with Jasmina Maschina Or I Think I'm Over Something, and Then It Turns Out I'm Totally Not

This happens too frequently. I thought I was over woozey, lo-fi-ish, bedroom neo-folk with intentionally hollow, distant vocals and sparkles of piano and other miscellaneous, blinking star-percussion, and then I hear Berlin-based multimedia composer Jasmina Maschina. I suppose I do still have albums by Tara Jane O'Neil, Jana Hunter and Mazzy Star.

Jasmina's second full-length album Alphabet Dream Noise (Staubgold, 2011) is stunningly well-crafted and one of the most balanced albums I've ever heard for its style. Never does the album suffer from the repetitive platitude of so many similar records; whereas they meander aimlessly, seemingly unsure of their courses, every detail on Alphabet Dream Noise is delicately and deliberately applied with acute precision and in ways that never shake listeners from the lull the album induces. Even the static and crackling sounds of looping electronics on "Invisible Rays," for example, flicker like an indolent flame as a candle burns to its end.

Jasmina's electronic proclivities appear elsewhere on Alphabet Dream Noise, strewn throughout the album in however limited doses, often appearing only as hypnotic background whirrs or a song's pulse; hear "Community," a drifter that makes listeners feel like they are submerged under waters so deep, the surface eclipsed by the black and blue abyss, that all notions of direction dissolve along with consciousness completely. Jasmina's capacity to conjure such a sublimating effect seems entirely natural when one keeps in mind (or discovers) that she also forms half of experimental electronic duo Minit.

Despite Alphabet Dream Noise's electronic overtone, the album is not a cold, alienating experience. Jasmina paints her ambient canvases with dabs and dribbles of intricate finger-picked acoustic notes and electric guitars that never get lost in her subtlety, her notes woven into gloaming melodies as her fingers slide audibly up and down the fretboard, imprinting her human touch.

It's strange how I always seem to stumble upon albums like Alphabet Dream Noise at the most appropriate hours for listening to them: midnight and beyond, when albums like this come alive like hypnotic nocturnal creatures. And then I end up looping them until it's time for both me and the albums to go to sleep.

For individual links to most of the tracks on Alphabet Dream Noise, visit Jasmina Maschina's Bandcamp page.

Thee Oh Sees: Pure-Bred Rock-and-Roll

San Fran's Thee Oh Sees are possibly the best ROCK-AND-ROLL band today, and they'll be hitting the Rickshaw Theatre here in early October. Sure, it won't be as intimate as their New York show depicted in Pitchfork's +1, but it's going to be REALLY fucking good. Need proof? Just watch my two favourite videos from Thee Oh Sees' KEXP session from a couple of years ago, and come rock with me in October:

The Jolts Are Serious

Like Barely Legal-era Hives - that is, basically, the Hives minus the fun. This Vancouver band means business and has renewed my faith in the city's local music scene. Here's hoping for a Jolts show sometime soon. Check out their MySpace page here.

One of Those Shows

I bought my ticket for Canadian rapper/composer/producer/piano virtuoso/all-around musical madman/genius Chilly Gonzales yesterday. Like with most of my favourite musicians ever, I haven't written about him yet because it's so difficult for me to say everything I want to about him. And I'm probably not going to be able to in this post.

Gonzales, whom may be best known as a long-time friend and collaborator of Feist's (including having helped produce her last two albums), is one of today's most chameleonic, progressive musicians I can think of. Almost all of his albums vary drastically from one another, jumping from dark, excessively coarse, primitive-beat-oriented rap on his first four albums (okay, bad examples with which to start) to the velvet-soft and completely self-descriptive Solo Piano to the glistening, shimmering 70s radio pop of Soft Power to the slick, scatter-shot rap-pop of Ivory Tower (the soundtrack to the film of the same name in which Gonzo appears) to the orchestral rap of The Unspeakable Chilly Gonzales, his latest and certainly most ambitious release yet.

