Animal.Calls

Finally settled in to Brooklyn life.
Just in time to head back to Cinti,
for a little camping trip over Easter weekend.
If you’ll be in the Cinti. O region, get in touch.

Loads of good finds this week.
Two Mark Lanegan collabs,
Two new Pocahaunted transmissions,
Mount Eerie goes \ \m//etal,
Boris turns down the drone,
High Places are the best band in Brooklyn,
Lucky Dragons are your new best friends,
Black Mountain & Omar Rodriguez fill your proggy needs,
& Kaki King + Shawn Smith bring the guitar gods fresh offerings.

Yes, this update is a day late;
but see, I got pool tables to build,
sewing machines to grease up,
and stray wiener dogs to feed falafel to.

It’s all oh so worth it.

NYC / Brooklyn Events are now found HERE in full.

(simply too many, and would clog up this newsletter)

Here’s what’s happening over the next week:

March 13 07:00PM - 08:30PM at Strand Book Store

Jean Feraca, Wisconsin Public Radio’s Distinguished Senior Broadcaster and poet, will read from her new memoir, I Hear Voices, accompanied by her son, Dominick Fernow, electronic artist Prurient. The focus of this mother and son duo will be the first chapter in the book, “My Brother/The Other,” which tells the extraordinary story of Feraca’s brother, Stephen, a man with “a life force that verged on the diabolic,” who left home at an early age for Pine Ridge Reservation and was adopted into the Sioux tribe. To carry the text through Stephen’s redemptive death, Prurient will perform layers of synths and electronics to create a landscape where the voice breathes a messageof existential paradox.

