The Home of Easy Credit - s/t

Here's another knockout from Northern Spy. The Home of Easy Credit is the husband/wife duo of Louise Dam Eckardt Jensen and Tom Blancarte, whose intricate, dense work together is hard to define in terms of genre. This music shifts between worlds of composition and free improvisation, pop, avant-jazz, postmodern classical, psychedelic and electroacoustic work, often woven within the boundaries of each track.

Jensen primarily focuses on alto saxophone and voice performance with electronic manipulation. She builds layers of sound with live electronics and loops, over which motivic materials are often reinterpreted or extended. And Blancarte (who also played on the beautiful "Fire Sign" album from Jeremiah Cymerman that I recently reviewed) creates a powerful foundation for this music with his amplified upright bass work, mostly playing with more conventional pitched ideas to hold everything together, though he does get into extended techniques like bowed harmonics and sul ponticello passages when the music heads into more ethereal territory. The pair make an incredible amount of sound on their own, and once loop-building is added to their approach, you would never imagine this music coming from only two performers with no overdubs.

Although The Home of Easy Credit covers a wide stylistic territory, this music evolves through structured consideration: these pieces fuse raw musical materials together slowly and thoughtfully, adding and removing layers with patience. I like my share of collage/cutup compositions, but there's something about these kinds of more mature methodical fusions of sound. They tend to stay with you longer. It also invites a more participatory kind of listening--I feel like I can get "inside" these tracks, as opposed to looking at them on a wall. They're plaintive, emotional pieces, and they readily invite you inside. Check out a track from the album, "The Feast of the Meal Replacement Bars" below, and you'll see what I mean.

Usually I don't have a strong opinion about the methods used in the creation of a good recording, but in this case I think that the "no overdubs" approach contributes a lot to the emotional intelligence of this music. The band's name and the titles of the tracks all point to frustration with the shallow artifice of consumer culture, toward having genuine shared experiences instead of choosing among brightly-colored, prepackaged Mcexperiences. These pieces succeed at being very complex and nuanced without losing a sense of intimacy. I can imagine how well this music translates live, a vibe that The Home of Easy Credit sustains by selecting small, intimate venues to play: galleries, coffee shops, house shows, all places where artists and audiences can be together with a minimum of mediation.

Fortunately, I won't have to simply imagine the live performance of this music for long, and maybe you won't, either: The Home of Easy Credit is on tour right now (check out their tour dates below). And their Lincoln, NE stop will be at my house! It seemed right to start hosting occasional shows as the opportunity presents itself, as I've been co-hosting a radio show and actively writing music reviews for a few years now. If you live in the area, you can keep up with our events on this blog, or "like" our Facebook page here.

--also published at Killed in Cars

Home of Easy Credit tour dates:
10/4 San Francisco @ The Luggage Store
10/7 Berkeley, CA @ Berkeley Arts Festival
10/8 Corvallis, OR @ The Red Room
10/9 Portland, OR @ Creative Music Guild
10/10 Seattle, WA @ 1412 Gallery
10/11 Caldwell, ID @ The Bird Stop Coffee House
10/13 Denver, CO @ Plus Gallery
10/14 Lincoln, NE @ Think Tank House (my house! This will also be the debut show for local duo Moss!)
10/15 Chicago, IL @ Jerry's
10/17 Cleveland, OH @ Black Cat Factory

Jealousy Mountain Duo - No_2, The Home of Easy Credit

I reviewed the debut record from Jealousy Mountain Duo back in April, and I'm pleased to report that they're already back with their second album. And it's another keeper--while staying close to the style and approach of their debut, No_2 finds Jealousy Mountain Duo digging even deeper into their unique style. Blending elements of math rock with creative looping and collaborative improvisation, this record shows continued growth and development for JMD: the interplay between Berger (guitar) and Schneider (drums) continues to improve as they play together.

The JMD sound will probably remind listeners most immediately of the duo configuration of Hella, but I like this band much more. They're capable of subtleties that one rarely hears from Hella--Berger's loop-layering techniques let him build vertical dimension in the music that gives space and support for some great melodic ideas, instead of having to blaze along with noodly horizontal passages most of the time. Berger writes beautiful melodies, and finds great ways to embellish them with thoughtful loops as real support, rather than layering a bunch of unnecessarily complicated figures. At times, he somehow balances Frippertronics-sounding layers, rich with backwards-sounding volume swells and occasional whammy pedal glissandos, with very listenable and memorable melodies, something often lacking in experimental rock circles. It sounds like guitar synths are getting some play on No_2 as well, with sub-bass tones and waspy synth textures added to tracks like "All Day Blizzard."

