Bratmobile - 2002 - Girls Get Busy

 

Lookout! Records – LK 280 CD  244.09MB FLAC

Girls Get Busy looks like a command shouted through a department-store window. The cover breaks Bratmobile into three black-and-white figures trapped inside green geometric wedges, surrounded by dots, hard angles and hot pink lettering. Allison Wolfe, Erin Smith and Molly Neuman appear less like a band posing together than separate signals being transmitted through the same graphic machine. The design is cleaner and more deliberate than the photocopied disorder associated with Bratmobile’s early years, but it retains the feeling of a zine page enlarged until every cut line becomes architecture. The title is both invitation and instruction. Girls are not being asked to wait for permission, recognition or historical approval. They are being told to get moving.

Released by Lookout! Records in 2002, Girls Get Busy was Bratmobile’s third album and the second record of the group’s post-1990s return. Pottymouth had captured their original collision of minimal punk, feminist humor and deliberate amateurism, while Ladies, Women and Girls proved that the reunion was not merely ceremonial. Girls Get Busy pushes farther. The guitars are thicker, the arrangements fuller and keyboards now enter the group’s once-skeletal sound, but Bratmobile’s identity survives because the songs remain fast, direct and suspicious of anybody trying to define what women should sound like.

“I’m in the Band” opens by attacking one of rock music’s oldest assumptions: that the woman near the stage must be a girlfriend, fan, photographer or helper rather than the person creating the noise. Allison Wolfe’s voice carries the same mocking edge that distinguished Bratmobile from more solemn political punk. She does not deliver a lecture about representation. She repeats the obvious fact until the stupidity of having to say it becomes the song’s punch line. Erin Smith’s guitar cuts forward with a compact riff while Molly Neuman’s drumming gives the track a blunt, almost marching momentum. The song is both declaration and eye roll.

That combination of anger and humor remains essential. Bratmobile came from riot grrrl, but they were never interested in presenting feminism as a school assignment surrounded by distorted guitar. Their best songs carry jokes, exaggeration, gossip, irritation and the quick cruelty of somebody finally answering back. Girls Get Busy is more openly political than their early work, yet it avoids becoming a list of approved positions because Wolfe’s personality keeps interrupting any possibility of respectable seriousness. She sounds impatient, amused and genuinely furious, often within the same line.

“Shop for America” places consumer behavior beside military power, written in the atmosphere following the September 11 attacks and the rush toward permanent war. The title twists patriotic shopping into a national obligation, exposing the absurd promise that buying products can become a meaningful response to political crisis. Bratmobile’s refusal to “fight your fucking war” arrives inside a tight, catchy song rather than a ponderous protest anthem. The bright guitar and brisk pace make the criticism more dangerous because the track can lodge in memory before the listener has finished processing its argument.

The production is noticeably fuller than the group’s early recordings. Audrey Marrs adds keyboards that flash through several songs, widening the sound without burying its basic economy. Marty Key contributes bass and additional guitar, giving Smith’s riffs more weight while preserving the sense that every part has a specific job. Bratmobile no longer sounds like three people racing to keep a song from falling apart. They sound like musicians who understand exactly how much structure their attack requires.

That improvement caused some listeners to accuse the band of losing its original charm, as though women in punk were required to preserve their technical limitations forever to remain authentic. Girls Get Busy quietly destroys that expectation. The group’s early amateurism was liberating because it rejected the idea that mastery had to come before participation. It was never a vow against learning. Here, sharper playing allows Bratmobile to hit harder, shift tempos more confidently and support Wolfe’s increasingly direct lyrics without sanding away the songs’ rough edges.

“Shut Your Face” carries that harder tone. The phrase is childish, funny and brutally effective, an answer to people who treat women’s speech as an invitation for correction. The song turns dismissal back upon the dismissive. Underneath its sneer lies a darker awareness that women are being harmed while others continue talking over them, explaining their experiences or reducing violence to an abstract debate. Bratmobile does not attempt to make that contradiction elegant. The hook remains rude because politeness is part of the problem.

“Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” takes the language of official secrecy and places it inside personal relationships and sexual politics. The title immediately recalls the United States military policy, but Bratmobile uses it more broadly as a description of cultures built around enforced silence. Questions are discouraged because answers might expose arrangements everyone has agreed to treat as normal. Wolfe’s delivery makes secrecy sound less mysterious than pathetic, another fragile system depending upon people being too embarrassed or afraid to speak.

The middle of the album demonstrates how many forms Bratmobile can create from limited materials. “That’s Happening” moves with garage-rock impatience, “Cryin’ Tryin’ Lyin’” compresses emotional exhaustion into a title that sounds like playground rhyme sharpened into accusation, and “What’s Wrong with You?” turns a common insult into an entire method of confrontation. Smith rarely fills the songs with unnecessary guitar. Her playing relies upon clipped chords, surf-derived movement and short melodic figures that leave space for Wolfe’s voice to strike.

