super groovy delicious bite: 2005

Showing posts with label 2005. Show all posts

Friday, November 13, 2015

takk...

Sigur Rós created glowing galvanic moments out of little adventures in the delicate dynamics and swelling strings of this rapturous requital. The Icelandic quartet had developed their unique ethereal sound over three albums ('Von' in 1997, 'Ágætis Byrjun' in 1999, and '( )' in 2002), three EP's (Rímur in 2001, Sigur 1 / Sigur 9 in 2003, and their composition for Merce Cunningham's Split Sides Ba Ba Ti Ki Di Do in 2004), and the instrumental electronic soundtrack to the documentary Hlemmur in 2002.

'Takk...' was recorded at their Sundlaugin "swimming pool" studio near Álafoss, in the town of Mosfellsbær. The sessions featured Jón Þór Birgisson on vocals and guitar; Kjartan Sveinsson on keyboards; Georg Hólm on bass guitar; and Orri Páll Dýrason on drums; with strings by Amiina, Kristín Lárusdóttir, Júlía Mogensen, Stefanía Ólafsdóttir, Eyjólfur Bjarni Alfreðsson, Ingrid Karlsdóttir, Gréta Salóme Stefánsdóttir, Matthías Stefánsson, and Ólöf Júlía Kjartansdóttir; brass by Eiríkur Orri Ólafsson, Snorri Sigurðarson, Helgi Hrafn Jónsson, Samúel Jón Samúelsson, and Össur Geirsson; Frank Aarnink on percussion; and Álafosskórinn as the choir on "Hoppípolla". The band co-produced the album with Ken Thomas.

Orri Páll Dýrason: "I think you can hear through the music what kind of mood we were in. We were a bit dazed by the brackets album. Life was weird, so many things were changing and we had no roots. Touring a lot. Now we are secure about ourselves, having gotten used to the whole thing. We are happy...We felt like writing lyrics. The reason there were no lyrics on the last album was that we had written these songs years back with Jónsi singing gibberish vocals to them the entire time. They were fully formed and it would have been strange to suddenly insert lyrics into these finished products. This time we went into the studio with only two old songs and both of them are lyricless. The new songs all have lyrics. It's fun to write lyrics. We all get together and chat a lot."

Kjartan Sveinsson: "We're thankful for we've been able to do, and for the appreciation we get. We really love where we are...We didn't set out to do anything. I think it's more heavy-ish and slow...We very rarely try to do anything. It's always just things happen in a way. We're always learning, of course. We did things differently but I'm not sure how to describe it exactly...It always develops. We mess with things until the last moment. So, no, I wouldn't say there's a goal when we start the process...We're just trying to do good music and enjoy it and have fun...We're really bad at practicing. The only time we play together is just when we're writing music. Then of course we play so much when we tour. We would never actually to go to the studio to practice our own songs. That's really boring to us. We should always be writing something new...They're kind of stories, some of them are just a few sentences, and it's all very childlike, fairy tale-y. They're not deep and meaningful lyrics on this album, no! It's more stories, short stories ... We have never been much for concepts even though it sometimes looks like it. Concepts come afterwards. When you look closely at a work it's always easy to find a concept there but we have never approached a project with a predetermined concept in mind. It's not our style, really. Sigur Rós is not a clever band. There are no deep thoughts behind what we are doing...If we don't [agree] we always manage to find a way to work it out. We've played together for so long and know each other inside out...No one is exactly the same. It's like a marriage. You have to nurture the relationship and make comprimises. Otherwise it won't last. This is especially valid for bands who form at a young age. You're always learning new things about behavioural patterns and about the different characters you meet. The difference is that in a marriage there are only two people who have to settle their differences...We've been working on this record for twenty months, which is a normal period of time. For Sigur Rós at least...You never know what will happen. This is our baby. It's exciting. Very exciting."

