Angkorwat is Dublin-based musician Niamh Corcoran.

This haunting little track has fascinated me ever since it first surfaced on a Wire sampler last year. High time I shared it, yes? (Yes.)

Angkorwat, “Big Little Edie"

IMAGE: BIG EDIE AND LITTLE EDIE FROM “GREY GARDENS”

I’ve spent the last few weeks in a kind of fugue state of disbelief. I still can’t quite believe this is happening. I can’t believe this is happening the the Gulf Coast again. At the very least, Katrina was a natural catastrophe, tragically compounded by negligence, ill-preparedness and bureaucratic red tape. In stark contrast, we brought the Gulf spill on ourselves: it speaks volumes of human selfishness, greed and hubris.

That it’s still going on leaves me heartsick, horrified and incredibly angry. I’ve never used this blog as a soapbox — I usually just natter on about music and leave it at that. But this issue is too big to ignore. (And getting bigger by the day. To put it in perspective, here’s a handy-dandy infographic that compares Deepwater to other epic spills.)

There are so many ways you can help.

Sign a petition or three. Reduce the amount of petroleum-based materials you use over the course of a day. Carpool to work. Tell the President how angry you are. (Better still, make him keep his promise to “kick BP’s ass.”) Donate your time or money to an organization trying to make a difference in the stricken region.

From now until June 18, Tiny Showcase is donating $15 from this Jen Corace print to the Gulf Restoration Network. Julianna Swaney is donating every penny from her latest limited edition print to the Audubon Society.

Oceana is concentrating its efforts on cleanup and outreach, while the International Bird Rescue Research Center, Audubon Society and the National Wildlife Conservancy are focusing on rescuing and rehabilitating as many birds and animals as they are able.

I won’t link to any photos, because I will completely lose it. Instead, I’ve posted the aforementioned Jen Corace print, “Down, Down, Down.”

Music: Lida Husik’s haunting “Ship Going Down,” from Your Bag. (A lost classic, If you don’t own it, hie thee to iTunes.)

Lida Husik, “Ship Going Down"

ARTWORK BY JEN CORACE, “DOWN, DOWN, DOWN”

“Super Panavision 70” is that cool breeze. With its wall-of-sound echoes of Broadcast, Beach House, and Tarnation’s lovelorn grit, this is music to get lost in. The crystalline production beautifully highlights the luminous, triple-tracked harmonies and round-robin vocals, underpinned and grounded by a slightly martial drumbeat. I can’t remember when a song grabbed me this immediately… It's mesmerizing and delightful. Umpteen listens later, it still is.

Strange Holiday is the brainchild of singer Alison Ables. Formerly of Tristeza, she’d always loved to sing but never had time to develop her ideas, thanks to constant touring. A brief spell in an a capella group led by Dirty Projectors’ Amber Coffman inspired her to move to Portland, built herself a studio, and start a solo project called Soft Fruit.

While working on her debut EP, she met Ben Simpson (bass) and Andrew Grosse (moog), who became full time members. With the addition of Kevin Davis on guitar and Jesse Robert W on drums, Strange Holiday was officially born.

You can buy Strange Holiday's debut EP, Archipelago, here. They are currently at work on their debut album.

Strange Holiday, “Super Panavision 70"]]> tag:www.warpedrealitymagazine.com,2010://1.168 2010-05-24T02:55:46Z 2010-05-24T03:00:25Z

Less a band than an unstoppable force, What Cheer? Brigade make Gogol Bordello look like wallflowers. Formed in Providence in 2005, this insane party machine has brought its unique éclat and élan to art openings, libraries, school playgrounds, traffic islands, warehouses and music festivals — often accompanied by fellow freaksters, Big Nazo.

Lo and behold, band-that-couldn’t-be-tamed has finally unleashed its debut long-player upon the world, We Suck, You Blow [Anchor Brain].

You can order direct from both band and label, but that would be so …expected. If you act now, you can buy artist Will Schaff’s super-cool What Cheer? Screenprint. Published by Tiny Showcase in a limited edition of 100, each print comes with a download code for the record, thus ensuring that you, too, can turn your abode into a truly righteous soirée sauvage! (Gorilla masks not included.)

What Cheer Brigade, “Siayan Re Saiyan"

ARTWORK BY WILLIAM SCHAFF, “WHAT CHEER?”

