Pages tagged “issue 45”

Efterklang Members: (L-R) Casper Clausen, Rune Mølgaard, Thomas Husmer, Rasmus Stolberg, Mads Brauer
Hometown: Copenhagen, Denmark
Album Title: Parades
For Fans Of: Sigur Rós, Múm, Sufjan Stevens

I was like, ‘What is going on?’” jokes Rasmus Stolberg in response to the critical success of 2007’s Parades, the latest LP from his Copenhagen-based ensemble, Efterklang. As we talk, he’s hustling from car to tour bus with a borrowed cell phone pinched between his shoulder and ear, moving luggage and fielding questions between breaths. Stolberg and his seven cohorts have just arrived in Boulder, Colo., and still need to make it to the post office in time to snag a rush shipment of T-shirts before heading into Denver for the first show of their extensive (and jokingly titled) Danish Dynamite tour with their friends in Slaraffenland. Today is slightly chaotic.

Hometown: Amsterdam
For Fans Of: Michel Gondry, MC Escher

It’s easy to mistake Roel Wouters for a filmmaker. “[What I do is] more about creating a certain circumstance or a certain condition,” insists the 32-year-old Dutch artist who works under the moniker Xelor (a lawsuit-avoiding variance on his more natural nickname, Rolex). Though his creations encompass graphic design, web conceptualizations and performance art, Wouters’ videos for zZz’s “Grip” and My Robot Friend’s “Robot High School” are the fullest realization of his “machines” yet, each a one-take mindbender based on a Gondry-like series of inventions.

A fascinating, disturbing glance inside the heads of Japan’s suburban teens

Entering Kirino’s dark fictional worlds demands total submission to her characters’ inner lives. Her latest novel’s characteristically unflinching study of four suburban Japanese teens is no exception. A smoggy, mundane summer dedicated to college “cram school” sessions is the perfect backdrop for this hardboiled story’s brutal catalyst.

In the midnight hour, she cries Mao, Mao, Mao

What could be a bigger turn-on than smashing to bits every single thing in the house that pictures Chairman Mao? Just such an iconoclasm ignites the fires of passion for two lovers in this sharp satire of life in 1960s China.

An essential slab of hip-hop history

Yes, it’s too long—and it’s not exactly packed with artists you know, even if you get down with Dizzee Rascal. But this two-disc compilation nonetheless serves a valuable purpose, reinforcing connections between British hip-hop and the Caribbean diaspora.

Arbitrary mix of great Brazilian grooves

Drew Friedman’s Spy cartoon once depicted David Byrne peering from behind a tropical bush, only to discover Paul Simon peering back. But much of the former Talking Head’s pan-global cultural acquisition initially—and authentically—took place at the record store. While the rhythms and strategies of Brazilian Tropicália and bossa nova have certainly found their way into Byrne’s music, he has more significantly been what Malcolm Gladwell would call a maven.

A journalist proves his metal in the Muslim world

It’s inconvenient but true that people, societies and religious systems are often more complex than we want to believe. Take Islam, for instance. In today’s America, we’re likely to presume that the violence and oppression we’re told represents Islam is the entire story of the world’s 1.25 billion Muslims. Many of us fail to consider that what we know of Islam is narrow and unnuanced—and that many Muslims struggle daily with the very extremism we fear. Plus, some of them really just want to headbang.

Sound collagists capably meld electronica with traditional Mexican idioms

Formed in 1999 by Pepe Mogt (a.k.a. Fussible), the Nortec Collective has pioneered a hybrid of electronica and Norteño—the most popular form of Northern Mexican music—from its Tijuana home. The crew’s third album focuses on the songs and soundscapes of Mogt and Ramon Amezcua (the latter often referred to as the godfather of the TJ electronic scene), and it’s a hoot. The 15 primarily instrumental tracks are built from processed beats, with standard Norteño instruments deftly worked into the mix. The title track encapsulates Nortec’s combined focus on momentum and contrast, its accordion and trumpet bouncing like kids on a trampoline over a souped-up groove that still comes off as indigenous. “Akai 47” features an accordion that sounds more zydeco than Mexico, while “Rosarito” is dub TJ-style, given extra punch by a heavily treated tuba. And the change of pace, “Brown Bike”—sung in English by Bryce Kushnier of the band VitaminsforYou—sounds like an outtake from Beck’s Guero.

Listen to Nortec Collective's "Rosarito" from Tijuana Sound Machine:

Book about magic possesses very little of its own

The author of renowned book The Alchemist explores magic this time out through a 21-year-old Irish woman’s earliest lessons in the occult traditions of the sun and moon.