Canadian "it" indie label Arts & Crafts' website describes The Unspeakable Chilly Gonzales perfectly:

"Accompanied by Hollywood swells, tympani rolls, noble French horns, hypnotizing bells and influenced by Prokofiev, Morricone and Phillip Glass among others, this record is Chilly Gonzales’ 'professional confessional', revealing more of himself on these monologues than ever before."

"Professional confessional" is right: The Unspeakable Chilly Gonzales is his most lyrically personal work yet. He even tempers his rap-deliveries, giving his lyrics which, on this album, largely pertain to themes of self-doubt, betraying his usual satiric self-image as a boastful, megalomaniacal, supervillainous MC, a peculiarly (for Gonzales) serious tone.

Knowing that Chilly Gonzales, in his bombastic, mad genius persona, is a performer in the complete sense of the word, as well as a technically gifted musician and improvisor, I know he's going to be one of the best shows I will ever see. It's also going to be my first time at the Rio Theatre just blocks from my place, even though the likes of Chad VanGaalen and Daniel Johnston have played there before. Pumped? You're fucking right I am.

How is Chilly going to pare down his band so it can fit in the Rio Theatre? At least I assume, as the Rio is primarily a movie theatre, it won't be able to accommodate such a huge band:

Fuck, I’m in Love Again Or Move Over, Best Coast. I Have A New Favourite Album of 2010.

Ah, it finally happened again! I discovered an AMAZING new artist thanks to Conan O'Brien. Not since Diane Birch had I been so instantaneously and completely enraptured by a new artist I saw on one of his shows. This time, the artist in question is Irish rockabilly/jazz chanteuse Imelda May.

Immediately after I watched Imelda May and her four-piece band light up Monday night's episode of Conan with "Mayhem," I got ahold of her third/latest album of the same name. One of my first thoughts when I listened to Mayhem (Universal, 2010) was how reminiscent it was of the First Lady of Rockabilly Wanda Jackson's Jack White-produced album The Party Ain't Over (Third Man Records, 2011). The same clarity, brass-driven bombast and scorching, dance-floor-igniting guitars were all there. But unlike Jackson's latest big-band line-up, Imelda May's back-up band is comparatively more streamlined, consisting of only one guitar, one bass, one trumpet and no back-up singers. Given both Jackson's and May's jumpy, swinging rock stylings, I wasn't entirely surprised, then, when I learned that Imelda May had shared the stage with Jackson before (in addition to other musical icons such as Elvis Costello, Elton John and Jeff Beck ... and Meat Loaf). To what capacity May has been involved with Jackson et al. though I am unsure.

Vocally, Imelda May's style resembles a restrained mix of Janelle Monae, Karen O (Yeah Yeah Yeahs), No Doubt-era Gwen Stefani and even a bit of PJ Harvey delivered with a seductive '50s swagger. Yet, unlike the aforementioned names (or unlike what they’ve ever displayed), Imelda May has also demonstrated, especially on her first two albums No Turning Back (Foot Tapping Records, 2002) and Love Tattoo (Universal, 2008) that she can hang with history's best jazzy lounge acts as well. Such vocal diversity is what I love about Imelda May: she doesn't always sound totally smooth (like when she belts out notes at the top of her lungs or cattily yelps like Karen O), but she can totally turn on the disarmingly coquettish charm whenever she wants.

I spent almost every waking moment I wasn't at work from the time I first saw her to the next afternoon trying to figure out a way to see her in Seattle today. But alas, I couldn't find any cheap, available hostels close to the venue. Oh well. I'm planning to drop $70~ to see her at Burnaby Blues and Roots Festival here on Saturday. I figured why not, since I'd have spent far more than $70 to see her in Seattle? I know the outdoor venue and type of crowd the bluesfest is bound to attract will be far inferior to the likely elegant indoor setting of Seattle's Neptune Theatre (where I won't have to worry about the weather) and that show's crowd, but I'd stand in the fiery brimstone bowels of Hell next to Satan himself to see her.

