Radiohead: A Moon Shaped Pool

| Tyran Grillo

A Moon Shaped Pool

To experience A Moon Shaped Pool, the ninth studio effort from Radiohead, is to find treasure in a garbage can. It’s a beautiful rarity in an ugly world that appears when you least expect it. The album’s title alone indicates the contradictory forces swirling within its 53 minutes. Listeners cannot imagine such a pool because, from a terrestrial POV, the moon has no definite shape. It appears differently to us night by night, and even at its fullest shows no more than half of itself. Still, these musicians are up to the task of degaussing their waters in accordance with the phases, cupping hands to receive the wisdoms dripping from Thom Yorke’s mouth. Said pool is as amorphous as his singing, which ranges from waxing clarity to waning enunciation—not one in which to dive headfirst, but to ease into as a hot spring.

If the staccato pulse of “Burn The Witch” tells us anything about what we’re getting ourselves into, it’s that the Radiohead soundscape consists of consistencies. Where songs like this one stay crunchy even in milk, others were born to flop around, boneless and insecure. The witch hunt, for its part, is a red cross of medium and message. The tactility of guitarist Jonny Greenwood’s arrangement ensures that things remain three-dimensional from start to finish. The feel of keratin on woven gut and metal turns this musical inquisition into a flashing light in the neighboring village that never goes away. You stare and wonder into whose hands the mirror cuts, but no change of angle gets you any closer to discerning a face. The slackness of Yorke’s delivery belongs to the furniture of everyday life, where not every contour need be known in order to enjoy its function. The dust gathering beneath it is the ash of a dead messenger swept into anonymity by the broom of overlord politics. The fireplace roars, spottily as in the song’s video, trailing messages in the darkening sky, each a comet falling upward into extinction.

When Yorke paints the scene as “a low flying panic attack,” he hints not at faith but a watchful eye buried up to its pupil in denials of equality. The echoing chorus is a thing of such attraction that the flames begin to feel like your safest haven from oppression.

Electronic reverie and rounded pianism introduce the warmth of execution that butters “Daydreaming.” Yorke extends his body toward the blurry pessimisms of being fed upon and tasted. Boards of Canada-esque distortions yearn for a childhood in which the allergies of springtime actually meant something because they confirmed the platitude of staying indoors. Backward voices and strings snore like beasts grabbing handfuls of their own skin amid nightmares of wasting away.

The accompanying video is a revelation for revealing nothing. Its forced temporal adjacencies of spatially disconnected places leave much to be desired, for desire is its only valid emotion. In such context, dreamers can only be enablers, and at their center Yorke folds as the line “Half of my life” plays backward in the final laydown, very much aware that all of this is greater than the sum of our admirations.

And in your life, there comes a darkness
There’s a spacecraft blocking out the sky

These opening lines of “Decks Dark” reveal a technological anxiety, half-quelled. Atmospheric blotting is a prediction of sunset, a faro-shuffled existence painstakingly restored to new deck order. Yes: decks not only of ships, but also of pasteboards—hearts and diamonds printed in the blood of expectation; spades and clubs in ashes of war.

The song further emphasizes a lingual idiosyncrasy, by which Yorke’s esses emerge as barest alveolar contacts. And it is a song about language:

Your face in the glass, in the glass
It was just a laugh, just a laugh
It’s whatever you say it is
Split infinitive

The presence of choir, however, reduces potential roars to whispers.

All of which explains the acoustic matrix of “Desert Island Disk.” Obsessions with interface magnify the necessity of human language, and so the band must unplug them for hope of capturing them. This dust bowl is shaped in the studio, in post-production, in the very circuitry of the air. It is an affirmation of repetition as the locus classicus of psychological attachments. The feeling of ritual is out of sight, but blasts its Morse code across the windowpanes of the ears.

Waking, waking up from shutdown
From a thousand years of sleep

So pining, Yorke succeeds in delivering a murder ballad where no one gets killed.

A wall stands between you and the destination you seek. It is “Ful Stop.” Peruse all you want for the missing el, but it will always tap you on the shoulder before disappearing. The laser blaster of ambiguity fires a few test rounds in order to gauge the thickness of communication, so that when Yorke exhales he knows exactly how to absorb the fumes on the uptake. He gives it to us straight (“Truth will mess you up”), compressing a coal of the stomach until it is a diamond of the mind.

