Thom York – “The Eraser” 2006

This is a CD I’ve been obsessing over for months. At first, it seemed like a bunch of Radiohead demos, a stop-gap whilst they were off the road and out of the studio. The music seemed too sparse, too much like a the best bits from a full notepad pre-editing. The lyrics were a familiar gumbo of paranoia and mirror- fracture musings, maybe a little more nakedly so than usual. On the other hand, they were good demos. The loops were off-kilter Auterchre-isms but never jarring with the (very up-front vocals) and little runs of etude-like piano kept tinkling across these potentially sterile soundscapes like solemn mice.

I kept listening.

It’s the voice that starts to pull you in, alternately a choirboy singing a requiem and the greatest tenor in the world moaning about his horrid day at the office whilst making it sound like day 327 at Guatanamo Bay. “Harrowdown Hill” hooked me first, a skittering beat and a deeply reverbed vocal, atmospheric synths fading in and out of a fearsomely paranoid (sorry, that word just won’t keep out of anything written about Yorke, will it?) run out complete with snapped bass accents and a chant of “It was a slippery slippery slippery slope/I feel me slipping in and out of consciousness”. Then the rest of the record followed in short order. “Atoms for Peace” could almost be a ballad with a positively lushly melodic line for the vocal, undercut by insect whines and lyrics like “The wriggling, squiggling worm inside/Devours from the inside out”.

The dread never stops (“So how come it looks so beautiful?/How come the moon falls from the sky?”) but the ultimately, it’s the intrinsic gift of Yorke’s voice (never more starkly recorded than this) that carries us through.

It’s on XL so there’s probably a big website somewhere.

Kode 9 and the Space Ape – “Memories of the Future” (2006)

This is not an easy listening record. Queasy listening, perhaps. It’s a fragmented science fiction novel of a record, equal parts old Sabres of Paradise, the darkest of Lee Perry and the record that a lot of people have been wishing Tricky would get off his arse and make for the last ten years.

I made a few notes listening to this the other day as different elements snagged at me. Here they are.

Glass – five am chill – not a pleasant one – as the dope runs out and sobriety bites. Best thing Tricky’s released in ages
Victims – scary, sci-fi lurch. “Alien virus” snarls the Ape.
Backwards – an unsettling dub march, “One step forward, two step back”
Nine – short fragment structured by fragmented, time-stretched stabs “Nine days…” Lost in space.
Curious – has an almost r’n’b chord sequence, if r’n’b was played on a melodica and underpinned by clanking dub. “Maybe just maybe we can save you/maybe just maybe we can kill you”, rumbles the Space Ape comfortingly. “There’s a word” (worm?)
Portal – Something outside is scratching at the window
Sine – “It’s June/…and a rocket ship explodes yet everybody still wants to fly/some people/a man never happy unless a next man truly dies/sines of the times/maybe make a speech…” An uneasy pulse, distant reverbed bits of percussion, a solitary hihat. So much space…Best Prince cover ever.
Correction – Future Sound of London watery synth trickles cut into a sepulchral whisper about disease and infection. Speaker hiss in the background, Quatermass.
Kingston – dissects the kind of mentality that can kill for an ideology. “As day becomes night, so much of our space evaporates from sight.” Little scratches of guitar and an irregular field of cymbal bells
9 Samurai – a sonorous brass loop processed almost beyond recognition. More dub. The most Gza-like treatment, sounding almost crassly fully-formed after the empty spaces murkily delineated in previous tracks.
“Bodies” and “Lime” – the empty murk descends again, claustrophobic. Quicklime out of Edwin Drood.
Quantum – subsonic bass, the fullest, fastest beat on the whole record – i.e. motoring just beyond a crawl. SpaceApe actually seems to be getting almost a word in every beat or two. Leaves a queasily upbeat sensation.

Utterly brilliant.

Tim Hecker – “Harmony in Ultraviolet” (2006)

“Harmony in Ultraviolet” was a record I seemed to have on repeat as I wandered around the weirdly space-station like corridors or Southport and Ormskirk Hospital whilst I waited for a close relation to die.  Generally, this would be at around 11pm or 2am or so.  No-one up but nurses traversing silently between wards and other relatives wrapped up in their anxious waits or quietly unfolding tragedies.  It was a surprisingly peaceful time and “Harmony” is a surprisingly peaceful record for it’s genre (glitchy laptop/electronica).  But it’s peaceful in the way that thunder or gunfire becomes peaceful when heard from the bottom of the ocean.

It’s not quite ambient – there’s too much going on just out of earshot and definite, though evolvingly iterative, melodies periodically emerge from the constantly unfurling reefs and shoals of sound.  The sounds could be derived from densely layered guitars, church organ drones or pure white noise – the treatments dissolve them into taut washes that gradually build tension over three or four minutes then gently or suddenly dissolve into the next piece.

I could (unusually for a lot of music in this area) pick out individual tracks but the album works best consumed at one sitting.  Closest thing I can think of is Eno’s “Day of Radiance” (which is a great listen in its own right, by the way).

You can find a couple of sample Mp3s at http://www.kranky.net/