Georg Hólm: "It comes as a surprise. It's as if we're constantly starting over. When we were making Ágætis Byrjun that's how it felt. The brackets album was more of an extension. It was a tough period. Now we're fresh again and it feels like we're starting anew. We took a vacation before we started this album and when we came together again it felt like we were all about to burst. Like we had been storing up creativity which was trapped inside us. It was a very pleasant feeling...We play in response to our surroundings. When we begin playing and writing we exaggerate the atmosphere around us. The songs exaggerate our feelings. We never decide on a fixed goal. We don't sit down and play a riff we wrote at home last night...We all agree to have no direction. It's just the four of us playing around, not discussing things we are doing...For us, music is the magic that happens in a moment. If you start dissecting it then you might spoil it. Sometimes you can discover new facets in music by talking in a superficial way about it but as soon as you try to get any deeper than that, you're in trouble. After all, things that are dissected usually need to be dead first."

Jón Þór Birgisson: "It's been a long process. We've been doing it for two years and toured in between. I'm terribly excited now that it's being released. It will be fun to see how people react to it...Takk is probably richer than the other albums. We're always learning. When we made Von we had to learn how to use the recording equipment because we wanted a certain sound and mood to come forth in the recordings. We also learned a lot from Ken Thomas while recording Ágætis Byrjun. He taught us that music is about a feeling and a mood rather than frequency and other bullshit. The brackets [( )]album was to a certain extent the most difficult. We had been playing the songs for so long and were tired of them when we went into the studio. It's hard to be creative when you're tired. We learned from this and have now gained a lot of important information which I think will benefit us in the future...We've been able to do [as we please] from the start. People often ask me what it's like being signed to a big label and I tell them it's exactly like being signed to a small label. We just get more space. We've been playing for twelve years and have proven ourselves as artists and don't need any supervision anymore. No one is monitoring us. We do everything ourselves: arrange, record, mix, master. We even make the videos ourselves. The label knows they don't have to worry about us so they just don't bother. They help us instead...We are feeling the pressure now though. In addition to all the music we're doing the album cover ourselves and handling the first video through internet correspondence. We handled the prep work and now it's being processed. We've never let go of creative control and let others do things for us. I guess it would be healthy for us to just trust other people. Somtimes the work we put into the band is more of a lifestyle. It's so much fun to be the four of us in a band, playing at concerts and stuff, but there are so many practical things that make it difficult. A lot of energy goes into these practical things. It's laboursome but in the end it pays off to have a grasp the bigger picture...It was fun writing lyrics this time. It's always been quite a challenge for us to express ourselves through words. Somehow music flows more easily. When it comes to words we freeze up. We listened to the songs together and let the music trigger words in us. I think we learned something from this experience. The lyrics are very simple and naive. Moments and small adventures. Nothing too deep...People tend to overinterpret and find meaning in something which isn't remarkable to begin with. It's funny."

'Takk...' reached number thirty in France, twenty-seven in Germany and the US, nineteen in Australia, sixteen in Denmark and the UK, twelve in Sweden, eight in Finland, six in Ireland, four in Italy and Norway, and number one in Iceland.

http://www.sigur-ros.co.uk/

'Takk...'
full album:

1. Takk... "Thanks..." 00:00
2. Glósóli "Glowing Sole" 1:57
3. Hoppípolla "Hopping into Puddles" 8:12
4. Með blóðnasir "I Have a Nosebleed" 12:40
5. Sé lest "I See a Train" 14:57
6. Sæglópur "Lost at Sea" 23:37
7. Mílanó "Milan" 31:16
8. Gong "Gong" 41:41
9. Andvari "Zephyr" 47:14
10. Svo hljótt"So Quietly" 53:54
11. Heysátan "The Haystack" 1:01:18

Sigur Rós Live in Reykjavík 2005 (Full Set)

Setlist:

0:00 Takk...
2:20 Glósóli
8:47 Ný batterí
19:10 Sæglópur
26:36 Untitled #4 (a.k.a Njósnavélin/The nothing song)
34:55 Gong
40:00 Andvari
46:30 Hoppípolla
51:20 Með blóðnasir
54:10 Sé lest
1:02:55 Olsen Olsen
1:11:25 Viðrar vel til loftárása
1:22:10 Svo hljótt
1:28:50 Heysátan

