The Wire Review Of Cian Nugent's Doubles In Its Entirety.

Flower-Corsano Duo Review On Tiny Mix Tapes.

Flower-Corsano Duo lands 4 out of 5 stars "Eureka!" review on Tiny Mix Tapes.

"....... Mick Flower and Chris Corsano, virtuoso madmen whose contributions to American experimental music are by now legion. Flower, the electro-acoustic sage on “Japan banjo”; Corsano, the shape-shifting genius drummer boy of aggro-jazz, noise rock, and, well, cricketing: to perceive The Four Aims as the work of just a duo is to gloss over the immense complexity within each pole, the subdivisions and layers of sonic sedition that weave through each man’s playing. It’s a profoundly collaborative product, but even to voice that cripplingly broad claim is to evade the dynamics of contention that enliven and, indeed, define the record. The five pieces and 51 minutes evince a mounting tension whose internal logic begs inspection only after having run its course, interpellating and pummeling the curious into bewildered submission....."

Read full review HERE.

Mammoth Words For A Prolific Guy - Richard Youngs Interviewed On Pitchfork

Tue: 01-29-08
Interview: Richard Youngs
Interview by Grayson Currin
Original post

Richard Youngs is a 41-year-old librarian's assistant living in Glasgow. He and his wife, Madeline Hynes, have a new baby boy in the house, and, since his arrival, they sometimes spend evenings listening to Gregorian chants. Youngs wrote a vegan cookbook in the mid-90s, and it was re-published in 2001 with illustrations by Hynes. Such a life-- steady job, progeny, a productive hobby-- seems sufficient.

Except Youngs has another hobby: Since the release of a solo album, Advent, and a collaboration with Simon Wickham-Smith, Lake, in 1990, Richard Youngs has appeared on well over 100 releases on labels as small as his own and as big as Jagjaguwar. His collaborators include Jandek, Acid Mothers Temple's Kawabata Makoto, Vibracathedral Orchestra/Astral Social Club member Neil Campbell, and Skullflower's Matthew Bower. He runs No Fans, his second label, from his kitchen table, and he masters records by his friends. Later this month, he'll complete his first remix, a reinterpretation of a new Astral Social Club seven-inch.

Indeed, Youngs' massive body of after-work recordings is one of the richest and most intriguing collections of the past two decades. He seems as tireless as he does fearless, recording much more than he releases, he says, and moving openly between instruments, roles and forms. Youngs has recorded exquisite 18-minute guitar-and-voice pieces (see "The Graze of Days" from Sapphie) and puncturing 12-minute electronics experiments (see "Alban Stands Here" from Festival). But whether he's engaging acoustic or electronic, harmonic or harsh, collaborative or cloistered muses, he has gone about this creation with middle-class humility. He's put in a lot of work over a long time, and he's content just to be able to continue working. After all, it's the hurdy gurdy he'd like to explore most in the future: "But they're hard to come by, you know? Cost a lot of money."

Pitchfork: Something that interests me about your career is that it's not a career. You record a lot of music, and sometimes it fits together as an album. In the day, though, you work as a librarian.

Richard Youngs: I know what you're saying. I've always recorded, probably since I was about 10 or 11. I got hold of a reel-to-reel and you could change speed on it. I always kind of experimented back then with the thing. For at least a decade, I made music for my own enjoyment, completely different from any wider public. Maybe a few friends were entrusted, and then, having released Advent and Lake, I suddenly found that there was a public for this music. Other people wanted to put stuff out, so that was quite a change-- a very exciting change. I carried on as I had done before, but I had the opportunity to put records out. A record is a very nice thing. You've recorded something, and you have a record. It's closure on it, if you know what I mean. It excited me. It felt good.

Pitchfork: How do you feel about that physical byproduct of your hobby slowly becoming obsolete? I'm holding a copy of your latest album, Autumn Response, in my hands, but I could have just put it on my computer.

RY: With downloads, you mean? I've never downloaded music in my life, so it's strange. I remember growing up and to get music was really quite a process. I might hear something on John Peel or on an open university program, and then I'd have to make a trip to London and go to a specialist record store and part with hard-earned money. You know, I was cleaning my parents' house for this money. I'm a teenager here. You then get it back to your home. There would be a record player in the living room. It wouldn't be like the computer in your bedroom. And you get your chance in the living room to actually play the record. It made that record something you'd worked hard for, and it was a treat to play it. If you're downloading, I guess your relationship with it is different. Maybe it is more like reading a newspaper-- now what is the music for today? Then again, you could come across stuff that would be really special to you, and you'd play the download lots, I guess. Do you download?

Pitchfork: I do, but, like you, I'm still fond of the physical product. I still buy a lot of records. Holding music is quite an experience, you know?

RY: I think it is. Things have changed, and I probably haven't changed. I'm stuck in the past.

