Cosmic, Man

Take an hour to relax and enjoy Stuart Arentzen's "a suite of recent synth fiddlings" via SoundCloud.

Listen in the title link above, or spin it in the embedded player below. What to expect? Let's say you're having a bubble bath with Carl Sagan and then you realize it's not a bathtub but a wormhole that shoots you out of the Milky Way, through a black cloud of dark matter and eventually into a nebula where juggling is encouraged.

Lava, Delta, Bravo

We were going to title this post "Do You Even Have a Blog Anymore?" but decided that was selfish. Also: Shut up.

Portland, OR duo LAVA make the kind of melted-ice-cream pastel pop that's perfect for putting through your headphones as you walk around and enjoy the pink perfume of spring.

Their new long-player, Wrest showed up on Bandcamp on March 6, so we're a month late in getting to this. And for that, LAVA (with delta/triangles where the "A's" should be), we apologize.

Do your ears a favor and spin Wrest here, then realize how deficient your life has been without it and buy it. They ain't doing this for free. Not intentionally anyway.

Things the Intertoobs Taught Us in 2011

Most media outlets publish carefully cultivated best-of lists for the end of the year. Some take it very seriously and that’s fine. Journalists and other media types generally like to argue and debate so making best-of lists feeds that urge.

The Typing Monkey is not immune to such impulses but we simply don’t consume enough new material to effectively create some sort of all-knowing inventory of things we think matter in music, film, television or whatever else.

Like the average jerks we are, we just mess around on the Web and document the things we find that entertain us. Some of those things make it to the blog.

In the spirit of year-end wrap ups and the critic’s inflated sense of influence, here is the first (and possibly last) "Things the Intertoobs Taught Us"

THE MUSIC
A. Dd+ – Dallas-based MCs Paris Pershun and Slim Gravy (!) slipped passed wider recognition. Too bad that, because they’re funny and smart, willing to lob lines such as “surprising everybody, reading a damn book” (“Likeamug”) in the midst of the kind of throwback boasting that workaday schmucks can actually visualize. On their March LP When Pigs Fly the duo was backed by wonderful soul-soaked production from Picnictyme. Grab the free download of their singles-collecting EP Loosies and thank A.Dd+ by paying for a copy of Pigs Fly.

CHRISTIAN MISTRESS – Given the TMI offices are in Seattle we must apologize to this Olympia, WA quintet for not discovering their classic blues-based metal until this year. Singer Christine Davis may have started smoking in the 3rd grade in order to get that voice (tremble men, you can’t handle her). The rhythm section knows when to boogie, when to boom, and the clean, dual guitar leads muscle in right next to the Saxon patch on your denim. Get on this already, they’ve been at it since 2009.

“I’m In Your Church At Night” by ACTIVE CHILD – Pat Grossi, the man behind the name, has released plenty of good music over the past year. This single came out in November 2010 but we didn’t find it until February of 2011 so we’re including it here because nothing else he’s done moves quite like this majestic, crystalline work of weirdo pop. Dig the video and it will all make odd, wintry sense – just lovely.

BELL WITCH – A drum/bass duo from Seattle (again, where were we?) whose funeral-doom rumbles come with uncharacteristic peals of bright, cleansing light in the form of madrigal-like harmonies. The match makes perfect sense and the band gives the six-string bass guitar a home. Four dollars gets you their demo and that’s four bucks well-spent.

NYEMIAH $UPREME -- A Queens rapper whose mixtape Bad will probably draw comparisons to more mainstream/current peers but sounds more to us as if she's standing on the shoulders of MC Lyte and high-fiving Fannypack on her way up. There's a day-in-the-life narrative to Bad that actually works amid the sketches of beats, bass and police-procedural keyboards. Bad could come off as typical "because I'm worth it" aphorisms wrapped in party music. A deeper listen reveals an independent woman a little pissed off that too many men around her are there because they think they're worth it, and more, that she should agree.

“Mountaineer” by WHITE SEA – The video for this single gets the teens-being-teens aspect right but missed an opportunity to craft the John Hughes homage that the song embodies. Soaring, tragic, self-aware, Morgan Kibby sings the lyric “it’s a teen dream” as if she’s trying to reassure a teary heroine, and the whole affair has you running back to give that sensitive rich kid another chance because maybe you two can make something of this after all. “Mountaineer” is pure Kate Bush-style drama with all the synthesizers and crashing drums to realize its grand ambitions.

Worth Following – We doubled up our coverage of SP-33 and XII Boar since we discovered both their free EPs on the same day. The former is Chicagoan Ezra Funkhouse, whose Escape the Carter smeared Lil Wayne vocals onto bleak synth grime from John Carpenter's soundtrack to Escape from New York. The latter is a stoner-metal quartet from England who managed to graft some hardcore fury and pumelling doom onto their resin-stained melodies.

Since then SP-33 has put out a woozy ambient mix and an original single titled "These Moments" both of which show Funkhouse deliberately branching out. Meanwhile, XII Boar promises a new release in 2012 and continue to play around the UK and the continent.

Reference material: We wouldn't know about three of these bands without regularly visiting the essential Cosmic Hearse blog. The Typing Monkey staff also spends a fair amount of time at RCRDLBL, Ill Roots, and enjoy mining for great rewards at Cover Me.

