Cantilever Recommends is a weekly rundown of London-based gigs, new releases and writing about music.
Shows this week
Darkside - Koko, 18.06.23 / some notes on film music
Back in 2013, Darkside released their debut Psychic and I was obsessed with it. My dad put me onto it at a time when he was introducing me to a lot of that sort of electronica, including one half of Darkside, Nicolas Jaar. Since his 2011 debut Space Is Only Noise, Jaar has released new material every few years, exploring the reaches of dark electronica and ambient.
One of my favourites is Pomegranates, an album that was originally a rescoring of the seminal Sergei Parajanov film Colour of Pomegranates (1969). The film tells the lifestory of Armenian poet Sayat-Nova, told through a series of tableaux. Jaar’s rescoring was never actually released with the moving image. Around the time it came out, I did try to press play on both album and film at the same time. It’s impossible to know whether the way it synced up on my laptop was the same as Jaar’s imagined effect, but the running time of both are pretty much the same. Someone’s now done it and uploaded it to YouTube, and it’s a very different experience watching the film with crushing electronics compared with the bucolic feel of the late-60s original.
The repurposing of cinema-related media is not something alien to Jaar; in his infamous BBC Essential Mix from 2012, he overlays a Jay-Z a cappella vocal with a piece from Johnny Greenwood’s There Will Be Blood soundtrack. The mix also begins by playing out a sensual clip of composer Angelo Badalamenti explaining how he wrote themes for Twin Peaks, with David Lynch conjuring up images from the show with words as he Badalamenti improvised to them on the spot.
It is often the case in the process of writing music for film that a composer will present a variety of movements to be used for the film, which are then chopped up by an engineer in post-production, being cut and edited just as the moving image is. In the filmmaking process, the composer gives themselves up to be a member of the group, much more than would be expected in a purely musicmaking context. In the example of Jaar’s Pomegranates, a reflection of this interchangeability leads to the original sound of the film being replaced.
There are many songs that have become associated purely with the films that they are in. One divisive example is Send Me On My Way by Rusted Root. For me, always the Matilda Pancake scene, for others (usually slightly younger) it’s the Ice Age song. In the case of the Matilda Pancake scene, the scene is also inextricably linked to that song, unimaginable without it.
I would wager, however, that in many cases people wouldn’t recognise most film music if they heard it outside of the context of the film. Often film music is purely there to aid the visual medium and has become so important to making people feel things that most contemporary blockbusters feature music near-constantly. This struck me when watching Ari Aster’s Beau is Afraid, which was almost never without some sort of sound in the background – a sustained string harmonic, a trilling clarinet — in fact, it was so constant that it alerted me to it (presumably not the point) and made me wonder how much more arresting the film would be without it…
Unlike Beau is Afraid, where the music is very much background, the first instalment of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune was constantly interrupted, rudely in my opinion, by Hans Zimmer’s brass parps. This sound became so synonymous with action films that there are YouTube compilations of its appearances and it has become known simply as ‘BRAAAM’. Unlike the more reflexive relationship between film and music described earlier – Jaar/Pomegranates, Matilda/Rusted Root – this sound created by Zimmer nearly deviates from being ‘music’ entirely, and becomes more akin to a sound effect, used to tell the audience that something massive is happening. In the case of Dune, it goes beyond this instruction, such is its overuse. So, for the unfortunate characters of the film, they inhabit a desert planet not only plighted by giant worms, constantly in the throes of geopolitical struggle, but also within the constant honk of Zimmer. Tickets
Nick Drake’s 75th Birthday - Moth Club 18.06.23
Nick Drake is so firmly in the world of untouchable troubled geniuses that any tampering with his work will be met by the purists not with shrugging indifference but quasi-religious anger: no one is trying to re-paint Starry Night, nor should they put an 808 on River Man. Where a forthcoming compilation with multiple tracks already dropped brings together reimaginings of Drake’s songwriting — from Let’s Eat Grandma to Fontaines D.C to Aldous Harding — a smaller scale affair will be present at Moth club on Monday night with artists who are perhaps too early in their careers to end up on an any officially sanctioned comp.
Tonight might be one for the purists after all, there will certainly be a lot of acoustic guitars present with Clara Mann, Naima Bock, Tapir!, Broadside Hacks, Daisy Rickman and The New Eves (who are new to me but I am finding their one track available to listen to, from the latest Slow Dance Records compilation, particularly mesmerising in its 70s prog-folk tone) performing music from the master on what would have been his 75th birthday. Tickets.