Pitchfork: Do you think that physical tie to music reflects itself in your job as a librarian?

RY: I work in a reference library, and there certainly is a lot of use made of resources that aren't physical. You might have online resources or resources on a CD-ROM, which you don't really hold. But there is the joy of the clunk of the microfilm or a nicely bound book.

Pitchfork: You called someone wanting to release your music "a change." Was it also a surprise?

RY: Oh, yes! Total. This was pre-internet days, and there wasn't the community out there which was easily accessible. Growing up in a small town and moving to Nottingham, which is like a city-- or is it a town, actually? It's a larger place from where I grew up. I did come across people who were interested, but it was just a handful of friends. I didn't really conceive that there would be other people. It was a social thing, something we did to amuse each other-- making music.

Pitchfork: How did it pass to the next level?

RY: Forced Exposure gave rave reviews to Advent and Lake. They suggested that we [Youngs and Simon Wickham-Smith] record them a single for their label. We recorded quite a few tracks and said, "Just choose what you want." Jimmy Johnson wrote back and said, "Why don't you just record a bit more and make it an album?" [Laughs] Pretty mind-blowing at the time. We did, and then he went on to release a couple of other things as well. He started suggesting us to people who wanted to do likewise, which was really quite something.

Pitchfork: Had you simply submitted those records to Forced Exposure?

RY: We were aware of Forced Exposure, and it was a very exciting magazine. You'd read about these records, and the way they were written about, you just wanted to hear them. Of course, it was very hard to get hold of the records, so you were reading about things you'd probably never hear. We were sitting on 300 records, and Simon said, "I'll send 'em. They might refuse 'em." That was that. He just sent them. We didn't know who else to send them to for review, and the rest is history.

Pitchfork: I'm quite younger than you, and I often hear stories from older music fans about reading about obscure records as kids and being fascinated but still not hearing them, even now. If you would have heard the records you were reading about then, do you think the sounds you've made would be different?

RY: That's an interesting one because back then you were probably exposed to a lot less. How old are you?

Pitchfork: 24.

RY: Oh, then you've probably grown up listening and had good access to quite a variety of stuff. Don't think we had that! There was the John Peel Show, and in Britain there were programs very late at night or very early in the morning through the open university. They would do a program on Stockhausen or Gaelic singing. This was stuff you'd never hear otherwise. John Peel played records you'd never hear otherwise. You came at stuff in a different way. I think one of the differences was that there was a certain filtering done for you, perhaps, where now you can just go online and surf, surf, surf away and come across stuff you wouldn't have come across back then. It's very hard to compare times, and I don't want to make out I'm some fuddy-duddy. But I don't download. Actually, as I've gotten older, I listen to less and less music. There comes a point where you get favorites which you go back to. The chance for music to shock you-- like, "Wow, that's something I've never heard before."-- becomes less and less. You don't hunt for new sounds quite so vigorously.

Pitchfork: Do you remember the last time a record shocked you?

RY: Yeah, yeah. My friend John Clyde-Evans sent me some recordings he had made. He went to India for a year. He always played very harmonic music. He went to India for a year, and your expectation might be that it would further mellow what was there. But he started making very harsh, brittle, shrieking music-- very strange. He's released a couple of these recordings, but I've got a CD-R that hasn't been released that he burned for me. I think it's the most definitive take on this period he's going through with music. It's very stately, and there are a lot of quite unpleasant sounds in there. It's quite unlike anything else, I think.

Pitchfork: And what are the records to which you return?

RY:In the last year, I've been listening to a lot of Gregorian chants. I've got a baby boy, and it was one way that seemed to improve his sleep. We just started playing Gregorian chants at night and grew to really like it. In terms of rock and pop, Syd Barrett's first solo album I think I can come back to endlessly. I think the songs are really rich. It's got a lot of beauty to it. I've got possibly unquestioning love for Pink Floyd. It's one of the first things I ever heard in my parent's space. The Meddle album I really like and come back to a lot. When I was a teenager, I listened to Cabaret Voltaire and [Einstürzende] Neubauten, and I like to hear that once in a while now. I think, "That's exciting stuff," but I'm not sure I'd come back to it too often. It would be an occasional pleasure certainly, as would Metal Box by Public Image Ltd. Steve Reich...Anne Briggs.

Pitchfork: I've seen you mention Pink Floyd as an influence several times. What first struck you about that band?

RY: The first stuff I heard was the early singles. The next thing I heard after that was Animals, which was several years later. I heard "See Emily Play," and I thought that was all they had ever done. I didn't realize they had a career. I moved away from Cambridge and someone had Animals. It was very different. I remember playing along with Animals a lot. But if you asked me now what I liked about Pink Floyd, it would be the period from Atom Heart Mother through to Meddle, when they were just four middle class guys making music. They weren't necessarily writing songs or making concepts. They were just making music. Meddle is a really good example of that. You've got your side of songs, and then you've got a longer piece on the other side. It possibly doesn't all fit together, but it's all just very enjoyable. There's that video, Live at Pompeii, and I love that. Again, it seemed to me to be a fortnight just making music.

