Matthew Dotson - Sublimation

I suspect that most music reviewers are aficionados of other good reviewers, and a big part of my musical news comes through some of my favorite creative music advocates/writers like "Strauss" at Tiny Mix Tapes/Cerberus. A little less than a year ago, I read his review of Matthew Dotson's "Excavation," and was intrigued enough to order the tape, which indeed lives up to its glowing review. Since then, Dotson has released a pair of cassettes through Chicago's Already Dead Tapes, including the recent "Sublimation."

Over the course of three tapes, Matthew Dotson's music has moved increasingly toward the "vaporwave" movement, using fragments of muzak-y pop culture aural effluvium as sound sources, but the way he handles musical materials feels wholly different than most folks associated with vaporwave. At least in my cultural circles, I've heard vaporwave dismissed as a product of hastily-prolific hipster fine arts nonsense, and I've heard it lauded as a critique of corporate culture constructed from its own remnants. What these seemingly opposite camps have in common is a tendency to dissect the genre through literary, visual art, or sociopolitical lenses--it's rarely discussed in musical terms. And frankly, a lot of vaporwave strikes my ears as vague, musically lackadaisical, or downright boring on strictly musical merits.

I find Dotson's approach far more musically interesting than most vaporwavers, and I wasn't surprised to find that he's studied composition at the doctoral level. While this music can certainly abide discussion in terms of conceptual transformation or post-capitalist material repurposing, it also works as proficiently-composed music, balanced and varied and dynamic in all of the right places for a pure listening experience that doesn't require extramusical apologetics.

And Dotson is really good at selecting names for his recordings: "Sublimation" in the Freudian sense is a perfect one-word description of the potential higher-order musical implications of vaporwave, taking vintage musical idioms mostly regarded as untoward or "lame" and re-using their raw materials toward a more transcendent whole. In contrast, the earlier "Excavation" tape really does feel like an excavation, unearthing deep cuts and exotic sources and bringing them into a musical light, and the first recording for Already Dead Tapes, "Revolution/Circumvention," starts to flirt with the musical materials one associates with vaporwave without going all the way.

"Sublimation" is presented as 2 sides of audio, but the A-side feels like a 2-movement idea to me, while the B-side contains 6 shorter ideas that aren't necessarily closely related. On the A-side, the first "movement" keeps percussion sounds going throughout, staying in a fairly narrow range of mid-tempo samples. While this kind of production has dance music/mixtape qualities, there's a formal structure at work here that balances the piece: For example, the first fully-orchestrated set of materials that arise from some clean-sounding 80s guitar at the beginning of the side return around the 10:00 mark to constitute a sort of thematic restatement at its end. In between, my ears were drawn to how voice and guitar samples get recontextualized with a variety of very musical contrasts. There is a very simple guitar part, for example, one simple note that's picked and followed by a downslide, that first appears atop a "chopped and screwed" (dramatically slowed down) rhythm bed, and it reappears later over a more real-time passage alongside a melodically moving synth line, turning the guitar into more of a harmonic pedal point mechanism than the kind of rhythmic accent role it had earlier. In terms of vocal fragments, Dotson seems to be drawing attention to the kinds of melodic shapes and exaggerated vibrato one finds at climactic moments in upbeat pop tunes while avoiding their original word content.

The shorter piece at the end of the A-side starts with a kind of ominous cinematic flourish and settles into an adagio pulse of synths and vocals for a couple of minutes, and then it becomes an uptempo rhythmic workout racing to the end, with almost industrial textures in the rhythms (though classic early techno synth-handclaps are there to remind you of previous origins). Finally, it settles into some very quiet chopped/screwed 80s balladry, followed by even softer recapitulation of some segments of the earlier cinematic-ish samples at the opening of the "movement." This piece has an especially wide dynamic range that follows a classic dramatic arc.

I find myself musically more into the variety of ideas that make up the B-side. The first segment is a relatively short passage, taking some wind sounds and sustained synth-bell tones into a wickedly dense fog of distortion for a couple of haunting minutes. That's followed by an almost 60s-ish section peeking through some phase and distortion effects, eventually settling into a kind of portatone percussion-meets-Art Bell-commercial-break-bassline, where a clavichord eventually steals the bass ostinato line away for itself. Skipping ahead, the last two sections are my favorite, with some reversed sounds, short percussion samples with tight delays, and a gentle synth/string figure that eventually dissolves into solo piano lines that are EQ'ed into a hushed oblivion at the end of the piece.

Already Dead makes very small editions of some tapes (50 in the case of "Sublimation"), so if you want to track this down, hit them up here or here as soon as you can. And be sure to check out Dotson's Bandcamp page, too, as he still has copies of his self-released "Excavation" cassette available, a much-loved tape at Words on Sounds.

