Oh! I forgot one Atom Heart CD / The Books / Tujiko Noriko

Ah - Rodger Tubesound - you nearly escaped my gaze!
The second Rodger Tubesound album is fantastic. The source material is a whole lot of avant-garde jazz (think Sun Ra, later Coltrane), and it kicks ass. Dark, smokey flavours, spaced out piano licks, bells, gongs, wandering synths, with the unmistakable Uwe Schmidt flavour. Although my favourite Uwe Schmidt album varies with the turning of the sun and moon, right now, this is it.

And that really concludes the Atom Heart section. Write to your local Atom Heartman proclaiming your support for a reissue of the classic Rather Interesting titles. In my world of electronica, Uwe is the great unsung hero.

Ok - The Books

Something a bit different, though a definite similarity in method at times.

Thought For Food - I remember when the first books album came out - I just didn't know what to make of it. On the one hand, I think that vocal samples in music are the hallmark of bad trance/dnb, but on the other hand Thought For Food was using them in completely unexpected ways. It took 3 weeks, but I eventually decided I liked the album, and bought it. The funny thing is, this is one of those recordings where there is a palpable sense of excitement or infinite possibility that you get from the performances. The first Books album is a little bit rough, but it is virtually exploding with ideas.

The Lemon Of Pink - is a refinement and focussing of the ideas on Thought For Food, and is currently the Book's high water mark. It works best as a single entity, rather than a group of separate songs. There is a darker tone to the album, and I'd probably use a word like 'haunting' to describe portions of it. They manage to channel their folk influences into these pieces which are basically put together through the manipulation of recorded performances, and this eats nearly any other 'folk-tronica' album alive, if you have to use that term for music that has steel-string and laptop at the same time.

Lost And Safe is good, but especially if you listen to it next to the other two Books albums, it is less startling. Where the other two sound outside of their time (as opposed to ahead of their time), L+S is more of a really well done piece of modern folk with digital processing. The songs are much more traditionally written, and the Books sing on this release in a way that they haven't before. For some people this will be the most enjoyable Books album, but I find it isn't as amazing as the first two.

I don't really know if the Books should go next to Atom Heart... they are a hard one to place...

Now
Tujiko Noriko:
This is what I'm talking about. The lazy description is 'Oh yeah, she's the Japanese Bjork', except that the only similarity is in a certain timbre of the voice. TN specialises in hazy, glitched-out pop songs that are usually 4 to 7 minutes longer than pop songs are expected to be. The music serves her voice, which is one of the most emotive ones I've heard in pop, but it is also inventive and unique. There's this great broken-down sound to it, like it's struggling at times to keep going. To me, this is what glitch is supposed to mean, the sound of a machine almost but not breaking down, not stuck-stuck-stuck-stuck-stuck buffer effects over and over again. This blog may seem to be recommendation after recommendation, but that's because I rarely buy stuff that I don't see myself keeping, and I don't keep things that I get bored with (e.g., Atlas Sound, which TN kicks the ass out of)

Shojo Toshi - The first album has the sound of her feeling out the sort of music she wants to make. There are a few real highlights on it (Tokyo is amazing), and a lot of experimentation on how to make this sort of pop song.

Make Me Hard - Everything hinted at on Shojo Toshi is realised here. Go listen to a track called Fly, and if you don't like it, I can't help you. Absolute top stuff. This album could be a foundational course on how to introduce extreme sonics into pop. Aside from Christian Fennesz, I can't think of anyone who has been remotely close to this kind of success.

From Tokyo To Niagara - The sound in this album gets switched up a bit, with some guest production. The sonic gauze is pulled back in places, and damned if there isn't the When The Levy Breaks sample (you know, like on Licenced To Ill). Narita Made is much more stripped back than her previous work, and puts her voice up right up front. When the drums come in, it's just fantastic. This is one of those songs that I have a very particular time and place for, where it was exactly the right music to have on at the time. When you get stuff like that going on, that's the real magic of music for me. This album has a reworking of Tokyo from Shojo Toshi on it which is just amazing, echoes and delays. The other six tracks are not phoning it in by any means, but I had to mention those two.

28 - This is a collab between Tujiko and Aoki Takamasa, and it was, I think, the result of his desire to remix Fly from Make Me Hard, which appears in two versions on this. Unfortunately, Tujiko lets him do most of the music, and he is simply not as talented. This album suffers from much more generic glitch rhythms and synth textures. Including the stuck buffer efffffffffffect, which is the devil. Tujiko's voice and compositions generally rescue it, but it's not essssssssssssential, due to the weak production.