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Passings

World1970

Too often, loved ones leave us far too soon.

There’s nothing that can prepare you for such moments, or for how painful it is to watch someone slipping away and being able to do nothing.

My father passed away when I was very young, after a protracted battle with lymphoma.

My cat Mister Henry passed away last week, a mere month after I found out he had untreatable myeloma.

Brainwashed.com’s Jon Whitney has curated a two-cd requiem for his mother, Marilyn Whitney, who passed away last November.

The fifth release in the Brainwashed Handmade Series, this lovingly compiled mix —titled Peace (for Mom)— gathers new, old, and previously unreleased music donated by friends of Brainwashed, including Matmos, His Name Is Alive, Marissa Nadler, Sybarite, A Place To Bury Strangers, Carter-Tutti, Ida, Little Annie, and many more.

All of it is in honor of Marilyn, whose intense love of music in turn inspired Jon’s own, seemingly boundless enthusiasm.

Proceeds go to the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, where Marilyn often volunteered. For ordering information visit Brainwashed.com.

Sybarite [myspace] | Antony & the Johnsons | Official Site

Peace (for Mom)
Track Listing:

Disc A:
1. A Place to Bury Strangers, “Sunbeam”
2. Antony and the Johnsons, “You Are My Sister”
3. Aranos, “Fall’s Golden Whispers”
4. Jessica Bailiff, “Fly High”
5. Little Annie Bandez and Paul Wallfisch, “Smile”
6. Boduf Songs, “Little Song for Jon”
7. Boy In Static, “Stay Awake”
8. Caribou, “Hummingbird”
9. Carter Tutti, “Woven Clouds” (alternate version)
10. Current 93, “All the Pretty Little Horses”
11. Fridge, “Five Four Child Voice” – [MP3]
12. Christoph Heemann and Andreas Martin, “Walla Mashalla”
13. His Name Is Alive, “This World Is Not My Home”
14. Ida, “See the Stars” (acoustic)
15. The Paula Kelley Orchestra, “Life for Life”
16. Kinski, “Waka Nusa”
17. The Legendary Pink Dots, “We Bring the Day” (edit)

Disc B:
1. Andrew Liles, “The Comfortable Illusion of Meaning”
2. Matmos, “Staircase”
3. Monster Movie, “Vanishing Act”
4. Marissa Nadler, “Stallions”
5. Nudge, “Greener”
6. Amanda Palmer, “I’ll Follow You Into the Dark”
7. Pantaleimon, “Idumaea”
8. Sandro Perri, “Family Tree”
9. Rivulets, “You Sail On”
10. Ulrich Schnauss, “Wherever You Are”
11. The 17th Pygmy, “I Know My Train’s A Coming”
12. Stars of the Lid, “Requiem”
13. Sybarite, “Mochi Swt”
14. 27, “Windows and Glass”
15. Volcano the Bear, “Wooden Sailus”
16. Keith Fullerton Whitman, “Weiter”
17. Windy & Carl, “I Have Been Waiting to Hear Your Voice”

MP3Antony & The Johnsons, “Hope There’s Someone” (from I Am A Bird Now)

MP3Sybarite, “Unica Zurn” (from Nonument, 2002)

Alison In Wonderland

goldfrapp-owl

Alison Goldfrapp is an intriguing iteration on the Diva. Her flamboyance is quiet, studied, her gestures thoughtful rather than brashly encompassing. Her style is less brassy than it is Surreal, flirtatious, even a bit louche. There’s something so marvelously fantastical and almost Pagan (think Wicker Man) about the unsettling worlds she paints with her songs. (They’re like musical corollaries to Angela Carter’s phantasmagoric and sometimes nightmarish short stories in tone and imagistic flair —think endless nights at the circus, or dusk-to-dawn cabarets presided over by Jenny Lind and Emmy Hennings .)

Her eponymous duo’s 2003 album Black Cherry has remained one of my favorites, a lush, ornate —yet oddly comforting— song cycle that hangs together more gracefully than most dancefloor-friendly albums deign to even attempt. That’s why the 2005 follow-up, Supernature, was a bit of a letdown. Far less consistent, it hit the same sensual notes as Black Cherry but pallidly, like a Xerox of a Xerox.

I have great hopes for her new album, Seventh Tree [Mute] as a bucolic and ever-so-slightly sinister return to form —the press release calls it a “sensual counterpoint …gilded in butterfly colors of an English Surrealism shared with Lear and Lennon.” I do hope that doesn’t mean that Goldfrapp’s marvelous idiosyncrasies have been wiped out in favor of the glitter-ball chanteuse who stomped all over Supernature. We shall see. (It’s out tomorrow, I believe.)

I’ve been a fan of Ms. Goldfrapp’s evocative voice for quite some time now. She’s graced some of the quirkiest, most unusual singles of the late 90s, working with Tricky, Orbital, Add N To X, among others. I leave you with some of my favorite Goldfrapp moments from her pre-solo career years.