The surf influence is especially important. Bratmobile’s music has always carried the clean snap and forward motion of early instrumental rock, but Girls Get Busy makes that connection more audible through stronger production. The guitar sometimes sounds bright enough to belong on a beach-party single before the lyrics drag it into war, sexism or scene politics. That friction between cheerful movement and hostile content keeps the album from settling into one emotional register.

“Idiot Lover” and “Are You Male or Female?” turn attention toward intimacy and identity. Bratmobile understands that politics does not remain outside relationships. Power enters through attraction, expectation, insult and the categories people use to make one another legible. “Are You Male or Female?” challenges the demand that every person provide an immediate, stable answer for somebody else’s comfort. The question sounds bureaucratic, like a box on a form, but Wolfe exposes the aggression hidden inside it.

The album’s title track is less a single anthem than the principle governing the entire sequence. Getting busy means forming bands, speaking, organizing, refusing war, questioning categories and making culture rather than waiting to be represented by it. The phrase retains Bratmobile’s conversational tone. It does not sound like language developed by an institution. It sounds like something passed between friends who have finished complaining and decided to act.

By 2002, riot grrrl had already been declared dead, commercialized, simplified and revived by people who wanted a clean historical movement with recognizable leaders. Girls Get Busy refuses to behave like a historical document. Bratmobile does not spend the album defending its place in the 1990s or explaining what riot grrrl really meant. The songs address the present: war, consumption, gender policing, sexual frustration and the continuing expectation that women in music justify their presence.

That present-tense quality gives the record its strength. Reunion albums often become museums of former urgency, carefully reproducing familiar sounds while avoiding anything that might disturb the audience’s affection. Girls Get Busy does not ask to be loved for reminding listeners of Pottymouth. It risks sounding different, more produced and more openly declarative because the band understands that loyalty to the past can become another cage.

The thirteen songs pass in roughly thirty-two minutes, leaving almost no dead space. Bratmobile does not inflate its return into a grand statement about survival. The record works through accumulation: one riff, one insult, one political refusal and one sharp hook after another. Even the fuller arrangements remain economical. Keyboards appear, bass strengthens the lower range and backing voices add dimension, but nothing stays longer than necessary.

Girls Get Busy became Bratmobile’s final studio album, which gives its title an accidental finality. The command continues after the band stops recording. Its real audience is not limited to people who followed riot grrrl in the early 1990s. It addresses anyone standing near the equipment while being told that participation belongs to somebody else.

The cover captures that transfer of energy. Three women occupy separate panels, but the angles connect them. Nobody stands at the center because the record is not about constructing another untouchable icon. It is about movement spreading across divisions. The title cuts through the geometry in white letters, direct enough to remain useful long after its original moment. Girls get busy. Girls form bands. Girls become better at their instruments. Girls refuse wars, scenes, lovers and categories built without them. Bratmobile’s final album does not close the story. It hands the work outward.

