SONIC ROUTER: Roll The Dice Interview

"...it’s a victory for us because we started out with no real ambitions for it. When we got the first two tracks down that felt like a victory, then we had an album finished then it took almost a year before someone released it and that felt like a huge victory..."  - Peder Mannerfelt

My most recent piece for the Sonic Router is up now: An interview with Swedish analogue kosmiche outfit Roll the Dice. They have an inspired new album out on Leaf next week followed closely by a show at Cafe Oto in London - and on the basis of the interview, it should really be one far out event.

READ IT HERE

SONIC ROUTER: Gorgons: Making Modern Sounds As Antiques

"I don’t want to think of it as merely casting a filter over something and calling it old or dirty. I want the reworking process of certain gestures to find a balance between what you exactly hear in your head while creating and the serendipitous events that occur to reach that sound or feeling you want a sound to impart."  Chris Vocchia - Gorgons

New interview by me with Chicago based ambient beatsmith Chris Vocchia, aka Gorgons is up on the Sonic Router site.

Over the last few weeks I've been chatting with Chris and getting deeper into the psyche of the mysterious producer responsible for the tracks I posted about in July. As in thrall to the ancient as he is the modern, this is a producer with depth. 


READ IT HERE

SONIC ROUTER: Interview & Mix - Dalglish [Highpoint Lowlife]

"...People who might as well not exist because it looks like bad copies of the ones somewhere else or even next to them..."












My most recent piece for Sonic Router went up yesterday - an interview with Scottish born, Berlin based techno pioneer Dalglish to complement his new album of granite toned electronic soundscaping Benacah Drann Deachd .  It's quite a heavy one, as is the mix he sent in to go with it - a tracklist that includes Synken, Michael Rother, Sun Ra, Coil, Cluster and Leyland Kirby.

Here's the intro: full interview, album stream and mix inside the LINK

"There’s a lot currently going on in the life of Dalglish, aka Chris Douglas, in and outside of the fact that he’s a man who has been producing confrontational exploratory noises since the techno-advent time of the late 80′s, with his first official release appearing in 1992. His back catalogue of work since then has informed swathes of genres, let alone the artists operating inside them, over two decades and he is still producing music that is capable of stopping a listener dead in their tracks. After pursuing this interview for some time, chatting sporadically to Chris as we contended with both the complications and darkness that hindered the flow of conversation; the same ominous cloud that indirectly helped inform both of us of a mutual appreciation for the psychological position from which Dalglish’s music approaches the listener."

INTERVIEW: Vagina Vangi

After being suitably wowed by their second EP, Locked Forever, I followed it up with a some questions to band leader Ilya Arhipov about their brief but striking history, his take on the witch house scene and about that name.

Not For Resale: Are you a band?

Ilya Arhipov: Not completely. I made all production and half of vocals from the very beginning of this project. But since I moved to Moscow (2 months ago) I took female vocalist and a drummer for live support and they both took some part in a new EP (though I made a major part of all work as well). So it's about to become a real band soon, I hope.

NFR: How many of you are there? What do you all play, who sings?

IA: Three persons - me, a drummer Grigory Dobrynin and a vocalist Yana Blinder. Male vocals are mine. I also did all the arrangements, mixing, beats, grooves, etc. At live shows me and Yana also will be involved in electronics beside our vocal parts. I never use guitars with Vagina Vangi and I will not use them in live shows. Meanwhile.

NFR: Is this your first band or have you had other projects?

IA: I had many bands and projects before. I tried everything from electropop to grindcore there. But none of that bands had any feedback like from this one. Recently we buried my electropop band Hint Machine. Yana sings in 3 Colours of White. Grigory's main band is On-The-Go (and to my taste, this band is probably one of the best indie bands from Russia).

NFR: Where in Russia are you from?

IA: Actually we are based in Moscow. I moved here 2 months ago. Before that I lived in Severomorsk and Murmansk - a very cold and dark place, I'd say. Not far from Norway and Finland (and I was hugely inspired by Norwegian scene). Vagina Vangi started there. Other guys also were born not in Moscow. Grigory came from Toliatti, Yana came from Rostov.

NFR: Do  you have friends making anything similar who you hang out with?

