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Is John Maus the millennia-bored voice of the almighty? He’s leant his hand to the work of Noah Lennox and Ariel Pink, but it remains hard to tell. On 'Bennington', an exclusive track pulled a while from the new Beater Blocker compilation ('Read On’ for details), stone-throat John looms as he has always done, somewhere above and beyond it all, a spectre trapped in a hidden zone. He's reaching out here though, succumbing to an earth-bound mortal whose "fucking eyes" he just won't forget, aiming a love song down from on high but tumbling in the process, below his beloved, elevating the girl to divine status and sucking the natural order of things inside out like a petty black hole. Claustrophobic swirls of synth-silk worry and toil to wrap and save the fall from grace, but it's too late so all they can even hope to do is swell, spread and brace and try to hurl him back to his pedestal, parachute-cum-catapult, a trampoline for a God limbs clumsy and in tears. How fucking absurd.
Find John Maus kicking around with the busy tastebuds at Upset! The Rhythm, who manned decks at the launch of heart-attacked Ed Godden's Beater Blocker charity compilation (alas we couldn't make it, proof exists that we were here).
Buy Beaterblocker from Phonica here for £7. For more on the comp plus an interview with Godden Read On...
Ed Godden is 21 and lives in London. Last year he was out in Bristol, took too many drugs and had a heart attack. At 21. NPIP imagines that sucked – yeah, pretty much – but luckily for Ed the staff at Homerton Hospital were on hand to guide him away from death’s gaping rot of mouth and back onto the smiling streets of Hackney, where fried chicken bones fall from the sky and street corners are guarded like fires. Rejoice!‘Cept there was a guilt that clung and couldn’t be shook. You can understand I suspect. Watch poor elderly unfortunates trolleyed off under blankets and you can x the usual dryout day guilt something exponential. So Ed did what any young buck with thanks to give would do and made a mixtape. Beaterblocker has 15 tracks from people like Vladislav Delay, Alex Smoke and Dirty Projectors' Angel Deradoorian (as well as the John Maus track featured earlier) and it’s on sale now for £7 from all the best places - Rough Trade East, Pure Groove, Boomkat, Phonica et cetera. All the proceeds will go to the people who kept Godden breathing at Homerton Hospital. Find the full list of tracks after this short stretch of dialogue.
How’d it happen, Ed?
I was out in Bristol for a friend's birthday. A few of us got some cocaine in (a couple of friends thought it was primarily speed - but I've never taken that before). I wasn't crazily addicted to the stuff - more like a payday treat. As the night went on, I didn't feel too ace, but carried on taking it.
And then? Bad times, right?
I got lost – I just couldn't stop thinking how 'hilly' Bristol was and ended up at a random house party somewhere. Eventually I found a mate and asked if I could crash at his house. I couldn't sleep and my chest area felt like a screwed up crisp packet. I was lying down with my head in a pillow for hours still wired. I had no idea what a heart attack would feel like or whether the pain was being exaggerated by my state – I thought it could have just been heartburn so I put off going to see anyone about it. I didn't end up going into hospital until two days later.
I was always under the impression it was an instant, chest-clutching, rushed-to-hospital thing with heart attacks. How long did they keep you in for?
I was in the Homerton Hospital for just over a week, just resting up the majority of the time and having loads of ECG/blood pressure checks and quite a bit of morphine to start. I was very dazed the first few days. I had an angiogram (where they put a wire through your largest artery either via your groin or your wrist - thankfully my doctor chose the latter). This was to see if I had any serious problems, as my Dad had trouble with his heart in the past. Fortunately I was given the all clear but it hit home that at 21 I was incredibly unhealthy - drinking all the time, smoking, hardly ever eating dinner, no fruit and veg, very little exercise...
Sounds worryingly familiar…
I've changed my lifestyle big time, but I really don't want the whole thing to be some anti-drugs campaign. This sounds incredibly corny but... whilst I was going out having all this fun, there were so many wonderfully good natured people looking after really sick people and I just wanted to say as big a thank you as I thought I possibly could.
Was there anything or anyone in particular at Homerton Hospital that prompted the comp?
An old man was wheeled away in my first day of being on the ACU (Acute Cardiac Unit) ward and then another man the day after. All the doctors and nurses that work there, helping people for a living. They were really nice and calm. I don't do much to help anyone else ever, so I wanted to repay some gratitude - especially as my case was self-inflicted. I felt very guilty indeed.