Bernhard Gunter - 1999 - Slow Gestures - Ceremonie Desir (For Heike) EP

Trente Oiseaux – TOC 993  49.98MB FLAC

Slow Gestures / Cérémonie Désir (For Heike) begins so quietly that the first task is not listening to the music but determining whether anything has started. Bernhard Günter does not announce the piece with a tone, recognizable instrument or dramatic entrance. Sound gradually becomes distinguishable from the room already surrounding the listener. A faint electronic grain appears, withdraws and leaves behind enough uncertainty that the next event feels both connected to it and entirely new. The composition does not occupy silence as an object placed inside empty space. It alters the boundary between recorded sound and ordinary environmental noise until the two become difficult to separate.
Released by Günter’s Trente Oiseaux label in 1999, the disc contains a single twenty-three-minute composition dedicated to his companion Heike. Günter described each gesture as simultaneously speaking about her and speaking to her without words. That private dedication changes the emotional character of his minimalism. Slow Gestures is not a scientific demonstration of tiny sounds or an austere exercise in near-silence. It is intimate communication reduced to pressure, duration and touch. The gestures are slow because care cannot be rushed, and because the smallest change becomes meaningful only when enough time has been left around it.
The title joins movement to ceremony. A gesture is temporary, disappearing as soon as the body completes it. A ceremony preserves meaning through repetition and attention. Günter’s composition occupies the point where those ideas meet. Each sound appears briefly, but the careful pacing gives it ritual weight. A soft click, thin pulse or blurred vibration does not function as a decorative detail. It becomes an action performed within a shared space, significant because somebody has chosen exactly when to make it and exactly how long to let its absence continue afterward.
This demands a different kind of listening from almost any conventional recording. Turning up the volume too aggressively can reveal the faint sounds, but it also changes their proportions and magnifies the playback system’s noise. At moderate volume, the listener must lean inward. The ears become alert to the amplifier, the room, traffic outside, breath and movement of clothing. Günter’s recording does not silence those accidental sounds. It recruits them. The composition becomes slightly different in every room because the room is allowed to remain audible.
That permeability is central to Günter’s work. His music is often associated with microsound and lowercase composition, terms used for artists who concentrate upon extremely quiet events, microscopic digital detail and unusually restrained dynamics. Yet Slow Gestures is not small in emotional scale. Its sounds may be tiny, but the spaces between them feel enormous. Günter magnifies attention rather than volume. A nearly inaudible grain can occupy the entire field because nothing else competes with it.
The piece unfolds without conventional development. There is no melody introduced and transformed, no rhythmic pattern building toward complexity and no climax waiting near the end. Instead, the music changes through density, distance and texture. One passage may contain a faint, almost continuous haze. Another opens into broad silence interrupted by isolated points. A sound can appear close enough to resemble contact with the ear, while the next seems to occur at the far end of an immense interior. These shifts create structure without converting the piece into a journey with a clear destination.
The word “slow” does not merely describe tempo. Günter slows perception itself. Ordinary listening favors obvious events because the mind is trained to sort sound quickly into categories: instrument, voice, rhythm, noise, background. Slow Gestures frustrates that reflex. A fragment may disappear before its source can be imagined. Another remains long enough to lose any stable identity it briefly possessed. The listener begins hearing qualities rather than objects: roughness, pressure, warmth, distance and decay.
This is why the piece never functions as empty ambient music. Background music is designed to tolerate inattention. Slow Gestures becomes less accessible when ignored because its substance lies in relationships too delicate to survive casual hearing. The space after one sound changes the meaning of the next. A faint pulse heard alone has one character; heard after thirty seconds of near-silence, it feels like contact. The composition builds not through accumulation but through memory. Every event leaves a trace that conditions whatever follows.
The dedication to Heike gives those traces the quality of private recollection. The music does not describe a person through recognizable portraiture. There are no sampled conversations, sentimental melodies or domestic field recordings establishing a shared history. Günter avoids turning intimacy into documentary evidence. Instead, he composes the conditions of intimacy: patience, proximity, hesitation, recognition and the understanding that communication can occur before language settles upon a meaning.
“Cérémonie Désir” can be understood as a ceremony of desire, but the desire presented here is far removed from theatrical seduction. It does not rush toward possession or release. Desire becomes sustained attention to another presence, including everything that cannot be fully known or translated. The music approaches, pauses and withdraws. Its restraint is not emotional coldness. It is a refusal to force private feeling into a public display larger than the feeling can support.
The short running time also matters. Twenty-three minutes was unusually brief for a standalone compact disc, especially when the format could hold more than three times that amount. Günter does not fill the remaining capacity simply because it is available. The object contains exactly the duration the piece requires and then stops. This refusal of surplus belongs to the composition’s ethics. More sound would not necessarily mean more expression. It might only reduce the importance of what is already present.
Günter’s Trente Oiseaux label was built around this kind of concentration, providing a home for electroacoustic and minimalist works that could disappear when placed inside louder musical economies. The label’s name, French for “thirty birds,” suggests another way to understand Slow Gestures. A landscape may appear quiet until attention separates individual calls, distances and silences. The sound was always present; listening had not yet adjusted to its scale.
Near the end, the composition does not gather itself into a final statement. Its sounds become no more declarative than they were at the beginning. The piece simply reaches the point where another gesture would be unnecessary. Silence resumes, but it no longer feels identical to the silence before playback. The ears have changed. Room tone appears layered, small movements become noticeable and ordinary quiet reveals itself as a field of continuous activity.
That altered hearing is the real conclusion of Slow Gestures / Cérémonie Désir. Günter does not transport the listener into an imaginary landscape or overwhelm the room with a new environment. He makes the existing environment newly audible. The disc ends, yet the composition seems to continue through heating pipes, distant engines, electrical hum and breath. What initially appeared almost empty has become crowded with tiny events.
Slow Gestures is therefore not music reduced until nearly nothing remains. It is music stripped of everything that would prevent the smallest gesture from being received. Its intimacy depends upon scale, its ceremony upon patience and its desire upon the space one person leaves for another. Günter speaks without words, but he does not abandon language. He creates a language in which silence is grammar, duration is emphasis and every fragile sound becomes a form of address.