1:35:50 Hafsól
1:44:40 Untitled #9 (a.k.a. Smáskífa)
1:53:44 Untitled #8 (a.k.a. Popplagið/The pop song)

Monday, October 19, 2015

feels

Animal Collective reconvened and took their time turning out this emotional dance up through an accidental truth gate in a broken cartoon show. The group has its roots in childhood, as Noah Lennox (Panda Bear) and Josh Dibb (Deakin) knew each other in elementary school in Baltimore before Lennox moved away to Pennsylvania. Dibb met David Portner (Avey Tare) and Brian Weitz (Geologist) in high school where they formed a band called Automine, which self released a 7-inch-single Padington Band in 1995.

In 1997, they all went to different colleges, Lennox and Dibb in the Boston area (Boston University and Brandeis University), while Portner and Weitz went to New York City (NYU and Columbia University). During this time, Lennox and Dibb put together Lennox's debut album, Panda Bear, on their own label, Soccer Star Records.

In 2000, Avey Tare and Panda Bear put out Spirit They're Gone, Spirit They've Vanished on their own Animal label. In 2001, Danse Manatee came out on the Catsup Plate label under the name of Avey Tare, Panda Bear, and Geologist. A limited edition live release Hollinndagain was put out in 2002 on the Secretly Canadian subsidiary, St. Ives. Their next album Campfire Songs was recorded on the screened-in porch of Portner's aunt in Monkton, Maryland in one take. It came out on Catsup Plate in 2003. It was around this time that Dibb began performing with the group.

They adopted the moniker Animal Collective and created a new label Paw Tracks with Todd Hyman for the release of Here Comes the Indian in 2003. Wietz and Dibb took a break from the band while Lennox and Portner recorded Sung Tongs for Fat Cat Records in 2004. Weitz and Dibb rejoined the group in 2005, during which time the group recorded the Prospect Hummer EP with Vashti Bunyan.

Feels was recorded in Seattle with engineer Scott Colburn. The sessions also included Doctess on piano and Eyvind Kang on violin.

Geologist: "Part of the reason we started playing live and releasing records, in 2000 I think, was to react against what we saw happening in late 90s indie rock. It was so intellectual and a lot of it lacked emotion. There isn’t a lot of irony in our music because we relate to music on a more pure, emotional level...A lot of us have been in more serious relationships this past year, so we figured Feels would be our “love” record. It’s not exactly childlike this time. Only some of our records really touch on childlike innocence, or the innocence of nature, but there’s still similar themes throughout about touching our lives and feelings, instead of intellectual concepts that we don’t have any connection to...We use lots of...found sounds, field recordings, electronics, feedback...a lot of times they sound like something they are not. We like liquidy sounds, but it’s often something different than just a stream or a faucet. But I won’t really go too deep into our approach on a technical level — I’m not trying to be secretive or anything, I just can’t think of an ordered process. It’s more like having fun and thinking about how a sound fits with the mood and color and feel of a song. We just use our bunch of effects and play around. Again, very little computer manipulation. We like turning knobs and faders and such. We’ve been doing it since high school, way before the laptop explosion, and we just stayed old school for the most part ...I would say the only boundaries we fight against are ourselves and our past. But it’s not too hard. We consciously try and move beyond what we’ve done before. Well not necessarily beyond, but away from. There are certain instruments we like, but I’m not sure they are crutches so to speak. We obviously like vocals, guitars, pianos, electronics, and percussion. But we try and change the dynamic between those things from record to record in order to explore more musical possibilities. If we create something that reminds us too much of something we’ve done before, or that we think could easily fit onto a past album of ours, we abandon it. We’ve covered that ground already, and it’s time to look forward."