Like the indefinable moon, “Glass Eyes” concerns artificial organs through which not even light may pass. A skipping beat and arcade progression give this song uplift, so that by the end Yorke has split into multiple voices. His falsetto is a bird on a wire, riding the shared border of floating and falling. “I feel this love turn cold,” he laments, never wanting to close his eyes until he is sure that others are gone from view.

Hence the return of panic, by now a leitmotif, in the self-pleasuring “Identikit,” which names a forensic tool used to draw composite portraits of criminals from a bank of predetermined features. It is connective tissue between fault and compliance. And as Yorke intones, “Broken hearts make it rain,” we think of monetary downpours imparting false images of who we are.

radiohead-photo-alex-lake
(Photo credit: Alex Lake)

The shared continuums of life are those we most abhor: our ability to slaughter, our want for personal gain, and our need to be remembered. Such are the conditions of a fashionable life, also running themes of “The Numbers.” A Jacob’s ladder of strings and strums captures the essence of adolescence in this prickly pear, shaken from its branch by daughters of ruin destined to become mothers of rebuilding, and by whose laughter the gas masks of subjugation will one day be fogged beyond use.

We call upon the people
People have this power
The numbers don’t decide

That this song was once known as “Silent Spring” is no surprise. Its well runs deep and its waters are thick with unuttered promises. And if we walk away from it thinking the system to be a lie, then we have fallen victim to that very thing. Such reminders of our constitutions are vital to holding this album in.

Like the Amnesiac sharpening that is “Knives Out,” “Present Tense” sings from a higher plane. Warped yet utterly literate, this bossa for supernovas thatches protection around the here and now, as if the very term were an abomination to evidences airbrushed between pulpits and podiums. The scrape of fingers on guitar strings is like the licking of a lion’s tongue across our collective backside: it grooms the hairs in perfect correlation but callouses the skin in the process. “It’s like a weapon” says Yorke of distance, which inters its social messages in fears of disability.

An electronica-oriented spin of the wheel lands on “Tinker Tailor Soldier Sailor Rich Man Poor Man Beggar Man Thief,” where at last the internal vocation of thought is given an external wage. You hope for balance between animal behaviors, only to find predatory favor in an indigenism gone awry.

All the holes at once are coming alive, set free
Out of sight and out of mind, lonely
And they pray

Or is it “prey”? For will not all teeth know the stain of blood eventually? If resonance equals proximity, then Radiohead is an abandoned cathedral. And in its reliquary: “True Love Waits,” a macramé of pianos drifting into summer. The lyrics are a skeleton rocked in a glass case until it spins flesh and begins to cry. Yet the love Yorke professes exists in a haunted attic, where he opens a box containing the final words, “Don’t leave.” But leave we must if we are ever to approach this music again, holding a suicide note written in a temporal hand.

The alphabetized song list represents the arbitrariness of order and the systematic breakdown of communication into its consensus parts. More than a critique, it is a critique of critique, a hammer taken to one’s own reflection in honor of the fragment. The interruption of time by space, then, is far more traumatic than the reverse, for at least in the former’s violence one can be sure of having lived. Otherwise, the meanings of all works and adorations grow sour. Day jobs turn into night sweats, and dreams take on a visceral truth. Darkness is common to both, exclusive to its self-imagining, and holds your hand down the mountain path. At its end: a match. And you are the kindling.

Thomas Strønen: Time Is A Blind Guide (ECM 2467)

| Tyran Grillo

Time Is A Blind Guide

Thomas Strønen
Time Is A Blind Guide

Thomas Strønen drums, percussion
Kit Downes piano
Håkon Aase violin
Lucy Railton cello
Ole Morten Vågan double bass
Siv Øyunn Kjenstad percussion
Steinar Mossige percussion
Recorded June 2015 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Mixed July 2015 in Oslo by Jan Erik Kongshaug, Sun Chung, and Thomas Strønen
Mastering: Christoph Stickel, MSM Studios, München
Produced by Thomas Strønen and Sun Chung
U.S. release date: November 15, 2015