The "complicated figures" in JMD are mostly the domain of Schneider, whose drum work combines rhythmic density with a very light, free spirit. Although his playing in this band is very busy, it's much more jazz-influenced than the constant barrage of megabashing one gets from Zach Hill (I like Hill's approach sometimes, but he totally has the "Buckethead problem" of doing the same crazy over-the-top thing on almost everything he plays). Schneider balances his complicated ideas by spending a lot of time working the rims of his drums and paying attention to dynamics and shifts in volume and intensity, and he generally saves his cymbals for especially poignant emphasis.  He's certainly capable of being a hard hitter and playing more riff-oriented drum parts (hear his work in Nicoffeine for great proof of that), but the heart of the JMD sound is his transcendent thoughtful-yet-rocking drum work, at least to me. I love listening to this guy play--he's intense, but very deliberate.

Like the first Jealousy Mountain Duo record, I'm sure there's some improvisation involved in these tracks, but it's obvious that even on the most free-form cuts, a lot of planning and composition is helping to guide this music. It's awesome to hear math-y music that can feel composed and loose at the same time. The music has room to breathe, and listeners have room to have fun.

Schneider is a skilled producer as well. He does it up old school with JMD, recording live to 1'' tape and pressing vinyl. If you don't buy the hype about analog recording and vinyl sounding "warmer," you might change your mind after a few spins through this record. Tubes, vinyl, and tape make the world of Jealousy Mountain Duo go around, and the kind of beautifully warm, diffused light and heat one can expect from using them is reflected throughout this music and all the way onto the album art, which makes a great companion piece with art and design of their the first record. Another well done record! I'm excited to hear what the future holds for JMD.

Good news for America: Jealousy Mountain Duo is touring the US through October and part of November! I'm sure we're not likely to see this German duo play here often, so be sure to get out and see them while you can. Their tour started in Boston last night, and the rest of their tour dates are listed below. Maybe I'll see some of you at the Omaha show. And in case you're not able to make it to a show, check out the Jealousy Mountain Duo BandCamp site for record ordering information.

--Scott Scholz

October 2012

 2 whitehouse family records, Boston, MA, US

 3 The Flywheel, Easthampton, MA, US

 4 Shea Stadium, Brooklyn, NY, US

 5 The Space, Ithaca, NY, US

 6 Elm Bar (old Rudy's), New Haven, CT, US

 7 houseshow with hyrrokkin, Athens, OH, US

 8 Mickey Finn's Pub, Toledo, OH, US

 9 The Shop, Pittsburgh, PA, US

10 Bug Jar, Rochester, NY, US

11 Now That's Class, Cleveland, OH, US

12 Stone Taverne, Kent, CT, US

13 Borg Ward Collective, Milwaukee, WI, US

14 The Frequency, Madison, WI, US

15 Burlington Bar, Chicago, IL, US

16 Black Sparrow, Lafayette, IN, US

17 Slowdown, Omaha, NE, US

18 Replay Lounge, Lawrence, KS, US

19 Lemp Arts, St Louis, MO, US

20 Court House Co-op, Memphis, TN, US

21 SoundPony, Tulsa, OK, US

23 The Trunk Space, Phoenix, AZ, US

24 Bar Eleven, San Diego, CA, US

25 Solar Culture Gallery & Performance Space, Tucson, AZ, US

26 The Percolator, El Paso, TX, US

27 1919 Hemphill, Fort Worth, TX, US

28 Notsuoh, Houston, TX, US

29 Beale Street Tavern, Austin, TX, US

30 The White House, Conway, AR, US

31 The Owl Farm, Nashville, TN, US

November 2012

 1 Conondrum Music Hall, West Columbia, SC, US

 2 Roasted Lounge, Macon, GA, US

 3 The Goat Farm, Atlanta, GA, US

 4 The HandleBar, Pensacola, FL, US

 5 Burro Bar, Jacksonville, FL, US

 6 The Junkyard Saloon, De Leon Springs, FL, US

 7 Safe // Sound, Savannah, GA, US

 8 Chapel Hill Underground, Chapel Hill, NC, US

 9 Slim's Downtown, Raleigh, NC, US

10 subterreanea collective, Richmond, VA, US

--also published at Killed in Cars

Zs - Score: The Complete Sextet Works 2002-2007

For anyone who missed out on the early years of NYC's remarkable ensemble Zs, this new four CD box set documents the complete recordings of the first five years of the band, covering eight out-of-print releases along with a disc of unreleased material. For those of us living away from the East Coast, the original pressings of this music were almost impossible to find, coming out in tiny batches on small labels, and partly because of that, I think that this music hasn't gotten the attention it deserves on a wide scale. Northern Spy, how you spoil us!

