Miss Piggy Lunchbox

This is the sweet spot…right where you want to be.  This is the perfect balance between dance hall rhythms and sounds, kickin’ melodies, and experimental glitch work.

Mouse On Mars, a duo from Dusseldorf, has been at it since 1993, so it’s no surprise that their 2006 release puts them leagues ahead of anybody else trying to do this kind of experimental dance-inspired music.  Hell, this album is so good it puts them leagues ahead of just about anybody doing either experimental or dance music, much less just those doing a combination of the two.

Somebody, it might have been Beckers, told me about some study once that revealed that most people like the music they do based on the timbre of it more than any other quality.  I don’t have a problem believing that, given my anecdotal observations of the world and their inferior (to mine, natch), illogical, and, quite frankly, wrong musical tastes.  But it must be a tendency and not an absolute because if it were an absolute, Mouse On Mars, with their scrumptious, sensual sound, would be the biggest band on Earth.  Still, it’s not hard to tell where these guys aren’t the most accessible band.  This album was released on Ipecac, after all, and that pretty much entails chaos and sour sounds.

Otto Von Schirach kept his grooves going longer than Fantômas did before exploding them into blips, and Mouse On Mars keeps theirs going even longer, fully engaging your butt and your heart before pulling your head in the game, taking you from rump shaking to beard scratching and back again throughout the course of a song and the disc.  And, yeah, like most electronic dance music, there are times when things get a bit repetitive, but, again, the sound is so warm and erotic that you just sink into the trance like a nap in the park on that first really warm spring day.

The real standouts are at the start of the disc.  “Chartnok,” “I Go Ego Why Go We Go,” and “Düül” are all amazing.  “Inocular – B” is like a lonesome didgeridoo in the outback played against a thumping, crowded club beat, which sounds like the most cheesy thing ever, but, as I’ve said, the sound is so gorgeous it somehow works.  “Skik”  could have been a great 8-bit video game song, which is a brilliant reaction to the Nintendo generation turning their favorite game music into guitar-driven rock.  Even “One Day, Not Today,” which is almost without structure, is incredibly listenable, with its muted glitches strangely comforting you the way the distance of the world does during the Sunday stupids when recovering from a Saturday night done to the fullest.

Honestly, it’s hard to imagine a more perfect combination of dance rhythms, catchy melodies, and experimentation than this.  You’ve got the perfect mix of immediate accessibility with the relistenability of all of the twists and turns of those crazy blips and bloops.  Both of me love this.

Rating:

Mixers: “Chartnok,” “Inocular – B,” “Bertney,” “Retphase – A,” “Retphase – B,” “Retphase – C,” “Retphase – D,” “Retphase – E,” “Retphase – F,” “Retphase – G,” “Retphase – H,” “Retphase – K”
Keepers: everything else
Filed Between: Bob Mould (The Last Dog And Pony Show) and Mozart (Le Nozze Di Figaro, London Philharmonic Orchestra, cond. Georg Solti)

Intelligent Dance Music, or IDM for short, may be the most pretentious musical genre name ever.  The Wikipedia entry on it, however, describes it in a way that perfectly encapsulates the varied music of IDM practitioner Otto Von Schirach:  “Stylistically, IDM tends to rely upon individualistic experimentation rather than on a particular set of musical characteristics.”

According to Von Schirach’s bio on Ipecac’s website, this album originated as a mix of 38 songs he sent to Ipecac co-founder Mike Patton, who then hand-selected the tracks that make up Maxipad Detention.  Patton’s influence is here, with an emphasis on fuzzy, distorted sounds patched together in musical ways, stuttery vocal samples, and, well, let’s just say that if I had had that original mix and been asked to guess which 18 Patton would have picked, I guarantee I would have known “Submarine Mammal Milk,” which features the incredibly unsettling mix of pornographic loops over babies crying, dogs barking, and cows mooing, would have made the cut.

While this has elements of Patton influence, this is also quite distinct from a Patton project.  Von Schirach tends to keep things moving along a bit more than Patton, there’s less dwelling in deep, meditative non-grooves, and, once your ears get used to the sounds and sound combinations, things almost seem kind of song-like.