IA: It's hard to say so. Maybe only by web. I have such a kind of friendship with Unison from France, for example but we never met each other. I also keep in touch with Nattymari, The Church Of Synth, Funerals, Meszahline and many other mutual friends. But we are hardly familiar.  In Russia there are also two projects who came from drag music: Stoned Boys and ~▲l▲~. They make cool stuff and I respect these guys as well. I hope this respect is mutual. We live in one city now, but unfortunately didn't meet each other yet. With my new EP I can't say I still belong to "witch-house" scene (if you heard or read about my first EP, you know what I mean). I'm trying to make something own by blending my favourite ingredients. But tastes differ, you know.

My "real" friends used to make some other stuff.

NFR: What is it about the witch house sound that drew you to it; Or where you already making these kinds of sounds before the term witch house started appearing?

IA: I used to make some dark music for about 10 years. Things I did before could be compared only by atmosphere and melodies, but not by sound. I knew about witch-house from the very beginning of Salem and Gatekeeper, but that time I thought I'd never make such music. Reasons why I tried it are simple - just for my curiosity and for having fun. Only in progress I understood that that sound fits well to my earlier unreleased ideas. But speaking frankly, these bounds are too tight for me as well. Moreover, I'm tired of that huge amount of bands playing witch-house. Bad and inelegant.

NFR: What about the name Vagina Vangi? Where does it come from? What is one of those?

IA: It's a Russian combination of  words. It means something like "Baba Vanga's Vagina". Many meanings can be taken from it, but what is the most precious is a phonetic harmony ("gi" in both words originally pronounced like in "give"). I don't remember how I got it. But when I started, I didn't doubt about the title.

NFR: I considered Witch House a very loose term for a lot of people making darkened, graven occult influenced, electronic heavy music – Mishka Blog's term GraveWave is also very appropriate.

IA: It is. First bands were not so similar as they are now.

NFR: When it first started appearing what did you interpret Witch House as?

IA: Firstly I didn't notice any principal difference between Salem, Gatekeeper (from one side) and some tracks of Crystal Castles, Zola Jesus an WU LYF (from the other). I started my own stuff when genre became more formulaic and caricature. I liked that atmosphere, but I knew I could make some things in my own way.

NFR: What is the difference between Vagina Vangi and the music Hint Machine played?

IA: Hint Machine had more friendly, properly processed ideas in all. I had to think a thousand times before I could offer any idea there. We tried to make the best music for ourselves. Vagina Vangi is entirely produced by me and I try to release the primal idea of any track as soon as it possible - I know exactly my disadvantages, but I do not solve them immediately - music itself and ideas are more important here.

And the other criteria - VV is dark music, it's totally inspired by dark moods and emotions, at the same time - HM had light and positive context - just a friendly pop music. Too proper, though a little bit outrageous

NFR: Why do you think people have taken more notice of your new project? Just the Witch House angle, or do you feel you have developed your sound?

IA: It's still a secret for me. Maybe we tried too hard with HM and "better" became an enemy of "good". Maybe my voice didn't fit that music. I don't know. HM is still unfinished (though broken-up already) and it's not correct to compare. As for my own sound - I think I've got a feeling of having something like that. And It's very exciting to catch my "typical" features and to throw them in to something unexpected.

NFR: What is it you want to create with V.V. that couldn't happen with your previous band?

IA: I'd like to move forward and to see where all this leads. I'd like to have a band, to tour, regulary to release some albums. That's what I always wanted to have deal with, first of all.

NFR: From my own, UK perspective, there are a lot of quite chart-friendly sounds in Locked Forever – Euphoric Trance and House kind of synths and progressions. Is being Pop important

IA: Thank you! Even in my first EP I tried to add hook into every song, some brightly emphasized melodies. Then I just tried to make voice more important because, at least that could be good for live shows.

Important is not to be pop - important is that I'll like my own tracks when I listen to them after some years. I always tried to evolve all of my music to something touching, catchy and emotional, even if I played grindcore. That's a question of taste - obviously I like pop music.

NFR: What are your main inspirations for this project?

IA: I think, my own experience inspires me the most. It's hard to say more exactly - the list would be too huge.

NFR: The final track on the EP never quite peaks the same as the other tracks, there is a constant unreleased tension. Why did you choose to keep that one more restrained?

IA: Never thought about it. If you want some things to some things to sound louder, then you should make other things hush. Maybe that?