Avey Tare: "I think just what seems comfortable–a lot of it these days has to do with that we do in our alone time. Not the ideas we come up with together since we’re not together so much. If we have a lot of time to think about things and work on stuff, it takes like a week and a half to come up with new ideas. Right now we want it to be a really slow process. Like just how long we worked on Feels–how it expanded in our brains and how we’re still playing some of it live–I think it takes a little while to move to a new place. We want it to be slow so it feels like the inspiration is actually there...In my perfect musical world a person could understand the lyrics or not understand the lyrics as they wanted. Initially, with writing music that included vocals, it was primarily the goal (and still is) to have the voice be seen as another instrument, as having a very integrated role in the overall scheme of a song. Though our song writing has become a little more focused on vocals than it had been in the past, it would still feel awkward to only focus on hearing the lyrics. Just as we like sounds to fit in with the color and feel of a song, I’d say we approach vocals in a very similar manner ...For our new record I think it’s the first time where the lyrics are basically from my point of view. I guess I just feel like I wanted to say something and that’s the way it came out ...But the music and the vocals will always be very attached and I think, most of the time, the lyrics get lost in the sound anyway, which is fine cause I don’t necessarily think lyrics are that important to getting into a song, as long as the feeling stays intact and the emotion doesn’t get lost — though it’s nice to think that people could know them if they wanted."

Deakin: "The word “collective” is oddly touchy for us because it has a certain political air. The idea of calling ourselves a collective was for our own state of mind. We weren’t thinking of it in a broader sense. We’re a fairly exclusive collective. There are people are in our lives that we work with who we consider part of it, in a way, but we aren’t a collective in the big sense. We’ve known each other since we were kids, and really enjoy doing this together. We don’t want to just form a regular band where it’s like “he plays guitar, he plays bass, and I sing.” We came up with the idea in college, when we couldn’t always all work together. Originally, our records had their own titles without band names attached. It’s this idea of creating an environment where you’re not wed to specific habits. Habit contributes to complacency. We wanted to allow for as much change and development as possible. My perception of collectives is that there is some kind of collective consciousness that is an element for us, but mostly we’re strong individuals who have different ideas and like to share them with each other...I hate to generalize, but there have been lots of new approaches to music and art in the past five, six years. We’re trying to get music and art back to expressing itself on some visceral level, not just being something on display that you look at and analyze. There shouldn’t be a wall between us and the audience. A lot of bands are into creating physical sound right now, and some of it I’m not even that psyched on, but I’m glad it’s happening."

Panda Bear: "This album’s the same and different at the same time in terms of childhood stuff. We’re talking about more mature adult topics, so there is a bit of the sour mixed in with the sweet. The way we like to describe experiences from childhood or see things in a childlike way, the uninhibited, anything goes, everything is new attitude, that’s all still there on Feels. In that way, our music is always the same. Now, the kinds of relationships we talk about are more adult, but the spirit of creating the music is still anything goes. Keep it new, fresh, and explore stuff...Confusion is another way to describe childhood illusion. When I was younger, I’d get fevers, so sick that I would feel crazy. I would go to places I’d never been to, in terms of hallucinating. Weird kid dreams are really confusing...Vocally, it starts when you go, “I want to use my voice to sing but not just to sing words. I want to use my voice like an instrument.” There are all kinds of things you can do with your voice in terms of tone, pitch, the color of it. You can tweak it any which way you want. For some people, it’s all about the message, but we have a lot of fun making weird sounds with our voices. With instruments and effects, one goal of ours is to make it not sound like what we’re using, to disguise the means. But with the voice, you don’t need to use effects on it so much because you can mask it in all kinds of ways. It’s the ultimate instrument...In the past year, a lot of the issues we’ve had with each other have been resolved. We’ve always been tight in the sense that a relationship with a person is an ongoing thing, and of course it’s not always perfect. We’ve made huge steps, and we understand each other better than ever. We’re having so much fun hanging out. Now, since we live far apart, when we do get together to play music or tour we’re immediately psyched to be best friends again. Three out of four of us have been affected by love in the past year, so there’s lots of emotion there. Feels sounds positive because it’s all about good times. There’s no room for abrasion on this one because everything is sweet. No matter how much work I do, I’m happy to do it."

http://animalcollective.org/

"Grass"

Feels
full album:

All songs written and composed by Animal Collective.