http://www.strandbooks.com/app/www/p/calendar/?startweek=4#1276

+++++ MUSIC +++++

	Acid Mothers Temple & The Pink Ladies Blues - The Soul Of A Mountain Wolf [Fractal, 2007]
	Before you go, geez ANOTHER Acid Mothers Temple album alreddy?? remember that this AMT isn’t that AMT. Acid Mothers Temple & The Pink Ladies Blues is a totally different band, in fact, one of the members of this trio isn’t even Japanese, he’s the French guy who runs Fractal. But that doesn’t stop him (or them) from sounding like they should all be wearing big Makoto Kawabata beards! Their music’s definitely THAT hairy. This second album of theirs, The Soul Of A Mountain Wolf, is all about heavy and droning riffage. It’s like “Rumble” on LSD. All-instrumental, nothin’ but far-out guitar wailin’ action, supported by pounding drums and bass. Any AMT fan, of any AMT, is gonna be pleased. One thing though, this isn’t that long of a cd. “Sandoza Death Blues” from their debut was almost as long as this whole disc, which is just under 20 minutes total. Hmmm. But it’s good stuff, if blown-out, acid-fried bluesy psych geetar stomp is your thing!! Ain’t it??
	William Basinski - Disintegration Loop 1.1 FILM  [2062, 2002]
	A 63 minute video. Disintegration Loop 1.1 had its world premiere at the 2002 Rotterdam International Film Festival. It consists of one static shot of lower Manhattan shot from his roof in Brooklyn on the evening of September 11th, 2001, as that fateful day turned to night.Or, view the lower quality stream.
	Black Mountain - In The Future [Jagjaguwar, 2008]
	Favorite psych-and-prog-spiritual pioneers BLACK MOUNTAIN are back with “In The Future”, their second full-length album that resonates with the same epic ring, beloved deep rock touchstones and genuine folk fragility that made their self-titled debut full-length an instant classic. The new album possesses immense breadth, seamlessly showcasing short and classic folk-pop gems along with driving modern rock masterpieces, peaking with “Bright Lights”, a seventeen-minute multi-dimensional opus that gives Pink Floyd’s “Echoes” a run for its money.
	Boris - Statement 7inch [Southern Lord, 2008]
	Boris returns with their first non-collaborative recordings in 2 years! A preview of things to come on their forthcoming full-length album, The two tracks here are a appropriate progression from the sounds and direction on their last studio full-length: Pink.Witness the world’s tallest Orange AMPSTACK in the video available here.
	Fleet Foxes - Fleet Foxes [Sub Pop, 2008]
	Steeped in reverb, and—signed to Sub Pop—are easily tucked away next to My Morning Jacket, the National, Band Of Horses, and any number of discs helmed by Phil Ek, who (not coincidentally) produced “Drops In The River,” the Sun Giant EP, from which it is drawn, and their forthcoming full-length. But, at least on first listen, this Seattle quintet seems to have plenty more to offer than NPR-ready indie-folk. Their saving grace is kind of literal—big, churchy harmonies that are at least appropriately solemn if not necessarily liturgically correct. On their pleasurable first single, “White Winter Hymnal,” the voices rolled in glorious waves, and on “Drop In The River” they similarly carve a convincing depth, like water hollowing out rock. There’s a there there. Harmonies like these are always a ruse and never a ruse, and are as such whether selling God or indie rock with equal authenticity. “Drops In The River” is not much like rock except in the way it slips down to quiet (a dramatic void one might imagine filled with cheers, should the band ever break it big) and rises back up as Robin Pecknold moans over, y’know, a drum kit. The real trap, though, which they avoid on “Hymnal” but fall into here, is of the mood overtaking the song. Except for the title phrase (“Days are just drops in the river to be lost always…”), everything melts into amorphous flourishes (including one last outro rise) that swell towards the clouds but break on the shore.Also Available: Fleet Foxes - Sun Giant EP [Sub Pop, 2008]
	Ghostland Observatory - Robotique Majestique [Trashy Moped, 2008]
	Only Texas could claim something as improbable as this: sweaty, raw-boned, and direct from the future; committed to electronics, stuck on big beats, yet unmistakably powered by rock ‘n’ roll. These guys share a love for Vince Young and Daft punk, Los Tigres del Norte, and The Animals. They mostly prefer to let their music speak for itself. It’s not subtle.
	The Gutter Twins - Saturnalia [Sub Pop, 2008]