SUPER HAPPY BONUS FUN TIME!

Getting Instrumental, Part III

THIS IS THE END MY FRIEND

These final two reviews in this series essentially ignore the rules laid out by the title of the feature, but just a little bit.

WOOLFY VS. PROJECTIONS
The Astral Projections of Starlight
(Permanent Vacation)
In the 1990s this would have been alternately derided and embraced as boutique music -- that broadly defined electronic music that included other vaporous genres such as downtempo, chillout (shudder) and lounge. A programmed bass foundation, muted beats and swells of synth chords make good on the vaguely new-age/prog look of the cover art and album title. But the Fender Rhodes, occasional Euro-soul vocals and one-chord vamp guitar (heavy on the wah-wah pedal) gives Astral Projections just enough urban soul to make the rotation at a swanky clothing store. Contextually, pills and thrills from the night before hurls many club kids into the arms of this sort of come-down music. For the rest of us, the impression fades as quickly as the ink-stamp on our wrists. However, "Neeve" feels distinctly like a minimalist variation on The Rolling Stones' "Miss You." Weird, huh?

Reference materials: Both Woolfy and Projections serve in the Los Angeles soul-funk collective Orgone. So if the cosmic sounds of Astral Projections feels too scrubbed, Orgone is messier and more immediate.



CIRCLE RESEARCH
Who?
(Melting Pot Music)
Two Canadians take the Beat Konducta/Donuts style of public audition/audio sketchbook to a logical hip-hop-will-eat-itself conclusion. The snake has eaten its tail, and said tail is delicous. But where Madlib, J Dilla (and Oh No, and so many others) have dipped deep into their record collections for source material, Astro and Nik T, the duo comprising Circle Research, mined the major hits of hip-hop's Golden Age. So instead of sending the heads scrambling to find out which obscure jazz break these men looped, they're letting nearly everybody play "name the sampled sample." Clipping Biz Markie's shocked declaration from "Just a Friend" to make the track "Oh Snap!" barely scratches the surface of how Who? works. Yes, these 36 mini-tracks are pieced together from some of the most recognizable rap hits of the late '80s and early '90s, but they didn't just grab the hooks or make a stunted mixtape. Call it micro-remixing.


Reference material: Circle Research might be too heady for dance-ready fans of Girl Talk's extended mash-ups. Anyone who gobbles up Madlib's Beat Konducta volumes, or MF DOOM's Special Herbs series will find much to ingest here.

Getting Instrumental, Part I

MUSICAL COCOONS

The TMI music library has a generous portion of instrumental selections, but very few could be classified as "ambient." As a style, ambient music can be dead boring (this means you, Brian Eno's Music for Airports) or so aimless and that it should really be tagged "pink noise for pretentious people."

Some fans of the form might balk at the suggestion of similarities between indie-approved ambient music and new age music, but the line is often as vaporous as the music itself. Besides, this kind of thing is all about mood and execution.

Here are two new ambient instrumental discs that made an impression, and yes, one even drifts into new-age territory.

NORTHERN VALENTINE
The Distance Brings Us Closer
(Silber)
The sprays of fuzz, feedback and (possibly imagined) overtones created by this husband and wife duo treads territory familiar to anyone reasonably familiar with shoegaze rock, especially the stuff that eschews drums completely. Distance marks the band's fourth LP, with a few EPs and live recordings in-between. Earlier efforts, per the band's MySpace page, have tribal elements. The lack of percussion here indicates a common evolutionary process for bands that produce this sort of trance-like material. "Born Yesterday" launches the listener gently down the stream-of-consciousness with a full 15 minutes of rippling static and drone. A short series of sci-fi pulses breaks up "Dimanche" just after the six-minute mark -- but don't let that jar you. This is ideal listening for a winter commute when it's not rainy or dark enough for something more immediate.

Reference material: If Seefeel's colder, cosmic crop-dusting experiments appeal to you, Northern Valentine will satisfy. And you should probably check out Louis and Bebe Barron's way-ahead-its-time soundtrack to Forbidden Planet.

UNLEARN
Places
(Noise Order)
This Seattle trio provides a perfectly good excuse for laying on the couch, after dark, staring at the mood lighting and waiting for a nice cozy feeling to kick in. "Whiteout" sounds like a medieval madrigal for the well-tempered synthesizer, and as such stands out from the rest of this debut LP. Unlearn uses keyboards, drums and guitar to weave gauzy stretches of chords that sometimes coalesce into twinkling melodies. Yes, there's some soundtrack sounding moments, but one of these guys might own Piana's Snow Bird -- and that helps keep it interesting.

Reference material: Unlearn's press materials mention the "conversation that Sigur Ros brought to the mainstream" but that band's from Iceland and The Typing Monkey didn't understand a word they said. Check out Piana, as we mentioned earlier.


Epilogue: If the suggestion that there's a permeable membrane between ambient music and the crystal healing power of new-age music has you composing an angry letter to The Typing Monkey, please listen to The Best of Hearts of Space: First Flight before you do. Or go to the Hearts of Space Website and read both "A Brief Profile of Space and Ambient Music" and "The N Word" from the "The Music" section of their site.