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Genius #4: Apr '24

.O.Rang, Heavenly Blue, Cindy Lee, Ekko Astral, Still House Plants; Black Flag; Guitar Harmonics; Discovery Zone, Oneohtrix Point Never

Larry Michaels

• 11 min read

Hello brainiacs, it’s time for Genius Dot Com. it’s time to listen to music. It’s time to hear a sound and go “oh yeah, that’s it, that’s that sound.”

Table of Contents:

  • Capitalism
  • Album recommendations
  • Replay
  • Garbage Corner
  • Scene Report & Upcoming NYC-area shows*

*Note, that I am moving to Baltimore at the end of June & will likely reconfigure this section to be DC/Baltimore/Philly area shows*

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Capitalism:

Turns out when you buy a house, you really don’t have money left over for other stuff. I picked up a t-shirt from Superiority Burger? And a copy of Polvo’s Today’s Active Lifestyles on vinyl, but I’ve already written too much about Polvo. Not being a good member of capitalist society unfortunately.

Album Recommendations:

I’m trying to keep a balance of old & new stuff for these recs, but there’s just so much new music coming out that’s getting my attention. Here are 4 new releases and 1 older that I wanted to highlight in April:

.O.Rang - Herd of Instinct (Echo,Echo, 1996)

Mysterious & evolving post-rock

When new-wave-darlings-turned-post-rock-pioneers Talk Talk finished Spirit of Eden, the band split: Mark Hollis kept the band name for one final release, the incredible Laughing Stock. He pushed beyond the last group effort and executed his vision of a sparse, haunting collage — built from thousands of hours of improvised recording sessions with dozens of musicians. Drummer Lee Harris and bassist Paul Webb must have had a similar idea, because they went on to form .O.Rang and their debut, too, is a tapestry of sounds from many different performers. The vibe on Herd Of Instinct is a lot more rhythmic and harmonically dense than Laughing Stock, with a focus on East Asian and Southeast Asian inspirations. This album hosts a seemingly infinite toolbox of percussions, bowed strings, screeching guitar feedback, and voices that sing/speak/whistle/whisper. Some of the best drum tones I’ve heard on a record — you ever hear a snare hit and make an audible sound?? Come on.

Heavenly Blue - We Have The Answer (Secret Voice, Apr ‘24)

Forceful & poignant screamo

Very sick release from the Michigan septet. Vocals fly from both lead vocalists & guitar patterns jump between giant chords and frenetic lead lines, underpinned by fuzzy bass and a full-kit approach to drumming. The lofi production mostly focuses on the midrange, making this release loud and full without feeling bogged down in heaviness: the guitars chime into the cymbals & the gritty vocals cut through the mix. Following along with the lyrics is really something, with biting commentary on the state of our world and living inside of capital’s empire. Each song is nicely varied in composition (jumping between various hardcore staples — chaotic rhythms, washy sunny guitars, big hooks, crushing breakdowns, etc.). HB’s got a legitimate pop hit in “Static Voice Speaks Static To Me.”

Cindy Lee - Diamond Jubilee (Realistik/self-released, Apr ‘24)

Sunny & nostalgic indie pop/rock

Cindy Lee’s latest has been making huge waves among the too-online-music-nerd set, so uhh guilty as charged. The double-CD has 32 tracks of nostalgic (?hypnagogic?) rock-and-roll; picking up bits and pieces of the 50s and 60s: motown basslines plucked underneath country-western chiming tremolo guitars with bass VI and spring reverb clangs. Every instrument has that plugged-directly-into-the-console kind of fuzziness. The soaring R&B vocal melodies hit the ceiling of the limiter and the lo-fi production hiss pushes the vibes to a perfect extreme. Cindy Lee is the drag alter-ego of Women’s Patrick Flegel: they don the fur-boa & cocktail dress vibe of a Marvelette or a Supreme and write songs that sound like they were plucked from a $1 record bin at Village Revival. Guaranteed to be a modern classic. Note that this release is only available as a zip-file download link thru the label’s geocities website (with a Paypal link for recommended donation) and on youtube (above).

Ekko Astral - Pink Balloons (Topshelf, Apr ‘24)

Wry & cutting indie-punk

DC punk rock is back baby! I caught Ekko Astral’s show in Brooklyn and it did not disappoint: frantic weirdo no-wavy stuff sitting right next to pop songs with giant, sparkling choruses and some old punk rock mosh tracks to round it out: Big fuzzy bass tone and swirling, scratchy guitars. Frontwoman Jael Holtzman took a moment halfway thru the set to point the mic back into the crowd, asking individual audience members to answer the question “what is your biggest problem with the world right now?” Their debut LP perfectly encapsulates the best and worst parts of living in our nation’s capitol: disjointed rhythmic music from a town so small, but you sit down at the bar and suddenly notice that everyone else there is wearing a lanyard from their evil think tank job. Great, great record — if ever there was a band to get in on the ground floor of, it’s Ekko Astral.