How did you go about getting the artists involved?
I started by asking a few friends based in London and the South East to put tracks on. I then e-mailed Sasu Ripatti (Vladislav Delay) about a possible contribution and he was quite shocked to hear about it, as he'd had major problems with his heart that were drug related in his twenties. Once he gave the OK I contacted a lot of my other favourite musicians and everyone tried to help in any way they could. The whole project's been really fun.
Did you ask the artists involved to write around a theme at all, or did they just contribute whatever they had?
Yes. Some. Due to label agreements a few artists couldn't provide exclusive material, but allowed me to choose anything previously released so I aimed to make it as fitting as possible to the cause. A few of the musicians were on lengthy tours so they let me have one of their hidden gems! So maybe they’re not all related, but I’m just really chuffed with all the donations.
Any plans to continue Beater Blocker after the compilation's released?
A label, I think! The launch on Thursday was awesome. I definitely want to put out more records and put on more parties. I have material that was offered in recent months but the disc was full…
Various - Beaterblocker compilation
Rhodri Davies & Louisa Martin - Soldercup [edit]
Marissa Nadler - Diamond Heart
Marsen Jules - Yara Series 1
Alex Smoke - It’s A Carni Life
Dead Leaf Echo - Anti-Matter
Loren Dent -Winter During Wartime
Vladislav Delay - Raamat
Robert Babicz - If I had A Dream
Abdullah Flex - Tell Me
Ghosthype - Sufferah
Qwerty - Butterjam
John Maus - Bennington
Women & Children - The Wolfman’s Tick-Tock
Klimek Kingdoms - Here We Come
Deradoorian - Grey Teeth (of Dirty Projectors)
No Pain in Pop has been a while enamoured with the artisan pop music of Brooklyn’s Parts & Labor. Recently expanded to a quartet (the acquisition of guitarist Sarah Lipstate adding a flash of naïf charm to a sound storm that was always noble in its toil, drummer Joe Wong mooring the whole thing with motorik anchor) P&L return later this year with a new record. Receivers is the successor to last year’s Mapmaker longplayer, the band’s fourth full album and – by the sounds of new single ‘Nowhere’s Nigh’ – it towers in melodic altitudes only hinted at by the band’s past; cutting a dash between pop and noise that compels us into sundreams of The Left Banke sweating a builder’s broth as there’s laughing with friends in the swelter of a humid city, all good work, cash in hand for some of Tom Wolfe’s “good ol’ boys” as they give up their days to earn weekend money for a short roadtrip to Rockaway. They'll be back in work dead on seven Monday morning though, for sure.
Parts & Labor - Nowhere's NighReceivers is released in the UK on the 3rd of November (10/21 in the US) through Jagjaguwar.
"Ultrasonic music, employing a vastly greater range of octaves, chords and chromatic scales than are audible by the human ear, provided a direct neural link between the sound stream and the auditory lobes, generating an apparently sourceless sensation of harmony, rhythm, cadence and melody uncontaminated by the noise and vibration of audible music."
They’re having boat parties in America! All ‘cross the territories, from Italo-disco glides tracing the very edges of New York to the viney boondocks of Missouri, citizens are hauling bold bodies to the waterside and filling aquaways with bustle and blood, red cells under a transient spell of summer. NPIP, too! - in shilly-shally dock shoes and rolled-up jeans, holidaying in the surf, talking to the faces. Faces to listen to, too! - punk sons of out-of-work raftsmen talking all Tom Sawyer; sons of richer men falling in with the wrong crowd and - better - daughters, chewing on river-reeds and shooting doe; bug-eyed acid kids floating in a cherry-pink spume, vigilant sentries for any angry langoustine and (god forbid) kill-krill. We sang and boister-bought as the light changed over our heads, put bricks through the window of the run-down boat-house and ran off guffawing into the woods to doze like drunken apes in trees.
This is a deck of lies of course. NPIP spent last night on the banks of the Thames, glugging kidnapped cans and looking on as the party boats, pumping stale sound out into the air, pottered up from under London Bridge and far enough past the one that shook ("synchronous lateral excitation") to disappear on the way to Vauxhall or Westminster or Blackfriars, before returning, louder and drunker and, somewhat inconceivably, with even worse music wafting from their tow. YMCA?! Balls to Village idiots. We need our own boat party. Come, Teengirl Fantasy?