1. "Did You See the Words" 5:15
2. "Grass" 2:59
3. "Flesh Canoe" 3:44
4. "The Purple Bottle" 6:48
5. "Bees" 5:38
6. "Banshee Beat" 8:22
7. "Daffy Duck" 7:34
8. "Loch Raven" 4:59
9. "Turn into Something" 6:29
Total length: 51:48

Monday, October 5, 2015

z

My Morning Jacket moved on from the fissure with the soulful cosmic swoon of this rearranged reggae rock reverie. They had released two albums (The Tennessee Fire in 1999 and At Dawn in 2001) on independent Darla Records before signing with the Dave Matthews RCA imprint ATO Records for It Still Moves in 2003). Danny Cash and Johnny Quaid left the band in 2004 and were replaced by Bo Koster and Carl Broemel. For their next album 'Z', the band decided to forgo recording again at the Above the Cadillac Studio and its 'magical' grain silo at the Olliges family farm in Shelbyville, Kentucky. Jim James (James Edward Olliges) and John Leckie co-produced the sessions in the Catskill Mountains at Allaire Studios in Shokan, New York which featured Tom Blankenship on bass guitar; Carl Broemel on guitar, vocals, pedal steel, and saxophone; Patrick Hallahan on drums and percussion; Jim James on vocals, lead guitar, and rhythm guitar; and Bo Koster on keyboards, vocals, piano, organ, looping, and percussion; with Andrew Bird adding strings, and whistles on "Gideon", "Into the Woods", and "It Beats 4 U"; and M. Ward doing the acoustic guitar and choirs on "Into the Woods".

Blankenship: "It didn't feel right, it felt like a ghost town, going out there to the studio [in Shelbyville]. We had milked that place creatively. Then we decided, 'Hey, we have two new members in the band, so we should just do everything differently.'...[Allaire is] so secluded, it took a half-hour just to drive up the driveway. We had been talking for years about really locking ourselves in when we did an album, and now there was no excuse but to be in the studio all the time. You'd wake up and have breakfast and grab your coffee and walk into the control room."

James: The place we recorded, was like an old mansion, that they built back in the 20's, that sits on top of its own mountain and overlooks like, all the rest of the mountains and it was blizzarding and snowing and we were locked in there for like a month. It's kinda like the Shining.

Broemel: "Jim's voice is a huge part [of our sound]. Patrick's right foot is a huge part of it. Everybody has their own little thing to contribute. As far musical ideas, the sky's the limit. There's things we probably don't think about that will always be there, but I have no idea what the next record will be like. We'll work and rework a song. "Into The Woods" had three or four incarnations that we thought were pretty cool before we finalized what we wanted to do with it. The same goes for "Off the Record" which wasn't a reggae-feeling song at first. All the songs are great as just acoustic songs, too."

Hallahan: "If you don't have any prejudice in the music you listen to you shouldn't have any prejudice in the music you play."

Koster: "There's a certain mysterious quality to everything. I always feel like I'm in another time or place when I play this music. Sometimes I feel like I'm in a movie or something. That's a testament to Jim and his imagination. His songwriting is very non-literal a lot of the time, and there's a fantasy element to some things."

James: "Just one letter not connected to any other letters or vowels at all. I like the shape of it. You can bend it to make a triangle. You can lop off one end to make a 7. I feel like it had a lot going for it. It’s also the last letter, the 26th letter in the alphabet, and I wrote all the songs when I was 26...I thought [the cover art by Louisville artist Kathleen Lolley] set a good tone about the world within us and going inside and being more within yourself, is how I took it. It’s something that I try really hard to do, to stop thinking and stop the mental noise and chatter in my mind. It really is like static, just a thousand voices and mental movies in your mind and when you stop and you just concentrate on your surroundings or where you are, it’s really like turning off a loud radio that’s just playing a bunch of shit"

Blankenship: “Whenever I was talking about the title people would think it was going to be our last record. I thought that was funny. Or someone said we were going to start going backwards. After Z we’d do Y and just keep going that way...Obviously, the reverb-- especially on the vocals and drums. I think those sounds are kind of a signature [to our sound]. You always know it's My Morning Jacket when you hear the drums start. Songwriting-wise we'll always be all over the map but production wise there's always little hints of what came before, a My Morning Jacket vein that runs through everything."