Still House Plants - if i don’t make it, i love u (Bison, Apr ‘24)

Soulful and chiming free improv

This absolutely buzzed my brain — the Glasgow trio arrived at the studio with unfinished jams and transmogrified that openness into magic. Soulful vocals, chiming and odd guitar patterns, with an understated drumming style that holds the whole shifting mass in place. According to interviews, they only ever practice the beginnings & endings of their songs, allowing the entire middle to be whatever exquisite corpse will get them from A to B. In my experience, writing and performing free-improv in the studio is a tight rope — a compositions can reach a high-risk/high-reward moments where pushing too far can unravel the process. But SHP take some really daring turns on these tracks, and the payoff is there: we get to hear the lighting that they caught in of the bottle. Big thanks to my friend Aled for the recommendation on this one.

Upcoming May albums to look forward to:

  • I’m so stoked for the new Agriculture EP, Living is Easy via The Flenser on 5/3. Ecstatic black metal for the people — heavy and bright, with undermixed shrieks and some lovely Irish folk music influence.
  • Scottish indie pop darlings Camera Obscura are back with Look To The East, Look To The West on 5/3, their first in over 10 years (and their first for Merge Records). The 2000s never died.
  • One more out 5/3: Nigerien guitar hero Mdou Moctar has another mind-bending afrobeat jam on Matador Records, Funeral for Justice.
  • Post-Rock legends Gastr Del Sol (Jim O’Rourke & David Grubbs) have a 2-CD compilation of unreleased tracks appropriately called We Have Dozens Of Titles coming out 5/24 with Drag City.

Replay:

Black Flag Discography

I took one day this month to listen to every single Black Flag album from the Nervous Breakdown EP (1979) to In My Head (1985). I didn’t listen to Minuteflag (1986) because I didn’t know about it until just now and I didn’t listen to the horrible What The… (2013) because there’s just no need. I also skipped the demo compilations.

Some ancient history: Black Flag formed in Hermosa Beach, CA in the late 70s. Guitarist Greg Ginn is the de facto leader and songwriter — over the course of the band’s history, his dark & weirdly jazzy playing got darker and weirdly jazzier. Equally important, his brother Raymond Pettibon played bass on a few early releases, but is best known as the illustrator for all of their albums (minus the aforementioned What The… which has the worst album art I have ever seen) and in-house graphic designer. His art has been featured all over, including the MoMA.

Each of their first albums featured a different lead vocalist until 1981’s Damaged, where Henry Rollins solidified the lineup through the end of the band’s initial run. It’s not controversial to say that the best line-up was the penultimate one: Kira Roessler’s virtuosic proggy bass playing goes well with the meat-and-potatoes drumming from Bill Stevenson (of the Descendents). Rollins’ vocals got more and more varied and a highlight for me was the Family Man album, which is 50% spoken word, 50% instrumental.

By In My Head, Ginn’s control over the songs had reached a boiling point to the rest of the band and the whole thing splintered. The album art was stolen from Pettibon without his consent, and the 2 have been unreconciled since then.

Here’s my ranking, purely vibes based:

  1. My War (1984)
  2. Family Man (1984)
  3. In My Head (1985)
  4. Slip It In (1984)
  5. The Process of Weeding Out EP (1985)
  6. Loose Nut (1985)
  7. Damaged (1981)
  8. Nervous Breakdown EP (1979)
  9. Jealous Again EP (1980)
  10. TV Party EP (1982)

Garbage Corner:

Guitar Harmonics w/ Ed Rodriguez, and Derek Bailey

I’ve been working to unlock guitar harmonics into my regular playing: not just as flourishes, but to use the tones as actual notes within the music I am writing and performing. I saw this video from Deerhoof’s Ed Rodriguez a couple years ago and I’ve been thinking about it basically ever since — I hope that Rodriguez’ enthusiasm for Derek Bailey strikes you the way it strikes me.

Through studying Derek Bailey’s compositions and techniques, Rodriguez offers “You really begin to see the range of the guitar and what [makes it] such a unique instrument.”

What’s a harmonic?