It's artists like Imelda May that make me wonder how people can dislike certain things; to me, she's pure music, and if you like music, I don't understand how you could not be as head-over-heels for her as I am. But that's people/taste for you: subjectivity, and variation makes the world go 'round, blah-blah.

For the sake of reducing visual cluttering, I'm going to hotlink my favourite Imelda May videos rather than post them directly, because there are a lot of them:

"Mayhem" on Conan

"Johnny Got A Boom Boom" on For One Night Only

"Psycho" on Later ... with Jools Holland

Her cover of Soft Cell's "Tainted Love" on Later ... with Jools Holland

Her cover of Johnny Burnette's "Train Kept A-Rollin'" on the Sunday Night Sessions

Field Rotation - Licht Und Schatten (Fluid Audio, 2009)

I've increasingly fallen out of love with ambient and electronic music, over the past few years. I rarely seek either style, although I do still keep up with ambient and electronic artists of whom I'm already a fan. That said, I was more than surprised when I blindly downloaded Field Rotation’s 2009 album Licht Und Schatten.

Working out of Kiel, North Germany, Field Rotation (real name Christopher Berg) composes warm ambient textures that flourish with electronic pulses and blips. The movement created by those flourishes, pulses and blips, despite Field Rotation's choice to use dissonant percussion, allows him to avoid the typical repetitive and sometimes even droning character one might instinctively associate with ambient music. Licht Und Schatten's seven tracks range from five to eleven minutes, but with the consistent motion that the aforementioned electronic effects (which never overstay their welcomes) create, listeners may barely notice how long the songs actually are.

If you don't like the cold, alienating effects of most ambient or electronic music, perhaps Licht Und Schatten will change your mind. Licht Und Schatten palpitates in a way I haven't heard in much down-to-mid tempo ambient or electronic music besides that of jazzy British electronic artist/producer Four Tet.

Standout tracks: "Lichtbrechung"; "Polarlicht"

Wildbirds & Peacedrums - Heartcore (The Leaf Label, 2007)

Wildbirds & Peacedrums are a rare specimen in my music library: incredible Swedish music. Moreover, they are one of the most instantly refreshing acts I've heard in the last few years. If there was such a genre as "vocal expressionism" (although I'm sure there actually is, especially in today's increasingly ambiguous musical climate), Wildbirds & Peacedrums would certainly be at its forefront, at least as far as contemporary indie artists go.

Heartcore, the band's debut LP, features standard chamber pop instrumentation used to minimal effect, although the album's focus is on the masterfully complementary interplay between Andreas Werliin's array of idiosyncratic, often avalanche-like drum patterns and wife Mariam Wallentin's breathtakingly powerful and spellbinding voice. Wallentin stretches her voice in all imaginable ways, cresting and troughing without much restraint, much in the spirit of Icelandic voice-collage artist Bjork. The majority of Heartcore, including "The Way Things Go," "Bird," "Lost Love," "The Window," "Nakina" and the partially a cappella "The Ones That Should Save Me Get Down" (a song that bleeds buckets of soul) is entirely drum-and-voice.

Heartcore's standout track "Doubt/Hope" is also entirely drum-and-voice and perhaps the best example of how much fire Wildbirds & Peacedrums can fuel with voice and drums alone. The song's emphatic, erratic cacophony most succinctly captures the duo's frenetic, bare-bones energy. Conversely, Wallentin can also be sweet, barely rising above a coo or even a whisper on "A Story from a Chair" or lulling on "I Can't Tell in His Eyes," possibly the most conventional song and tender moment on the album.

Despite songs like "I Can't Tell" and closer "We Hold Each Other Song," however, an overall palling sense of emotional strife similar to that which has incensed so much of PJ Harvey's and My Brightest Diamond's works still pervades Heartcore: hear "Bird," for example, on which Wildbirds & Peacedrums seem to struggle to contain or direct their volatile inner turmoil.