At night, a few lights marked port and starboard of these gargantuan industrial forms, and I filled them with loneliness. I listened to these dark shapes as if they were black spaces in music, a musician learning the silences of a piece. I felt this was my truth. That my life could not be stored in any language but only silence; the moment I looked into the room and took in only what was visible, not vanished.
–Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces

Thomas Strønen follows in the ECM tradition of path-defining artists. Even if that means straying from the path one has already defined. Such is the modus operandi of the Norwegian drummer and composer, whose neural wanderings speak in soft bursts of ideas and creative directions. His relationship with the label began on 2005’s Parish, a leader debut whose acoustics stand apart from the electronic flights of his next three albums—Quiet Inlet, Mercurial Balm, and This is not a miracle—as part of the roving collective that is Food. In a recent interview, I asked Strønen to elaborate on how the band came together for this particular recording.

“The ensemble started when I was commissioned to compose a concert by Fiona Talkington (BBC Radio 3), who at the time was curating a concert series called Conexions. The concept was to bring UK musicians to Norway to collaborate with Norwegian musicians. While brainstorming with Fiona, I landed on these particular musicians. Some of them I knew from before and some of them I had never played with. The plan was always to only play this one concert, but it ended up being something musically new to me, as well as a lovely combination of people, so I decided to continue the adventure.”

Connections indeed nourish the lifeblood of this music, which in the network of its composer’s venation flows through human experiences, and beyond them into experiences of the human. Such flexible dichotomies are fully operational on Time Is A Blind Guide, yet another turn of the Strønen prism that reveals fresh hues of collaboration. Beyond departure, it is also integration, as the bandleader explains to me when I ask about its distinctions:

“This particular ensemble combines three constellations in one: it’s a piano trio, a string trio, and a drum trio. It’s an all-acoustic setting with more through-composed material than any other band I’ve ever played in. It’s a cross between a chamber ensemble and a jazz group, and the music was specially written with these musicians in mind. In a record industry struggling to survive and adjust to new ways of treating music (technically and economically), ECM still manages to be an important voice. To me, the release of Food’s latest record and this one shows how open-minded Manfred Eicher and his label are (and always have been).”

Group Time

Strønen’s characterization of ECM is no small one to consider when approaching Blind Guide as an historical experience. For while it mines some igneous influences, it also draws light from aboveground into its balances. One might, in fact, say it’s his most cosmic record to date—all the more impressive when you consider the acoustic matrix in which it is based. As “The Stone Carriers” breaks the five seconds of silence that begin every ECM album, the sensation is of a comet reversing its trajectory to interstellar origins. From this diffuse texture coalesces a steady bass line, and with it the promise of a full groove going forward. Violinist Håkon Aase is an obvious defining presence from the start, one to listen for as the album progresses.

As one track break sets me up for the next, I can’t help but feel the album’s literary nature. Did Strønen have any particular stories, books, or narratives in mind while making it?

“While writing most of the music for this album I was (re)reading Canadian author Anne Michaels’s novel Fugitive Pieces. It’s a poetically written book in which language is as important as the actual storytelling. I’m not sure how much this affected my actual composing, but it set me in a state of mind and inspired me to use some words and sentences as titles for the pieces. The band name is the book’s first sentence.”

Alternatively, one might call this music cinematic in character, as if it were a soundtrack in search of images. Strønen, in his fashion, is amenable to the idea but also has his own:

“I tend to think less abstractly about my own music, as it is the result of a longer process from drawing board to recording session. The term ‘cinematic’ is versatile, and if the music brings associations to other art forms, I appreciate it. But it means something different to me. When I listen to my own music (something I seldom do), I seek ways to develop and improve. I enjoy working with various media and have been composing for theatre, film, and dance. These are areas I would like to explore more and I would be happy to see this music used in a movie score.”

Beyond associations with extra-musical art forms without context, I am further tempted to place this album in the grander realm of its ECM associations. In particular, I am tempted to draw threads of continuity back to the works of Jon Balke’s Batagraf (cf. the percussive interlude “Tide”) and Christian Wallumrød (“Everything Disappears”). I ask Strønen if these similarities are coincidental:

“My writing carries the weight of my experiences in my (musical) life. ‘Tide’ is a baka, a drum signal like the ones used in West African Wolof music. The difference is that ‘Tide’ compositionally goes through a special combination of time signatures and rhythmic modulations, while the original bakas are less metrical. I got introduced to Wolof music while traveling to Gambia together with Jon Balke and other musicians. I like Batagraf and worked with them in my own drum ensemble, Extended Ground. We have different approaches to drum music compositionally, but share some of the same aesthetics. I grew up listening a lot to European jazz and improvised music in my early years as a player. But I’ve also discovered treasures in the American jazz tradition, Japanese classical music, West African music, electronic music, and European and American minimalism. All of these have inspired me in many ways.”