Pitchfork: The way you described Pink Floyd, it almost sounds like you're describing yourself, in terms of recording what you want.

RY: I'd go along with that. The other thing would be why wouldn't you make what interests you? Why would you make something that doesn't interest you? I might want to sing unaccompanied, or I might want to ram 24 instruments over one another. Whatever I want to do at the time, I'm free to do. I'm not chained to any preconceptions…or having to make any particular type of music. There are songs and more experimental elements, so whatever.

Pitchfork: Does it surprise you then that people still want to put these records out?

RY: I think so. If you do songs and people respond positively, that's very nice. It is a nice surprise.

Pitchfork: With John Clyde-Evans, you mentioned this movement from pretty to harsh music. There are a lot of examples of that in your music, like the abrupt movement between noise and a very beautiful acoustic track on your album with Kawabata Makoto. Is this a conscious thing for you, sort of a reflection on life?

RY: I don't know. I think it's reflective of the way the recordings turned out and nothing else. [Laughs] But life's very rich, isn't it? But I have quite a short attention span, maybe, so I get bored and frustrated. I go mad if I stick to one thing.

Pitchfork: Must be nice to have friends who want to make music with you then.

RY: It is, yes. I have a couple of regular sessions in Glasgow. One with a friend Andrew Paine and another with Alex Nielson. They're duos. It's very nice, and it's a social thing as well. It's not just business. Some people play golf. We play music. It's very much a part of my social life.

Pitchfork: When did music first become a social outlet for you?

RY: It would have been at school. We were probably about 11 or 12, and we called ourselves the Rejects. We had a drum kit built out of Tupperware and meccano, and we had some acoustic guitars which we strummed. There was four of us. They were very much songs-- three verses, chorus. I had classical lessons, and I didn't know any regular chords for quite a while. It was always a bit of a mystery how people wrote pop songs with chords, so I remember struggling quite a bit to come up with songs with chords. I was holding down two open strings and just one fret. I wanted that chord sound, but I couldn't quite get it.

Pitchfork: Did you have the normal adolescent rock-star dreams?

RY: No, I don't think so. I probably wanted to be able to make a different sound than I was managing to make. "Wow, wouldn't it be great to have an electric guitar and sound powerful? Wouldn't it be great to record with a certain degree of fidelity which I'm not getting at the moment?" Those were my thoughts of the moment.

Pitchfork: Have you ever dreamed of at least making music your career? Or, if someone offered you $100,000 for a record, would you take it?

RY: [Laughs] It's hugely hypothetical, but I've kind of drifted into having some sort music or recording career, I suppose. I certainly would be very interested in the offer. I'm sure there would be conditions attached to it, but, yeah, find me that person, and I'll talk to them.

Dusted Allies With Sunroof's Monument To Stochasticism.

Dustedmagazine.com Reviews

Artist: Sunroof!
Album: Panzer Division Lou Reed
Label: VHF
Review date: Nov. 30, 2007
Online review

On what is at least the 16th release under the Sunroof! moniker, Matthew Bower turns in one of his most brutal, primitive performances to date. Tapped in to that diamond point of amphetamine rush where the energy spikes, Bower and his cohorts eradicate any concept of what is forward or what is backward. The music endlessly seeks plateaus, and once it arrives at a new one, it pulls up the ropes that helped get it there, levitating you ever higher and ever more precariously, posing a koan to you in the process: Is it the crest of the wave or its crash?

The evolution of Bower’s sound is one of degree, not kind. He’s tried chirping, flickering soundstreams (Bliss), rickety rhythmic thrust (Cloudz), even writhing digital-induced mayhem (Silver Bear Mist, yet on each release, Bower is essentially sharpening the same knife he’s had for years: a total abandonment to the craggy extremes of feedback, static and other musical detritus. He knows music can be a tactile experience, and he exploits that possibility to the fullest.

His music has long been compared to Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music, so Bower now makes the comparison explicit in the strained syntax of the title. It is half-tribute, half-invocation, the reference to the German WWII tank adding attack imagery to the mix. But where Reed birthed his monument to stochasticism and then orphaned it, Bower has nurtured the idea, doing what Lou Reed didn’t have the will — or the balls — to do: He’s made a career of slaying our eardrums and synapses.