SOUL GLO - Moth Club, 21.06.23
Soul Glo’s latest album ‘Diaspora Problems’ is a bludgeoning hardcore record with little respite: thrashing riffs and wild high screaming on lead track ‘Jump!! (Or Get Jumped!!!)((by the future))’ lead straight into the distorted trap bass of ‘Driponomics’, a pairing half way through the record that points towards the similarities between these strands of what you might term Heavy Music - it all starts with anger & Soul Glo deal it out politically, centring on race. Final track ‘Spiritual Level of Gang Shit’ may be a taste of things to come as the band look to their future in album mode, with the hardcore and more straight down the line jazz inflected hip-hop engaged in an immensely listenable tete a tete. The roof of Moth may not be there come Thursday. Tickets
upsammy - IKLEKTIC, 23.06.23
Bandcamp is a great place to go to see the full scope of the ‘conceptronica’ PR machine at work. Upsammy’s bio, for example:
“As electricity blossoms and leafs glisten, upsammy creates interpretative space, cleverly paradoxical in its concurrent comfort and desolation.”
That this bio actually uses the word ‘clever’ is pretty revealing: I’m thinking of the phrase ‘trying to be clever’ which is used by music press and football pundits alike as a negative take. Are we dealing with the musical equivalent of a Panenka? This seemed to be the implicit thrust of Simon Reynold’s article “Why so much electronic music this decade felt like it belonged in a museum instead of a club” in Pitchfork from a few years ago.
“Most of the leading conceptronica artists have been through art school or postgraduate academia, and they’re comfortable speckling both their work and their conversation with references to critical theory and philosophy. During our interview, Chino Amobi brings up everyone from the black studies and performance scholar Fred Moten to the ’90s cyber theory collective CCRU. Hyperdub producer Lee Gamble likewise enthuses to me about the inspiration sparked by listening to an unofficial audiobook of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, a deliriously dense philosophical work about capitalism, desire, and schizophrenia.
This high-powered discourse contrasts with the relatively down-to-earth vernacular of ’90s IDM luminaries like Aphex Twin’s Richard D. James and Luke Vibert, whose records were more likely to be daubed with puerile humour and porn references than concepts from poststructuralism. Another major difference between conceptronica and old-school IDM is that the latter could be used as a relaxing background shimmer, a spur to unthinking reverie rather than intellectual musing.”
On Upsammy’s latest full length for PAN (the main label referenced in Reynold’s article) — Germ in a Population of Buildings — there are certainly all of the calling cards of the genre. That said, the movement though Arca-ish vocal led tracks through footwork to many shades of ambient hint at songs that never quite arrive — ‘Square to Sphere’ the penultimate track gives me a Kid A music box feeling or even a Kraftwerk sad-computer vibe — they are dense and reveal more the harder you work to unpick what is going on (maybe like “critical theory and philosophy”) but, I find, give me quite a lot of moments of ‘unthinking reverie’. Do I enjoy getting stuck in to dense arcane stuff? Yeah! Do I feel clever listening to Upsammy? A bit… Would I prefer electronic artists to reference “Fred Moten” over “porn”? Kinda… Tickets
Death Grips - Electric Ballroom, 25.06.23
It is coming up to exactly 10 years since Death Grips staged a piece of performance art in Chicago where, instead of playing their show, they projected a suicide note on the back wall causing the crowd to go Woodstock 99 and tear the set to bits. With the venue upgraded from Electric Ballroom to O2 Kentish Town Forum due to massive demand, the mystery around the Sacramento three piece seems to have stayed strong since they last touched down in London for Field Day 2019 (the torch possibly kept lit by the ever burgeoning influence of Anthony Fantano (NYT article linked) — possibly the worlds biggest music influencer, even on this side of the pond — and his army of a million memeing minions.)
Thing is, for all the memes and the chat about how annoying the DG fans are (or dare I say the Grippers), Death Grips’ singular take on experimental hip-hop over their six full albums and beyond are astonishingly varied and stand up more the further you peer in: personal favourites “Black Quarterback” from The Powers that B Part. 1 (2015) in which MC Ride and Bjork — who contributed to every track on that album — try to keep their heads above a cacophony of wailing beats and blips that sound like they’re being sucked through a black hole and the understated “Big House” from Government Plates (2013), a twisting castanet-ish whorl with the sinister phrase “LA creeping under my skin” delivered without MC Ride’s signature yelp ad infinitum are just two examples of the band’s wide ranging scope. If you’ve not yet given them a go, now’s the time (that is, after the majority of the hype). There were only balcony tickets left available when the venue was moved which would be a surprising viewing experience but may spare you the broken nose. Tickets
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