Despite any lack of overall genre affiliation, artistic intent is the constant glue of Blind Guide. The extreme tactility of tracks such as “Pipa” and “I Don’t Wait For Anyone” invites the listener to be a piece of the puzzle. Melodic currents held by pianist Kit Downes are remarkable, complementing Strønen’s palette with comforting ease. At times, a silver-tongued violin regales with stories of long ago, moving in tandem with bass and percussion toward the attainment of conversational magic. In concert, these instruments move like a Rubik’s cube until colors begin to orient themselves along uniform sides.

Whether activated by chance or circumstance, the motivic gestures of “The Drowned City” feel as inevitable as the progression of time, thus intuiting the project’s title. Watery gongs and other submarine percussion give visuality to a lost civilization, while cascading pianism is the only indication of the grandeur that once thronged its avenues. “Lost Souls” treads a fraternal archaeology, matching the thread of a bowed string with the thicker rope of drums.

In light of these impressions, one may feel like this music is rooted in the ancient past even as it looks to the future. Strønen’s view is humbler:

“The music simply reflects my interests and my ideas of music. If I manage to create something some define as new, that’s great, but I’m not very concerned about having to create something that hasn’t been made before. There’s so much good music being made all the time and the last thing we probably need is more music. Still, we discover new elements or perspectives and many of us have a need to pen them down and try them out. So I guess it’s not a conscious choice, but more of a natural process.”

The title track demonstrates this organic quality in spades. Anchored by percussion, persuasion, and persistence, its steadiness is dotted with details in relief: a flower for every stem. “As We Wait For Time” further engages the subconscious with its thoughtfulness, violin and piano phasing like two reflections in search of the same radiance.

That being said, conscious connections to material lives do matter, as in “Everything Disappears (Pt. 2),” a quiet drum circle that bears dedication to pianist John Taylor, with whom a project was in works at the time of his death. But in the end, it’s the droplets of notecraft in “Simples” that belie the album’s oceanic casting, and unravel its hidden fortress of dreams.

As one immediately involved in both the recording and production of this album, Strønen has touched nearly every aspect of its growth from idea to digital reality. Blind Guide is a Polaroid snapshot of the serendipity that pulses through his musical universe, shaken to the beat of an unseen heart for want of an image that can only be your own.

Nils Økland Band review for RootsWorld

| Tyran Grillo

Now up for viewing over at RootsWorld online magazine is my review of Nils Økland’s latest ECM project, Kjølvatn. This album takes an evolutionary leap from his first two for the label, Monograph and Lysøen, by surrounding the Norwegian fiddler with a full band. A beautiful expansion of folkish atoms into forward-thinking molecules. Click the cover to read the full review and hear a sample track.

Kjølvatn

Review of MPS Compilation for All About Jazz

| Tyran Grillo

My latest review for All About Jazz should be of special interest to ECM fans. The compilation Magic Peterson Sunshine chronicles the history of the German MPS label, a vitally important predecessor to ECM Records on which many familiar artists (including John Taylor, Eberhard Weber, and John Surman) made key appearances. This album is a vital cross-section of music history and belongs on the shelf of anyone who cares about the history of jazz in Europe and beyond. Click the cover to read on!

Magic Peterson Sunshine

Lee Scratch Perry: Rise Again

| Tyran Grillo

Rise Again

Lee Scratch Perry + Bill Laswell = a collaboration written in eons-old starlight. The pioneering Jamaican producer and shamanistic bassist have been approaching dub from different directions—one from the past, the other from the future—and at last meet in the here and now. Tunde Adebimpe, Gigi Shibabaw, and Hawkman throw their vocal legumes into this vegetarian stew, while Bernie Worrell (keyboards), Peter Apfelbaum (tenor sax and flute), Steven Bernstein (trumpet), Josh Werner (bass), and Hamid Drake (drums) extend their bodies toward an overlapping dimension in which to sing.