In fact, I have the perfect “composer” to compare this music to, but it will mean nothing to any of you and simultaneously seem pretentious.  From time to time I’ll get a bug up my ass that I’m going to start composing again, taking full advantage of synthesizers, sound libraries, and loop technology, because what I hear in my head can’t really be notated, at least not the way it comes to me, and it certainly can’t be played on my piano.  This album contains several songs that sound like the music in my head when I get on one of these kicks.  When I first heard “Rumbling Cork Screw,” I was sure I’d heard it before, but I couldn’t place the artist.  It took me a few minutes to realize that the style therein was first heard by me in my head.

No single track is exemplary of the entire album, especially given its compilation process, but “Alligator Waltz” is the best track and so receives the exemplar treatment.  It begins with a heavy riff that is pretty quickly contrasted by a high-range, melodic, pasted track of female vocal samples, which will eventually become the track’s chorus, for lack of a better word.  The vocals will anchor you when you get disoriented by the rapidly changing rhythms and sound combinations of car horns and muted jackhammers and dentist drills.  It’s a fantastic seduction of the brain, always keeping you on the edge by getting you just comfortable with a riff before taking you in a new direction that’s even better; it’s what Fantomas’ Suspended Animation could have been if they hadn’t just screwed the whole thing up so badly.

The biggest drawback of the album is that it was put together not necessarily as an album but as a collection of styles that Von Schirach could execute on.  As such, there’s no arc here. Furthermore, while some of the tracks are exercises that make for intellectually stimulating material but not necessarily entertaining listening, and while everything is well-executed, there are a few tracks whose aims are flat-out ill-conceived.  As a collection, though, it’s great, from the long-burp vocals of “Frog Gingivitis” to the ominous intro to “Tea Bagging The Dead,” the best-named song of all time, to the Ummagumma trip of “The Seventh Juggler” to the sci-fi soundtrack of “Translator Kuthumi,” there’s something here for everyone.  Well, maybe not everyone, but it sure does provide a lot of descriptive phrases I couldn’t end the review without getting in.

Rating:

Mixers: “Alligator Waltz,” “Frog Gingivitis”
Non-keepers: “Toma Liquido De Ballena,” “Maxipad Vegetation,” “Three Billion Electron Volts,” “Submarine Mammal Milk,” “Translator Kuthumi,” “Swollen Whale Abdomen”
Filed Between: Voivod (Negatron) and Wagner (Der Fliegende Hollander cond. Ferenc Fricsay, orch. RIAS Symphony Orchestra)

I went with this meme just a few posts ago, but what the hell, if it works I’m going to use it. The last time I reviewed something by Norwegian electronic- and film-composer Kaada, it was his collaboration with Mike Patton. Therein, I said:

[T]his CD holds its own for what it is. This is great early morning listening, particularly a lazy Sunday morning when memories of your prior night are still coming back to you in waves. It goes down easy and yet has a lot of nuance to delve into when you want to forget….

The same goes here, with this slow, dreamy set of “film music” that wasn’t composed for any film in particular. You won’t find any catchy tunes per se, but you will be willfully hypnotized by the rich-but-not-dense layers of artfully arranged and composed pieces. There isn’t a lot that will fit on a mix, but it’s perfectly self-contained. Its low points (the lowest of which is “Birds Of Prey”) aren’t as low as those of his debut Thank You For Giving Me Your Valuable Time or Romances, but there’s also nothing as good as Romances’ “Seule” or even the best moments of Thank You. In the end, none of that matters because this album absolutely nails what it intends to do.

And that is actually kind of special, because Kaada’s gone out and formalized the genrefication on a non-genre that had been genrefied. I mean, on the surface, “film music” is music used in a film. And a healthy percentage of film composers will still insist that’s what it is. And they have a point…film composers shouldn’t feel constrained to write in a certain style that is a style of film…they should write what fits the film. (This ignores the gesamtkunstwerk ideal that the relationship be more symbiotic, but whatever.)