NFR: What else is coming from Vagina Vangi? Is there a full album you are working on?

IA: Soon we are going to release one more new single or EP with a couple of new tracks. And to play live as much as it possible. Something about full-length album will be clear when we'll find a label. Though we will not stop composing our new stuff.

An introduction to the world of ʄ≜uxmuℭica

“I started ʄ≜uxmuℭica around 2005 after seeing Bradford Cox with two friends perform as Deerhunter in a small club in Atlanta called MJQ. The concept was and still is "real music is not popular, so lets just drown it in noise". I had this concept before I ever met Bradford or before I ever saw him perform but it wasn't until I saw them play live that I realized how I was going to do what I wanted to do. Watching Bradford play definitely helped me realize how to add the post punk flair to ʄ≜uxmuℭica. As far as the reflection of ʄ≜uxmuℭica in terms of real music, in the notation of a musical language, is not popular so and thus has lost it's face value-- to me it has sort of added an extremely fake element to our culture and society. Hence, ʄ≜uxmuℭica; I decided to take pop music structure, which I have studied, extensively used, and broken down into a few completely new terms that have become bastardized genres, and fuse it with classical structure in the most minimalistic sense; most of my recordings never have more than 4 instruments- usually 2 analogue synth lines, a sampler, and a drum machine”   -  Yorba Zergot, ʄ≜uxmuℭica

This week I am going to present to you the hitherto unseen dark side of Witch House, an artist that has been kept out of the black light of the scene right from its inception for a multitude of reasons depending on who you talk to, or who will talk about it - silence often revealing as much as any answer, if not more. Producing some of the most cryptic, challenging and futuristic music in recent memory, the Californian based Yorba Zergot, the sole artist behind ʄ≜uxmuℭica , and leader of the multimedia collective Escape Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, should be right at the tip of any mention of occult electronica.

This is not going to be easy for you. I have been listening to this music, and talking with Yorba for months and I'm still trying to find my way in to everything. Both my understanding and appreciation for this music, along with the number of releases there are have all reached critical mass, so I am giving you a whole week of ʄ≜uxmuℭica to download, listen to and viddy yourself senseless with - or more senseful, depending on how well you connect. In a recent post on Mishka, Nattymari very succinctly nails an entire ouvre in one short article,  so go there to read that before I start stumbling around any further in reach of some profundity.

Yorba's is a wandering soul, and as much as his music wriggles free of any genre you might try and leash it to, so too does his sense of place, a physical manifestation of his art's cultural collagist qualities to stay broad and fluid. What he tells me about his movements over the last few years also echoes the confrontational aspect of his music: “I kind of got burnt out on the scene in Atlanta after getting fired from every good job I ever had in that city and kind of becoming a gypsy stealing gas and making cigarette money with tarot cards. then I left North America for three and a half years. I've lived in like four or five major metropolitan areas at this point; Atlanta, San Francisco, Portland, Bangkok”

He has made a name for himself within the inner circles of the Witch House scene by being a bit of a firebrand, making few concessions to the person on the other end of any messages he writes them. The first contact I had with him was off the back of a White Ring remix & video of his that I posted - his follow up thanks email was more like a hazing technique to see if I had what it took to keep him interested in me. It's easy to see how his approach could rub people up the wrong way. There's a harshness tinged with a slight bitterness at how the cards have played out for him. His tarot deck offering a glimpse of a future when he was signed up to Warp Records at the age of 17 in 2002, only to be dropped months later due to his inability to tour the US. “At the time I was making some fusion of downtempo, dark ambient and idm. After being dropped my initial reaction was to make dark electronic dance music rather than ambient or droney gazey music and to fuse it with pop and post punk elements into some sort of occult "anti-pop"”

As well as sniping off at a scene he saw the dawning of “I tagged myself with "witch house" and "anti-pop" in 2007 as kind of a personal joke, I think we all see what it has grown into” he can also wax extremely generously in lucid and informative fashion, as with his post about the genesis of the Witch House genre on his last.fm page.