2 from George Korein and the Spleen

I first heard George Korein's earlier project Infidel?/Castro! with bassist Colin Marston on a split with Friendly Bears quite some time ago. I?/C! was vaguely on the metal/industrial tip, but with a very identifiable style of electronic mangling, rich with layers of feedback and droning metallic sounds at their densest moments that were always handled with an orchestral sense of space and proportion. Since I?C! became inactive, I've been very aware of Marston's work, both as a producer of many of my favorite albums of the last decade and as a performer in great bands like Dysrhythmia and Behold... the Arctopus, but what happened to Korein?

Bandcamp has the answers. I don't recall that Korein's late-oughts band, Art Jerks, had national distribution, but there's a killing no-wave album from them just waiting for your ears. And over the last couple of years, Korein has dropped two full-length solo jams as "George Korein and the Spleen," which expand into even more stylistic directions.

Condition of Air (2012)



The opening title track to "Condition of Air" starts with gnarly fuzz guitar that wouldn't be out of place on a classic no wave record, but over the next few minutes, it becomes clear that Korein's focus on this album is informed more by pop idioms/songwriting than the harsher edges of his previous work. Generally, these are "songs" in the conventional sense, with lead vocals high and distinct in the mixes, though most songs still use more complex forms than a typical pop tune. Synths and drum machines form the basic framework of the music, while guitar work generally takes a supporting role, evoking particular musical eras like the bits of dub guitar on offbeats in the verses of "The Sky Heaved," or blending almost seamlessly with sawtoothy-synth tones in tunes like "Sobriety I Decided." Most synth sounds are aggressive and metallic, and a lot of the guitar and synth sounds throughout the record are treated with ring modulation and envelope filters to an extent that it can be difficult to tease out what sounds might come from synths versus guitar, an approach I particularly like.

I've not often thought of the relationship between no-wave and new-wave music (actually, I haven't thought much about new-wave at all), but the minor key balladry found in a lot of these tunes makes a fascinating connection between the styles. Take one of the more straightforward tunes, "You'd Have To Be in My Dream," for example: the vocals have a touch of vocoder added in the background, and the vocal harmonies, synth pads, drum programming, and reverb treatment make me think of the darker side of late new wave, but there's still a kind of looseness in the vocal approach and a musical disaffection that linger closer to the no-wave camp. Some of my favorite pieces, though, like "I Was Entertained," are just plain weirdly defiant of genre-specific description, with a playful melody that could work in a Tin Pan Alley tune over a trudging synth line that wouldn't be out of place on a Residents album.

My favorite pieces on "Condition of Air" fall toward the middle of the record: "Dreamnose" is built on a vaguely funerary bass/organ riff with a gently repeated vocal fragment: "Don't snatch it before I love it," and the chorus section has a short but incredibly memorable melody, occurring only once in the song but casting a shadow over the whole piece. The outro has lots of heavily tweaked, appropriately dreamlike clouds of upper-octave piano tinkling, drenched in delays and reverb. Beautiful. Immediately following "Dreamnose," "The Sky Heaved" is a lyrically appropriate tune for the end of this brutal winter, opening with a Residents-ish theme that moves into great contrasting sections of pensive, slightly wet verses against comparatively dry overdriven choruses propelled by kick drum-heavy drum programming. The outro of this piece brings back the kind of electronic/tape manipulation sounds that point all the way back to intense moments in I?/C! pieces--a satisfying and nuanced ride that leads perfectly into the creepy, heavily panned microtonal guitars of "Dark Trees Dark Skies."

Brain Problems (2013)


 Last year's "Brain Problems" gets off to a weird start right away with spooky string stabs, ominous repeated vocals, and delays that stack up in nervous claustrophobia. But once the song form "proper" kicks in, you get a refreshing new/no-wave tune with smart guitar playing that sounds like Eno-era Talking Heads figuring out how to work with compound time signatures. While this record is very much an extension of the general approaches in "Condition of Air," these tunes seem to breathe a little better, maybe because there are fewer harsh/metallic sounds competing for similar spaces in the mix. The vocals sound more confident, and there's more of a hi-fi vibe throughout.

My favorite tune here is "Neutral Evil," which has a great riff and some fun shreddy guitar lines playing just behind the vocals in the verse sections, and a kind of "tough guy" vocal approach that I really dig. In the middle, there's a menacing breakdown with just synths and vocals that creates a satisfying contrast to the first half of the piece. And I love the relentless dancefloor propulsion of "Pleasure of Food," which frequently gets stuck in my head. But those lyrics...