But honestly, when I say “film music,” you get an idea of what that sounds like. So despite some composers’ most strident theoretical insistence, film music has become a genre. And what Kaada’s done here is gone and thrown away any presumption that it’s not a genre, accepted the most obvious sonic parameters given the non-genre’s history, and turned it into a film-less, enjoyable listening experience.

As such, this album represents evolution. Evolution from the first generation of film composers in the “golden age” of film who were the pioneers, through the second generation of film composers, like John Williams, who defined it and made themselves stars of film in their own right while struggling to define it by not defining it, and onto the third generation, of which Kaada, born in 1975, is directly a part. This kind of evolution can only happen generationally, when what previous generations created is accepted as a given, only then can it be redefined.

Or something like that. Just be glad this review didn’t take the “what’s a ‘moviebiker’?” angle.

Rating:

Mixers: “Mainstreaming”
Keepers: “Smiger,” “Julia Pastrana,” “No Man’s Land,” “Daily Living,” “The Small Stuff,” “Celibate,” “Retirement Community”
Filed Between: Thank You For Giving Me Your Valuable Time and Kaada/Patton (Romances)

I don’t know what the saloon is a reference to, but the tango in the band’s name is not rhetorical: this is definitely tango. For the most part, this project of Julian Curwin is traditional tango, including a couple covers of Astor Piazzola tunes, but there are aspects of modernity and experimentation thrown in, like synthesized timbres and complex start-stop song structures.

The biggest problem is that there are too many areas where the music gets bogged down in itself with no passion to pull it up. And tango without passion…well…it’s not really tango. It’s the novel composition that causes the most problems. The worst parts are when the songs either hit some jam-band rut or become too interesting for their own good.

But even when it’s not all that great, you’ve still got that interesting to fall back on, and when the focus is on sound instead of structure, the disc shines. The 70’s sci-fi sounds that pepper “Man With The Bongos” and the last 25% of “Intermission” are reminiscent of Messer Chups, and the mixers are must-hears. Even some of the non-keepers have grown on me in the last few days as our recent heavy cloud cover (honestly, a recent eastern- to western-border drive confirms that clouds in Seattle are simply darker and more depressing than clouds elsewhere) has mellowed me to the point of being more in tune with the pleasant but passionless non-keepers. It’s still not tango without the passion, but whatever it is, those tracks are not a bad accompaniment to a chill mood.

Rating:

Mixers: “Upon A Time,” “La Calle 92”
Non-keepers: “Overture,” “March Of The Big Shoe,” “Carol,” “Intermission,” “The Little Plane That Could”
Filed Between: Talking Heads (Popular Favorites: 1976-1992) and Art Tatum (Piano Starts Here)

What a difference a year makes: this CD is a vast improvement over Mugison’s Ipecac debut.

Little Trip is a film score to a movie called Little Trip To Heaven, which I’m guessing is named after the Tom Waits song of the same name that is covered on this album. The cover features rusted out cars in front of broken down homes and barren trees against a cloudy, purple sky, and it basically sounds like the score to a film heavy on those elements.

It’s dark, melancholy, and brooding. It’s heavily instrumental, featuring sparse piano, saxes, Lovage-esque shimmering synthesized strings, and some steel guit, all moving with a slow, smoky groove As a film score, it doesn’t always make sense without the programmatic aspect of the visuals, like when it suddenly shifts from soft to loud for seemingly no reason. So it’s more of an interesting thing than a relaxing, enjoyable sort of thing, but I can dig that.

If I were to judge it on pure enjoyability, it’s a 3.5-lunchbox CD. That’s the criteria I use to decide what gets kept on my DMP. But if I’m to judge it on its merits as a film score and its function as art music, it’s definitely four lunchboxes.

Rating:

Mixers: “Go Blind,” “Watchdog”
Keepers: “Little Trip To Heaven,” “Mugicone,” “Piano For Tombstones,” “Mugicone Part 2,” “Sammi & Kjartan,” “Murr Murr v 2”
Filed Between: Mugison’s Mugimama! Is This Monkeymusic? and Murphy’s Law (Dedicated)

This is the next installment of Ipecac’s 2005 releases, and it slots in as easily their best release of the year. It’s a refreshing listen by virtue of more than just its high quality: this is the kind of album that we in the review business like to classify as a “fun-loving romp.” Consisting of an amalgamation of Russian and Eastern-bloc performers, Messer Chups lays out 45 minutes of their take on Western culture through the eyes of Cold War-era filters and instruments. Imagine the comical exuberance of White Zombie translated to spy music played on Soviet-era synthesizers and theremins, and you’ve got Crazy Price. Clips from American horror and science fiction b-movies dance alongside innovative sound-effect timbres turned into instruments that groove unexpectedly well.