	Mark Lanegan and Greg Dulli as “the Satanic Everly Brothers”. Mystical, unpredictable, ultimately masterful, the album both embodies and defies any expectations suggested by the principals’ individual notoriety. Pointedly not resting on the sonic laurels of their previous successes, Saturnalia instead proves rootsy but baroque, handmade yet modernist, teeming with siren melodies that don’t resolve. Saturnalia’s eerie modal swirls trap the listener in each song’s atmosphere; simultaneously evoking everything from Indian sitars to Appalachian folk and Delta grit, the drones inadvertently create narcotic hooks. Spartan electronica indelibly collides with spooky space blues on “Who Will Lead Us?”; “Idle Hands” fuses Middle Eastern exoticism with shocking guitar riffs that shoot AC/DC boogie into another fucking galaxy. The cumulative effect proves internal yet epic: the netherworld symphonics of Mogwai, Sigur Ros and Bohren und der Club of Gore are touchstones, alongside the sprawling emotions of Pink Floyd, the melodically catchy paranoia of the Beach Boys, the primal confessionals of John Lennon. Still, what Dulli and Lanegan achieve here ultimately feels like the determinedly individual product of two auteurs coming together.
	High Places - 0307 - 0907 [Self Released, 2008]
	The Brooklyn-based duo High Places are most often compared to Beat Happening, a band cherished for their regression– into musical primitivism, adolescent sexuality, and any other condition that twenty- and thirtysomethings bemoan the loss of in therapy. High Places’ indulgence in nursery rhymes aside, the kinship is mostly an ideological one: Like Beat Happening, they exult in the simple.03/07 - 09/07, a collection of the band’s first 7″ and stray compilation tracks (released through the mp3 subscription service eMusic), shows a group whose comfort zone isn’t the folky imperative, but heady, hippyish imprecision. The songs here are almost all identical: polyrhythmic miniatures built by small drums and shakers, clouded by blankets of echo and reverb; deliberately basic structures; short, and in their own way, catchy and pretty. Rhythms suggest provinces a step removed from where other white, arty urbanites tend to dwell: There are flashes of soca, reclined bounces that remind me of Indian music, and though “Sandy Feat”’s swing could be Tom Petty’s “American Girl” or David Bowie’s “Modern Love”, they inflect it they way Brazilian bands like Os Mutantes did (or Paul Simon on Rhythm of the Saints)
	Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan - Sunday at Devil Dirt [Cooperative Music, 2008]
	Fans of cotton swabs with sandpaper, cream puffs with granite - rejoice! Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan’s voices will once agin be united in song, she soft and he gruff, she Scottish and he gravelly as a Rocky Mountain road. The duo’s previous collaboration, Ballad of the Broken Seas, was nominated for the Mercury Prize in 2006, but it was never the most obvious team-up. While Lanegan was fronting the Washington grunge band Screaming Trees in the late 80s and 90s, Campbell was pedaling around Glasgow on her bicycle, burning her lips on cups of tea, and eventually singing twee duets with Stuart Murdoch in Belle & Sebastian. Campbell struck out on her own in 2002, a time when Lanegan had started working with Josh Homme in the Queens of the Stone Age. A mutual admiration finally threw the singers together and Ballad of the Broken Seas was the result. As on that album, Sunday at Devil Dirt was written, produced and arranged by Isobel Campbell. Lanegan provides lead vocals. It was recorded at studios both in Glasgow and the Catskills, where we like to imagine that Campbell and Lanegan subsisted on diets of rose petals and bourbon respectively.
	Omar Rodriguez Lopez - The Apocalypse Inside of an Orange [Infrasonic, 2007]
	Insanely solid psychedelic rock album. One more piece on Omar’s solo discography, since it shares the same 70’s mood of most past works. There are improvements here - I could feel a bigger synthsizer presence. But not like in Se Dice Bisonte, No Bufalo (I really don’t like the piano on that album). Money Mark uses matured sounds to create the perfect synth balance on this release. Tight, and essential.
	Lucky Dragons - Dark Falcons [Glaciers of Nice, 2008]
	The cut and paste digital derivative of musique concrete, melodic memory, splintery soft glitches, anxious dada, dirty indie, beautytronics. Lucky dragons is Luke Fischbeck, who edits it like a magazine to make sure it stays going. There are so many others to share the light, though: singing, drawing, dancing, touching, plucking and spinning or sewing with sound files or just listening really well. They are a DIY sound branding and sound breaking collective. Records are densely knit collages of ecstatic language, folk melodies, and AM radio rave ups. Live shows are convulsive celebrations of sounds from hard drives and gentle skin contact. Our aesthetic is handmade. Contributing members currently live in Providence RI, Philadelphia PA, coastal Southern California and New York City.Read a song by song breakdown here. Also available: Lucky Dragons - Mini Dream Island [Marriage, 2007]
	Kaki King - Dreaming Of Revenge [Velour, 2008]