I do have some lyrical difficulties with this album. While I laughed out loud the first time I heard the opening lines of "Pleasure of Food," for example, by the end it made me super uncomfortable, like an accidental voyeur at a pretty dismal Overeaters Anonymous meeting. That tune is followed by three huge lyrical downers whose names will give you the basic idea: "Why Stand Up," "I Can't Go On, I'll go Bananas," and "Forced to Live." And the closing tune, "The Miracle of Humiliation," is a conceptual dirge in the spirit of King Missile's "Failure" or something, but it doesn't feel as obviously funny. While I imagine most of these are intended as narrative songs, there's something about the delivery that feels really confessional in a way that's awkward for me as a listener. Normally, I don't even pay a lot of attention to song lyrics, but these vocals are mixed really high, and Korein's diction is all too clear, so I can't help but feel a little queasy at most of these tunes lyrically.

Lyrics aside, the music itself is very thoughtfully arranged, and I really dig Korein's compositional style.  Word on the street is that another George Korein and the Spleen album will be dropping in the near future, and I'm excited to hear the project evolve some more.

Arnold Dreyblatt and Megafaun - Appalachian Excitation

Wow. This record feels like family. I've developed a really warm relationship with this music in a short amount of time, partially because it was with me at the perfect moment for a first listen. Normally, I do all of my "serious" listening at home, preferably with a full-fi physical copy on a decent stereo, bathing in the music with undivided attention. But "Appalachian Excitation" and I first met on a return car trip from southern Missouri, via an iPod loaded with a few new albums to keep me awake.

If you've never been to those parts, there is a stretch along southern Missouri and northern Arkansas, drifting into southern Indiana and eventually into Kentucky, that feels like extended foothills to Appalachia in my mind: the rural areas are full of rolling hills and intensely curving highways where trees with tiny individual crowns crowd right to the edges of the roads, making a weird collective canopy that makes you forget about the sky. These hills begin just south of the final reach of glaciers from the last Ice Age, and both the land and the people take on a unique vibe, with the humid and ancient energy of the deep south blending into a cooler kind of remoteness I associate with more northerly regions. As a Great Plains native, I can relate to the lonely rural energy of these spaces easily, but we can see for miles in every direction on the plains. A little further south, it feels secretive in an unfamiliar way. You might assume the terrain carries on in similar fashion through the next stand of trees and over the next series of hills, but you never know--there could be crazy stuff hidden all over the place, almost on top of you. You don't know until you get there.

Normally I hate to interpret an album title so literally, but "Appalachian Excitation" falls perfectly into line with the feelings I get in those parts of the country. In a general sense, Dreyblatt's music with his Orchestra of Excited Strings has always felt both familiar and a touch alien to my ears, with just intonation tuning approaches providing an overwhelming sensation of harmony as an almost physical mass, a force that's always been there but has been hidden away to please the pianos and other equal temperament creatures of the musical world. And many of the string sounds themselves are struck rather than plucked, a kind of articulation that those of us raised on mostly Western musical traditions often hear as vaguely Asian. Specific to this new record, which feels like a close cousin of Excited Strings recordings like "Animal Magnetism," the prominent sound of banjos and country bends, along with rhythmic and harmonic nods to Appalachian and Ozark folk traditions, bring even more cultural signifiers into a complex-but-inevitable-feeling hybrid of orchestral, world, and folk musics.

And it rocks, too. Car trips aside, now that I've had the chance to sit with this music in LP format and move some serious amounts of air, I think this music works best when you can feel like you're right in the middle of a performance. As Dreyblatt put it in the liner notes to "Animal Magnetism," "This music is composed with a specific acoustic effect in mind. One should listen at maximum volume!" I think that principle very much applies to "Appalachian Excitation," too. On the surface, this is minimalist music, but the drones and simple harmonies that make up this record truly come to life when the walls of your surroundings--and your body, and your head--start to resonate in sympathetic vibration. I'm sure it's even better live, but the fine folks at Pinebox Recording in North Carolina did a wonderful job of capturing this music with a very present, "played right in front of you" kind of feel, and it's been mastered and pressed with plenty of dynamic range, so the frequent unison hits found throughout the record have a charged, intense front end that decays into satisfying chords, rich with the harmonic overtones characteristic of the "excited strings" approach.

Given the overall sound of "Appalachian Excitation," it feels natural to describe this music in terms of Dreyblatt's musical history, but serious appreciation for Megafaun's performance here needs its own mention as well. Megafaun fans might initially be bewildered by this record as a non-vocal set of pieces. And they really are "pieces," not tunes. But their commitment to this music is admirable: it takes a unique sense of "the present" to really get inside this music, as each chord, unison hit, or change in direction has a kind of holographic significance to the whole of each composition. Megafaun nails it. They're all in. It's also interesting to hear them work with some electric instruments on this record, including the super high-tech Moog lap steel, which seems to be responsible for synth sounds and almost hornlike drone moments that surface in pieces like "Edge Observation."

Recommended! Check it out at Northern Spy.

--also published at Killed in Cars