Teengirl Fantasy - Customize It
'Customize It' is nascent (not even appearing on this head-turning Dublab mix recorded last month) and it is what's referred to in inter-planetary boat party parlance as 'a banger'. Teengirl - Logan and Nick, two teenage Ohioans who cry eyes and laugh sherbet - bring seven and something minutes of lean dance rapture that's as limber Lindstrom as it is Foucault dizzy-reeling on a gilded Balearic isle, pumped and bruised, utterly danced.
Labels: music
“Death is not final, only a misunderstanding of time.” So sayeth the voice looming above Shackleton and Vengeance Tenfold’s ‘Death is not Final’, the 9th Skull Disco cut Appleblim and co released into the world like a creeping, green kill cloud back in early spring. Having no recollection of a first-hand death experience NPIP may be getting ahead of itself, but as ready as we are to wire up to sub-bass for sunk-eyed excursions ‘round this city it’s good to know there’s something else down there in the dirt and the lost spaces, God forbid us dead boys and girls are ever in the mood to cross bones in a post-life futility fuck.
In truth, Xeno and Oaklander are sweeter than that curse, if no less haunted. There’s something in the naivety of synths that seem to strive to imagine the afterlife and the French language in general that immediately makes me think of death. Or dying, at least. For all the heavy talk, a remarkably sprightly beat kicks along somewhere out back, momentarily homing in on Dan Deacon as he sneaks below Paris to break the fourth wall for all the skulls awake and restless in the catacombs, an oafish Indiana tumbling down through ruins time-unbounded and a cobweb colony to return Trippy Green to whence he came, some neon rogue sat atop the Cotillion shooting looks into empty eyeholes surrounded by kohl, crossing-hands with the happy residue of Guy Debord as howls and screams clatter off distant walls to carouse with the aching, throbbing throng.
'Cèleste' appears on Analogue Electronic Music 2008, the second compilation from Brooklyn's Wierd Records.
Labels: music
Labels: art
Labels: music
…then the broken light came tapering through the gaps in the glass, sun shattering on a pane it’d beaten vivid, first, then faded into an amaranth, cerulean, fern prose that told loud and wry the time and the weight of how things are now. Just another day under the rainbow dome for London’s Gentle Friendly, who awake to find alarms chiming new hours in and old ones away towards the weather and unchecked foliage that creeps outside. There’s a stretch and a pause as bones click and break the silence again, triumph falls flat in the distance, through the din of trees all palm and shawly, in the shape of a paper plane plummet, awesome awesome silent sight and a martyrdom more necessary than anyone can tell yet even if they were watching what you were. Twenty seconds or so of falling and then it disappears behind the canopy before anyone in this dome comes within eyeshot – other eyes watched its descent, perhaps, some distance flung afield, but for now the moment’s passed: dead rocket, solemn somewhere. Still, now a half-thought of weary and noble noise ties together to tear the skyline, cloud-hopping curios with fighter pilot helmets and three grubby stripes that chart the gap between shoulder and elbow like a grazed knee, Messrs Daniel and David stretch out, again, there are drums to bang and ridmic knots to be laced; skyward leftenants, hear dem angels yez?????
Gentle Friendly - Five Girl Night
On a planet ruled by a falling sun everyone is Icarus; dead rockets waxy wings.Across the dorm the prolapsed star is rousing Arch M from however many minutes of sleep was had in between the hot hours. Lobes are still plugged to the loop of grandfather’s music box, the data now battered and worn common as old tape and like they said it wouldn’t by the rise in temp. Through soft hiss melody persists, valiant still as Italian bill-boards rotted and scattered across the plains of the small-hours, bawling and baleful, pen-pal appalling. Corey came from the West coast US four years back to this sinking city, before Bradford Cox’s soul seemed so street-corner.
Brains boiling in skull, '21st Union' leaks out through the ears as a dazed, humid sob, the residue of fever dreams. Sentient in sleep, a beat pulses carefully through the treacherous coves of the subconscious (dread on the right brain, sex on the left) - an intruder! - to wake the puppet with a start. Wiping bleary eyes thoughts turn to the last night and the next night and the swelling tender surf of all the other nights still to come, before they notice the back-turned shadow staring out past the glass, fists aclenched and the brain, stretching its aching bones up and out, makes ready for the day that's ahead and appearing to expand in all directions around it, desperate gills fluttering like young, burning leaves.
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