The Experimental Electronic Netherworld of Basic House

May 17, 2017 – 11:27 am

Basic House

Whether making music as Basic House or running his label Opal Tapes, maverick producer Stephen Bishop has consistently charted his own path. A self-proclaimed fan of both dance music and pop, as well as the fringe stylings his own output favors, the U.K.-based Bishop has varied his approach over Basic House’s releases while retaining a semblance of techno and house music’s core foundation in traditional beats. Not so his latest full-length, I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed by Me, on which Bishop abandons rhythm almost entirely, in favor of creepy ambient spaces.

Fittingly enough, the album derives its title from artist Trevor Paglen’s 2007 book of the same name, a photo collection of patches from top-secret military “black ops.” But as bone-chilling as the new material gets, Bishop also sees the album as a commentary on underground music scenes and their codes. In the early days of Opal Tapes, for example, Bishop initially balked at selling digital versions of the label’s catalog, preferring instead to dub every single cassette by hand. These days, of course, he subscribes to a more pragmatic approach that offers the best of both worlds.

Case in point: The second Basic House album on Luke Younger (aka Helm)’s A L T E R imprint, I Could Tell You, is also available via Opal Tapes in an expanded NOYFB! box-set edition that features a bonus album, Puke Your Horizon, assembled from a blend of live performances and field recordings.

Bishop spoke with us about the new album and its intersection of themes.

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Oliver Lake on Black Artistry, How His Artists’ Group Changed New York’s Loft Scene

May 17, 2017 – 11:26 am

Oliver Lake

For the last five decades, saxophonist/composer Oliver Lake has been a leader in the worlds of improvisation and composition. As a cofounder of St. Louis’s famed Black Artists’ Group (BAG)—a part of the wider Black Arts Movement of the late ’60s and early ’70s—Lake was instrumental in organizing performances by black experimentalists across artistic disciplines. Actors, poets, dancers, and musicians have all collaborated in BAG. After the organization disbanded, Lake also continued to work with fellow BAG alumni like Julius Hemphill, in the popular World Saxophone Quartet. Lake still collaborates with a wide array of groups, using his big band to reinterpret tunes by Outkast and Mystikal, and performing a fully-improvised set at this month’s Bang On A Can marathon.

Right Up On is the veteran’s latest release on his independent label, Passin’ Thru. It underlines his unique way of fusing traditions that are often thought of as separate. The album collects pieces written for the contemporary-classical string group FLUX Quartet over the last two decades. In these works, Lake explores a thrilling variety of approaches: Some of his scores for the group are traditionally written out, while others have graphically-notated sections, allowing significant improvisation.

Lake himself joins the string quartet on three of his album’s tracks, contributing his excitable, instantly recognizable alto sound to the spiky opener “Hey Now Hey,” the avant-blues composition “5 Sisters,” and in the last minute of “Disambiguate.” We recently took a trip to visit Lake in his Montclair, New Jersey home. The living room was surrounded with books on art and music, and was also decorated with some of Lake’s own paintings. (His artwork is also featured on the cover of Right Up On.)

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Big Ups: Deerhoof’s Favorite Bands on Bandcamp

May 17, 2017 – 6:57 am
Deerhoof

Photo by Asha Shechter

Greg Saunier admits he’s a funny choice for an interview about music. For the record, the Deerhoof drummer loves the stuff—you don’t have to dig too far into his band’s nine-album deep catalog to discover his passion for producing, writing, performing, and experimenting with music. But sometimes, it can be a bit too much.

“It’s like the busman’s holiday,” Saunier explains from his home in New York. “The last thing the bus driver wants to do when he gets a break is go on a trip. Because I’m working on music so much, I like to regenerate with silence. I almost never listen to any background music. But once in awhile, if I feel like I need a crutch, if I need some help, or if I need to be in mood X but I’m in mood Y, I’ll put on a record.”

Sure he may not be blanketing his days with sound, but perhaps predictably, Saunier enjoys records where—much like his own output—musicians take risks. Genre purists need not apply. Noise rock rebels and classical heroes alike, here are five of Deerhoof’s favorite Bandcamp finds.

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Casey Dienel Retires White Hinterland and Discovers Herself

May 17, 2017 – 6:57 am
Casey Dienel

Photos by Brad Ogbonna

Casey Dienel likes having rules. For more than a decade, the singer-songwriter has been recording lush, gauzy art-pop as White Hinterland. Each time she started writing an album, she would give herself a set of restraints. “No proper nouns on these songs,” she offers as an example, between bites of pizza at Saraghina, an eatery near her Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn apartment. “Or, ‘No acoustic instruments on these songs,’ or ‘No reverb.’”

She readily admits to having a “Type A” personality. But when she set out to write the songs that would make up Imitation of a Woman to Love, the first album she has released under her own name in 11 years, she decided she had to change things up. She wanted music that was livelier than anything she had made before, lustier and more fun. And, most of all, truer to herself. So that meant she had to forswear her reliance on rules.

Well, except for one. Old habits, etc.

Listen to Imitation of a Woman to Love in full exclusively on Bandcamp Daily: 

“The only thing I really wanted to stay away from was a sense of wonder. A lot of times when there are songs about people’s sexuality, they’re caught up in spirituality, and almost the saintly-ness of the woman’s body,” she says. “I don’t feel that way about my sexuality. I feel a more earthly situation with it. I didn’t want to have anything where I was talking about Gaia.”

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Album of the Day: Brooklyn Youth Chorus, “Black Mountain Songs”

May 17, 2017 – 6:57 am

A heady project on paper translates to a transcendently breathtaking sonic experience on the Brooklyn Youth Chorus’ debut, Black Mountain Songs. Now in its 25th year, the Brooklyn Youth Chorus brings together 500 seven-to-21-year-olds through after-school choral programs in New York City. The Chorus regularly commissions composers to create new works for performance, and Black Mountain Songs is one result of that project. A collaboration between The National’s Bryce Dessner, Arcade Fire’s Richard Reed Parry, and contemporary composers like Pulitzer Prize-winning Caroline Shaw, Nico Muhly, and Aleksandra Vrebalov, the nearly 75 minutes of music on Black Mountain Songs celebrate the utopian vision of North Carolina’s non-traditional Black Mountain College, which operated from 1933 to 1957 in the rural Appalachian mountains.

Rhythm and lyricism prove equal forces in Shaw’s transfixing “Its Motion Keeps,” where circling bowed strings and plucky pizzicato accompany the syncopated chant, “my days, my weeks, my months, my years.” The unraveling rounds dissolve into moments of ecstatic, glowing glissando and sustained atonal harmonies. In Vrebalov’s “Bubbles,” a line from a poem written by Robert Creeley and John Cage—“Then what is emptiness for”—is voiced by a lone soprano, between moments of animalistic cacophony and urgent chanting. The noise soon gives way to resonant bells and a glistening chorus.

The album closes with Parry’s brazen anthem “Their Passing in Time,” which, in the beginning, trembles with solemn minor-key sopranos singing, “With the passing of time …” At first, the line is delivered in solo; then two, then several voices, framed in “ah-ah-ahhhhs,” droning hums and dirge-like strings, join in just past the halfway mark.

This is an expertly-crafted 21st century collage from a vibrant youth choir, an album that celebrates modernist innovation birthed in rural hills deep in flyover country. Brooklyn Youth Chorus’ Black Mountain Songs will destroy you, in the best possible way.

—Katy Henriksen

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