Stephen Cornford - 'Two Works for Turntables' (Permanent)

Sound art, or music?  It's never a debate I cared to have, always subscribing to the Cagean view.  But in recent years, no doubt due to my engagement with bonafide "sound artists", I've started to make a distinction, which has something to do with listening vs. expression and the boundaries of such articulation - I'll figure it out later and you'll be the first to know.  Anyway, Stephen Cornford is very clearly in the sound art camp, as he produces works for galleries and exhibitions that are frequently built around the idea of rotation.  The turntable is a natural platform for this, and this 7" excerpts two of his pieces.  Unlike Marclay, Cornford is not using the turntable so much for its instrumental functionality as for it's structural - a motor, a rotating platter and a tone arm are the tools, and by implementing various other objects on the decks, these turntables become perpetual sound machines.  It's hard to gauge how much "playing" is going on here, or if these are really just recordings of installations.  Things change, so you certainly get a feeling that there are different objects being applied, but whether this is being done in situ or by mixing recordings together in post-processing, is uncertain.  You can read the list of sound-generating devices in the liner notes and get a sense of what this "sounds" like: springs, marbles, piano wire, horse hair, ceramic discs, gravel, etc.  I love artists who transform the domestic into something otherworldly - British sound artists like the Bohman Brothers seem especially adept at this, and Cornford's recordings really carry it.  What I could do without are the liner notes, written no doubt to explain this crazyness to the general public (the record was financed by the Arts Councils of England and Brighton, so clearly some sort of document was mandatory) by comparing it to hip-hop as well as the typical historical bit about Pierre Schaeffer.  But that aside, it's a lovely document even though I'm sure these works are best experienced in person.

Joe Colley/Mike Shiflet - 'Meaning' (Gameboy)

Not a collaboration, but a split; Colley gets the A-matrix with 'Intentional Accidents for Microphone', a track with sounds as contradictory as its title.  Static and hum are the main tools, presumably being built from unadorned microphone (+ mixer + amplification, I'd guess) and it's incredibly composed, with long slow passages of almost-nothing that rev into static roars, only to be cut out by either mute-button inline editing or some post-processing.  My bet is on the former. It's an approach to electronic minimalism that sounds really indicative of the era (2004) but I don't mean that to be diminishing.  On the other side, Ohio noisenik Mike Shiflet starts '4 a.m. with Chris and Dan' in an ecstatic manner, and the emphasis is on the static.  This track is from a live radio performance on WFMU so it naturally sounds less controlled and tense than the Colley track.  There's a repeating thump, like a turntable that's finished, stylus bumping the run-out groove, and it adds a chilling momentum underneath the horizontal colours of the oscillations that stay constant throughout.  Both sides of this record are careful, even restrained; yet I wouldn't say delicate.  Both sides end in locked-grooves (of course!) but Shiflet's has a sudden menace that gives this a fond farewell.

Le Club des Chats - 'Yes Madame!' (S-S)

How do you like your quirk?  Thick and with a French accent?  Le Club des Chats dropped this single about four years ago and you'd think it was the reincarnation of Family Fodder.  French kids in their bedroom, I guess, but everyone is making music in their bedrooms these days.  The artwork has housecats shooting laserbeams out of their eyes, and the band name is pretty fucking stupid as well.  You gotta love this approach.  You also gotta love seven songs at 45 rpm; it's not a hardcore record, but it is ferocious, exploding out of the vinyl with 'Master of Toadstool' - though the title is misleading cause this isn't slow mushroom music in the slightest.  The drums are the name of the game, frantically bashing through every song and drowning out the other instruments except for the manic male-female voices that shout over every song.  'Ring-a-Ding' is little more than that phrase repeated over a catchy drum cacophony, but it conjures Renaldo and the Loaf at their most punk rock tendencies.  It's ridiculous and young and strange and great.

Chisel / The Van Pelt - split single (Air King Alliance)

Air King Alliance appears to be an in-house label for WMUC FM of Washington, DC, as these two bands (so closely associated with the Gern Blandsten scene of the mid-to-late 90s) both recorded their contributions live on the air.  Thus we get a 7" presumably pressed out of university budget money, with all the great non-production that student engineers give us.  The Van Pelt are the a-side, with 'Yamato (Where People Really Die)'.  It's made up of frantically strummed solid-state guitar over a clop-clop rhythm and those high-strung, yelped vocals that are the reason I never really liked the Van Pelt (who I have a vague memory of seeing in a moldy basement circa the time of this record - perhaps that's even where I got it!).  Yeah, it's the flipside I keep this for - an "electric" version of 'Towncrusher', the hot acoustic jam on Set You Free which is pretty much the only song I really remember from that album.  This is certainly a substandard version, kinda bashed through without much passion or purpose, but it's still good since I don't own a copy of the original.  The guitar solo here is lacking the fire and verve of anything from 8 Am All Day - it's a big step towards the indie-by-the-books efforts of the Ted Leo solo record.  I wonder if Air King ever released anything else?

Chisel - 'It's Alright, You're OK/The Guns of Merdian Hill' (Gern Blandsten)

Ten months without a post!  Sorry about this corner of our little alphabetical world - somehow 7"s get overlooked and I tend to do them in batches.  We left off with Chisel last year and pick it up with a 7" that might actually belong chronologically before 'The O.T.S.'.  Post-8 AM All Day Chisel never did much for me, apart from a few songs here and there. 'It's Alright, You're OK' feels like a tune with a bit more pop chart potential than anything before. Leo's voice has always been high in the mix, and there's a lot less guitar scrapings, instead being driven by a bouncing bassline and an organ-swirl chorus. That said it's a lot less 'heavy' and the traces of 'punk' are removed in favour of a more feel-good, soulful mod pop. I like this song a lot, but you have no idea how many times I listened to it in high school. The b-side is a song that for some reason I always thought was a cover, but it's actually not. It's a bit more driving, with some good strumming, maybe a return to form of their old Nothing New-era sound.  It's lacking the one spark of greatness to catapult it out of B-side territory, but at this point, I'll take it over the flip.