Even the dirgiest music amongst the horror-drone and darkwave-glitch has nothing on the level of psychological challenge Yorba's music levels at the listener. As with all insularly functioning artists, the concept of listener doesn't occur until after the event: “I don't make music for mass appeal in any sense other than I have a mass appeal to good music - this to me in most cases is classical, experimental, or avant garde music - I am a huge junkie for innovation and novelty.” Despite such a credo, one of the insatiable, indestructible elements in his music is the innate sense of pop that doesn't ever allow a traditional song-form to fall apart completely. It isn't abstract or untethered music, each track is locked into it's own unique sense of rhythm, meter, verse chorus and bridge, illustrated by the arcane glyphs and sigils that form the song titles. They may not function within the same laws of musicology that the regular listener is familiar with, but give yourself enough time in the company of ʄ≜uxmuℭica's logic and your mind will fall in with it: “All of the albums are supposed to sum up some sort of urban gothic mythological motive for market placement of inferior music (666) so I sort of transmuted that into the key of the godhead (777) by adding some scifi noir and dead wood pop melodies. I always try to communicate a deep resonance of my music with, archetypes.”


Prepare yourselves, for the next few days are going to provide you with some of the most cerebrally and aurally challenging music you will have heard for some time.

INTERVIEW: What the buck?! Revenge of Shinobi change name to Hind Ear!

Following their seemingly mysterious disappearence after their Black Dice support slot, NFR favourites Revenge of Shinobi have remerged with a set of new songs a new name - Hind Ear.

The two songs on their MySpace show a definite progression from the sound of the Shinobi years. In Origami the allusions to shivery post-euphoric comedown sensations still set the band apart in tone and atmosphere; The liquid propulsion of the beat in Coconut a trancy heart that erupts into distorted shards of feral thumping by the end, picking up the cues from all kinds of noisy influences and beautifying them into a more graceful, streamlined form. Both are exciting evolutions of the former sound.

Fresh off the back of their gig at London's White Heat on Wedensday with pop hardcore upstarts Pulled Apart By Horses, we caught up with Seb and Craig to ask their collective mind a few Q's about their plans for dominating the bliss-tempoed post-rock scene.

NFR - Why the new name, whose idea was it and what does it mean?

S&C: We wanted to change it. The other one didn't fit. We wanted something that wasn't an obvious, direct reference to anything, apart from the word 'Hind' and the word 'Ear'

- What does the name change represent?

Not sure.

- Origami is a re-recording of Organ isn't it?

No, it's a cover of a Revenge of Shinobi song

- Is there going to be a new sound emerging with it?

We're doing what we used to do, but better, with more focus.

- You are playing with some pretty different bands - Pulled Apart By Horses are pretty hardcore (the sound, that is) whereas Volcano! and Mi Ami are more heavily rhythm & effects kind of outfits. Do you prefer playing with bands in a similar sound to you (like the Black Dice gig...kind of - their sound is everywhere though!)

It doesn't really matter about the band, although of course it's always good to play with nice people who have a similar outlook to making music as us. Black Dice are one of our favourite bands in the world, their live show is beyond belief, so playing that kind of show is obviously a great thing. It's more about the audience. If they are appreciative of what we are trying to do then that's be the main thing. Playing with bands who have a similar approach to making music does bring that sort of audience.

- How do you think you're going to go down at those gigs and how are you all looking forward to them?

We're very excited, particularly the Mi Ami show. We're big Black Eyes fans, so for that reason excitement is rife.

- Are their many more gigs on the horizon?

Yes, we've got some really exiting shows coming up. We're presently in talks about the Michael Jackson support slot. 50 shows x standard £50 support band fee = £2500! We'll be coining it in.

- And finally, and most importantly - does all this - new manager, new name, new gigs, mean that a release is finally on the horizon? (is it by Toy Soldier - did I see that listed already?) do you have a date for it, or any tracks that you know will be on it?

No, but hopefully soon. We've been working on a bunch of recordings that are sounding really strong, and our aim is for them to be released in some form or other. But again, we are in talks with Mr Jackson apropos a double A side. Coconut on one side, Dirty Diana on the flip. Or maybe it could be 'You Rock my World', I love Rodney Jerkins.


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They are taking the reinvigorated Hind Ear out on a number gigs over the next few weeks so you can get to see them here:

...in Brighton:

5th April @ The Freebutt with Volcano!
29th April @ The Freebutt with Themselves and Jacob’s Stories

...in London:

10th April @ The Lexington with Mi Ami.
30th April @ Hoxton Square Bar & Kitchen with Young Knives, Django Django and Hook & the Twin


Jump: www.myspace.com/hindear