'Z' reached number seventy-four in the UK, seventy-one in Belgium, and sixty-seven in the US.

http://www.mymorningjacket.com/

Gideon

Off the Record

'Z'
full album:

All songs written by Jim James, except where noted:

00:00 - Wordless Chorus
04:09 - It Beats 4 U
07:51 - Gideon
11:21 - What a Wonderful Man
13:43 - Off the Record (James, Tom Blankenship, Patrick Hallahan)
19:09 - Into the Woods
24:25 - Anytime
28:16 - Lay Low
34:18 - Knot Comes Loose
38:09 - Dondante

Saturday, October 3, 2015

extraordinary machine

Fiona Apple made the most of melodies and maladies, fighting folderol to get a better version of this astonishing apparatus. After the tour for her 'When The Pawn...' album ended in 2000, the singer songwriter moved to Los Angeles. Apple admits: "The first couple of years, I didn't have anything left in me to write about. That was a good thing, because it meant I'd done my job on the last batch of songs. I was riding a wave of independence. I wasn't trying to write; I just figured if the songs came to me, they came to me, and if not, 'Oh, well, it's been fun.'"

She began working again with Jon Brion, who had produced 'When The Pawn...', at the Paramour Mansion in 2003. Sessions continued at Cello Studios and strings and orchestration were done at Abbey Road Studios in London. Apple says: I gathered scraps for songs. And I ended up writing the rest on the way, a totally new approach for me. The upside was that I'd finished all these songs that otherwise might've been left in 'I don't care' land; the downside was that I didn't have enough time to live with the songs before recording them, so I really didn't know what I wanted."

As the release of 'Extraordinary Machine' continued to be delayed, the songs were leaked online and fans started a campaign petitioning Sony BMG Music to released the album. Apple was still not satisfied with the songs and began working with another producer Brian Kehew who brought in Mike Elizondo to co-produce a second version of the her third album. They reworked all but two of the songs at Elizondo's Phantom Studio at his home in Westlake Village.

When 'Extraordinary Machine' was finally released in October of 2005, it made it to number seven on the US pop album chart and eventually sold over six hundred thousand copies. It was nominated for a Grammy Award for "Best Pop Vocal Album". Apple beams: "I've got a bundle of songs of which I am exceedingly proud. And I'm excited to see how I handle the whole trip this time around, being that I'm finally at the point where I can call myself an adult without losing myself to the giggles."

http://www.fiona-apple.com/

"O' Sailor"

"Parting Gift"

"Not About Love"

'Extraordinary Machine'
full album:

All songs written and composed by Fiona Apple.

1. "Extraordinary Machine" 3:44
2. "Get Him Back" 5:26
3. "O' Sailor" 5:37
4. "Better Version of Me" 3:01
5. "Tymps (the Sick in the Head Song)" 4:05
6. "Parting Gift" 3:36
7. "Window" 5:33
8. "Oh Well" 3:42
9. "Please Please Please" 3:35
10. Untitled 4:08
11. "Not About Love" 4:21
12. "Waltz (Better Than Fine)" 3:46

'Extraordinary Machine'
unreleased version produced by Jon Brion

1. "Not About Love" 3:46
2. "Red, Red, Red" 3:30
3. "Get Him Back" 4:32
4. "Better Version of Me" 3:33
5. "Oh Well" 3:51
6. "Oh, Sailor" 6:25
7. "Used to Love Him" 3:43
8. "Window" 4:33
9. "Waltz" 3:45
10. "Extraordinary Machine" 3:41
11. "Please, Please, Please" 3:55

live at Club Largo

1. Extraordinary Machine
2. River, Stay away from my door
3. Paper Bag
4. Fast As You Can