As a unit, these musicians render the studio a portal of insight into the human condition, crafting art as an effigy to be burned in offering. Only they can see the glyphs written in every trail of ganja smoke, swirling and separating into runways for alien landings. This revisionist history of life unfolds like a book not only bound in but also written on skin, burnished by hands whose shapes are much unlike our own. Instead of fingers: attracting forces. Instead of wrists: only skies, cocked to the angle of the sun’s passage at any given moment throughout the day. The compass is strong with this one, for its seeking is bound to the realm of the dead, if scrutinized only by the living.

Perry is a griot on stilts. He drops his beats and words from a higher place. In the rain of his exhalation, one feels a lifetime of atmospheres at play. From autobiography and politics to godliness and metaphysics, his themes interlock across vast spatial and temporal expanses, but always in service of the utterance in real time. It all begins in the narrative impulse of “Higher Level.” With animal wanderlust and anti-parasitic skin, Perry charts a course through this world of hunters and sinners, following ley lines along which Rastafarian secrets, scriptural wisdom, and the esotery of personal experience share borders.

In “Scratch Message,” Werner takes a ride in the captain’s chair, navigating this vessel with religious deference. It is a stroll through the valley of life, in which the waters of tolerance have run dry, yet where the footprints of many travelers before have laid a path of resistance. It is this which Perry follows beyond the oceans of his island and straight into the heart of “African Revolution.” This call of arms to rid the world of arms is a protest in the name of salvation. It bows to the same goddess of groove who in “Butterfly” dons a crown of blessings.

Though the peace cultivated by this crowd may be far from the madding others, Perry’s knowledge of the spider’s web runs deep. In both “Wake The Dead” and “E.T.” he gives listeners a private tour of conspiracy, flushing out toxins of ignorance with nutrients of awareness. The latter tune is especially reminiscent of Laswell’s Sacred System project, an early dub transmission from 1996 that still ripples across these waters. Through the governmental sacrament of blood and fire, he sharpens the blade honed by Perry decades before, now polished by millennia of intergalactic breeding and glinting in the bonfire of oppression.

Perry’s refusal to be pinned down by the weight of elitism comes from being supported and pushed ever upward by the hands of his ancestors. And in the songs “Orthodox” and “House Of God,” the former gilded by Shibabaw’s golden throat, he attunes his vibrational frequency to the rhythms of prayer. Laswell’s bass drops head and heart into poetic comportment, as Shibabaw gives her all to the inner science of these readings, singing with the knowledge that stillness is just an illusion resulting from perfect equilibrium between rising and falling.

Turning the kaleidoscope again, Perry shows us his whimsy, rapping through the televisual brilliance of “Dancehall Kung Fu” and spinning the roulette to land finally on “Inakaya (Japanese Food).” On the surface an ode to cuisine but in actuality a blood pact shared between two pricked geographic fingertips, it is an ice cube on the forehead in summer.

If you want to know where dub is heading, you must understand where it has come from. And on Rise Again, we get both in one circle. But let there be no talk of masterpiece, for Perry is a master, whole.

(For more information, click here.)

Last Exit: Iron Path

| Tyran Grillo

Iron Path

League-of-his-own guitarist Sonny Sharrock. Subterranean saxophonist Peter Brötzmann. Atmospheric bassist Bill Laswell. Former Albert Ayler drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson. Alone, each is a power tower of musical ideation. Together, they blind the sun. In 1988, these free-jazz atoms bonded to unleash their only studio molecule. Now remastered for the 21st century, it bleeds redder than ever.

Like Everyman Band before them or Krakatau after, Last Exit pummels through walls of expectation as if they were made of feathers. From these they fashion a giant pair of wings across 10 spines of reality. As Steve Lake so reverently describes in his liner notes: “There’s no false modesty in Last Exit, no false anything. The group is important precisely because its rush of sound is a heartfelt force. It sweeps away all the fakery that proliferates on both sides of the highbrow/lowbrow cultural divide.” None of that flavor has dulled these last three decades, and if anything has grown more piquant with age.

