Fluffhouse Music Reviews

Apparat - Walls (2007)
A genuinely sunny and uplifting electronic pop album. Right from the first track "Not a Number", its bubbling xylophone rhythm offset against slinky strings, German producer Sascha Ring marks himself out as having a bit more musical flair than your standard bleepy popster. Throughout, pretty instrumentals are lavished with melody and colour, peaking with "Fractales" (which I'm not sure why is split into two tracks - part II is essentially a beatless extended closing section to the first part). These are mixed with casual poppier numbers ("Hailin from the Edge" and "Holdon"), cowritten with their singer Raz Ohara, unexpectedly R&B-leaning but fitting in quite well. The soaring falsetto vocal of "Arcadia", strikingly like Thom Yorke, inspires comparison to a sunnier Radiohead. Though while Apparat's electronic pop is more accessible, there's still musical muscle here. A more individual album highlight is "Birds", whose delicious chorus "one single spark ignites - into new life" is countered by a silken string tune over skittering synths. Pervadingly upbeat, the album's only intrusion of angst comes in "Over and Over", whose vocal, echoed as through opposing mirrors, cleverly fits the song's introspective theme.
(8/10)

LCD Soundsystem - Sound of Silver (2007)
The second full-length from James Murphy's LCD project has just the right balance of hooky tunes and edgy cleverness. It's good solid dance-pop, with dashes of glam-rock in the stomping chorus of "North American Scum" and jerky funk in "Us v Them", while the vocal harmonies of "Get Innocuous" undulate over the skittering groove like something from Talking Heads' "Remain in Light". Its lyrics, delivered with sardonic tone by Murphy, drip with the jaded dancefloor veteran. But most importantly the album boasts some plain strong beats and grooves, from the wistful "Someone Great" and the hypnotic, New Order-tinged "All My Friends" to the pure, icy repetition of the title track. The most welcome surprise is saved for the end, the piano confessional "New York I Love You, But You're Bringing Me Down", which blurts out its urban confusion at the pace of David Bowie's "Five Years".
(8/10)

The Knife - Silent Shout (2006)
A creeping strangeness pervades this superficially extroverted dance-pop album by Swedish siblings Olof and Karin Dreijer. It might be singer Karin's piercing tone, distorted to sound electronic, the clashing harmonies she overdubs herself with, or the icy purity of their synth sequences. However they do it, it makes an refreshing change from the straightforward summery dance of Röyksopp (who Karin guested with on their second album) or Kraftwerk-style dour electronica. With plain good searing dance tracks like "Neverland", or sturdy 80s-style synth pop ("Marble House") it's uplifting stuff. Their affectations sometimes seem too deliberate, particularly the helium voice effects on "The Captain" and the "hoo hoo hoo" chorus of "One Hit". On the other hand the weirdness can be strikingly attractive, like the unearthly duet over the delicate steel-drum-like synth loop of "Na Na Na". Best of all is the breathless "Forest Families" - I'm a sucker for a refrain like "I just want your music tonight", especially offset against such dark, paranoid verses.
(8/10)

Steve Roach - darkest before dawn (2002)
Steve Roach's work has been an interesting introduction for me to this highly purist form of ambient music, despite my mundane motivation for this purchase (it is extremely good value on pay-per-track download services!) It's one single piece stretched to the maximum length of a CD, 74 minutes of soft, dark noise. Its purely electronic sounds evoke the void of outer or inner space, with an eerie remoteness from any signs of life. On the surface there's not much going on, but it's difficult to isolate all the constituents of the sound. It's almost certainly just a few loops of gradually shifting notes, aligned to create a strange sort of harmony. But just as the imagination might conjure shapes from visual darkness, listening closely you might hear something subtly different at each point, and become alert to how external noises blend into the record's shades of black.
(6/10)

Steve Roach - the dream circle (1999)
Another pay-per-track bargain from Steve Roach, a piece of purist minimal ambient. It's seemingly designed to be faded in and out, or to encourage dozing off, during anywhere in its 74 minutes of soft synth swells slowly decaying and overlapping, peppered with tiny echoes, trickles and glitches. It's a fairly generic example of this type of "under-sea" ambient sound, and it's rather too clean a sea. The reliance on synthesised sounds gives it a clinically futuristic feel, with no real-instrument sounds in evidence, unlike the ambient works of, say, Brian Eno or Stars Of The Lid. I guess this style aims to get away from worldly humanity, towards the mysteries of unexplored spaces. Though if the theme is sleep and dreaming I would expect at least some human touch. Perhaps it's trying to delve into very deep sleep. One interesting effect is that you can almost imperceptibly detect it slowing down on occasion, as the breathing and heart rate might during sleep.
(6/10)

Robert Rich - Below Zero (1998)
Robert Rich is most famous for overnight concerts of ambient music for sleeping audiences, but "Below Zero", a compilation of material he released in the mid nineties, is the stuff of nightmares. These menacing, chilly pieces hold together well without sounding like a compilation. Dynamic ambient made from huge, rich synthesiser textures, it's by no means background music - these massive sounds are even more impressive for being focused on and wallowed in. There's a sense of high technology being used to the full, while its microtonal swarms recall "high art" reference points like the orchestral clusters of Ligeti. As well as pure sound colour it has a lot of dramatic gestures, massive swells and sweeps, so it avoids giving the impression of an expensive sound software demo. But since these moments don't tend to piece together into larger structures, its drama can be hard to engage with, at least at the pace lived by mortal humans. For instance, the tension created by the imposing opening of "Star Maker" dissolves into twenty minutes of otherworldly ruminating. Even so, it's not really about conventional drama, it's all about those luscious sounds and how they're transformed and manipulated. A couple of juicy moments to take home from your space travels include the marvellously evocative "A Flock Of Metal Creatures Fleeing The Onslaught Of Rust" and the massive choral effect that fills "Requiem".
(7/10)