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Watching this blurry yet riveting footage of Lydon/Levene/Wobble era makes me wonder what P.I.L. mach 2010 could possibly have to offer. Despite the reliable backing of mssrs. Lu Edmonds (Mekons), Bruce Smith (Pop Group, Slits) and Scott Firth, Lydon himself has bloated into an increasingly unknown quantity. Where did the incisive, self-critical Lydon of "Public Image" and "No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs" go? To paraphrase the redoubtable Tim Gunn, I worry about his taste level.

In all likelihood my curiosity will win out and I'll be there, front row and center, for P.I.L.'s Providence show at Lupo's Heartbreak Hotel on May 9th. Tickets on sale March 26. Be there or cry into your limited-edition Metal Box tin.

Or, like former drummer Martyn Atkins, make brownies.

Public Image Limited, "Public Image" ]]> tag:www.warpedrealitymagazine.com,2010://1.164 2010-03-07T17:52:29Z 2010-03-07T18:53:25Z

I love it when familiar or (in)famous faces turn up unexpectedly in new contexts. It happened when KK Barrett of the Screamers showed up as Spike Jonze's production designer, and it's happening now with David McDermott and Peter McGough's new film, Mean to Me, a 12-minute end-of-the-affair noir starring Agyness Deyn, in her acting debut.

You may (or may not) remember McDermott's immortal harangues from Glenn O'Brien's TV Party. Exhibit A:

Designed to showcase, as Deborah Harry so succinctly put it, "neighborhood access to your friendly freaks around the block," TV Party was an anarchic and often brilliant forum for a coterie of artists, musicians and writers just on the cusp of fame (or, in some cases, obscurity).

A TV Party regular, McDermott is one of these true East Village eccentrics. Through his partnership with McGough, he has sought to live entirely out of time, viewing the present as a trap and a dead end. The past, however, is filled with endless possibilities.

Partially underwritten by a number of corporate sponsors, this new project pushes their quietly anachronistic work into a new realm of commercial possibility. Watch the trailer via the New York Times T blog.

COURTESY OF CHEIM & READ

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While there’s a hell of a lot of clutter and noise on the internet, there’s also a lot to be discovered. By randomly clicking a link it’s possible to discover (or rediscover) a whole new world.

Like, for instance, A Diamond Age, Atlanta, Ga.-based musician M Leer’s ever-mutating (mostly) solo project. While he’s busy putting the finishing touches on his next record, you’d do very well to download his beautifully-curated mix tapes — very heavy on Technicolor psychedelia and rarities from the glory days of Cinecitta.

Whatever you do, don’t pass up Beguiling the Hours, Leer’s track-for-track tribute to Gareth Williams and Mary Currie’s collaborative project Flaming Tunes.

Williams’ post-This Heat project only saw limited release on cassette in the 1980s. Thanks to Mick Hobbs’ Life and Living Records, it was given a proper reissue last year.

When Leer, a dedicated This Heat fan, stumbled upon an FT bootleg in 2007, he was amazed to discover that the album wasn’t more well-known, even among the cognoscenti.

“What initially grabbed me was that it was in a different place from This Heat, but with a similar cadence. You could tell where it was coming from,” he said in 2009. “Essentially, [it’s] a pop record —a song-oriented, soulful thing.”

Cheers to Dan Selzer at Acute Records for alerting me to this wonderful video of Gareth Williams, filmed in the ‘80s and completed after his untimely death in 2001 by friend Colin Harrison.

“Nothing’s On” and other rarities can be downloaded at Flaming Tunes. (The links are very quietly hiding out on the right, under the photos.)

A Diamond Age, "Raindrops from Heaven" (from Beguiling the Hours, 2007)

Gareth Williams, "31" (demo)

IMAGE: LETTER FROM GARETH WILLIAMS TO MARY CURRIE, FROM FLAMING TUNES

Brighton group Ebsen and the Witch are a rather mysterious lot, all sepia-toned and wintry on their Myspace page. (Which is to say, I know next to nothing about them.) Today they released a limited edition single as part of the newly-reinvigorated too pure singles club—which is reason enough for me to pay attention to them. Reason #2 is a recommendation from none other than producer Mark van Hoen —always a sign of something wonderful going on.

Like the fog, this track tip-toes in on little cat feet. But it gathers in power as it goes along, turning into a storming, fuzz-drenched, JAMC-by-way-of-Phil-Spector-before-he-went-completely-psycho delight. (How I love bands that harken back to the glory days of shoegaze.)

