Beneath Iowa City is a black blind and beautiful warren riven with secret passages. We are musical rabbits, noisemaking ferrets, multiplying in the spring chill.

Friday, March 06, 2009

Newly Night People, Part 4 - Blessure Grave - "Unknown Blessure"


Holy shit, Joy Division are back, yet more low-pitched male singing, some ringing guitars. Singing about jail, that sounds pretty heavy. But my initial stab at disdain is ebbing away, there’s something really otherwordly about these guys. It’s not hard to imagine this as the demo reel for a group contemporary with Joy Division who didn’t make it because they were too uncompromisingly bleak.

I know that a great deal of the Night People essence is in a certain rawness held in common by many of the label’s artists. And there’s something about Blessure Grave that is appropriate, they’re still loose and they cover for it with their intensity. But perhaps a hidden pleasure of the record is in wondering what it would sound like if they pushed past the demo-on-a-tape phase and polished and honed. Would it be better than this loose but compelling set of songs about being trapped and buried alive?

Then again, who needs this kind of nihilism to be more effectively executed? Some people have real problems.

Bottom line: Intensely depressing or depressingly intense, I can’t quite tell.

We find ourselves constantly being brought back to that text by the paradoxes of the double and of repetition, the blurring of the boundary lines between ‘imagination’ and ‘reality’, between the ‘symbol’ and the ‘thing it symbolizes’.

-Jacques Derrida, ‘The Double Session’

Tuesday, March 03, 2009

Newly Night People, Part 3 - Jeans Wilder - "Antiques"


I should say right up front that I don’t get the trend where ostensibly serious bands name themselves using intentionally unfunny pop culture puns. I know this Pocohaunted thing is really beloved, but.

Anyway.

This is pretty varied, including lo-fi rhythm/sequencing and blown-out vocals, wavery electronica, some gentle guitar strumming and backgrounded vocals. The first track is a genuinely beautiful piece for three handed piano and frying eggs. But overall it’s surprisingly singer-songwritery for a NP release - dude does that thing where he can’t really sing but he knows he left the note around here somewhere.

Things get much more interesting for the second song on side B, when there’s a stretch away from what was still somewhat normal singing and guitar playing, to a strange pitch-shifted garbling and squealing that only vaguely suggests form. Ditto for the fourth song, where the guitar gets ditched for some dirgey organ sounds that just fit the vocals better. It’s like an even darker, more depressing version of Joy Division.

Bottom Line: Bedhead for neoprimitivists.

In premodern societies the dimension of the uncanny was largely covered (and veiled) by the area of the sacred and untouchable. It was assigned to a religiously and socially sanctioned place . . . With the triumph of the Enlightenment, this privileged and excluded place (the exclusion that founded society) was no more. That is to say that the uncanny became unplaceable; it became uncanny in the strictest sense.
– Mladen Dolar, ‘I Shall be With You On Your Wedding Night’

Sunday, March 01, 2009

Newly Night People, Part 2 - Nautilus - "Big Shadow"


This tape is actually the reason I decided to write about all of them. Almost unbelievably rich, a thickly layered – yes, I’ll say it – tapestry of stringed instruments, tenor synths, and wordless, skillful vocals. This is not damaged, fractured in the way mostly given to Night People releases to be. It’s not much for structure, but it’s not afraid to sound ‘right’ and even pretty. I’ll admit I’m thinking of elves the whole time – there are harps in here, dulcimers – but I don’t mind one bit.

Side A is all one long song. Song? Side B opens with, well, let’s catalogue – a pulsing strumming bit, a high theme on three notes, a low drone, and a tenor drone, with the texture of a snake-charmer’s flute. Then soon we’re through to a duet of wordless female vocals, semi-moaning, semi-droning, semitoning. And enter another stringed instrument, utterly simple but otherworldly. It all shifts and twists so quickly, in so many different directions – and yet all these shifts are integral, the experience is singular, a continuous journey.

These guys and gals are all clearly musicians, in a sense that doesn’t apply to all the acts with releases on NP. There’s an air of improvisation, but the playing is delicate and there are no ‘wrong’ notes, nothing to take you out of the fantasy being created.

The coming of the sandman is first of all something to be experienced in the ear. Its force consists above all, perhaps, in the unsettling strangeness of what is ‘to come’: ‘The sandman is coming’ can be heard as at once a statement of what is already happening and as promise and/or threat: it is undecidably constative and performative. The sandman is to come, through the ear, still.

-Royle, The Uncanny