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“Open Strings: Early Virtuoso Recordings From The Middle East, And New Responses” (Honest Jon’s, 2009)

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This is the fourth beguiling release culled from Honest Jon’s plunge deep into the EMI Hayes archive of forgotten 78s. Like Sprigs of Time, Living Is Hard, and Give Me Love before it, this is a singular and expertly curated exploration of some seriously obscure music. Unlike those albums, however, Open Strings also features the curious (and possibly misguided) addition of a companion album of modern artists that mine similar territory.

Entertainment Weekly once proclaimed Honest Jon’s “the hippest world-music label going” and there is a lot of truth in that, despite both serious competition from Sublime Frequencies, Soundway, and Analog Africa and that particular magazine’s historically misguided and unfortunate musical taste. If someone had told me ten years ago that Damon Albarn from Blur would someday play an integral role in shaping my musical taste, I would’ve dismissed them as a madman, but…damn, that guy seems to unearth some astonishing stuff. The 20 tracks of archival material collected from Egypt, Iran, Iraq, and Turkey here are ample proof of that.

There is a lot of instrumental variety displayed on the archival disc; I am not an expert on traditional Arabic music by any means, but I think I can confidently report that ouds, buzuqs, and violins are all heavily represented (and probably some quanun too!). The tracks vary quite a bit in tone as well, as blistering shredding (such as “Mavaraounnahr”) coexists with mournful bowed strings and contemplative drones, but the performances are uniformly virtuosic. 

Sadly, I was unable to track down any English language information about him, but multi-instrumentalist Nechat Bey seems to dominate the album, as he contributed five of the twenty tracks, as well as the album’s most haunting moment (the achingly sad violin in “Husseini Taxim”). Even without him though, this would be an inarguably compelling listen; few tracks fail to evoke a sense of passion and timelessness.

As for the second album….well, I have some mixed feelings about it. I certainly understand its inclusion, as it makes a case for the continued influence of traditional Middle Eastern string music. However, the presence of contemporary white revivalists here kind of cheapens the experience and ruins my music geek fantasy of embracing something forgotten and obscure. In particular, I found Rick Tomlinson’s “Surfin’ UAE” to be especially unwelcome and illusion-shattering (I suppose kitschy irreverence has its place and all, but a less forgettable track would have been a welcome substitution). Also, the Charlie Parr piece (“Paul Bunyan’s Fall”) seems as heavily indebted to American blues as it does to the Middle East.  

It is not a bad track by any means, but I suspect there are dozens of freak-folkies who could’ve have contributed a more thematically pure work. Finally, the second disc feels somewhat unnecessary and anticlimactic because the evolution of the form has not been especially dramatic (except for production quality). Of course, all that is mere subjective carping-—there are some very strong pieces by the usual suspects here (Sir Richard Bishop and Six Organs Of Admittance), as well as some more obscure folks (Micah Blue Smaldone). I even have to grudgingly admit that MV and EE’s sitar drone (“You Matter, Sometimes”) is quite good, even though they usually leave me rather cold.  

While it would have been nice if the second album were optional (and if some information on the artists had been included), Open Strings is undeniably a wholly worthwhile release (and clearly a labor of love).  Of course, if you are interested in music of this sort, the opinions of a reviewer are unlikely to sway you either way, as this is ground that no one else is in a hurry to cover. Thus, by default, this is both definitive and essential (unless you are an extremely hip nonagenarian that snagged all these releases their first time around). I hope this series thrives and finds an audience, as the EMI Hayes Archives has certainly yielded quite a few forgotten gems and unusual listening experiences already and seems unlikely to be exhausted by a mere handful of compilations.

Listen here.

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Our Love Will Destroy The World, “Stillborn Plague Angels” (Dekorder, 2009)

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Campbell Kneale may longer be known as Birchville Cat Motel, but he certainly has not stopped making abrasive, nightmarish music. Surprisingly, curating a Prince tribute album (Shutupalreadydamn!) has failed to translate into a funkier, sexier Neale. Stillborn Plague Angels is exactly the sort of album that Satan would make if he had the time and inclination to start a noise band.

Campbell Kneale has made many unusual changes in his artistic life over the last few years.  Most notably, he ended both the influential and beloved (in certain circles) Birchville Cat Motel (largely due to frustration with fan expectations), and his record label, Celebrate Psi Phenomenon (allegedly torching all unsold stock in a bonfire). Additionally, he formed a doom metal band called Black Boned Angel, started the Our Love Will Destroy The World project, and developed some serious animosity towards digital media (“Nobody’s going to love a puny uploaded file…they might like it, or maybe find it interesting, or be able to list it on their ‘what I’m listening to now’ blog. But they wont be able to LOVE it. These people are cursed.”). In keeping with this newfound media idealism, Stillborn Plague Angels is only available on vinyl.