Hometown: Curenavaca, Mexico
Album: De Sur a Sur
For fans of: Gipsy Kings, Adreas Vollenweider, Joanna Newsom

For Paraguayan-born, Mexican-raised harpist and violinist Celso Duarte, music is the family business. And business has never been better.

Afropop/jazz-fusion record is hit-and-miss

West African guitarist Lionel Loueke’s Blue Note debut is a challenging and occasionally wondrous fusion of Afropop and knotty, dissonant jazz. Loueke has been an integral part of recent releases from trumpeter Roy Hargrove and legendary pianist Herbie Hancock (that’s him on Herbie’s recent Grammy winner/Joni Mitchell tribute River: The Joni Letters), and here Hancock and fellow Miles alum Wayne Shorter return the favor, playing on three of Karibu’s nine tracks. Those tracks are the highlights, since Loueke’s regular trio—featuring bassist Massimo Biolcati and drummer Ferenc Nemeth—fails to overcome Eli Wolf’s safe fuzak production. Loueke’s a major talent, incorporating scatting vocalizations and tongue clicks to accompany his fluid acoustic-guitar runs, but the music doesn’t really take flight until Hancock and Shorter drop in. Shorter’s soprano sax solo on John Coltrane’s “Naima” is feathery light and endlessly inventive, while the interplay between Hancock and Shorter on “Light Dark” recalls some of the dissonant push and pull of late-’60s Miles classics such as Nefertiti and Sorcerer.

Listen to Lionel Loueke's "Zala" from Karibu:

A riveting journey from Thelonious to monk and back

“But this is India...Things happen again and again for absolutely no reason,” laments Lodro Chosang (Nikolai Grozni).

Rusby for president... of the Folk Music Preservation Society

Kate Rusby’s bonus-track cover of Ray Davies’ “The Village Green Preservation Society” adds a delightful context to the characters she sings about on the mostly traditional but in-touch Awkward Annie. While you take in the English folk singer’s angel-sweet voice, backed by simple strings and the occasional accordion or horn, picture her own Village Green Preservation Society meeting: All her characters attend. John Barbury and Jane, about to have a baby out of wedlock, wait anxiously in the front row. Sitting together in the back are heartbreakers Awkward Annie, who hopped on a horse and rode away from her admirer, and the Bitter Boy, who “walked for miles through stormy weather” with a girl, then left her. The old man who claimed he “could do as much work in a day / as his wife could do in three” runs into the meeting late, followed by his grinning wife, proud to have proved him wrong. The sailor boy’s sweetheart sits alone by the door, still sore from the grief of a sad farewell. The meeting begins, and the townspeople talk about conserving the streams of the Nancy, milking the cows before they dry up and sending off the eastbound sailors. Rusby’s Awkward Annie is a welcome respite from the complicated life of a commoner.

Listen to Kate Rusby's cover of "The Village Green Preservation Society" from Awkward Annie:

I’ve always been big on allowing disasters to dictate my vacation destinations—you seriously can’t beat the deals to be had from a desperate tourism economy after it’s been hit by hurricanes or other acts of God. I was among the first people to fly to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Sure, the point was more to evacuate the survivors than pickle myself on Bourbon Street, but the fact remains that the entire getaway cost me less than a tank of gas. Granted, I slept in the airport and my cuisine consisted mainly of peanut packets and FEMA handouts, but still, cheap is cheap.

A giant talent, after all

German-born bass-baritone Thomas Quasthoff is one of the most versatile singers of our time, equally at home with the lieder of Schumann, the bel canto of Handel and American standards. (He croons “My Funny Valentine” with an intimate intensity halfway between a sob and a sigh.) His scat singing dazzles.

Gripping debut from Norwegian singer/songwriter

Silje Nes’ low-key but ultimately gripping debut album is equal parts cute forest elf, kooky CocoRosie and prowling Cat Power. It’s a home-recorded disc, and one can imagine the young Norwegian—who grew up in Leikanger, where the climate is mild, fruit trees thrive and splashes from the Kvinna waterfall produce rainbows in the summer—strolling along her stream of consciousness, adding flickers of melodica, glockenspiel, cello or whatever instrument suited her at the moment. Nes’ music is less a genre than a mood: sometimes haunted, and other times slinky. “Bright Night Morning” and “Melt” are echo-y Americana, all wind-chapped barns and harvest moons, while “Giant Disguise” and “Dizzy Street” are pure make-out songs. This won’t all register on first listen; Nes takes subtlety seriously. But trust us, hissing fauna—she is the destroyer.