	Kaki’s follow-up to last year’s Until We Felt Red, which saw the originally acoustic guitar instrumentalist add electric and pedal-steel guitar to her recording repertoire, Dreaming finds her exploring another new path. “Even though half the tracks are instrumentals, I feel like I’m writing pop songs,” Kings remarks about the new project. “We really concentrated on the melodies. Everything I write tends to be dense and chordal, but this time the idea was to layer the challenging guitar work under very simple, beautiful melodies. I really wanted them to be memorable.” By “we,” King is referring to Dreaming producer Malcolm Burn (Emmylou Harris, Peter Gabriel, Daniel Lanois) who worked with King on expanding her vocals and who insisted that the material be grounded on accessible melody lines. King says Burn summed up his approach thus: “If someone can’t be sawing a log in half and whistling along to the song, I don’t want it on the record.”
	Mike Patton - A Perfect Place [Ipecac, 2008]
	This score is from Derrick Scocchera’s short film of the same name. And it’s a complicated soundtrack that, much like all of Patton’s work, stretches through many different genres of music. Of note to most hardcore Patton fans is that he is actually singing on a few tracks here. While some of the music is orchestrative in its nature, there’s also a pop song and a ragtime ballad included. It is a full-blown work of genius that almost overshadows its visual counterpart. In fact, the soundtrack is twice as long as Scocchera’s film.
	Mount Eerie - Black Wooden Ceiling Opening [PW Elvrum & Sun, 2008]
	Mount Eerie is Phil Elvrum who used to perform and record under the moniker of The Microphones. With The Microphones name, Phil created some fantastic (and at times, really creepy) lo-fi folk music. With Black Wooden Ceiling Opening it looks like it was time to try something a little different, and by a little different, I mean unlike anything anyone would have expected. Halfway through the first track, I don’t think many people would argue against labeling the song as metal. The remainder of the record, for the most part, follows suit. The strangest thing about it is that it works. This record is loud, fuzzed out, and doesn’t seem the least bit forced. Chalk this one up as the biggest surprise of 2008.
	Pocahaunted - Beast That You Are c30 [Night-People, 2008]
	Two sides of end-of-’07 action from the Phaunted axis. The A is a rare acoustic feather float down from white heights into blissed grey blues, while the B documents a frenetic live set with Yellow Swans and Mouthus at The Smell in October, with Andy Spore on guest sax.
	Pocahaunted - Peyote Road [Woodsist, 2008]
	Evolving comes easier to some than others. A lot of the 21st century’s chief underground ringbearers are happy mining the same psych-ditch for the same warped ore, tape after tape and day after day. But Eagle Rock, CA’s Pocahaunted are too restless (and easily annoyed?) to sit still like that, and so spent all of ‘07 throwing ever weirder new figures and moods into their amplifier family, and “Peyote Road” shows the motion of their transformation agenda. The A side ritual, “Divine Flesh,” stirs hand drums and chimes into a bellydancing blur of voice smoke and rhythm before breaking down into its base elements and slowly reforming. The flip side (”Heroic Doses”) documents Pocahaunted’s set opening for Thurston Moore on Halloween night in the wasted and highly un-mystical California desert town of Visalia. Bobb Bruno and Britt Brown backed up the ladies’ blown-out but melancholy wailing wall with electronic drums and drones, and the recording treads a dim, no-fi path into a bleak and holy void.
	Sean Smith - Eternal lp [Gnome Life, 2008]
	Sean Smith is a modern composer of ageless guitar folketry. With several masterful solo-guitar albums behind him, Smith has been drawn out of his hermetic recording life by the power and potential of collaboration, presented here on this record. Sean Smith becomes more fully fructified in the company of his friends, one voice becomes many… 6-string steel, Weissenborn [slide], & nylon-string guitars, with dulcimer, banjo, violin, organ, drums, & electric wall of sound… his guitar breathes deeply in this new depth of field and altered sonic state, giving bright light and love to his powerfully emotive instrumental songs.
	Xela - The Illuminated [Digitalis, 2008]
	A new side of xela’s schizoid personality is revelead on “the illuminated” as type records figurehead john twells unleashes two sonic barnstormers that cover a lot of ground. overloaded with copious amounts of analog synths, “the illuminated” is baked in the grimmest plot of scorched earth you’ve ever seen. twells wrecks his voice lamenting the black clouds above on “gilted rose,” hoping for an exorcism that never comes. the doom is thick as thieves with this one, and the last candle has been smashed to pieces. underneath all the hell and fury, though, xela does attempt to bury the vaguest of melodies. it seeps into the soil, hoping one day to be dug out. bells and chimes sound like rusted chains slogging through the mood as the slaves march their way to the edge of the cliff looking for salvation dying down below.