Folks in the Midwest, for example, didn't stand a chance. Sure, we have the internet (and indoor plumbing, in case any readers weren't sure), but there is a bit of truth to the notion that cultural news moves a little more slowly in the middle of the country. Many of us missed out on Zs, and the rest of us came late to the Zs party, struggling to track down their back catalog through mail-order distros and living vicariously through YouTube videos of stunning live performances. If you care about "New Music" made with serious dedication and heart, my advice is to take the release of Score as an opportunity to experience some of the most powerful music made in several generations.

As much as I cringe at heading toward hyperbole, I don't think I can overstate my admiration for this music. Zs is my church. And taken as a body of work, I think that the pieces included in Score should be mandatory listening for the next generation of music students: a copy of this box set should be a heavy purchase consideration for every academic music library that takes contemporary music seriously. The day that Zs gets added to the contemporary music sections of music history classes will be the beginning of some majorly harder/deeper art music.

I was a music school cat myself just a few years before Zs took off, graduating in 2000, and there was something in the air back then that I kept reaching for but never quite found. Looking back, I think there was something about the impending change-of-millennium that was making a lot of creative folks ponder those deepest issues of "what comes next," and musical genres were splintering into more sub-sub-sub genres by the hour. But it was also the beginning of the internet age, with so much potential for bringing people together--how would that affect music when creation of more pigeonholes seemed to work against that potential being realized? I was hearing the beginning of something in my head that could draw from the resources of any genre without having to live in those lines, and in reading the liner notes of Score, I really vibed with the similar impulses that were driving the beginning of Zs for founders Sam Hillmer and Alex Mincek: as Mincek reports, "Sam and I wanted to be something that was blurry."

Ironically, being "blurry" in the sense of genre transcendence requires an almost inconceivable level of focus and discipline, individually and collectively, and that kind of intense attention to detail is one of the main forces behind the music of Score. Most of the pictures online are too small to make out the details, but the outer box artwork in this collection is a composite of military ribbons. In one sense, this album art highlights Zs as an incredibly disciplined military unit, thoroughly practiced and capable of perfected surgical strikes. From a performance perspective, the Zs sextet was certainly capable of almost impossible musical acrobatics, and the military theme has a certain resonance.

But with Zs, one has to consider a broader compositional scope in addition to breathtaking performance capabilities, and from that perspective, the military iconography takes on a more complex significance: Zs is a military unit acting in opposition to the hollow, insincere trappings of New Music performances, the stale air of classical performance spaces and the bureaucracy of academia, polite clapping deployed carefully at the ends of pieces and never between movements. This music might borrow from a vocabulary and conceptual palette often associated with "academic music," but it succeeds in a more immediate way by simple virtue of being played in front of "normal" people at shows including various kinds of rock/pop music.

To the extent that this music is demanding to listeners, it's also true that it demands even more head and heart to compose and play--there is an undeniable spiritual component underlying the conception and performances of these pieces, and even hearing the music as recordings-from-afar, you can accurately guess what performances might often be like: the crowd gathers in close around the band, the band turns within and plays impossibly hard. Everyone has to give. And collectively, everyone receives, too: the pretentious distance of art music appreciation dissolves as quickly as postmodern sarcastic self-referential TV culture detachment, and everyone has a legitimate shared experience and becomes part of a community, at least for a while. As Hillmer reports, "I have serious reservations about how much gravity something can have that's taking place outside the logic of community," and at least within the Brooklyn scene that got to directly experience this period of Zs performing and evolving, I think this is both the ultimate triumph of the pieces documented in this box, as well as their ultimate potential for experience with a broader audience. Sometimes it seems like it would take an army to cut through the caustic layers of attitude and apathy that pass for "culture" today, and the Zs sextet was the right kind of army.

