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Dusted Features
Every Friday, Dusted Magazine publishes a series of music-related lists compiled by our favorite artists. This week: Two acts slated to appear at the upcoming Table of the Elements festivak, Leif Inge and Deerhunter.
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Listed: Table of the Elements presents: Leif Inge + Deerhunter
Each Table of the Elements festival is named after an element on the periodic table, and this year’s installment (the fourth in an intermittent succession) has been labeled Bohrium. Taking place over Labor Day weekend in the label’s hometown of Atlanta, the five-day festival features such TOTE heavies as Tony Conrad, Rhys Chatam, and Loren Connors, as well as film/video screenings covering John Fahey, Charlemagne Palestine, and two films from Ira Cohen (including the fully expanded Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda. Leif Inge and Deerhunter are among the acts slated to appear, and though their music comes from different hemispheres, stylistically and geographically, both fit in at opposite ends of Table of the Elements’ aesthetic spectrum.
Leif Inge
Leif Inge is an artist from Oslo, Norway, who’s been exhibiting in his homeland and abroad since 1996. He’s best known, however, for 9 Beet Stretch, an ambitious project in which Inge, using Snd and Common Lisp Music audio software, elongated Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony into a twenty-four hour piece. Inge made use of no pitch-shifting, and the resultant music is one of subtle swells and extended drones. The conceptual minimalism of the piece piqued the interest of listeners and writers worldwide, and the piece is slated for an upcoming dvd release by Table of the Elements. At the festival, 9 Beet Stretch will be featured as a 24-hour performance, and, for those unable to attend, the piece is also available online in a number of formats.
I am careless about styles. I do not care much about jazz, but some of the music I adore is jazz. I am ignorant about authencity. But some of the music I adore is filed under world music. The fusion, the experiment, the everything inbetween, its all in vain for better terms (though at least some terms are descriptive to a certain degree). It is as simple as this; in music as in anything else I want - and seek - to be amazingly surprised. It is impossible to do a list like this without leaving a lot of the greater music unlisted (sigh). And then, there are plenty music I do not know about. There will be more surprises I am certain.
1. John Cage - Indeterminacy
John Cage reads his stories while David Tudor render the occational bang and squeek... All stories is read within 1 minute, thus Cage has to read long stories fast and short stories slow - it is the anarchistic whims John Cage, after all. Entertainment for an acquired taste maybe, but entertaining nevertheless.
2. Francoise Bayle - Erosphere
This CD contains two pieces which is probably of the more accessible works by Bayle, with his worldly sounds all rendered in a clear and tangible way leaving an awesome world of sounds.
3. Eliane Radigue - Biogenesis
When I first heard this 3" from Metamkine I had no clue what to expect. I had never heard of Eliane Radigue at the time. I have since gotten everything she has released. Minimal textures minimal progress leaves a fantastic world of sound.
4. Fripp & Eno - No Pussyfooting
Like Radigue this is music where the textures are woven by soundwaves.
5. The 13th tribe - Ping-Pong Anthropology
From their selfinflicted restrictions - PVC wind instruments played with no use of fingerholes - this is in the vein Walter Durand coins 'buzzing'. Sometimes restrictions creates the unsuspected!
6. Miles Davis - Bitches Brew
There is so much great stuff in Miles Davis recordings from Bitches Brew to Pangaea, and this is possibly the best.
7. Univers Zero - Uzed
An other sort of fusion, yet similar in being an electrifying and dense demanding recording.
8. Yasko Argirov Band - Yasko
Also a fusion og its kind, a wildly hardhitting music. People wed to this music!
9. Toumani Diabate - Kaira
Ah, this young fellow is a master kora player. Rather the opposite of fusion, as Diabate strips the tradtion and plays solo kora, and he do so densily layered with rhythm. This music is manna to my ears.
10. JS Bach - Musikalisches Opfer - Karl Muncinger / Stuttgarter Kammerorchester
It is quite rare that I find recordings of JS' music very attractive, but this is certainly the exception! This is a truly Musical Offering of sheer and intens beauty. This is more manna to my ears.
Deerhunter
Deerhunter are one of the hometown acts on the Bohrium bill, and their appearance comes at an opportune time. The Atlanta quintet is gearing up for a European tour with Liars this fall, and the release of their album Cryptograms by Kranky in early 2007. Deerhunter’s most recent work focuses on hypnotic melodics, kraut-ish rhythms, and an ambience that’s capable of moving from sparse to lush in long, sweeping crescendos. The release of an ep, Flourescent Grey, will follow the release of their Kranky debut, also in the winter of 2007.
1. Brian Eno - Here Come the Warm Jets
I dig the collage thing about the way songs blend together, and the cover art, and the double-tracked drums and guitars buzzing.
2. Stereolab
Stereolab pretty much defined my musical tastes in high school. No telling how much shit I found out about from them. My favorite song is probably "Blue Milk" off of "Cobra and Phases Play Voltage in the Milky Night", which is like 11 minutes of hypnotic ringing guitars with weird electronics ebbing and flowing until this meltdown witch-dance ending. It sounds pretty witchy. They are also amazing because over the years they've kept moving and not repeated themselves.
3. The Fall - Hex Enduction Hour
The fragmented pacing and weird hypnotic garage thing really appeals to me in a pretty timeless way.
4. My Bloody Valentine - Loveless
Everyone talks about this album because everyone has felt exactly like this sounds at some point in their life and feels like they understand it in a way no one else does. That's really genius.
5. David Bowie - Low
I have my own fictionalized fantasy ideas of how Bowie was in love with Iggy Pop during the whole Berlin thing and this record is like his desperate coming to terms with that. "Be My Wife" is one of the saddest songs I've ever heard and it doesn't have to be all slow and sad sounding to accomplish that. And then the album just changes direction totally and ascends into ambient wordlessness.
6. Patti Smith - Horses
"I saw the boy break out of his skin, my heart turned over and I crawled in." She was so onto something.
7. Casino Versus Japan - Go Hawaii
I first heard the "Untitled" song he contributed to a Raymond Scott tribute and then I got this CD and listen to it probably more than anything else. It really evokes something. I wish I understood how he does this. Always makes me feel the same elegiac nostalgia for shopping mall parking lots and delivering Chinese food and other suburban stuff.
8. Dennis Cooper - Closer
Probably the best book to start with by my favorite writer, Dennis Cooper. This guy probably defined more of my aesthetic taste than anything else, music, or otherwise. Queerness and Punkness and Teenage Boyness fused in my brain when I read this. It kind of fucked up my ability to relate to "squares." I still fantasize about making this into a movie someday.
9. Liars
Everything about them, as musicians, as people, etc. They are really honest, radical artists. Completely genuine. They command my respect.
10. Black Lips
You'll know soon enough if you don't already. They are the psychotic wet dream of pagan twelve year old with loose snare and solid state. FACT: they really and truly are as fucked up as they seem.
11. Telepathe
I can't get enough of this rad group. They're from Brooklyn but remind me of a band I would see in a kitchen in Athens years ago. Very kitchen-tapes. Very "Raincoats on acid." Ethereal, dense, and tribal.
12. "The Dream's Dream" the last song off Adventure by Television.
This is one of my favorite last songs ever. It's sad and uplifting at the same time, despite the totally random and meaningless lyrics, I think it's neat how it still evokes something without relying on words to do all the work. For some reason it makes me think of a.) what it would be like if Martin Luther King had not been assisntated and had gone on to become president. b.) what it would be like to be a teenager dying in a carcrash while on summer vacation at Cape Cod, and c.) missing the bus every morning in middleschool and having to walk.
By Dusted Magazine
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