What Messer Chups brings to the table in innovative use of sound and kicking grooves they lack in compositional talent. About half of these 16 tracks work themselves into structures that maintain your interest for three minutes, but when they miss it’s because they stay in the same monochromatic vibe for that amount of time.

The band is at their best when they stretch themselves (which is a better proposition than being better when they don’t), as they do on “A Plateful Brain,” which features a modern jazz piano riff of cluster chords, and “Gangster They Called Horizon-man,” which begins with harp. More of these tracks are shareable than the singleton mixer indicates, but the halting use of sampled movie dialogue (they clearly have a love for the rhythms of English) prevents most of them from flowing with anything.

Messer Chups isn’t just about sound, as they demonstrate with their use of other media. They include five videos on this CD which are perfect visual analogies of their songs, featuring patched-together and psychedelically-altered visuals from b-movies, along with what seem to be some creations of their own. Four of the five videos are of songs not on this album, which is nice because they’re not just throwaways. I really wish they’d included some audio-only versions of them, in particular “Super Megera.” Check it out for yourself:

They’ve also mastered text. Their Wikipedia page is rich, and well worth a read. I’m not sure there’s a single band whose Wikipedia page gives a sense of a band’s sound better than that of Messer Chups. Here are some verbatim clips:

Since 2005 Messer Chups is duo of Gitarkin and ZombieGirl on bass and in 2007 they became trio with drummer Denis “Kashey” Kuptzov from famous Leningrad band. In 2008 they changed drummer to Alexander belkov and became vocalist Alexander Skvortzov.

Messer Chups’ music often features a fundament of surf drums on which they build collages of samples from odd sources, like circus music, jazz, east European animation soundtracks, and American B-pictures. On top of that they lay solos from guitar and theremin. The overall effect is one of loving parody and good fun.

Good fun, indeed.

Rating:

Mixer: “Sex Euro And Evils Pop”
Non-keepers: “Chasing For Young Blood,” “In 3 Minutes Till Massacre, “”Ghost Rides To West,” “Make Music, But Not Trash,” “Monkey Safari,” “Not Made In Japan,” “Good Night”
Filed Between: Mercy Me (…And The Devil Makes Three) and Metal Church (The Human Factor)

What a horrible year 2005 was for Ipecac. It began with the requisite Dälek release, Absence, which was basically the same silly two-lunchbox thing Dälek always puts out. From there it went through a set of mediocre three-lunchbox releases by General Patton vs. The X-ecutioners, Guapo, The Locust, and the Patton-led Fantômas. Then came what may have been the year’s highlight, the requisite Melvins release, which was Mangled Demos From 1983, and also received three lunchboxes. I want to highlight that, as of May, the best Ipecac album for 2005 was a re-release of hastily recorded tracks by noise-mongering teenagers in 1983. From there things got really bad, as they released the 1.5-lunchbox OV by Orthrelm and followed that up with this disc, another 1.5-lunchbox effort, this time by Icelander Mugison.

Somehow this release won Best Album at the Icelandic Music Awards, with “Murr Murr” taking home Best Song. I know there are only like 300,000 people in Iceland, but this was released in that country in 2004, which means it beat out Björk’s Medúlla. I don’t know that album, but I find it hard to believe Björk made something worse than this.

This album has its moments, like the lo-fi acoustic guitar funk (it seems to be mandatory to compare this song to “Loser” and Mugison himself to Beck) of “Murr Murr,” the driving synthesizers of “Sad As A Truck,” and the plaintive sweetness of “I Want You” and “2 Birds.” Even some of the more challenging tracks like “The Chicken Song” and “What I Would Say In Your Funeral” grow on you to the point of listenability after a while.