Heartcore is a truly unique album amidst a tepid musical climate wherein conceptions of minimalism, especially with the advent of new musical technologies, increasingly associate the aesthetic with electronic drone music. Heartcore flawlessly demonstrates that raw, at times seemingly improvisational energy and technical skill can be compromised to unique emotional effect and resonate with listeners on the most primeval of levels.

Free Downloads: FAROFF Mash-Up Madness

I love mash-ups, and in my opinion, no one does them better than FAROFF. The greatest thing about his mash-ups is that he doesn't rely on generic, indistinguishable club songs; instead, he builds his songs out of classics by the likes of the Beatles, the Doors and the Ramones, danceable contemporary artists such as LCD Soundsystem, Gwen Stefani and Fatboy Slim and old-school hip-hop artists and one-hit wonders like Elastica and Dee-Lite.

All of FAROFF's mash-ups are available for high-quality download (between 256 and 320 kbps) on his official website djfaroff.com. Linked below is a smattering of my favourite FAROFF mixes:

The Beatles vs. LCD Soundsystem vs. The Kinks - "The Brits Are Playing at My House"

B-52s vs. Lipps, Inc. vs. Patrick Hernandez vs. Yello vs. Soulwax - "Funky Shack!"

Franz Ferdinand vs. Stealers Wheel vs. Nirvana vs. Michael Jackson vs. Def Cut vs. C.S.S. - "Franz Tranz"

Britney Spears vs. Metallica - "Enter Toxman" (for Smashlie, if she reads this)

Nirvana vs. Dead Or Alive - "Spins Like Teen Spirit"

I Am Forever Indebted to Jack White

Because he introduces me to bands like Love: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSUoYHEJCGI

How am I only hearing this band now? Actually, the answer to that question is because I haven't been curious as to whether or not the White Stripes' version of "My Little Red Book" was a cover until now. It turns out the Stripes' version is a cover; in fact, their version is a cover of a cover: "My Little Red Book" was originally written by the classic song-writing team of Burt Bacharach and Hal David (performed by Bacharach), a favourite of both Jack's and Meg's. I guess it's even less surprising that the White Stripes covered "My Little Red Book."

Diane Birch - Bible Belt (S-Curve Records, 2009); The Velveteen Age EP Preview

One of the greatest feelings is getting so totally blown away by a new artist that you get goosebumps. Exactly one year ago, that artist for me was a young pianist/singer-songwriter named Diane Birch.

Born in Michigan in 1983, Diane spent most of her childhood in Zimbabwe and Australia where her father worked as a Christian preacher. By the time she was ten, her family had settled in Portland, Oregon, and she had already been learning piano for three years.

Despite Diane's experiences abroad, her sound is quite western. Such is unsurprising as her parents disapproved of secular music and thus exposed her mostly to opera, classical music and hymns. What is surprising, however, is that despite no longer being sheltered from popular music (or popular culture in general), Diane's sound has not deviated much from the styles she has grown up listening to. Indeed, her modern gospel draws endless comparisons to the very legends who influenced her such as Carole King and the Carpenters.

Diane Birch flawlessly blends soul, gospel, R&B and folk on her debut album Bible Belt (2009): "Choo Choo" is a jumpy, key-filled rocker; loungy tracks like lead-single "Nothing But a Miracle" and "Forgiveness" call to mind classic, sultry chanteuses such as Nancy Sinatra. Diane also displays some modern pop sensibilities: fans of sweet, simple, sing-along pop songs, like Feist’s smash hit "1234," may instantly fall in love with "Valentino," named after Birch’s imaginary childhood friend.