The title track kicks the album off on an appropriately ugly and unsettling note, as a distorted throb lays the foundation for a menacing, metallic shimmer. Gradually, layers and layers of dissonant and unsettling synths and guitar noises are built up until the song culminates in a bizarrely effective atonal lead guitar part that would make Jandek smile. Amusingly, this teeth-rattling discordance is among the more melodic and conventionally musical moments on the album, as there are at least actual, clearly defined, notes being played.

The following two tracks can best be described as grotesque and corrupt hellscapes. They are both painful, uncompromising, and very difficult to listen to. I find that “Pink Hollow Paradise” is more of squirming, chattering, strangled miasma of shrill queasiness while “Chinese Emperors” leans more towards being a wavering, slow motion, anguished howl. I don’t know if I will ever listen to these tracks again, but they are both resoundingly successful in creating a palpable sense of abject horror. 

After some disquieting shimmering drone, “Chinese Emperors” erupts into the mournful guitar squall of “Over Prehistoric Texas” (although it might just be one long track entitled “Chinese Emperors and The Army of Eternity Over Prehistoric Texas”—the Dekorder website seems to think they are separate and I feel ill-equipped to win an argument with them over it, so i will assume that two separate tracks segue).  While “Texas” is undeniably more melodic than the previous three tracks, it seems a bit anticlimactic and uninspired after the previous visceral abominations.

Naturally, music this unrepentantly harsh will appeal to very few people, but Stillborn Plague Angels is a complete success artistically. Terms like “good,” “bad,” and “listenable” seem irrelevant in the face of such elephantine and single-minded ugliness. Dekorder quite aptly describes this album as “endless roaring catastrophe” and I have absolutely no qualifications to add to that. If such a thing sounds at all appealing, Campbell Kneale is someone to watch closely (albeit definitely without hassling him about your fucking unmet expectations).

Listen here.

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Muslimgauze, “Sycophant Of Purdah” (Staalplaat, 2009)

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Bryn Jones had a work ethic that verged on frightening and supernatural. Despite his death at the relatively young age of 38, he managed to complete over 90 albums (not counting reissues). Unsurprisingly, the handful of hapless record labels that supported him during his life could not possibly keep up with the deluge of material that he continuously submitted. As a result, Muslimgauze continues to be one of the most prolific entities in music, despite the fact that its sole member has been dead for a decade now. Much more striking is the fact that the vaults still contain some great and fully realized material.

Bryn Jones completed Sycophant Of Purdah (“Purdah” is the practice of preventing women by being seen by any men that are not their husbands) in 1994, but he changed his mind after submitting it and decided to release a different album in its place. It is amusing that he had to pick and choose which albums would actually see release, as he still managed to put out six that year (two of which were double albums). Jones’ biographer Ibrahim Khider describes Purdha as the “missing link” that connects Muslimgauze’s more industrial albums (Izlamaphobia, Zealot, Silknoose, etc.). I will have take his word for that, as acquiring my own comprehensive understanding of Muslimgauze’s creative arc would delay this review several months. (On a related note, there is a Muslimgauze biography being released by SAF Publishing…someday (it is now delayed indefinitely).  I hope it eventually sees the light of day, as I have long found Jones to be one of the most compelling and bizarre figures in contemporary culture.)

The aberrant opener, “Jericho Loop-Bin Duplicator,” combines a decidedly non-Middle Eastern-sounding breakbeat with a thick, funky bass line. Bryn Jones clearly came to party, as the only clue that this is even Muslimgauze at all is that indecipherable (presumably Arabic) radio broadcast snippets keep wandering into the mix. Despite the general absence of weirdness/darkness, it is a pretty awesome and heavy groove.

While the playful and funky tone of “Jericho Loop-Bin Duplicator” is unique to that track, it still fits comfortably with the rest of Purdah in being heavily (almost exclusively) rhythmic. In fact, musical accompaniment on this album is extremely minimal and mostly limited to vague ambiance buried low in the mix. I initially thought this made the album feel like a series of very repetitive and sparse unfinished song sketches, but after a few listens I found Purdah to be quite compelling and hypnotic. Also, when I eventually listened to it with headphones, I realized the percussive loops were not completely static and that constant subtle shifts were occurring in and around them.