It’s never enjoyable for more than a few minutes at a time, though, and spends an awful lot of time being down right annoying. “Swing Ding” is just 24 seconds of somebody burping “rock and roll” and “Afi Minn (My Grandpa)” features several minutes of muffled noises that sound like somebody scuffling through a morning kitchen routine. That was groundbreaking in the 40’s and, with advances in fidelity, managed to continue to be interesting in small doses into the 60’s (see Pink Floyd’s Atom Heart Mother), but in 2005, what is your artistic statement here? What value are you adding to the world? How do you justify using storage space for this? What are you trying to say, beyond the fact that you’re weird and different and oh my god there is no yawn big enough to serve as a response to that level of pretentiousness.

I still have a couple of 2005 releases from Ipecac to get through, but if I had been listening to these discs as they came out, I just may have given up on them before they picked things back up in 2006 with East West Blast Test, Ghostigital, and Peeping Tom. I think Ipecac’s 2005 can probably be summed up as a WTF wasted year.

Rating:

Mixers: “I Want You,” “Sad As A Truck”
Keepers: “2 Birds,” “Murr Murr”
Filed Between: Mudhoney (The Lucky Ones) and Murphy’s Law (Dedicated)

From Ipecac’s Orthrelm bio:

Orthrelm’s first recordings avoided repetition of any kind, no choruses, no riff repeated. … With OV, Orthrelm embraces repetition…. sort of.

Sort of? I can’t think of a single better word to summarize this album than “repetition.” This is prog rock meets minimalism, where a short, rapid-fire guitar riff about one second long is repeated dozens upon dozens of times, achieving such a hypnotic effect that when the riff finally changes, which happens about once every 2.5 minutes early on in the single, 45-minute track on this CD and a few times per minute later in the track, it has a dramatic effect in stark contrast to the slight variation of the actual change.

Charles-Louis Hanon is the nemesis of every young piano student, as his technical exercises of repeated ascending and descending patterns are drilled into all of them. Just say the name Hanon around a pianist and you will almost certainly get a visible shiver, as memories of plagues of incessant aural and kinesthetic patterns instilled by exacting teachers are conjured up. This is like Hanon, minus the ascending and descending. It’s just repetition.

Of course, like minimalism, interesting perceptual effects are achieved with this level of rapid repetition, and the listener is left wondering if the phasing in the drums or the changes in accent in the guitar riff are really there or if their mind is just playing tricks on them. It’s very cool in an intellectual, artsy sort of way, but without the proper mood-setting chemicals, it’s not really an enjoyable casual listen.

You can listen to a sample of it on Ipecac’s site here. The intro is different from the rest of the track, and takes up about a third of the sample, so if you make it to the big change a third of the way through, you basically know what the remaining 44 minutes sound like.

Rating:

Mixers: none
Keepers: none
Filed Between: Orff (Carmina Burana, St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, cond. Leonard Slatkin) and Beth Orton (Trailer Park)

General Patton Vs. The X-ecutioners, a project between Mike Patton and The X-ecutioners, a group of three turntablists, is kind of a cross between the two Mike Patton releases on Ipecac that would follow it. As a predominantly hip-hip album, it serves as a bit of a forerunner to 2006’s Peeping Tom, though this isn’t nearly as accessible and the cohesion I raved about in that album’s review isn’t present here. Still, you can hear Patton experimenting with some of the things he would employ expertly the following year.

Unfortunately, early 2005 seemed to be a time when Patton had run out of ideas as well as the ability to concentrate for more than one minute, as this disc bears a lot in common with the Fantômas album that would be released six weeks later, Suspended Animation. Back then I wrote:

The fragments are too short and the intermittent samples are too long. Just when a groove starts to take hold, they cut it short in disorienting fashion. The album doesn’t flow and I don’t feel compelled to keep listening for what’s around the corner.

