Successless@Vox

Dosh is another one man project, sometimes augmented by guests and collaborators (notably Fog's Andrew Broder, Andrew Bird, Bonnie 'Prince Billy', and others). His usual working method is to build songs layer by layer, armed with a drum kit, rhodes piano, assorted keyboards, and some looping devices. you can get a good idea of how that works in this video.

This track is from his newest album, "Wolves & Wishes," which I guess kind of makes it the title track. I don't have any particular reason for posting this one, other than that it was what rocked out to on my commute home today. A lot of Dosh's work has a more hip hop feel to it, often with slow melodies on top of double-time beats, or vice versa. In this piece, most of the parts work at a similar pace, with swift, overlapping melodic lines on synthesizer and sax over a peppy drum beat, giving the whole thing an unusually upbeat feeling.

Hello.

Is this thing on? Test....test.

So it's been a while. I used to keep up with this whole daily MP3 thing on this here little Vox blog, but it's been *checks archives* just over a year since I actually did anything here. In fact, I was 27 when I stopped this. Now I'm 29.

A lot has happened and I'm not going to tell you about any of it. This is not the place for me to do that, and no one is here to read it anyways (if anyone is here to read this at all).

But I'm going to try it again. As a refresher: this is a pseudo-daily excercise in sharing music. One song a day, plus one to two paragraphs of commentary. New music, old music, long time favorites and fresh discoveries. Novelties, gems, guilty pleasures. Whatever. No promises, I may skip days or disappear completely (again). So we'll see where this goes.

To start off, here is a song by my favorite band from Bellingham. I only know one band from Bellingham (other than Death Cab For Cutie, who got their start there), but still. I can't imagine liking another one better than I Love You Avalanche. It's a solo-ish project that I saw opening for a Northen California band called the Americas last year. Everything I've heard from her/them is super lo-fi, covered in tape hiss and room noise, but the sweetness of the songs shines through, and the layers of vocals are perfectly wispy and tender. This song in particular kills me. It gets stuck in my head from time to time, and I find myself needing to listen to it regularly. The lyrics, the wavery vocal melody in the bridge, the Major lift into the chorus, the overlapping counterpoints towards the end....it's like this song came forth as a fully formed ideal of the solo female folk song. It's also a perfect song for my life at the moment, all about friendship and loss, exciting and bittersweet, painful and exhilirating all at once. I hope you love it as much as I do.

Fizzarum's Monochrome Plural is one of those secret gems, an album that came out of nowhere, sold out it's initial pressing, and basically disappeared, only to be spoken of in hushed tones by the true fans. Comparisons to early Autechre are the easiest and most accurate, especially in reference to that groups Amber and Incunabula albums. Melodic, with some spacious reverb and slowly shifting patterns of clicks and buzzes keeping time. Perhaps in the same vein as Telefon Tel Aviv as well.

It appears that the out-of-print album is available as a CD-R directly from Fizzarum, so if you like what you hear, you can order it online and get a bonus CD-R of rare material.

How's Monday treating you? Mine presented me with 5:30am dogshit cleanup and a dead car battery. Then there was work...so here's a song about that.

You know Elvis Costello, right? Sort-of-but-not-really punkish icon of British rock/pop, revived the chunky Buddy Holly glasses look basically single handedly (and anyone who mentions Rivers Cuomo here gets bitch-slapped, OK?), thumbed his nose at SNL and their parent corporation on live television, produced the first Specials album, worked with everyone from Burt Bacharach to No Doubt...what hasn't he done?

So yeah, the debut track from his first album has one of the best masturbatory euphemisms I've ever heard ("Now that your picture's in the paper / Being rhythmically admired..."), and it should be mandatory listening every Monday morning.

Not sparse enough to be ambient, too many live instruments for techno, too loopy for post rock, not loud enough to be shoegazer/dreampop...where exactly does Seefeel fit?

"Through You," from their first full-length, Quique, rides all of these genre lines pretty closely. There's plenty of guitar here, though it's all blurred and smeared and pushed way back in the mix, and it's pretty definitively non-rock guitar. There's a percussive element that could either be a heavily processed drum machine or drummer in a distant room. It builds slowly and steadily, but doesn't end much louder or more forceful than it began.