Belfi / Grubbs / Pilia - 2010 - Onrushing Cloud

 

Blue Chopsticks – BC21  160.55MB FLAC

Onrushing Cloud begins with three musicians feeling for the edges of a room that does not yet belong to any of them. “Hermitage” is spacious but never empty, opening through isolated guitar tones, faint electronic movement and percussion that seems less interested in establishing a beat than measuring distance. David Grubbs and Stefano Pilia do not immediately divide themselves into lead and rhythm guitarists. Their instruments hover, overlap and occasionally touch before separating again. Andrea Belfi listens from inside the gaps, placing drums, cymbals and electronics where they can alter the shape of the silence rather than simply filling it. The piece sounds like the first encounter it partly preserves: three distinct musical languages discovering a temporary common grammar.
The trio formed after Belfi and Pilia traveled from Italy to New York for a Harlem Studio Fellowship residency in the spring of 2009. All three had previously recorded for the Swedish Häpna label and were already familiar with one another’s work. Grubbs brought a history stretching from Squirrel Bait and Bastro through Gastr del Sol and a large catalog of solo and collaborative recordings. Belfi had developed an idiosyncratic approach to percussion in which drums, electronics and acoustic resonance continually exchange roles. Pilia brought a guitar language capable of moving between drones, carefully articulated melody and dense amplified texture. Calling them a power trio is accurate, but Onrushing Cloud removes the usual implication of muscular rock display. Its power comes from concentration.
The album contains five pieces totaling just over half an hour, but they function as one continuous arc. The tracks are not linked through obvious crossfades or repeated themes so much as through the trio’s growing confidence in one another. “Hermitage” preserves caution. Each musician leaves room for the others, and the music’s slow movement creates the impression of a structure being assembled while the listener stands inside it. Guitar notes are allowed to decay completely. Cymbal resonance becomes an event. Electronics gather around acoustic sounds without revealing where one ends and the other begins.
The title “Hermitage” suggests withdrawal, solitude and a shelter deliberately separated from ordinary activity. Yet the piece is made by three people negotiating shared space. That contradiction becomes important throughout the record. Onrushing Cloud is intimate without being comfortable, communal without erasing individual voices. Each player retains a private territory, but the boundaries remain permeable. A guitar tone can enter Belfi’s electronic field and return with its apparent scale altered. A drum strike can redirect two sustained guitar lines without becoming a conventional rhythmic command.
“Nitrated Out” tightens the atmosphere. The title suggests an image exposed, chemically altered or burned away through photographic treatment. The music becomes sharper and more compressed, with guitar gestures appearing in quick, angular relationships. Belfi’s percussion begins to establish a firmer pulse, but the track never settles into an ordinary groove. Rhythm arrives as a sequence of pressures and interruptions. A cymbal opens space; a drum closes it; an electronic vibration continues underneath both.
The brevity of “Nitrated Out” makes it feel like a flash of overexposed film between the larger structures surrounding it. Grubbs and Pilia’s guitars sometimes sound almost identical, two clean electric lines meeting in the same register. At other moments, their differences become obvious. One instrument may produce a dry, sharply defined figure while the other spreads into sustain and feedback. The pleasure comes from hearing those identities continually exchange positions.
“City Rats on a Mountain Pass” provides the album’s closest approach to a stable rhythm. Belfi’s drumming is patient and understated, giving the guitars a moving ground without forcing them into a rigid pattern. Grubbs adds piano accents that arrive with unusual weight because the album has been dominated by strings, metal and electronics. Each chord seems to drop vertically through the piece, briefly organizing the surrounding material before the guitars begin drifting again.
The title introduces figures displaced from their proper environment. City rats belong in alleys, tunnels and dense human infrastructure, not on an exposed mountain road. The image is comic, but it also carries vulnerability. Urban instincts offer little protection against altitude, weather and open distance. The trio’s music creates a similar displacement. The instrumentation suggests a rock band, but the familiar habits of rock music have been removed. Drums do not guarantee momentum, guitars do not promise riffs and piano does not provide harmonic reassurance.
The title track finally introduces Grubbs’s voice. Its arrival after nearly sixteen instrumental minutes feels significant without becoming theatrical. He sings in a calm, measured register, describing travelers stranded on a mountain as an approaching storm reorganizes the world around them. The lyrics are concise, allowing the instruments to supply the scale and danger that the words deliberately understate. Lightning creates a moment of suspension, and events demand complete attention.
That description also explains the trio’s method. Onrushing Cloud is music built from attention under changing conditions. The players do not attempt to dominate the storm or convert it into dramatic spectacle. They notice the exact moment when the atmosphere shifts. Belfi’s percussion gathers force while the guitars thicken around the voice, but the song retains a peculiar stillness at its center. The cloud rushes forward; the people beneath it can only watch, listen and adjust.
Grubbs’s singing gives the album a temporary human scale. Until this point, the music could be heard as abstract relationships between sound, space and time. The voice reveals that the landscape has contained bodies all along. Yet the singer does not become a heroic narrator standing above the instruments. His words are surrounded by guitar resonance and electronic weather, another fragile signal inside a much larger system.
“Lightning Vault” closes the record with its longest and most expansive piece. The title joins sudden electrical discharge to an enclosed chamber, suggesting lightning captured inside architecture. The trio gradually increases density without abandoning detail. Belfi’s drums become more forceful, Pilia and Grubbs build overlapping guitar fields, and the album’s earlier restraint begins releasing stored energy. Still, the piece avoids the predictable post-rock climb toward one overwhelming climax.
Instead, intensity appears in waves. A guitar figure gains volume, encounters another layer and then withdraws. Percussion pushes forward before dropping back into scattered impacts. Electronics occupy the air between instruments, making the whole performance feel larger than three people while never obscuring their individual actions. The vault does not explode. It contains repeated flashes, each briefly illuminating a different part of the structure.
The production preserves a remarkable sense of physical space. Instruments sound close enough to reveal touch, yet the reverberation around them implies a much broader environment. Belfi’s cymbals carry long tails, while guitar notes can appear dry in one moment and distant in the next. This shifting perspective gives the album its cloudlike quality. The music has recognizable edges, but those edges continually dissolve and reform.
Onrushing Cloud belongs to a tradition of experimental rock that treats improvisation and composition as overlapping activities rather than opposing methods. The five tracks possess clear identities and deliberate shapes, but their internal life depends upon reaction. No instrument merely executes a fixed role. Every gesture changes what becomes possible for the other two players.
That responsiveness prevents the album’s restraint from becoming polite. The musicians leave space because space increases consequence. One piano chord can redirect an entire passage. A single snare hit can feel violent after several seconds of suspended guitar. A voice entering late in the record can suddenly transform abstract sound into weather experienced by human bodies.
The album ends without clearing the sky. “Lightning Vault” spends its final minutes holding energy inside shifting layers, then releases the listener without a grand resolution. The storm has passed through the music, but no one announces that safety has returned. What remains is the heightened perception produced by exposure: every sound separated by distance, every movement carrying consequence, and three musicians discovering that a power trio can become most powerful when nobody insists upon standing at its center.