Some basic sound physics: every single sound in the world is made up of a fundamental frequency & all of its sympathetic overtones — that’s why you can play a C on piano and the same C on a trombone and your ear can tell which is a string hit with a hammer and which is a resonating brass bell. The harmonic series is a set group of sympathetic overtones, but different instruments have different weights to different harmonics. Here, let Bradley Cooper explain:

It’s incredibly easy to resonate a string into its harmonic overtones: if you rest a finger against the string at an exactly specific interval (ie halfway, at 3/4 of the length, etc.) before plucking (and then let go), you can create a standing wave that vibrates at the harmonic (also called an overtone or partial). If you place your finger in the exact middle of its length, you get 2 opposite vibrations happening on either side of the “node” where your finger had been. If you place it exactly at the 3rd or quarter of the string, you get tripled waves and quadrupled waves pulsing from node to node.

In the image below, the top “oval” is the string as it resonates from high to low and each line below is a different harmonic of that open string:

The Harmonic Series and Its Implications On Composition | Los Angeles Guitar Lessons by Vreny Van Elslande | ZOT Zin Guitar Lessons

Great, how do i use it in my playing?

What makes the guitar special is that it’s got frets — you can find all of the locations above and use the frets to guide you to the different harmonics.

Let’s start with Ed Rodriguez’ discoveries:

  • Fretted/open/harmonic tones: Rodriguez plays chords and scales made up of open strings, fretted notes, and natural harmonics. Rodriguez quotes Bailey: “I’m trying to get an even mix of different timbres, using pitches.” Bailey goes on to offer that if you want to play a chord with the notes C, D, and E — you can play C as a fretted note (E string, 8th fret), D as an open 4th string, and E as a harmonic (7th fret of A string).
  • Practicing chromatic scales where each step is an octave away from the last (up and down), using harmonics when possible.
  • Playing tone clusters on a guitar, using the open strings and harmonics to achieve notes that are a half-step apart on each string

And here is a list of the natural harmonics from the 0-12th frets — these are made up of the overtone series of each string as you subdivide the strings by adding nodes of resistance:

  • 2nd harmonic (octave): 12th fret
  • 3rd harmonic (octave+fifth): 7th fret (and around the 19th)
  • 4th harmonic (2 octave): 5th & 17th frets
  • 5th harmonic (2oct+major 3rd): 4th, 9th, 16th frets
  • 6th harmonic (2octe+fifth): 3.2 fret
  • 7th harmonic (2oct+min 7th): 2.8, 10th, and 15th frets
  • 8th harmonic (3 octave): 2.2 fret

Above the 8th harmonic, it’s a challenge to get the string to resonate properly at higher overtones, but cranking up the distortion (which increases ALL overtones) can help! Happy hunting out there. Play us out, Derek.

Scene Report:

Discovery Zone at TV Eye (4/8)

The hometown show for DZ, who has been an ex-pat to Germany for some time. I wrote about their newest, Quantum Web, in Genius #3 and was very excited to catch the live versions of these songs. First off, the opener was sick: a full dance set based on a Teenage Engineering EP-133 while someone wearing all black sat behind him & speed-ran an anime bullet hell game.

DZ’s set was lovely — her set-up was a keyboard vocoder, some kind of sampler, and a theremin & she had a side man just there to play soulful saxophones. The set was largely controlled via MIDI, but the theremin & vocals kept it feeling like a live setting and not a “press play and dance” kind of situation. Plus, she had a very detailed visual setup with a projector & mesh screen in front of the stage, allowing her to appear to be in between 2 different planes of visuals. I had an out of body experience during the song “Mall Of Luv.”

Oneohtrix Point Never at Brooklyn Paramount (4/26)

A brand new venue in downtown Brooklyn and boy is it nice. Let’s start with the deets: easily transit accessible (directly above DeKalb Ave NR/BQ), it’s absolutely beautiful inside (weird Vegas vibes, with a fake sky and everything), and the sound is honestly perfect. The front of the stage is graded slightly upward, but as you get farther back, the grade increases — the back of the venue feels like it’s a full 5 feet higher than the front.

Openers were Pedagogy (moody guitar/synth + highly rhythmic drummer) and comedian Sarah Squirm who roasted the audience the whole time (good). OPN’s set was really impressive, largely pulling from Again with a few songs from most of his other releases. The arrangements were a little heavier than on the albums & the visuals were stellar: intercut cel animations & a live puppeteer/videographer who streamed his videos to the big screen. Overall, an inspiring set: OPN’s ability to stretch timbres that are both synth-based and sample-based is really wild & his composition structures are a little easier to follow when you’re seeing them happen in a live setting.

May upcoming shows:

Later:

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