It's easy to see the lines of influence in retrospect, but sort of hard to see how they all wound up together. From the minimalism and pattern layering of 20th Century composers like Steve Reich and Terry Riley, to the insistent post-techno ryhthms of early Aphex Twin and, to the rich textures of everyone from Brian Eno to Kevin Shields, Seefeel was sort of a summation of a certain line of progress in the hitory of recorded music, where the focus was on feel, atmosphere, and tone rather than harmony, melody and rhythm. You can hear their own influence echoing today, rippling outward from the experimental territory they occupied, into deeper abstraction, and into more meditative rock/pop areas.

Let's hear it for educational synthpop!

This song is just complete giddy fun, packing in funky basslines, beat freakouts, found sounds and female vocals by Becky Jacobs, the sister of Max Tundra (AKA Ben Jacobs). It sort of sounds like a glitchier version of Prince remaking one of They Might Be Giants remakes of a song from an old educational record. It's typical of Jacobs' second album, Mastered by Guy At The Exchange, which is in itself atypical in almost every way. Carefree, playful, quirky, smart, and above all fun. Oh, and the album is named for its mastering engineer, a role that doesn't usually get much time in the spotlight. I can't think of another example of such a prominent shout-out off the top of my head...

MBGATE was originally released in the United States by Tigerbeat6, the notoriously weird and inscrutable label run by Miguel Depedro (AKA Kid606). Though Tundra's musical stylings are far less harsh than much of the Tigerbeat6 output, his spastic genre-hopping and restless pursuit of oddball ideas fit right in with labelmates like Cex, Numbers, and Blectum from Blechdom.

Even their own liner notes can't resist making the inevitable Joy Division comparison. Well, the liner notes to the recent re-release of most of their catalog on Domino Records. At one point, Scottish post-punk band Josef K was a footnote in the history of independent music from the British Isles, and I guess they still kind of are. The Entomology disc that collects much of their music has brought some attention, and some well-placed press, but don't expect them to reunite for a million-selling comeback album and stadium tour anytime soon.

About that Joy Division comparison though...is it really that apt? Sure, there's a definite dark and gloomy edge, and the deep vocals of frontman Paul Haig are in the right ballpark, but I'd probably place them a little closer to Echo & the Bunnymen. Either way, that's good company to be in, I suppose. Though of course, both of those groups were together longer and released more material (and Echo & the Bunnymen are still releasing material these days). But neither holds the distinction of recording two albums in a single year (and discarding one of them, at that).

Like their countrymen Disco Inferno, Hood has toiled in relative obscurity for most of the 90s and 00s, making music that combines savory pop with experimental material that some might consider unpalatable. Which is a shame really, since it's actually just an acquired taste.

This track is an outtake that was only released on The Hood Tapes, a tour-only CD they sold during their 2004 tour in support of Outside Closer, their most recent album. I'm not sure where the sample that forms the backbone of the track originated, but it's my guess that it wasn't safe to release a song based on an obvious uncleared sample. I could be wrong though. It's a track that could fit right in on any of their recent material, with heavily processed acoustic instruments joining hands with completely synthetic material. Their original sound was more organic, a lo-fi approach to the shoegazer sound by way of cheap equipment and less-than-ideal recording cisrcumstances, like re-imagining Loveless as recorded by early Pavement. By 2001, on their album Cold House (featuring Doseone and Why? from Anticon as collaborators) they had embraced everything from sequenced drums to DSP effects, taking their moody indie pop into IDM territory, where this track is leaning toward.

I think Disco Inferno is one of the best band names ever, especially since it belongs to a band that is completely undanceable and challenging on all levels, practically the opposite of all that actual disco music championed.

Disco Inferno is one of those bands that never really caught many people's attention, but made their mark nonetheless. They were difficult enough to repel casual listeners, yet had enough pop savvy to draw in those with an ear for the unusual. Equal parts nostalgic and futurist, they had a relatively brief career, featuring 3 full length albums and a smattering of EPs, starting from early-80s Manchester mimicry (in 1989) and ending with an odd fusion of experimental techniques and pop structure.

"Even The Sea Sides Against Us" comes from the 1994 album D.I. Go Pop (misleadingly titled, of course). Showcasing their love of sound collage, a loop of crowd noise and waves crashing against the shore fills the role of a percussion instrument, leaving bass, echoing guitar, vocals, and glittery keyboard fragments to flesh out the rest. The noise blurs and obscures in the same way that My Bloody Valentine's guitars do, with a roaring cascade of frequencies that mask other elements. The result is indistinct, yet lyrically more comprehensible than MBV. Many of Disco Inferno's techniques have been borrowed from other sources (MBV, hip hop, musique concrete and electronic music), and most have been re-borrowed by the handful of artists who have drawn inspiration from their pursuit of a singular vision.