The whole album is quite strong, but I found the harsher, more industrial tracks to be more immediately memorable and engrossing than the ethno-percussion ones (although the addition of droning sitar and speech fragments in “Dupatta” stands out quite nicely). “Mossad Evil” combines a heavy, rumbling groove with some sort of strange liquid-y sucking sound and a somber violin loop, while the title track transforms Arabic percussion into a crushing and insistent mechanized groove with a somewhat shrill wavering tone panning around deep in the mix. 

I am a bit curious about what Jones was trying to convey thematically with this album. Historically, I have completely disregarded the political aspect of Muslimgauze, but I have since become fascinated upon learning that Jones issued albums almost as real-time reactions and commentaries on unfolding Middle Eastern events. Now that albums conceived in the distant past are being released, I was expecting an odd temporal disconnection. I didn’t find one here, but neither could I find a unifying theme among the song titles (traditional Persian music and poetry, Indian scarves, the Mossad, genetic engineering, etc). Enigmatic. 

Sycophant of Purdah is a worthy addition to the Muslimgauze oeuvre. It is certainly less melodic, strange, and dark than many of Jones’ more celebrated releases, but it is also extremely listenable and mesmerizing. I hope the rest of albums sifted from Jones’ mountainous backlog of material for Staalplaat’s archive series are similarly excellent, as this release makes it clear that they are still a long way from scraping the bottom of the Muslimgauze vault.

Listen here.

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Harappian Night Recordings, “The Glorious Gongs of Hainuwele” (Bo’ Weevil, 2009)

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The title of this album alludes to a deeply macabre and scatological Indonesian myth about young girl who possessed the dubious magical ability to defecate surprising items ranging from earrings to knives to…well…gongs. When she distributed these items to men at a village dance, the villagers collectively decided that her power was an infernal and unseemly one and that they needed to bury her alive. Fortunately, the story has a happy (albeit grisly) ending, as her friend later dug up her corpse, dismembered it, and reburied its parts all over the village, which caused delicious tuberous plants to grow.  

I am not sure quite what moral I should take away from this tale, as it seems to make a strong case for digging up and disfiguring corpses, but frowns upon public defecation. Regardless, the timeless, bizarre, and shadowy music of The Glorious Gongs of Hainuwele certainly approximates the sort of music that might’ve been playing at just such a memorable dance.

Syed Kamran Ali (one-third of The Hunter Gracchus) is one of the key figures in Sheffield’s recent resurgence in underground music prominence, a small but thriving scene centered around a disused factory and the Singing Knives label. On this, his solo debut, he performs an ingenious inversion of the Muslimgauze formula, appropriating exotic field recordings in order to create even more exotic (and imaginary) field recordings of his own.

Some material seems likely to have been culled from Africa and The Middle East, but Ali could just as easily have limited himself solely to the thematically appropriate region of Southeast Asia. Much more important than the origin of the base material is what Syed does with it. Actually, what he doesn’t do with it might be more important still: these songs sound completely raw, unpolished, and devoid of any conspicuous contemporary music influence. 

If anything, Ali seems to have artificially eroded, distressed, and overloaded his loops to make them sound even worse, though he clearly took cautions to avoid completely rendering the instruments unidentifiable. As a result, the music captured here sounds ancient and forgotten, very much akin to Nonesuch’s Explorer series, which documented everything from folk dances to voodoo rituals. The key difference, of course, is that the culture that Ali is documenting exists only in his head.

Syed covers a lot of stylistic and emotional territory here, which is what elevates the album from a cool idea or clever intellectual exercise into something truly unique and mesmerizing. For example, the ruined strings of “Mal De Ojo” and “Scarecrow” are haunting and heartbreaking to a degree that can only be achieved by a time-ravaged tape reel, while other tracks (like “Lila Derdeba”) can be quite raucous and heavily rhythmic. 

There are also some moments that sound like a waterlogged tape of Tom Waits at his lurching, junkyard-percussion best, yet all these disparate threads somehow manage to fit seamlessly alongside flourishes of deranged and harsh experimentalism. Throughout it all, Ali displays an innate genius for keeping things hooky, hypnotic, and unwaveringly human. An experiment like this one is an easy one to ruin with too much tinkering, self-indulgence, repetition, and clutter, but Syed has managed to sidestep every peril to egolessly let the recontextualized loops lead him into strange and wonderful new territory.