Piano Magic - Popular Mechanics (1997)
The eclectic collective's debut is a curiosity shop of colourful and bizarre electronic miniatures. Just as Kraftwerk iconified modern technology, Piano Magic here evoke a steampunk world with all manner of marvellous contraptions. It moves at an itchy pace with a short attention-span, as if we get no more than a glimpse of each antique on the shelves, like the Aphex Twin-like kitchen-sink electronic splurge of "Metal Coffee", and the glittering waltz melody of "Revolving Moth Cage". The eerie mood competes with a sense of whimsical fun, with neither quite winning. Drifting amongst the electronics are a few brief dreamy female-voiced songs, including "Wintersport" which morphs strangely into a Tangerine Dream-like analogue synth race, and "Amongst Russian Lathes and Metal Curls" backed by a single stark low hum. The most wonderful example of this "art-house" song style (which they were to perfect on "Low Birth Weight") is "Wrong French", where Raechel Leigh recites wistful diary fragments in a deadpan-sweet tone over gently swirling keyboards.
(8/10)

Piano Magic - Artists' Rifles (2000)
Piano Magic's most minimalist full album is this elegiac set on the theme of the First World War and its dead and missing. A spare militaristic drum introduces a listenable though tasteful sequence of songs interspersed with instrumentals. An array of haunting melodies are sung by the delicately harmonised voices of Glen Johnson and Caroline Potter, while the instrumental textures are stripped down to thin gauzes of chiming, pinging guitars and the occasional solo cello or harpsichord. The sombre beat and bassline of "No Closure" set the scene - this song's lingering fadeout may be wordplay on the title but it works. The vocal effects are particularly beautiful on "A Return to the Sea" where Potter sings plaintively in stereo counterpoint with herself. It dips briefly into heavier territory on the shoegazy instrumental workout on "Password", before the album closes respectfully with the featherweight tribute of the title-track.
(8/10)

Piano Magic - Part-Monster (2007)
The third and latest album by the "conventional group" incarnation of Piano Magic is full of crisply-produced dream-pop, with more than a hint of 80's alternative (Cure / New Order) sound. Vocals are shared between the clear-toned Angele David-Guillou, who sings the soaring-chorused single "Incurable" and "Soldier Song", and Piano Magic mainstay Glen Johnson, whose whinier voice fronts some some genuinely good tunes including "Halfway Through" and "The Last Engineer". Simon Rivers also lends a deadpan tone to the Morrissey-style dirge "England's Always Better (As You're Pulling Away)", which pulls itself out of a damp puddle with an elegant brass arrangement. It's all arranged with admirable colour and precision - one particularly great moment is the driving twin-guitar instrumental "Great Escapes", which recalls another underappreciated band, The Church. Though the acoustic title song is a bit too much of a downer to finish on.
(7/10)

Tim Hecker - Harmony In Ultraviolet (2006)
The most recent album by Montreal musician Tim Hecker is one of those welcome but rare works that has me appreciating music from a completely new angle. One continuous piece, it's built from a dense mass of heavily effected shoegazer guitars, floaty synth clouds of thick fogs of manipulated noise, and delicate keyboard melodies. Going beyond multi-layered, its layers blend into a continuously-shifting geological mass, but experienced at a human pace. The construction clanks soon after the beginning bring you into a world where some huge and fantastic structure is being built, whirling you past each corner to absorb every detail. But it's not so much a sonic cathedral, but a living, dynamic organism, continuously breeding new strands of sound. Far from abstract brain music, it's also full of genuinely beautiful fragments of melody, and, of course, harmony and colour, from the Cocteau Twins-like "Chimeras", the intense heartbeat loop of "Dungeoneering" to the undersea ambience of the title suite. [ Note because of the continuous sequencing, this absolutely needs to be heard on CD, or via a media player with gapless playback! ]
(9/10)

Fennesz - Endless Summer (2001)
Electronics and guitar collagist Christian Fennesz here makes an album of warm noise to luxuriate in. "Endless Summer" rocks back and forth between densely-layered ear-itching glitch textures and ear-caressing samples of acoustic guitar, highly processed and smoothed-over. The best examples of this style are the title track with its lilting melodies draped with cinematic pads, and the indulgent "Happy Audio", a mishmash of ultra-quiet percussion, layered to a crescendo of bubbling distortion. As a whole it's sequenced to stupefy rather than shock, evoking perhaps a long summer seen through the woozy head of hay-fever. [Note this is the 2006 reissue with two bonus tracks]
(8/10)

Jan Jelinek - Tierbeobachtungen (2006)
My first taste of electronic musician Jan Jelinek is this, his most recent and least beat-oriented album. It's a soft but intricate example of the "warm noise" approach. The six colourful pieces here are based on a background of warm hiss and looped samples, often of acoustic instruments, with delicate little synth squeaks and twitters bubbling around the mix. "A Concert for Television" is perhaps the strongest of these, its glitchy samples looped at a gentle pace, like fabric being knitted from sound, over analogue sounds reminiscent of household appliances and traditional synth bleeps. One of the oddest-titled pieces of music in my library, "The Ballad Of Soap und: Die Gema nimmt Kontakt auf" is anchored by a loop in the unexpected form of a country-and-western ballad bassline, which finally dissolves into a mist of quiet synth scoops. A low-key but quite fascinating album.
(7/10)