Blog: Lend Me Your Ears

Delicate as silk

Feb 21, 2008, 9:05am Lend Me Your Ears

Frank Bretschneider 's mesmerising live reworking of Happening Tone is one of the highlights of the new Hub Tierbeobachtungen homage to Jelinek noted here recently . Adding dreaminess & shimmer to the original (see below), it's a good excuse to revisit his lovely, suitably delicate Silk ( zShare ) from Curve on Mille Plateaux ; NB: can also be found on eMusic here . Can't post the new version under LMYE's draconian [...]

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Eno of the Plains, pt 2

Feb 20, 2008, 8:23am Lend Me Your Ears

Eluvium ( TR profile & MP3 giveaways ) ( unofficial MySpace ) - I Am So Much More Me That You Are Perfectly You ( zShare ) (from Lambent Material ) Previous post . Previous video .

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Confection of percussive clatter (update)

Feb 20, 2008, 6:38am Lend Me Your Ears

Update: here 's a recent Kieran Hebden set from the sweetly shambolic Beats in Space that includes some fine fooling from the new 4-track EP/mini-album highlighted last week. (Feb 15) Welcome news this week that a new Four Tet ( MySpace / Wikipedia ) EP/mini-album thing is on its way is a good enough excuse to look back over his exceptional output to date. Four Tet remixes have featured in several previous posts [...]

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Confection of percussive clatter (update)

Feb 19, 2008, 12:38pm Lend Me Your Ears

Update: here 's a Kieran Hebden set from the sweetly shambolic Beats in Space that includes material from the new EP/mini-album highlighted last week. (Feb 15) Welcome news this week that a new Four Tet ( MySpace / Wikipedia ) EP/mini-album thing is on its way is a good enough excuse to look back over his exceptional output to date. Four Tet remixes have featured in several previous posts here (specifically this , this [...]

• Kieran Hebden (Four Tet) - BeatsInSpace-02.05.08 Part2 with Kieran Hebden

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Artist:	Kieran Hebden (Four Tet)
Title:	BeatsInSpace-02.05.08 Part2 with Kieran Hebden
Link Text:	here
File Name:	bis020508part2.mp3
Bitrate:	128 kbps
Year:	2008

Collective effort (expanded)

Feb 19, 2008, 3:53am Lend Me Your Ears

Guess Kammerflimmer ( MySpace ) is a better known Kollektief than September , but no less interesting for that. In fact, their stuff is rich, moody, textured vamping of the highest order - despite the occasional twanging steel guitar that I could do without. There's a hint of one on Mohn! ( zShare ) - from their third album, Hysteria - & it's still a quivering, yearning delight... I'd have liked to hear Kammerflimmer involved in the recent live [...]

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Value of defiance

Feb 18, 2008, 4:37pm Lend Me Your Ears

Hard to capture now the almost shocking impact of the NME 's C81 compilation tape back there in 1981 (well, on one deeply reverential teenage NME reader, at least, & quite possibly a few more...). Simon Reynolds has called it "post-punk's swan song", apparently, but that doesn't quite get the shift to a more diverse &, crucially, poppier aesthetic that this little £1.50 (& two coupons) tape encapsulated. Which would, in turn & in time, lead to the whole mutant disco/punk-funk genre - particularly once house & Ecstasy had allowed a critical mass [...]

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The value of defiance

Feb 18, 2008, 10:01am Lend Me Your Ears

Hard to capture now the almost shocking impact of the NME 's C81 compilation tape back there in 1981 (well, on one deeply reverential teenage reader, at least, & quite possibly a few more...). Simon Reynolds has called it "post-punk's swan song", apparently, but that doesn't quite get the shift to a more diverse &, crucially, poppier aesthetic that this little £1.50 (& two coupons) tape encapsulated. Which would, in turn & in time, lead to the whole mutant disco/punk-funk genre - particularly once house & Ecstasy had allowed a critical mass of [...]

• Scritti Politti - theSweetestGirl

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Artist:	Scritti Politti
Title:	theSweetestGirl
Link Text:	here
File Name:	theSweetestGirl.mp3
Bitrate:	96 kbps

Spirit of Eden

Feb 17, 2008, 2:49pm Lend Me Your Ears

In 1988 Talk Talk released cult classic Spirit of Eden (buy here or here ), which some consider to be a forerunner of the post-rock sound. However, when I listen to first track The Rainbow , I think "ambient soul" might be a better label. Mark Hollis has one of the most intense and distinctive vocal styles in contemporary music and 10 years after Spirit , it can be heard again on his brilliant solo album Mark Hollis [...]

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A small prize

Feb 16, 2008, 10:16am Lend Me Your Ears

"Good, yes, you've done well. Here is a small prize..." The History of the World : arguably, the best Gang of Four track of all - even though it comes from the weakest of this always under-rated group's original albums ( Songs of the Free ) [or on the Brief History of the 20th Century compilation] & lacks Dave Allen , who'd left for Shriekback (also due a post here) by this stage of Go4 history. [...]