Listen to Silje Nes' "Dizzy Street" from Ames Room

Incomparable Irish-trad duo weaves gently understated masterpiece

Renowned Irish fiddler Martin Hayes and guitarist Dennis Cahill have been making music together since the 1980s, when the two first met up in Chicago. The pair’s newest record, Welcome Here Again, captures the magic that’s possible when two musicians are confident enough in their abilities to serve the music so fully that they disappear entirely. There’s no ego, no grandstanding with instrumental technique, just the absolute soul conviction of Hayes’ scraping bow, at its most emotionally devastating on the “The Dear Irish Boy.” Cahill’s guitar accompaniment offers a similarly delicate touch, providing a supple foundation for the fiddle. Welcome Here Again is a superb-sounding record from start to finish, abounding in space and atmosphere. “The Booley House Jig” might be the record’s finest two-minute stretch, a charming little dance tune that rolls gently by with a wink and heart-gladdening lift.

Listen to Martin Hayes & Dennis Cahill's "The Clare Reel" from Welcome Here Again:

Between 1961 and 1989, Berlin was divided by a wall, and on each side was a culture, one of which was communist. Which isn’t to say that the commies didn’t rock—far from it: They had bands in East Berlin, notably The Puhdys, who are still going strong. But West Berlin wasn’t a part of West Germany, and was administered by French, British, and American forces. Since the German army wasn’t allowed, and West Berlin had two great universities, it teemed with young men escaping the draft and the young women who followed them there. There were bands, but many couldn’t tour.

What do I remember about my first seven years? I remember that I spent them in Ireland. I remember the rain and the pervasive grey skies that made every color on earth below—natural and manufactured—seem bottomless. I remember those rare sunny days that occasionally prompted women to stand in their front yards wearing bras like bikini tops, soaking up what sun they could. We were deadly pale, the ghostly descendants of Adam and Eve, and we felt no shame.

Singer/songwriter issues otherworldy songs from his own private island

Despite having been recorded on Gotland, the windswept Swedish island that was the final refuge for famously bleak film director Ingmar Bergman, The Singer is not an album carved solely from existential angst. Teitur Lassen shares with the late auteur a gift for penetrating slice-of-life vignettes and meditative landscapes that only reveal their deeper truths after repeated exposure and time in mind. Following Káta Hornið, his third studio album and first totally performed in the language of his native Faroe Islands, Teitur writes songs with clever turns of phrase and quirky metaphors that wouldn’t likely occur to someone fed on a lifetime of English clichés.

Release Date: Sept. 12
Director/Writer: Alan Ball (based on novel by Alicia Erian)
Cinematographer: Newton Thomas Sigel
Starring: Summer Bishil, Aaron Eckhart, 
Peter Macdissi, Toni Collette
Studio/Run Time: 
Warner Independent 
Pictures, 124 mins.

Awkward directorial debut from American Beauty writer

Screenwriter Alan Ball (American Beauty, Six Feet Under) is no stranger to daring stories, but in his awkward film directorial debut he seems unable to capture the soul of Alicia Erian’s novel—and with a story like this, that’s disastrous. Towelhead is about a 13-year-old girl with a father from Lebanon and a mother from the U.S. living with her divorced dad in Texas during the first Gulf War. She walks daily through a minefield of over-protective parenting, predatory male neighbors and aggressive boyfriends. The film isn't visually explicit—young-looking actress Summer Bishil was 19 when it was shot—but Ball includes all of the uncomfortable sexual situations from Erian’s novel and boldly uses the same racial epithet for a title. What he omits, however, is the mental rationale, the view into a child’s mind—not because he’s simplified the story, but because he seems unable to navigate the potentially salacious story with a cinematic finesse that equals Erian’s prose.

Elegant chamber pop from the Czech Republic

Romantically inclined East Bohemian quintet Miou Miou writes and sings in French, and the lush, carefully manicured settings of the group’s debut seem Gallic as well, redolent of the band Air’s soundscapes. Citing influences as far-ranging as Serge Gainsbourg and The Modern Lovers, Claudine Longet and My Bloody Valentine, Miou Miou derives much of its disarming personality from Karolina Dytrtova, who sings with such ingénue delicacy that she makes Longet seem like Ethel Merman. But this band is far from twee, as a powerhouse rhythm section brings muscle and mass to the gossamer. The whimsically titled “Le Petit Punk” pits a jackhammer groove against a skylarking flute (or synth), and “La Chambre Voisine” rocks like a top-down highway cruiser, power chords blazing. Overall though, La La Grand Finale plays out with a sustained sense of wistful refinement and obsessive intricacy. You could do worse than while away a Sunday with this insouciant Czech Beaujolais.


Listen to Miou Miou's "La Chambre Voisine" from La La Grande Finale:

A new mystery genre rears its lovely head

If I have to read one more blood-drenched mind-of-a-serial-killer novel, I’ll scream. Or maybe whimper.