What’s most impressive about Bower’s work is that it suggests a kind of music that lies outside of improvisation and composition. It almost literally forces one into heaps of metaphors and analogies for description, so thoroughly does Bower obscure most of his sound sources and avoid traditional musical grammar. The crush and swirl of “Stairways and terraces descending one beyond another in a stupefying state of exhaustion” is like gazing into the billowing turbulence at the bottom of Niagara Falls. “Etoile Sauvage” seemingly taps into a raw feed of static from the ether, making for an aggressive, burrowing drone. Pieces like these don’t so much erase your thoughts as sweep them aside with an irresistible shove.

Under these conditions, dialogue, interaction, balance, and teamwork are all unnecessary notions. And yet, the two parts of “Slew Plateaus” (“#1” with Mick Flower on guitar and John Moloney on drums; “#2” with noise provocateur Mattin) burn with the most energy and intrigue here. Perhaps this is due to the live recording, or perhaps it is how, with collaborators, the inevitable, elemental movement of the music becomes apparent. It becomes clear that what keeps Bower’s gales of electronic chaos and guitar feedback from pulling themselves apart — what makes it listenable — is not any notion of structure or form; there’s an intangible force, a kind of audio gravity lashing them down long enough for a listener to jump on, strap in and lift off.

By Matthew Wuethrich

Wingtip Sloat Reviewed On Pitchfork.

Fifteen years down the road Wingtip Sloat finally recieves some much deserved recognition.

Wingtip Sloat
Add This to Rhetoric
[VHF; 2007]
Rating: 8.3

As is often the case with concurrent, like-minded bands, a lot of the underground rock groups of the early 1990s felt pretty similar at the time, but eventually splintered widely. Some ventured above ground (Pavement, Sebadoh), some followed unbeaten paths (Sun City Girls, Thinking Fellers Union Local 282), and some ended up frozen in time (Trumans Water, Fly Ashtray). A rare few left behind music that remains inextricably tied to the era, yet is somehow transcendent too.

Virginia's Wingtip Sloat were that kind of band. Their brainy brand of indie/punk/grunge/math, married as it was to pre-computer recording and pre-dot-com slackdom, could only have happened in the early 90s. Yet it sounds uncannily fresh today, as if high-rises and strip malls shot up around the group's basement studio without tarnishing the beer-drenched walls and tobacco-stained bathroom, leaving their fantastic sound echoing there, perfectly preserved and surprisingly undated. You can hear that decently on the band's two later albums, 1995's Chewyfoot and 1998's If Only For the Hatchery. But the most convincing proof has up to now gathered dust on early, out-of-print 7"'s and cassettes.

Add This to Rhetoric collects those artifacts, forging a kind of living, sweating time capsule. As for what it actually sounds like, that's best left to Sloat's Patrick Foster, who in his liner notes calls the perfectly-titled "I Wish I'd Been There to Make It a Cliché" the prototypical Sloat song. "It's all there," he rightly boasts. "Arch/true/ironic song title, stop-start nervous discharge, chaos, self-referencing lyrics, kick-axe drumming, a gut-punching bass, a guitar hanging on for dear life and a ridiculous coda that even made us laugh most of the time." To which I'd add a proggy use of shifting tempos, an affinity for overlapping vocals, and a snarling energy more openly indebted to punk than anything Pavement would've ever copped to.

Otherwise, Wingtip Sloat and Pavement's influences were pretty similar, from the Velvet Underground across to the Fall and Wire and up through the Swell Maps, the Clean and Tall Dwarfs. But in contrast to Pavement's sly dodges, Wingtip Sloat owned up to their borrowings. Hence the inclusion here of their irresistible takes on the Swell Maps' "Read About Seymour", the Clean's "Anything Could Happen", Tall Dwarfs' "Beauty", and, in a nice show of team loyalty, Sun City Girls' drunken "Kill the Klansmen".

But Wingtip Sloat's originals burn most brightly through the haze of intervening years. Their 1991 debut 7", which opens the album, is basically perfect, four tracks full of rhythmic turns, spilling guitars, and savvy vocals. Sloat followed that up in 1992 with a 12-track double 7". Here the band's manic three-minute songs sit snugly next to one-minute toss-offs, much the way a stoned conversation turns profound musings and fleeting babble into sides of the same coin. (Such wordplay was a skill the group honed through their "pre-blog post-punk racing form" Sweet Portable You, which printed stories, rants, and other oblique ramblings under the guise of record reviews).

The rest of Add This to Rhetoric doesn't quite hit the same highs, but it's never less than compelling. The band continually finds the kind of mini-epiphanies that can only come from basement music made outside the sterilizing light of pro studios and promo budgets. That effect is summed perfectly by the album's back cover, a track listing made simply by piling up the individual, hand-decorated cassettes each song was recorded on. It's enough to transport you back to a time when cassettes and handwriting still mattered. But Add This to Rhetoric is no nostalgic reverie; it's less like faded ink than wet paint, still dripping with vivid sounds and ideas.
-Marc Masters, August 17, 2007