The song’s mix of delicacy and power brings to mind Sian Alice Group, the Cocteaus (all those ringing guitars), with dreamy echoes of Julee Cruise, Beach House. Thematically, this is akin to AC Marias’ “One of Our Girls (Has Gone Missing)” —taking the dramatic ending of The Awakening as a starting point, a new beginning. (Like the book, both songs are melancholy but hopeful too.)

Welcome back, too pure, Kick my ass again with something this great, I dare ya.

Esben and the Witch, “Lucia at the Precipice"

PHOTO BY ANDREA FELDMAN

In Dennis Potter’s classic mini-series The Singing Detective, characters frequently, and without warning, burst into song, channeling the sounds of the past in order to put an optimistic (and often ironic) gloss on a dark present.

As with Potter, the playful, sometimes eerie sound collages of British groups Broadcast, the Focus Group, Moon Wiring Club and Belbury Poly conjure up an alternate reality—an eccentric, occasionally unsettling combination of cold war dread and boundless optimism.

Belbury Poly’s Jim Jupp (also co-owner, with House, of record label Ghost Box International), pinpoints the off-kilter sound as the precise juxtaposition of “ancient and modern, or the cosmic and the parochial.”

Less a full-blown genre than a state of mind, “hauntology” (as it has been dubbed by Simon Reynolds) mixes such far-flung influences as early analog electronica, musique concrete, library 78s, Italian film soundtracks and old newsreels into something wholly other yet quintessentially British in flavor.

Studio maverick and musical (brico)lagist Raymond Scott is also revered, as is twisted folk from the 70s (Wicker Man and Valerie & Her Weeks of Wonders being particular touchstones), as well as sultry echoes of Tropicalia and other 8-track exotica.

Taking a cue from Scott, collage is the primary form, with sounds sampled from thrift-store finds, dusted off and given new life. Vocals are generally not sung, but intoned, with a bit of radio static for extra verisimilitude.

There’s a tinge of sci-fi to be sure — “the future is now” — mixed with nostalgia and the desire to recapture the idea of community in a pre-digital age, using digital tools as the medium. (These songs are preoccupied by yearnings for a pre-lapsarian, pastoral world; the Brutalist architecture embodied by the New Town movement is simultaneously revered and reviled, as is the very concept of Suburbia.)

Take, for example, Broadcast & the Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults Of The Radio Age (Warp), a new maximalist extended player from Broadcast in collaboration with Julian House, the like-minded mastermind of the Focus Group. This collagist kaleidoscope plays out like an album-length socio-ethnographic séance, sprinkled with quasi-historical references and half-remembered voices. True to its title, the resulting spectral sounds seem to emanate from an imagined future.

Oddly, American band Dymaxion was among the first groups to really hit upon this sampladelic, largely instrumental style.

Like Kurt Schwitters, this short-lived but fantastic band were expert at culling beauty out of junk; their retro-futuristic collage aesthetic consistently yielded surprising, devilishly catchy results. Their 1997 track “Haunted Radio” (written for a marvelous one-off Vesuvius compilation called Spooky Sounds of Now) could be a thesis statement for the ghostly sounds to follow. Their posthumous singles compilation, 4+3=38.33, may still be available from Duophonic. (Dymaxion principal Claudia Newell has begun posting new music on her blog, Maison Atomisée).

Oakland, California duo Crawling with Tarts pre-dates Dymaxion by a number of years, taking an abstract, musique concrete approach. Their two-song suite Grand Surface Noise Opera is composed for two turntables and uses “surface noise as a binding element” (to quote co-composer Michael Gendreau). It’s also about building narrative, layering voices and tonalities to create mood and to shift meaning (both linear and non-linear). In a 1999 interview, the Gendreaus traced the piece’s origins back to England, specifically, a record store in Portobello Road…

Broadcast & the Focus Group, “Love's Long Listen-in" (from Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age, 2009)

Dymaxion, "I-Man Transport (from 4+3=38.33, 2002)

Crawling with Tarts, “Grand Surface Noise Opera No. 3 (Indian Ocean Ship)" (from Operas 3 & 4)

IMAGE BY IAN HODGSON AKA MOON WIRING CLUB, FROM THE BLANK WORKSHOP