Alexander Tucker - 2012 - Third Mouth

 

Thrill Jockey – THRILL 297  215.67MB FLAC

Third Mouth opens with a dried seahorse resting inside the shell of a hand, a small dead creature preserved as an object of wonder. Alexander Tucker takes that image and quietly constructs the entire album around it. The songs are filled with things held, remembered, altered and examined after their original purpose has become uncertain. Acoustic guitar, cello, bass, synthesizer and tape manipulation gather around Tucker’s voice without settling into ordinary folk-rock arrangements. Every recognizable object seems to possess a second existence just beneath its surface. A melody can behave like a memory of itself, and a voice can divide into companions that may be harmonies, ghosts or further versions of the singer.

“A Dried Seahorse” initially appears to offer a clear entrance. Tucker’s acoustic guitar establishes a gently revolving pattern while his voice arrives with an intimacy that suggests somebody recalling the contents of a room. The song was connected to memories of his father’s shed, a place where tools, shells and forgotten objects could acquire private meanings simply by remaining undisturbed. Yet Tucker refuses straightforward nostalgia. Strings gather around the melody, and the arrangement begins loosening from ordinary domestic scale. The shed becomes a cabinet of curiosities whose walls continue expanding.

This movement from physical object to unstable inner landscape defines Third Mouth. Tucker’s lyrics rarely explain their images through conventional stories. Seahorses, windows, branches, stone and invented names appear as fragments within a private mythology. They feel specific enough to have been recovered from actual experience, but their connections remain dreamlike. The listener receives the emotional pressure of memory without being given a complete account of what happened.

“The Glass Axe” deepens that contradiction. An axe is designed for impact, but glass promises fracture at the first serious blow. The title creates an impossible tool, beautiful and dangerous because it cannot perform its function without destroying itself. Tucker’s music behaves similarly. His voice is rich and controlled, yet the arrangement surrounding it continually threatens to break into drone, dissonance or electronic blur. Acoustic strings establish a song, then amplified layers stretch the song until its edges become difficult to locate.

At more than seven minutes, “The Glass Axe” gives repetition enough time to alter perception. Tucker does not repeat a phrase simply to reinforce a chorus. Each return arrives with a slightly different atmosphere as cello, guitar and processed sound accumulate around it. The song seems to remember its own beginning incorrectly. What first sounded solid becomes translucent, and the listener gradually realizes that the apparent structure was always more fragile than it appeared.

“Mullioned View” brings architecture into the album’s language. A mullioned window divides one field of vision into several framed sections. The same landscape remains outside, but it is broken into separate images by the structure through which it is seen. Tucker’s layered vocals work in much the same way. His voice multiplies across the stereo field, with Frances Morgan adding harmonies that make the song feel occupied by several observers looking through adjacent panes. The voices join without becoming one unified choir. Their small differences preserve distance.