I could hardly describe this album better. It has its moments, great ones in fact, but those moments seem to be randomly scattered throughout bland, repetitive melodies, a constant shifting from one riff or noise to another, and the same vocal tricks by Patton that were brilliantly original from 1995 to 1999 but are just treading water now. “Chuck-a-loo, chuck-a-loo,” Patton percussively sings, and I drift back to the Clinton administration, when he was breaking new ground with how the voice was used as an instrument. Then, to really drive home that parts of this disc were just mailed in, we get the “This…is a journey…into sound” sample. I mean, really? Really? This sample was on just about every hip-hop album in the 90’s and you…I mean…what the…what on Earth made you think this was some effective way of demonstrating your sonic prowess in 2005? I don’t know, maybe if you were in a coma in the 90’s and wanted to hear Patton’s take on hip-hop, then maybe this would be a great listen.

As it is, it’s merely a good listen, as some of the great moments bring it up just high enough to clear that bar. “Battle Hymn Of The Technics Republic” is a Star Wars laser gunfight on Planet Hip-Hop and manages to out-do all but the first two movies on its own. About midway through, “¡Kamikaze! 0500 Hrs. (‘Take A Piece Of Me’)” is probably the highlight of the album, with its hard-hitting beats and big, encompassing sound…if the whole album could have been that good…well, if wishes was fishes, I guess. Instead it just makes me that much more appreciative that Patton came out of his 2005 funk to make Peeping Tom, which I think I’m going to go listen to now.

Rating:

Mixers: “¡Vaqueros Y Indios! (Joint Special Operations Task Force),” “Battle Hymn Of The Technics Republic,” “¡Fire In The Hole! 0400 Hrs. (Joint Special Operations Task Force),” “¡Kamikaze! 0500 Hrs. (‘Take A Piece Of Me’)”
Non-keepers: “Improvised Explosive Device 0300 Hrs.,” “Precision Guided Needle-Dropping And Larynx Munitions (PGNDLM),” “Convulsive Antidote For Nerve Agent Autoinjector (CANAA),” “Surprise Swing Insurgency/Tabla And Tongue Twist Counterattack/(‘Dragon Seeks Path’),” “Eastside Multichannel Tactical Scratch Communications (EMTSC),” “Warcry/Infrared R’n’B Hallucination/Jungle Operations Exfiltration System,” “L.O.L.—¡Loser On Line! (Hate The Player, Hate The Game)”
Filed Between: Gene (“Sleep Well Tonight”) and Gershwin (Complete Piano Works (perf. Dag Achatz))

Vincent & Mr. Green is like a Nick Cave scene in a Wim Wenders movie. The music is overwhelming you and though you can’t quite discern a melody through the viscous bass, rhythm, and insanely-closely-mic’d vocals, you know that one’s there, but it’s an amorphous, mutating blob you can’t quite discern, coming into focus briefly, only to slip back into the ether. Somewhere somebody in a beret laughs and somebody else with a pencil-thin mustache pensively puffs away at a long cigarette. All is either black-and-white or monochromatic and draped in themes of death, betrayal, revenge, and disappointment, but also a zen-like acceptance. It’s disturbing, but compelling, and if you just surrender to it…just droop your eyelids and bob your head along, or at least nearly so, with the beat, you will reach a higher plane of consciousness and appreciate the sounds surrounding you.

And before you know it there’s a DJ right in front of you laying down beats that aren’t really slamming but seem like they are in comparison to where your now-surrendered head is at, and there she is, as clear as can be, Jade Vincent, the seductive, sultry, elusive chanteuse, you will be haphazardly pursuing for the next sixty minutes in this altered reality laid down by Mr. Green. And thank god, because he makes it all sound so good, so delicious, so palpable. You are now his movie, his creation. He controls all of your senses and finally you are able to surrender to everything, and just in time because Part I ends with Vincent telling of a phone call from Mom about Dad’s recent death, and you descend even further down the rabbit hole into the sonic mindfuck muck of Part II, never to be seen again, like the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey through the prism of a 1930’s French cabaret.

Rating:

Mixers: “Preface,” “Like You,” “Dance,” “Daddy,” “Dance (Part II)”
Non-keepers: “Burn,” “The Green Room,” “Will,” “Transylvania X,” “Once”
Filed Between: Verdi (Otello) and Voivod (War And Pain)