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Confection of percussive clatter

Feb 15, 2008, 10:19am Lend Me Your Ears

Welcome news this week that a new Four Tet ( MySpace / Wikipedia ) EP/mini-album thing is on its way is a good enough excuse to look back over his exceptional output to date. Four Tet remixes have featured in several previous posts here (specifically this , this & this ), so this'll stick to the man's own stuff. Four Tet's masterpiece is Rounds . Anything & everything from this classic 2003 confection of percussive clatter, fragments of surprisingly touching melody & smart samples is [...]

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Can I tell a short story?

Feb 14, 2008, 6:20am Lend Me Your Ears

Eno versus Aphex Twin - an ambient dream-team pairing brought together in this masterful mash-up (sometimes called Rhubarb & Villages ): Eno talks about the sociology & human engineering of the Hutterites over an exquisite Aphex vamp with exactly the right tone (reflective, melancholy, ultimately uplifting)... I found it via Art Decade . "Randomness, generative situations...you let the thing grow: there's a lot to learn from artists." In classic Eno style, the domed one's talk riffs on from the drama of building & populating a Hutterite daughter [...]

• Will Wright & Brian Eno - Playing with Time

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Artist:	Will Wright & Brian Eno
Title:	Playing with Time
Link Text:	here
File Name:	salt-0200606-wright-and-eno.mp 3
Bitrate:	16 kbps
Year:	2006

Stuttering, wriggling, angelic masterpiece

Feb 13, 2008, 10:04am Lend Me Your Ears

Aphex Twin yesterday brings us today to the endlessly fertile & fascinating Nobukazu Takemura , via AT's casual genius TM version of Let My Fish Loose (from 26 Mixes For Cash ). Highlights of Takemura's own remixing include his cool take on Tortoise 's TNT (from A Lazarus Taxon ) &, especially, his stuttering, wriggling, angelic masterpiece around Steve Reich 's [...]

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Casual Genius (cont, more)

Feb 12, 2008, 11:12am Lend Me Your Ears

After a couple of posts last year about Aphex Twin 's casual genius (also here ), it's time to acknowledge that little in his massive, inconsistent but often mesmerising output can rival the effortlessness of Alberto Balsam (from I Care Because You Do ) - amazing how this simple track, with its loping pace, pretty melody & cool electro shrieks adds up to something so moving. Giving it the name of a dandruff shampoo just adds to the piece's brilliant nonchalance... [...]

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Aphex Twin vs. Man Ray

Feb 12, 2008, 10:29am Lend Me Your Ears

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Battles - Tonto

Feb 11, 2008, 5:31pm Lend Me Your Ears

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Efterklang - Mirador

Feb 11, 2008, 5:28pm Lend Me Your Ears

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Clanging metal bath

Feb 11, 2008, 8:56am Lend Me Your Ears

Exquisite though it often is, Mark Hollis 's glacial trajectory isn't the only post- Talk Talk story. Less prominent, but also richly rewarding, is .O.Rang (sometimes written 'O'Rang, for no very obvious reason...). Mind on Pleasure from first album Herd of Instinct illustrates their dense, dubby, Krautrock-y post-rock, with its fantastic clanging, metal bath drum sound. That sound's author, Lee Harris, also drums (or drummed, possibly) in the under-rated Bark Psychosis [...]

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Jazztronica

Feb 7, 2008, 3:22pm Lend Me Your Ears

Electronica with a jazz groove on Bosco's Disposable Driver by Flanger , taken from the album Nuclear Jazz . To follow, two other fine examples of jazztronica. The first from Inch-time isn't quite so obvious until you get towards the end but the jazz credentials of the To Rococo Rot track are clear from the start - great jazz bassline augmented by [...]

• Flanger - Bosco's Disposable Driver
• Inch-time - Take Care. O Pilgrim!

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Artist:	Flanger
Title:	Bosco's Disposable Driver
Link Text:	Bosco's Disposable Driver
File Name:	Flanger-Bosco's Disposable Driver.mp3
Bitrate:	128 kbps

Artist:	Inch-time
Title:	Take Care. O Pilgrim!
Link Text:	Take Care. O Pilgrim!
File Name:	Inchtime-Take Care. O Pilgrim!.mp3
Bitrate:	128 kbps

Burnt Fried Man

Feb 6, 2008, 5:14am Lend Me Your Ears

With a fairly recent & apparently excellent new Burnt Friedman album out, a quick retrospective on the great man's extraordinary body of electronica-infused post-jazz/funk/dub work - with witty, funky Flanger , with ex-Can drum-meister Jaki Liebezeit , with Jaki & the legendary David Sylvian in Nine Horses , with his own Nu Dub Players & as a remixer - especially of [...]

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Stretching, sawing, counter-pointing

Feb 5, 2008, 7:18am Lend Me Your Ears

After Do Make Say at the weekend , it's clearly time for the lovely Esmerine . Even without the usual deranged found voices or guitar frenzy (never mind Silver Mt Zion-style croaking), Sweet Surrender Be True from If Only A Sweet Surrender to the Nights to Come be True is a Godspeed family classic - fragile, echoey atmosphere; building sense of foreboding interspersed with moments of hope & redemption; empty room out-of-tune piano; stretching, sawing, counter-pointing strings; muffled, funereal percussion. & it's long, of course. The later [...]

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