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TwinSisterMoon, “The Hollow Mountain” (Blackest Rainbow/Dull Knife, 2009)

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This brilliant and mind-bending solo opus by Natural Snow Buildings’ Mehdi Ameziane was originally issued as an LP by Dull Knife in 2009 and sold out within hours. Fortunately, it has now been reissued and remastered and augmented with a massive amount of bonus material for those of us that
weren’t fast or well-informed enough to catch it the first time around.

There are a lot of unusual things about Natural Snow Buildings, but the most notable (to me anyway) is how utterly detached they seem to be from the mundane and often petty world that the rest of us are stuck living in (both musically and otherwise). Instead, Solange Gularte and Mehdi Ameziane seem to inhabit a darkly magical and Edward Gorey-esque shadow reality. Also, they seem guileless and genuine in a way that is wholly foreign to modern human nature. Those are admittedly odd statements to make about a band, but Solange and Mehdi’s recorded output provides excellent corroborating evidence. The duo are certainly prolific, but each new album is released without fanfare, as though they had simply accumulated enough otherwordly material for yet another dispatch from their insular, self-contained universe. 

More significantly, though the duo tend to put a great deal of effort into beautiful art and packaging, they release everything in such limited quantities that it seems that they have a total indifference to any of the external rewards that might be reaped from producing great work. Or they’ll release a double-album as a free download (through some third party, of course). The simple act of creation seems to be the entire point and whether the rest of the world notices or gets a chance to hear it is largely irrelevant.

Another odd thing is that Mehdi’s vocals are quite feminine- in fact, critics often mistake him for a woman.More specifically, he sounds like a profoundly sad and somewhat ghostly Vashti Bunyan. The actual music, on the other hand, sounds exactly like the sort of album Shirley Collins might have made (but regrettably didn’t) after teaming up with the Current 93 milieu. 

Some songs, like the simple and sparse acoustic ballad “Bride of the Spirits,” sound a lot like traditional Celtic folk (until the “Come to me, my only child- I’ll just eat your flesh” line, anyway). More often, however, the songs seem to come from a much more exotic time and place, such as the pagan drone of “Druids.” While this mystique and timelessness is certainly deliberate and well-earned, some of the credit must be given to Mehdi’s exclusive use of instruments that cannot be associated with a fixed point in time, such as flutes, tampura, shruti boxes, and tambourines.

Despite the clear allusions to psych folk, traditional music, and modern drone/noise strewn all over the album, The Hollow Mountain still sounds like something entirely fresh and unique. Ameziane weaves all of his influences together in an unpredictable, ingeniously arranged, and complicated way, but makes it all sound like a seamlessly and organically unfolding dream. This is the kind of music that unicorns would make (if they had good taste): melancholy quasi-medieval ballads warp into field recordings of babbling brooks, clanging cathedral bells, or a chorus of happily chirping birds just as easily as they turn into evil-sounding drones or heavenly psychedelic fugues. The tone is similarly mercurial, as Mehdi’s sweetly melodic songs have a tendency to become menacing, ritualistic, or pastorally beautiful with little warning.It never seems jarring or clumsy either, although Ameziane’s vocals can sometimes be oppressively sad when I am in the wrong mood.

I have not heard the original LP version of this album, so I cannot say how much effect Ben Nash’s remastering efforts have had on it. It’s a pretty lo-fi album, but not in a bad way-—more in an immediate and raw way, but with a thin patina of hiss and distortion that suggests that it may have been recorded with just a microphone and an 8-track. Amusingly, the “bonus track” included here is almost 45 minutes long, making it essentially a “bonus album.” Disorientingly, it is just as good as the main album and could have easily been released separately, but I’m sure Mehdi forgot about it as soon as it was done and had already moved onto something else. Regardless, more TwinSisterMoon is always a good idea, as Mehdi’s artistry is best appreciated as complete immersion.

I haven’t tracked down enough of the voluminous Isengrind/Twinsistermoon/Natural Snow Buildings ouevre to effectively contextualize The Hollow Mountain within a hierarchy of essentialness (they’ve been working in extreme obscurity for 13 years now), but I can conclusively state that it is a beautiful and stunning album and that it is actually still available (a very rare occurrence indeed). Also, despite the fact that it has been retooled slightly for mass consumption, it still retains some of the duo’s characteristically ambitious packaging: the disc is (egolessly) enclosed in a booklet of Solange’s creepily surreal woodcut-inspired art.