Despite Bible Belt’s title, the album is no bible-thumping exaltation of the Lord: "bible belt" refers to Diane's self-described restrictive religious upbringing. Yet, Bible Belt is not an anti-religious album either; rather, Diane addresses finding one’s own path in life - breaking away from her religious roots and discovering what else is in the world. She expresses this idea most explicitly in the jazzy "Rise Up" in which she advises listeners to "wise up to the stories [they]'ve been told." Diane also addresses the difficulties of trying to carve out one’s own path in life: "Fools / Knockin' on my door / Callin' out my name / Tellin' me to change my ways," she sings on the feisty "Fools."

Diane is not completely confident in her newfound secularism, however. Moments of self-doubt surface in the introspective "Mirror Mirror" ("Mirror, mirror, is it me or you that's lying? / Mirror, mirror, is it me or you that's crying? / You know I try / But I can't hold my head up high").

Although Bible Belt is loaded with hits, the album's real centrepiece - the real sparkling gem that makes Bible Belt the great album it is - is not any individual song but Diane's voice, one of the most gorgeous, arresting voices I have ever heard. From whisper to gentle coo to full-on barn-burning shout, Diane can hit all the notes, giving Bible Belt a pleasant varying intensity.

Since Bible Belt’s release, Diane Birch has graced countless magazine covers, performed on most of the major North American daytime and late night talk shows, toured the world and served as the opening act on Nick Jonas and the Administration's Who I Am tour. Before she even had a record deal, she had gained Prince's endorsement: after having watched one of her gigs during her days as a pianist-for-hire at a hotel in Hollywood, Prince invited her to his mansion to jam and eat egg sandwiches just so he could "check out" this new talent.

This Tuesday, one year and three days after Diane Birch first blew me away on The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien, she will return with a brand new EP The Velveteen Age. Among the EP's seven new tracks will be covers of songs by Gothic post-punk legends Joy Division, the Cure, Siouxsie & the Banshees and Echo & the Bunnymen. We have heard her cover the Beatles, Hall & Oates, Tom Petty and even Haddaway, but her new covers, being of artists of such drastically differing styles, have the potential to be her most interesting covers yet.

Zoe Boekbinder - Artichoke Perfume (self-released, 2009)

A month ago, a couple of friends and I went out for a laid back drink at the Cafe Deux Soleils here in Vancouver. We didn't expect to have stumbled upon what I later found out wasn't an open-mic act but an actual show by Oakland, California-born musician Zoe Boekbinder.

The crowd was small and intimate, perfectly befitting of Zoe's music which I did not expect to mesmerize me as much as it did. She's not a typical girl-with-acoustic-guitar act; she has a really unique voice and really knows how to stretch her vowels. Her songs are fun and quirky, light and fluffy, although her quirkiness tends to translate into stage-banter that lasts too long. She also uses a loop-pedal to create cool vocal harmonies.

One thing I really like about Zoe Boekbinder is that she incorporates some carnivalesque elements into her songs. "Adventures of Turtle and Seahorse," for example, clearly shows this continuing influence from her days in Vermillion Lies, her pseudo-cabaret duo with her sister Kim.

In addition to Zoe Boeknbinder's self-released debut album Artichoke Perfume, she also has a seven-song EP called Awkward Like Cut Melon that's worth checking out.

SleepResearch_Facility – Dead Weather Machine (Manifold Records, 2004)

Who'd have thought recordings of the hums of broken, dust-clogged heaters could sound so ... good? Granted, Kevin Doherty, the man behind SleepResearch_Facility, relies heavily on digital manipulation to create his dark, hypnotic, sleep-inducing "music." Listeners find themselves wondering what exactly the sources of his sounds are, as the generally beatless ambience gently hums and pulsates. For an optimal listening experience, follow Kevin’s recommendation and try to imagine yourself shrunken down to microscopic size and walking through the interior of his sound sources. Dead Weather Machine is a long but truly unique and rewarding journey into the expanse of avant-garde experimentation (should one complete the journey).