Third Mouth is often described as psychedelic folk, but Tucker’s psychedelia does not depend upon colorful excess or extended guitar soloing. It arises from unstable perspective. Instruments change apparent size. A voice recorded close to the microphone can suddenly seem to come from behind the listener. A delicate plucked figure expands into a broad drone, then contracts again before the transformation can be fully understood. The songs remain compact, but the rooms inside them keep changing dimensions.

“Window Sill” reduces the scale after the larger movements of “The Glass Axe” and “Mullioned View.” The sill is not the window itself but the narrow ledge beneath it, a place where objects gather and where the interior meets the outside world. Tucker’s arrangement occupies that threshold. Soft vocal layers and restrained electronics hover around a simple melodic center, creating music that feels suspended between song and environment. Nothing forces the piece toward a climax. Its power comes from remaining poised at the edge of departure.

“Andromeon” moves farther from recognizable geography. The title sounds astronomical, technological or invented, and the music responds with an almost weightless electronic atmosphere. Tucker’s acoustic origins remain audible, but the instruments have been processed into a smooth, drifting field. The voice becomes another current within it rather than the central narrator. This is not outer space represented through grand synthesizer chords. It is a smaller, more intimate cosmos, discovered by magnifying the space between breath, string vibration and magnetic tape.

The brief “Amon Hen” interrupts that drift with sharper angles. Its title recalls the hill of sight from Tolkien’s Middle-earth, a place from which distant events can be perceived, but Tucker avoids fantasy illustration. The piece is compact, dark and unusually abrasive, a black shard placed between the album’s softer surfaces. Guitar and electronics form a jagged structure whose violence is intensified by its brevity. It arrives, cuts through the atmosphere and vanishes before the record can comfortably absorb it.

That interruption prevents Third Mouth from becoming a purely pastoral object. Tucker’s music may contain acoustic instruments, natural images and the damp atmosphere of English landscapes, but nature here is never harmless. Forests conceal, stones preserve, windows divide and small dead creatures carry memories beyond their apparent scale. The pastoral world is full of thresholds through which something unfamiliar might enter.

“Rh” closes the album with another long piece and another title reduced almost to code. The letters might indicate blood type, chemistry, initials or nothing that can be translated from outside Tucker’s private system. After an album filled with suggestive objects, this final abbreviation refuses even the partial clarity of an image. The music responds by gathering earlier methods into a slow, layered conclusion. Acoustic guitar, sustained strings, voice and electronic processing overlap until the distinction between composition and atmosphere nearly disappears.

Tucker’s background helps explain the album’s unusual balance. Before developing his solo work, he played in the hardcore group Suction and later moved through drone, improvisation, tape collage and collaborations including Imbogodom and Grumbling Fur. Third Mouth does not abandon those experimental practices in favor of conventional songwriting. It places song structure inside them. Tucker uses a verse or vocal melody as source material that can be copied, stretched and rearranged just as freely as a tape loop or sustained guitar tone.

The album was written across approximately twelve months and followed Dorwytch by only a year, eventually becoming the middle part of a loose trilogy completed by Don’t Look Away. Tucker later described these records as a movement toward clearer, more traditional compositions while retaining his desire to manipulate source material into unfamiliar shapes. Third Mouth occupies the most delicately balanced point in that movement. The songs are memorable enough to survive independently, yet none remains untouched by the studio processes surrounding it.

The title suggests a voice beyond the ordinary pair of mouths involved in communication. There is the singer, the listener and then a third mouth produced by recording itself. That third mouth repeats speech without owning a body. It can layer one voice into several, preserve a performance after the singer has left and make private memories available to strangers. Throughout the album, Tucker seems fascinated by this artificial speaker and suspicious of it. Recording preserves, but it also transforms.

Third Mouth remains warm despite its strangeness. Tucker never treats experimentation as a barrier placed between emotion and the listener. The electronics, drones and edits deepen the songs’ intimacy because they reproduce the instability of remembering. Objects become larger than their physical dimensions. Rooms contain earlier versions of the people who entered them. A dried seahorse survives as a fragile shape long after its living environment has disappeared.

The album ends without solving any of its images. The glass axe remains unusable, the divided window continues framing several views and the third mouth keeps speaking after the first two have gone quiet. Tucker’s achievement is making that uncertainty feel welcoming. Third Mouth does not ask the listener to decode a private mythology correctly. It invites them to enter, handle the objects carefully and notice how every familiar surface opens into another room.