I realize that I'm heaping praise before I've even described the music. Forgive me--it's an enormous task to describe 4 discs documenting five years of nearly impeccable musical activity and evolution. Your best bet, seriously, is to drop what you're doing and dig into Score. But if you need at least some generalities before you commit, the first three discs of the box are organized chronologically by release date. The early self-titled Zs release, which I first happened upon years ago on iTunes, first made me think of relatively recent Anthony Braxton work, particularly the "ghost trance music" period. That's a good starting point, as the music develops through similar kinds of focus on systems and their fortification/refinement, but as much as I'm a fan of Braxton's work, Zs is even more intense. In addition to a similarity in compositional discipline, the presence of saxophones as dominant instruments has given both Braxton and Zs a parallel uphill battle in terms of transcending a similar "Saxes? This must be jazz, then" form of lazy musical interpretation. But Zs doesn't need to Swing to mean more than a Thing.

From there, the music on this box gets increasingly difficult to describe in terms of pre-existing forms, as Zs continued to evolve into a bewilderingly powerful unit, drawing from many disciplines without committing to any. I suppose that it's fair to say that over time, a dominant theme that one must confront in the music of Zs has to do with ever-shifting distinctions between minimalism and a sort of maximalism/brutal-prog attack. Small cells can repeat and subtly shift, and when they're played long and hard enough, ostinatos become drones, become oppressive walls, become transcendent doors to B sections that arrive just in time. That minimalism/maximalism continuum is violently and even religiously shifted in perspective and context, in ways that are usually unexpected but seem perfect once you hear them. As a listener, you have to be able to both "hold on" harder and "let go" faster than you ever have before. But you will be richly rewarded: by the time we get to the music of the "Arms" LP, which takes up most of disc 3 in this box, Zs has become an absolute genre unto themselves.

"Arms" is my favorite of the albums contained in the Score box. I've been listening to it regularly for five years, but I still don't think I'm capable of articulating the special magic of this record. My favorite piece on the album, though, and one of my favorite pieces of music ever, is the Charlie Looker-penned "Nobody Wants To Be Had," which I've discussed a bit before in my review of Looker's most recent album with his Extra Life band. Hearing this music alone is well worth the very reasonable cost of admission to this box set (under $30 for 4 discs!), and there is so much more to discover.

You'll get a chance to hear those extramusical, "music as community" aspects of Zs' work mentioned above within "Score," too. The "Buck" cassette release is included here, for example, which is a fascinating document that shows both how these pieces continued to develop and change (especially in tempo) as they were played live, and well as capturing some of the live atmosphere around Zs performances: these are loud clubs. People are listening intently, but they're also talking, drinking, sometimes laughing, and the band banter is funny at times, too. It's so refreshing to hear this music played to real people, no jacket required. The inclusion of various remixes of Zs pieces throughout the box represents another aspect of this music being absorbed into the greater culture, too: it's hard to imagine most new music composers developing the kinds of social and musical relationships with the rest of the "normal" world to have occasional remixes become a normal part of their work. They're good remixes, too.

"Score" isn't one of those box sets made in a crazy oversized shape that forces you either to hide the thing after listening or leave it out somewhere to become an endless topic of conversation every time someone visits your house: it's housed in a tight, clean box that should fit right onto your CD shelves, right at the end of the alphabet where music keeps evolving, and where you'll always be able to find it (it's time to throw out those ZZ Top "Nice Price" discs, son). But I'm not even bothering to make room for these albums on a shelf--I can't imagine more than a few days passing without these discs getting some play time. The 20 page essay included in the box is a great read, too, covering both this sextet period of the band as well as more recent efforts through the "New Slaves" period of Zs. The layout also includes some interesting score snippets, if you're interested in what the scores of "Score" actually look like. My only minor quibble with the box is that this essay was already published a couple of years ago by New Music Box, but it makes sense that they ran with it--it's easily the best piece of journalism on Zs that's been done to date. And I hope more people find out about Zs through the release of this box set, and more articles get written, and young musicians get the chance to experience this stuff and take it to the next crazy level.

If you check out "Score" and you're hungry for more, members of both this original sextet lineup of the band and later iterations have all played in a wide variety of other bands that I would count as mind-blowing essential listening: Period, Extra Life, Normal Love, and Little Women are four of my favorites, and there are many more. After all, the Zs sextet might have been an impossibly tight unit, but they were also the catalyst for a much wider community. Or as an anonymous poster recently put it on Brooklyn Vegan, "You dis Zs, you dis yourself."

--also published at Killed in Cars