Goldfrapp [official] | [Myspace] | Tricky | Add N to (X) | Orbital

MP3Add N to X, “Revenge of the Black Regent” (from Avant Hard, 1999)

MP3Tricky (with Alison Goldfrapp), “Pumpkin” (from Maxinquaye, 1995)

MP3Orbital (with Alison Goldfrapp), “Sad But New” (from the Insides EP, 1996)

LIVE :: Neptune, Helms, These Are Powers

Neptune-GreatScott

These Are Powers
Helms
Neptune
[Record Release Party]
Great Scott
Allston, MA
Saturday, February 16th

Variation is a wonderful thing. Even though Saturday night’s show is (on paper at least) power trio night, it’s amazing how much leeway there is within that structure. None of these bands would everbe mistaken for one another.

These Are Powers start things off with a bang. High-kicking banshee priestess Anna Barie is aided and abetted by equally energized co-conspirators Pat Noecker (ex-Liars) on bass and vocals and diminutive powerhouse percussionist Bill Salas on squiggle box/drum kit/vocals.

There’s a kernel of truth to the group’s Myspace genre designation “breakbeat/healing & easy listening.” On the one hand, their music is crazily danceable and weirdly hi-NRG; on the other, it’s tribal and contemplative, a beguiling mix of the high and low, the sacred and the profane.

Noecker’s intoned, vaguely ominous vocals contrast effectively with Barie’s wide-ranging, often startling ululations. You never get the sense that these two having a conversation, per se. Lyrically, their intentions clearly have nothing to do with your typical pop scenario of lovelorn grievances; rather, the effect is cumulative and largely textural —using repetition and variation to gradually build meanings and associations.

Musically speaking, though one can hear echoes of angular, vaguely No Waveish skronk, TAP’s overall sound melds psychically exhausted, apocalyptic end-times music with something altogether more optimistic, even Dionysian. The group is as much about pure revelry as it is about painterly textures.

Most importantly, though, their collective, headlong engagement with the music is joyously infectious. Not that a Boston crowd is going to dance without a fight, but the head-bobbing gets noticeably more frenzied. By the time the too-short set culminates in their as-yet-unreleased new single “Chipping Ice” (complete with whacked-out coughing solos), the group’s endearingly manic energy seems to have won over the blasé, packed-in-like-sardines crowd.

I’m prepared to like Helms, really I am. They have a kind of well-balanced grace, standing there, instruments at the ready. So far, so good, until… they…start…playing.

Their energy is so consistently tamped-down and, well, consistent —with so little tonal variation from moment to moment— that they leave little in the way of expectation. Their format —rock-solid rhythm section propping up noodly-muso guitarist (with nary a rhythm guitarist in sight, alas)— is texturally numbing and borderline dullsville. Throughout their set I keep hoping for the rhythm section to mutiny (they’re so obviously better than Mr. Muso and his mumbled vocalizing), but, seeing as how the bassist and drummer are respectively wife and brother to said muso guitarist, that hardly seems a likely scenario. Alas.

To their credit, their final song finally breaks out of the gray-wash torpor and deigns to ROCK. I wish they’d done it sooner. They really, truly need to be thrown off-balance, to get out of their comfort zone, and rough up their dynamics a bit.

Helms drag my energy level down to nothing, then Neptune sweep in and build it back up —and then some. And I’m not just saying that because they ply the audience with sheet cake (inscribed with the name of their new album, Gong Lake).

Neptune is a gimmick band that long ago transcended the gimmick. This decade-old Boston-based trio make their own instruments, literally sculpting sound with their own bare hands using scrap metal, found objects and their own twisted Rube Goldberg-ian imaginations.

None of this three-dimensional ingenuity would mean much if the music didn’t match it with equal fervor, but it does.

To fall back on the dreaded “Listen if you like…” cliché, Neptune ably build on the urban dread of Rocket from the Tombs and the whimsical (albeit sadistic) genre-tweaking surrealism of Diskomo-era Residents (although Neptune lack that group’s more explicitly theatrical elements).

At times the music sounds like robot dub —all mutant polyrhythms and processed, echo-chambered vocals. It can also be hushed and cinematic, playing with drones and slow-building tension.
Whispery and barbed, Neptune’s music full of coiled-up energy that gets released in short, sharp bursts by three expert players who instinctively know one another’s strengths and play to them with breathtaking efficiency.

Here’s to another ten years.

These Are Powers | Helms | Neptune

MP3These Are Powers, “You Come With Nothing” (from TERRIFIC SEASONS [Hoss Records, 2006])

MP3Helms, “There’s No ‘I’ in Team But There Is One In Tina” [from SECRET DOORS | Plants & Brains, 2006])

MP3Neptune, “Purple Sleep” [from GONG LAKE | Table of the Elements, 2008])

NEPTUNE AT GREAT SCOTT, FROM NEPTUNEBAND.COM

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