Akira Sakata & Chikamorachi - 2009 - Friendly Pants

 

Family Vineyard – FV66  371.45MB FLAC

Friendly Pants opens as if the musicians have been dropped into the middle of an argument that has already become exhilarating. Akira Sakata’s alto saxophone enters with a cry that is too concentrated to be called an introduction, while Chris Corsano’s drums scatter impacts around him and Darin Gray’s acoustic bass rises from beneath the collision with thick, bowed resistance. Nothing waits for a theme to be formally announced. The trio begins at full attention, each player reacting to several possibilities at once. The title may sound goofy, but the music wears its friendliness like somebody grinning while sprinting directly through a wall.
The album paired Sakata with Chikamorachi, the rhythm-section duo of Corsano and Gray, and became his first American release in more than twenty years. It was produced by Jim O’Rourke and issued by Family Vineyard in 2009, containing six performances spread across nearly an hour. Sakata was sixty-five when it appeared, but nothing in his playing suggests a respected veteran cautiously entering a younger improvisational scene. He sounds delighted by danger. Chikamorachi does not accompany him with respectful restraint. Corsano and Gray create the kind of unstable ground that invites Sakata to leap harder.
The opening title piece immediately demonstrates why this combination works. Sakata’s alto can produce a broad, almost vocalized tone, carrying melody, abrasion and laughter within the same phrase. He may begin with a recognizable line, squeeze it until the pitch breaks, then emerge on the other side with something unexpectedly tender. Corsano refuses the ordinary distinction between keeping time and making texture. His cymbals hiss, shimmer and crack while the drums create bursts of momentum that can disappear before they settle into meter. Gray provides weight without functioning as a stationary anchor. His bass walks, groans, bows and pushes, continually changing the direction of the floor.
Free jazz is often described through conflict, but Friendly Pants is strongest when heard as cooperation operating at dangerous speed. The musicians interrupt one another because they are listening closely enough to recognize when interruption will be useful. A saxophone phrase may be cut open by a snare impact, but Sakata uses that impact to redirect the line. Gray can place one immense bass note beneath a frantic passage and suddenly alter its scale. Corsano may leave a gap where a conventional drummer would reinforce the momentum, forcing the others to decide whether the music should fall, hover or charge forward without him.
“Un” stretches beyond twelve minutes and reveals the trio’s patience beneath the obvious volatility. Sakata does not spend the entire performance producing maximal force. His quieter notes are rounded, spacious and sometimes startlingly lyrical. The emotional directness recalls the ecstatic tradition associated with Albert Ayler, but Sakata never becomes an imitator. His melodies carry a distinct mixture of Japanese song, bebop memory, free-jazz rupture and theatrical vocal expression. A phrase can sound mournful for several seconds before acquiring an almost comic exaggeration, not because the sorrow was false, but because Sakata understands that several emotions can occupy the same breath.
His humor is especially important. Sakata has always treated vocal sound, nonsense syllables, cries and sudden theatrical gestures as part of improvisation rather than distractions from serious musicianship. Friendly Pants allows that personality to remain visible. The album is intense, but it is not grimly committed to proving its intensity. Moments of absurdity loosen the music and make the next violent passage feel less predetermined. The trio can sound like three people escaping a burning building, then briefly resemble friends telling an increasingly ridiculous story.
“In Case, Let’s Go to Galaxy” possesses the record’s most openly cosmic title, yet the performance avoids the floating synthesizers and spacious drones commonly used to signify outer space. This galaxy is entered through physical acceleration. Corsano’s drums continually manufacture new propulsion systems while Gray’s bass supplies gravitational pull. Sakata climbs through the register of the alto, generating upper tones that appear to tear away from the instrument. The trio does not contemplate the stars from a safe distance. It builds a malfunctioning craft and launches immediately.
The piece also exposes the precision hidden inside Corsano’s apparent chaos. His playing can sound as though every part of the kit is falling down a staircase, but the placement of each strike continually changes the conversation. He does not simply increase density beneath Sakata’s solos. He selects textures that oppose or sharpen them: dry drum against sustained saxophone, metallic cymbal wash against short vocalized bursts, rolling toms beneath one held pitch. The drums become several simultaneous partners rather than one accompanying instrument.
“That Day of Rain” changes the album’s weather. Sakata’s tone becomes more spacious and mournful, allowing lines to hang in the air while the rhythm section creates a dark, slowly shifting field. Rain is not illustrated by cymbal splashes or sentimental melody. The piece captures the way weather changes perception, making distances appear uncertain and enclosing the listener within continuous movement. Gray’s bowed bass is crucial, producing long textures that blur the boundary between rhythm and atmosphere.
The quieter passages make the trio’s trust more obvious. Free improvisation can become overcrowded when every musician feels responsible for proving continuous engagement. Chikamorachi understands withdrawal. Gray can reduce his activity to a small pressure beneath the saxophone, and Corsano can let cymbal resonance carry more information than a full drum pattern. Sakata responds by exposing the grain of individual notes. His sound contains air, saliva, reed vibration and the small instability produced when breath is pushed against resistance.
“With Saigyo Path” invokes the wandering Japanese poet Saigyō, whose work is associated with travel, solitude, nature and the awareness of impermanence. Sakata does not turn the piece into historical illustration, but the title encourages a different understanding of his lyricism. His melodic phrases can behave like observations made during movement, brief encounters with beauty that cannot be held in place. Gray and Corsano create a path that continually changes beneath him. The trio advances, but every step alters the route.
This ability to connect explosive improvisation with older forms of emotional expression is central to Sakata’s importance. Born in Hiroshima Prefecture in 1945, he studied marine biology before becoming deeply involved in Japan’s free-jazz world during the late 1960s. His career included major work with pianist Yosuke Yamashita, solo projects, collaborations and performances that placed fierce saxophone technique beside voice, humor and traditional material. Friendly Pants does not present that history as a résumé. It allows decades of experience to operate as instinct.
The closing “Yo! Yo! Dime” gathers the album’s physical and theatrical qualities into one final long performance. Sakata’s phrases sometimes resemble speech accelerated beyond language, while Chikamorachi supplies a rhythmic field that can pivot from swing to eruption without announcing the transition. The trio sounds joyful, but the joy is not soft. It comes from discovering that freedom can be constructed through extreme attention rather than the absence of structure.
Friendly Pants succeeds because nobody is treated as the guest star surrounded by supporting players. Sakata’s name may attract the first attention, but the album belongs equally to the three-way exchange. Gray’s bass provides muscle, shadow and melodic resistance. Corsano’s drums turn every second into a decision. Sakata supplies the voice at the center, but Chikamorachi continually changes what that voice is able to say.
The title finally feels exact. These are friendly pants because the musicians have found a fit loose enough to permit impossible movement. The album is aggressive, humorous, melodic and physically exhausting, yet its deepest quality is generosity. Each player creates openings for the others, then attacks those openings before they close. Friendly Pants is not the sound of chaos accidentally captured. It is three musicians listening with such intensity that collision becomes a form of care.