Australian brothers make nervy, theatrical pop

There’s something unsettling about the way the voices of these Australian brothers wrap around each other—they’re urgent and insistent, with close, uncanny harmonies and disembodied sounds that conjure chilly moonscapes and nightmarish slumbers. As disturbing as it is artful, the group’s pristine melodies—all executed with architectural precision, beckon listeners to an alien place Pink Floyd only hinted at on A Saucerful of Secrets. But it’s worth the journey because mysteries are revealed, whether it’s in the arcane language of “Photographs” or in vocals that recall a young, pensive Robert Plant on the romantic obsession of “Desert Rose.” Occupying an unexpected niche between prog and pop, The Kin resurrect power ballads with the confidence of new initiates, not even caring that the art form has long been dead.

Listen to "Together" from Rise and Fall:

Mali’s reigning musical magician uncorks another genie from his bottle

If the only reason Western pop fans know anything about Malian music or genius-level kora player Toumani Diabaté is because of world-beat hitchhikers such as Blur’s Damon Albarn (whose 2002 Oxfam benefit release Mali Music includes collaborations with Diabaté and several of his master-level countrymen), then shame on us all.  The kora is a 21-string harp fashioned from an African bottle gourd, cut in half and then fitted with cow skin to create a resonator. Players at Diabaté’s level of accomplishment are capable of making the instrument sound as much like flamenco- or Delta-blues guitar as a harp, and on his second true solo release since issuing his 1988 debut at age 23, Diabaté’s magic hands coax an amazing array of voices from his instrument. His songs emulate a cascading waterfall (“Elyne Road,” inspired by UB40’s “Kingston Town”), ants scurrying across a dusty road (the impossibly fast “Ali Farka Toure,” an homage to his late mentor) and Nick Drake on a meth jag (“Kaounding Cissoko,” “Cantelowes”), never ceasing to astound with his unique combination of virtuosity and soul. Whether you’ve heard of Diabaté doesn’t matter; you need only to hear him to understand his diabolical wizardry.

It’s 1:30 a.m. in Oslo, Norway, and the official shows at the 2008 by:Larm music festival have all shut down. But as I squeeze into the tiny music room at the back of hole-in-the-wall pub Revolver, the band shows no signs of slowing. The miniscule stage is only a foot or two off the ground, and red velvet drapes hang from the low ceiling, partly obscuring the bass player. This is power-chord bar rock, and with beers in hand, the crowd loves it.

Hometown: Bergen, Norway
Album: Fortress Round My Heart 
For fans of: Feist, Sondre Lerche, The Hold Steady

Despite growing up in Nesna—a tiny Norwegian coastal village with 1,855 people and one gas station—Ida Maria Sivertsen was never at a loss for music in the home. “What we heard on the radio was what we got, and the CDs that were sold in the gas station were the choices you had, but my family were record collectors, so we had loads of good stuff like old rock ’n’ roll, soul and reggae."

Son of Afrobeat titan boldly assumes the mantle


With the possible exception of Bob Marley, no figure in so-called “world music” looms quite as large as Fela Kuti. With an incendiary and confrontational approach to the ills of then-contemporary Nigerian politics and a frenzied rhythmic urge that closed the circle between James Brown and more traditional African forms, Kuti was a galvanizing social force above and beyond his sonic impact. Rather than flee this inevitable shadow or shake the implications of his name a decade after his father’s death, son Seun has instead chosen to lead his father’s classic band, confidently claiming the legacy. The sinuous groove of “Many Things” and the political venom of “Don’t Give That Shit to Me” show that there is something in the blood, while “Mosquito Song” candidly confronts the scourge of malaria with knowing empathy. Providing a rekindled voice for the often voiceless, Seun’s courage is gripping, and a fitting tribute to his father.

A dip in the River Ganges with an Indian slide-guitar master


Anyone looking for a primer on authentic Indian raga—with its bendy, atmospheric slide guitars and gentle tabla beats—would be well served by the latest album from this award-winning master musician. On this, his follow-up to Calcutta Slide-Guitar, Vol. 3, Bhattacharya takes the listener on a tour of his home city, its mornings and its prayers through the sounds of a small slide ukulele, an Indian harp and an ancient one-stringed instrument called the ektara. A casual listener might write off this album as just more background music for meditation and hoity-toity spas. But a deeper listen will reveal what makes the songs so accessible to Western ears: hints of blues, Afro-Andalusian rhythms and a Hawaiian flavor. The latter comes courtesy of the late legend Tao Moe, who visited Calcutta in the late 1920s with his steel guitar, kicking off a national trend that found its way into the Bhattacharya family.