The debut album from French jazz double bassist Henri Texier, who has worked with Don Cherry, Bud Powell, Donald Byrd, Chet Baker, and Total Issue, and co-founded the Transatlantik Quartet and European Rhythm Machine. Amir is spare and stark, vibrating and volatile with unrealized possibility, slightly sinister and about to burst at the seams. Long stretches of double bass drone, lyricless vocal chants (Texier’s voice sounds an awful lot like a string instrument), and a few brief forays into free-jazz, moments at which the record threatens to break apart. Texier on double bass, viola, oud, flute, percussion, piano, and vocals. Cool, weird dinner-eating music.
[RIP Dieter Moebius] Cluster – Sowiesoso, 1976
This is in honor of the life of the German musician Dieter Moebius, who passed away yesterday at the age of 71. He was most famous for co-founding Cluster and Harmonia, and for his longtime collaboration with Connie Plank.
Sowiesoso (“always the same”) is Cluster’s fourth full-length, recorded over a period of just two days in Forst, Germany, and mixed in Connie Plank’s studio. Compared to their other albums, Sowiesoso is gentler and more melodic, alternately wading through a dense jungle inhabited by robotic synth-chirp birds and picnicking in the countryside. It’s shimmering, warm, and surprisingly nostalgic, as far as Cluster goes, with track titles that translate to “For Eternity,” “The Wanderer” (fretless bass!), and “Once Upon A Time.” Outlier “Halwa,” replete with middle Eastern kitsch, is a reminder that Cluster still deals in the scronky sense of humor innate to so many krautrockers. Closer “In Ewigkeit” (“For Eternity”) is an opiated smoke drift, ghostly and sensual, a soundtrack to leaving the party as the sun comes up, wide awake but with heavy eyelids.
Safe travels, Moebius, and thank you for everything!
Karma Moffett – Sitting Still Within / Sitting Still Without, 1982
Guest post by Gaurav Bashyakarla (Beer on The Rug)
This cassette was gifted to me by a very close friend in 2011 after returning from travels through the great state of California. The album was originally digitized with the intention of being shared on the Crystal Vibrations blog around the time it went defunct. Unfortunately it never saw the light of day there but is here now for your listening pleasure.
The sounds, frequencies and overtones on this tape lend themselves to a stillness of mind and chakra activation/harmonization. Just listen and you will see/feel.
The sounds, frequencies and overtones on this tape lend themselves to a stillness of mind and chakra activation/harmonization. Just listen and you will see/feel.
Double Fantasy – Universal Ave., 1986
For those who don’t mind a healthy smear of cosmic cheese. Molten guitar streaks, shivery synth grooves, and unhurried drum machines. Very sick and very slick. Makes me want to throw on some mirrored sunglasses and drive a silver convertible along winding cliffside vistas smoking an e-cig in front of a photoshopped sunset. Alternately meditative and searingly emotive, this thing is a few pan flutes shy of Pure Moods (a very high compliment). There’s not much decisive information about Double Fantasy available online, but it seems to have been the project of Klaus Schulze disciple Robert Schröder, who was only allowed to release two records under the Double Fantasy moniker because of legal clashes with his label, Innovative Communication. He went on to release many more records under a slew of different aliases, but both this and the other Double Fantasy release, 1994’s Food For Fantasy, are worth tracking down.
[RIP] Susumu Yokota – Acid Mt. Fuji, 1994
Guest post by Jon Williams (synths, Excepter)
I was disheartened to learn of electronic composer Susumu Yokota’s passing this past spring after a long illness. Like Florian Fricke – another musician who passed too young – Yokota’s works frequently evoked pastoral landscapes. Acid Mt. Fuji, in particular, marries the metronomic stomp of Robert Hood with the shimmering pads of Popul Vuh. Yakota’s palette of sounds was always distinctly his own, extending beyond the traditional acid staples found in the Roland TR series to include hand drums and animal noises.
This summer I took the occasion of my first solo hiking trip to listen to Acid Mr. Fuji, letting the drums set the pace as I struggled up the slopes of the Appalachian Trail, passing down swamps rimmed in Rhododendron bushes.
[RIP] Charanjit Singh – Synthesizing: Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat, 1982
We were deeply saddened to learn that Indian musician Charanjit Singh suddenly passed away at home in Mumbai this morning, at 75 years old. His death came just a few months after the passing of his wife, Suparna Singh.
Over the past few years, Singh’s story has been told hundreds of times, attaining mythological status. It started as whispers on the internet in 2005, rumors of a record of frenetic acid house renditions of traditional Indian ragas–but it was the record’s release date that left listeners in disbelief. Synthesizing: Ten Ragas to a Disco beat was purportedly recorded in 1982, a full three years before Phuture wrote “Acid Tracks,” generally acknowledged as the pioneering acid house track.
It took another five years for Synthesizing to be reissued, instantly cementing it as an electronic cult classic. Singh surfaced and started playing shows, largely thanks to the efforts of Rana Ghose. With Singh’s reappearance we learned that he had been a Bollywood session guitarist, that he had bought his Roland TB-303 in Singapore shortly after its introduction in late 1981, and that Synthesizing had come about through at-home experimentation. Singh recounted:
There was lots of disco music in films back in 1982, so I thought, why not do something different using disco music only. I got an idea to play all the Indian ragas and give the beat a disco beat–and turn off the tabla. And I did it! And it turned out good.
We were fortunate enough to have Charanjit play at Body Actualized Center last August (photos below) and it was one of the most memorable musical experiences of our lives. The show was packed and sweaty, with Charanjit shredding through a long and ecstatic set on his Jupiter 8 in a suit jacket, unfazed by the heat. As was their tradition, his wife Suparna was seated next to him smiling the entire time.