The most obvious politic at play on the scale of Iron Path is its balancing of opposites. “Prayer” feels like anything but as a growling bass eats into the foreground, one pathos-ridden chew at a time. But as the terminal illness of its build reaches a plateau, bells of immolation toll for those with water. Guitar and drums power through resistance like berserker prospectors panning for untranslated scriptures. And these they find in the proffered wisdom of Brötzmann’s horn, which by virtue of prophecy spews all of its treasures for the taking. So does “Marked For Death” reveal its hidden meanings with patience. Brötzmann’s soloing exemplifies the restraint required to unleash such morbid finality. In “Eye For An Eye,” too, Laswell blows smoke through gritted teeth: a mountain pushed through a chain-link fence, to the call of an interspace chant.

Some tracks are purposefully grounded in the everyday. “The Black Bat,” for instance, bears dedication to Japanese producer Aki Ikuta, who tragically died at the age of 33 as the result of a car accident the year this album was recorded. His restless spirit echoes throughout this piece, in which colors swirl into mournful timbre. Other passages are more obscure and require further peeling of the ears to appreciate. The title track, with its eastern infusions, whispers of simulacra slashed across time, while “Devil’s Rain” finds Sharrock rocking the cinematic edge as Brötzmann lobs the heart of a volcano into the exosphere.

“The Fire Drum” is one of two blatantly descriptive turns, boasting comet streaks of brilliance from the guitarist and reedman. “Sand Dancer,” on the other hand, is Laswell’s electric phoenix all the way. And if these seem too grounded in their spaces, one needn’t worry, as both “Detonator” and “Cut And Run” hybridize aggressive haunts with tidal preaching, until only one piece of advice remains: Structural failures are the birth of monumental impulse.

(For more information, and to hear samples, click here.)

Milford Graves & Bill Laswell: Space/Time Redemption

| Tyran Grillo

Space Time Redemption

The first studio duet of drummer Milford Graves and bassist Bill Laswell, both yielding warriors of their respective dark arts, is a selfless proclamation. Residing in their speech is the yin for the other’s yang, a drop of sun for moon.

In approaching this vessel, one does better to go below decks from the first sounding, interpreting this axis from its crux outward. And toward the end, we have that very intersection in the form of “Autopossession.” More than a title, it is a mission statement by which the body is rendered inert through spiritual process. Being a solo from Graves, it melts surrounding ice, stopping just before it reaches steam. Thought and action likewise turn into liquid. But the drummer’s is more than a beat-driven consciousness, for here the specter of regularity serves only as the reminder of a talismanic past. If the head nods at all, it is because the mind has left it behind.

Regressing a level of reality gives us “Eternal Signs,” one of four collaborative improvisations that include “Another Space” and “Another Time.” Each is a ring linked to the others in a multidirectional chain of being. Drums and bass serve as equal partners, connected by lightyears of shared experience. The energy seems violent in origin, even as it breeds nothing but harmony. A pliant strum or forceful tap: either closes the gate as easily as opening it, sealing terror exhaust from the inevitability of inhalation. The more such improvising develops, the more macroscopic it becomes, crumbling outward in an explosion of planetary dimensions. It is the repression of history, demystified in music.

Yet the most willful approach reverberates throughout the dedicatory “Sonny Sharrock,” which like its namesake unwinds the familiar into unexpected filament. Laswell applies an echo effect, allowing it to float above the ionosphere of influence over which his instrument’s dreams wander. Amid gamelan-like touches from Graves, he adds flame upon gnashing flame, so that oxygen expends itself at shaman’s touch. There is a shape to that fire, one that flits between human and animal with the unpredictability of an autumn leaf’s path. Percussive chemicals seep into those four heavy strings, while the drums eject prophecy from the pilot’s seat in favor of crash landings, leaving Laswell’s branch-bending scriptures to flutter alone in the final breeze.

There is no mystery, other than the space to which the album’s title refers. It would seem to be our own by virtue of our listening, organ-less and multiple, a mirror fogged by the breaths of gods too far away to see yet too close not to sense in the shifting of tress at night just before sleep shades your retinas. But on closer inspection the reflection is that of a star child breastfed on shadow, now spitting words of light for our foraging. It returns the gaze and whispers: Wings were not invented for flight, but flight for wings.

(Available at Amazon here.)