Air Miami - 1994 - Airplane Rider 7''

 

Teenbeat – TEENBEAT 147  33.13MB FLAC

“Airplane Rider” sounds like a band discovering that escape can be accomplished in under three minutes. The guitar enters bright and weightless, Bridget Cross’s bass supplies a melodic undertow, and Mark Robinson sings with the clipped excitement of somebody already watching the ground disappear beneath him. The song retains Unrest’s fascination with speed, repetition and immaculate pop construction, but its atmosphere is looser and more openly joyful. Air Miami does not sound burdened by the responsibility of beginning again. The new name fits immediately: music suspended between airports, motion and the glamorous fiction that changing location might also change identity.

Air Miami formed from the final fracture of Unrest, with Robinson and Cross continuing together after drummer Phil Krauth’s departure. Rather than preserving the old group under altered personnel, they treated the break as permission to redesign the project. “Airplane Rider” was their first vinyl single, issued by Teen-Beat in 1994 with “Stop Sign” on the reverse. The record became a compact announcement that Robinson’s gift for lean, infectious songwriting had survived, while the emotional chemistry around it had changed.

The title track is almost absurdly efficient. Its guitar rings instead of grinding, creating forward momentum without heaviness. Cross’s bass does far more than support the chord progression, moving beneath the vocal with the independence of another melody. The rhythm stays direct, giving the song the physical bounce of indie pop while preserving the nervous velocity associated with Robinson’s writing. Nothing is extended for display. Each part arrives, performs its function and vanishes while the hook is still glowing.

There is also something wonderfully artificial about the song’s idea of travel. “Airplane Rider” is not a detailed account of airports, destinations or life on the road. It treats flight as pure sensation: elevation, distance and the brief fantasy of becoming untethered. Air Miami’s name evokes a sleek imaginary airline, part tropical promise and part corporate logo. The single sounds like its advertising jingle after the company has been taken over by record collectors.

“Stop Sign” brings the flight back toward pavement. It is sharper and slightly more earthbound, built around another clean guitar figure and a chorus whose simplicity becomes its strength. Where “Airplane Rider” rushes forward through open air, “Stop Sign” converts interruption into pop structure. The command to halt becomes something repeated, melodic and strangely energizing. Even when the title announces obstruction, the band refuses to sound stationary.

The two songs make an ideal single because they operate as opposing road signals. One offers departure; the other demands a stop. Both are built from the same disciplined minimalism, with hooks strong enough to survive without thick production or ornamental playing. Air Miami would broaden this sound on Me. Me. Me., adding greater polish, keyboards and a more cosmopolitan pop surface, but the essential design is already complete here.

“Airplane Rider” captures the exact instant when a former band’s ending becomes useful. Robinson and Cross carry recognizable musical instincts into Air Miami without pretending nothing changed. The single is too buoyant to function as a memorial to Unrest and too assured to feel like a tentative rehearsal. It lifts off immediately, circles once above Teen-Beat’s Washington, D.C. world, and lands before its small engine has time to lose momentum.