Susana Estrada – Amor y Libertad, 1981
I first heard Susana Estrada on a Spanish Bizarro compilation, and I had a time getting ahold of this record–after coming up short everywhere, Maria finally tracked it down for me through mysterious channels, and it was worth the hunt. Perfectly unabashed Spanish disco-funk with lots of wonderful vocal layering, judicious usage of the now-ubiquitous “Christmas Rappin'”/”Bounce, Rock, Skate, Roll” bass line, and enough hand clap samples to make Patrice Rushen proud. From the very limited information available about her (i.e. Google translate and what I can only assume is a photo of Estrada having sex with a robot), Estrada was a big proponent of sexual freedom, and as such, Amor y Libertad is full of drawn out moaning intervals and very, uh, “progressive” lyrics. “¡Gózame Ya!” is a favorite for its warped, weird synth lines, but there’s not a weak moment to be found anywhere. Perfect 4th of July soundtrack, as long as your Spanish-speaking grandmother isn’t at your party! Apologies for the poor sound quality, but until somebody reissues this thing (ahem), it’ll have to do.
Einzelgänger – Einzelgänger, 1975
One of the early electronic masterpieces from the wizard himself, Giorgio Moroder. Einzelgänger (roughly “lone wolf”) was a one-off experiment. Moroder says that about a year after its release he realized that he didn’t like the record at all, and personally bought all the remaining LPs to prevent anyone from hearing it. He seems to be warming up to it these days, in light of “some of his friends liking it very much” and “a fan once telling him that it was very futuristic and way ahead of its time” (that Moroder needed a fan to tell him this is very sweet; thank you Facebook).
Einzelgänger is sonically unrecognizable from the disco that made Moroder famous–the record lovingly riffs on German electronica, and unsurprisingly could easily pass for early, slightly rough Kraftwerk, replete with wandering synth noodles, sputtering vocoder, hazy cabbagescapes, and schnitzeling aqua beats. (“Ich bin der Einzelgänger/Habe keine Fans/es macht mir aber Spaß, Spaß, Spaß…”, roughly “I’m the lonewolf/having no fans/but I’m having fun, fun, fun…” is presumably a play on Kraftwerk’s 1974 “fahren fahren fahren auf der Autobahn,” oft misheard as “fun fun fun on the autobahn” and probably a Beach Boys reference, so there you have it.) Only Moroder could pull off an experimental joke this skillfully. Make sure to bump this on your skateboard during your next underwater pastoral road trip, smoggy sunset viewing, automaton-themed biergarten, or post-dystopian wasteland picnic.
King Sunny & His African Beats – Aura, 1984
Aura was the last album from jùjú music pillar King Sunny Adé before he left Island Records, purportedly because of increasing pressure to westernize his sound. You can hear it, too–Aura is much beefier than his other two Island releases, the classics Juju Music and Synchro System. It’s plumped up and pulsing with drum machines, electro beats, and synth samples–arguably not a bad thing. King Sunny Adé was the first to introduce the pedal steel guitar to Nigerian pop music, and it shines here on top of a dense flurry of percussion, thanks to six percussionists and plenty of talking drum. Featuring a Stevie Wonder harmonica solo on “Ase,” and Tony Allen on drums in “Oremi,” this is not traditional jùjú music, but the endlessly rolling, meditative grooves and the joy are still there in full force. A perfect summer record. Thanks for playing this for me in your car, Kat!
David Hykes & the Harmonic Choir – Hearing Solar Winds, 1983
“This recording was made in L’Abbaye du Thoronet, a 12th-century Cisterian monastery in Provence, where I had previously brought the choir in 1978. The simple harmonic geometry of the abbey seemed perfectly proportioned to magnify the choir’s music and let it resonate within its sacred space. Working there was an incredible challenge: our sensations, our breathing, and even our thoughts and emotions became intensely amplified.”
–David Hykes, liner notes
Hearing Solar Winds is a milestone for the human voice. Much of Hykes’s work originates from Tantric Tibetan Buddhism and western Mongolian khöömi, or overtone singing. Yet in this context, recorded live in a French abbey over the course of two evenings, it’s a completely different beast from traditional throat singing. It’s less active and more drawn out, less human and more ghostly. It shimmers–did a songbird get trapped in the abbey, or was someone playing an unimaginably tiny glass flute? “Telescoping,” and of course “Rainbow Voice,” quite literally sound like light being split through a prism: when producing harmonics, “the voice acts as a kind of sonic prism, ‘refracting’ sound along a frequency spectrum which extends upward from the fundamental tone.”
Elsewhere, Hearing Solar Winds is as much about sonic illusion as it is overtones. Several tracks employ the Shepard scale, which is a “sound consisting of a superposition of sine waves separated by octaves, with the base pitch of the tone moving upward or downward. This creates the auditory illusion of a tone that continually ascends or descends in pitch, yet which ultimately seems to get no higher or lower. It has been described as a ‘sonic barber’s pole.'” Upon first listen, the effect is disorienting and even a bit nauseating, as it’s difficult to understand where you are, tonally. If you don’t mind losing track of your body, Hearing Solar Winds becomes less of an album and more of an hour long meditation–cosmic not because of shimmering synth pads or floating arpeggiation (there are none) but because of its direct sonic verticality. This is the real deal.
Incredibly, Hearing Solar winds is David Hykes’s first album. He went on to release five more albums with the unbelievably precise Harmonic Choir, and five more without them. (Side note: “Rainbow Voice” was featured in the soundtrack for Dead Poets Society.) He’s worked extensively with sound healing and spirituality, developing a comprehensive approach to “contemplative music” called harmonic chant, about which there’s a nice interview with him here. I would highly recommend a rainy day listen of Hearing Solar Winds on good speakers, without doing much of anything else.
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