P035: Cabeza de Vaca – Long range special

There’s not too much more to add to the show this week other than the music itself. This week on Cabeza de Vaca and Scanner FM we indulge ourselves in some longer tracks that can easily be overlooked as their qualities are sometimes awkward for different circumstances. In this sense its nice to have the ability to do a show like this with freedom and no constraints, so thanks to Scanner FM.

In the show I mention a previous track by Vtothed on Greta Cottage Workshop which captures the same cosmic/Kosmische vibe.

As well the original of DJ Kaos’s “Kosmischer Rukenwind” is quite different from the Quiet Village remix, and less than half the length!

It is definitely worth checking out some more material and a little of the biography of In Aeternam Vale. The track I play on the show was released on Minimal Wave whose website has a lovely biographical blurb. Their sound is frighteningly modern at times, not far from Not Not Fun or 100% Silk, neither is it so dissimilar from DFA or some of the other “indie dance” stuff around. Watching the old footage as well you cant help but think of a nerd Suicide.

Here as well is an official promo video for Jay Ahern and Morgan Packard's "Mesa_Sequence" that features about 4:30 of the track.

Number	Artist	Track	Label	Year
1	Vtothed	NYE Space Sessions Pt 1	White	2012
2	DJ Kaos	Kosmischer Ruckenwind (Quiet Village Remix)	Clone Loft Supreme Series	2012
3	Owl	Untitled A	Owl	2012
4	In Aeternam Vale	La Piscine	Minimal Wave	1989 / 2012
5	Jay Ahern & Morgan Packard	Mesa_Sequences	Modular Cowboy	2012

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P034: Cabeza de Vaca – Russian electonica and Udacha special

“You are indebted to create good from evil, because there is no other material for it to be created.”

 

Robert Penn Warren

 

These are words up on a website called Far From Moscow  in which I found some of the only reliable information on the Udacha label, the focus of our show on Cabeza de Vaca and Scanner FM  this week. Deliberately obscure and yet out in the open, spacey, dreamy and foreign, yet tangible and logical. Such is Udacha. Their sound is certainly not what you would call a Russian stereotype; if there was one song today looking for that claim it would be “Morskaya” by Kompakt legends SCSI-9, with its intense stings and rainy claustrophobic melodies. But the point of Udacha is exactly this, that it is not a cliché, but a new way of seeing (or meeting) a country. Certainly in Barcelona there has been a recent increase in the presence of people from the east, and not just Russia, but Romania, Ukraine, Poland. On the way to my old work there was a new Russian bakery and delicatessan that opened up, for example. Why should this even be mentioned? It seems an important moment, that after living the Cold War as a youth, and having such a one sided story, that so long after its end, that suddenly the people, or the descendents from the other side of that story should suddenly become real, become “available” for communication.

 

In electronic music at least there has been plenty of new stuff from the old eastern block countries that has come to the fore. Udacha is a prime example, somehow forging a sound in only a few short releases and more to come. Here is a couple of recent or upcoming rleases from Russian artists and some notes on the show.

 

 

 

 

 

Dirty Owl

 

We at Cabeza de Vaca and Scanner FM are loving Dirty Owl and the design of the SEALT label stuff. There was never any need to doubt vinyl as a medium, and less so when you get such wonderful design and presentation. But the image is only one thing and the music has to match and without having heard any of the other releases in full, I can only speak for Dirty Owl. Excellent! A lot of variation, technique and humour as well. Great debut and highly recommended. A digitial version is now available as the vinyl is pretty rare already.

 

 

SEALT

 

 

Nina Kraviz

 

As far as Nina and “Bubblebathgate” goes, better look for yourself at the original video and then have a look at the comments and some of the opinion pieces. Quite an extraordinary reaction to message boards etc that can seem more and more apathetic. I of course am all for promoting women artists here in whatever way they want to represent themselves. I try not to resort to positive discrimination, but where possible I also try to consciously keep a balance of female artists in the show. The Wire recently highlighted these kinds of issues and mentioned a website that tries to quantify the number of women in electronica called Female - Pressure.

  

Greg Wilson

 

FACT – Lauren Martin opinion on Greg Wilson

 

Storify

 

 

Finally a few other things I discovered researching this show:

One of the most well known Russian artists Anton Zap has something new coming out soon:

 

If the show had been a bit more techno based, I might have put something from Yuka on instead of Nina Kraviz, although the story is of course an important catalyst. As well, Yuka hasn’t had a very fresh release, but in any case, looks like an interesting producer and DJ to keep an eye on.

 

Alexey Volkov has also had some interesting techno releases on some good labels including Semantica, and Terrence Fixmer’s Planete Rouge.
 

 

Anyone looking for free house sounds should check out the label Chevengur Melody who are a Russian deep hpuse netlabel with some great stuff available on their Bandcamp page. They have just advanced into physical releases as well.

 

 

 

Number	Artist	Track	Label	Year
1	Bipolardepth	Vessel	Udacha	2012
2	Pjotr	I see	Udacha	2013
3	Alex Danilov, Brother G and Yuri Shulgin	Untitled	Udacha	2013
4	Dices	Confuse	Udacha	2012
5	Andrey Pushkarev	Gingo Biloba	Circus Company	2013
6	Nina Kraviz	Aus Feat King Aus On The Mic	Rekids	2012
7	Dirty Owl	Veltro	SEALT	2013
8	SCSI-9	Morskaya	Kompakt	2006 / 2013

 

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Recent gigs – Störung Festival 8

My oficial round-up just came out on Resident Advisor , so here I will only add a few details.

Firstly, Finn of Tomland who played every day all day and then also at two additional shows around Barcelona before hand. We paid tribute to his SonuoS label by opening this weeks Cabeza de Vaca   show on Dadub with an Yves de Mey remix of Valanx.

Here is a DJ set from FLIM Open Air 2012 which shows you the kind of sound that he wielded to great effect and gets him gigs like a celebrated slot opening the Echochord club in Copenhagen and in his home town on Malmö.

 
 

The three best acts of the festival were (in no particular order).

 

Yui Onodera

Japanese ambient artist and former architect played on the opening night, mixing field recordings and cinematic tones into a shoegaze-style cloudscape. He has played and recorded with the likes of Celer and is running the Critical Path  label who are just about to release a 2CD compilation of ambient music by 15 different artists all based around the recording and manipulation of field recordings. The release comes with a 16 page booklet and features artists such as forementioned Yves de Mey, Lawrence English, Janek Schaeffer, Simon Scott (former drummer from Slowdive with releases on 12K and more) and of course Onodera himself. The CD is out 5^th June and can be bought from Whereabouts Records to begin with.

 

Mathias Delplanque

Frenchman Mathias Delplanque was one of the most difficult to pin down and therefore one of the most enduring performers of the festival. His music is both outwardly abstract and yet intensely intimate, claustrophobic even. His album “Chutes” from which the track below comes from is stunning. Released on the French Baskaru label it feels like an intense dialogue of glyphs and symbols written out like an evanescent audio story board.

 

Jacob Kirkegaard

Danish artist Jacob Kirkegaard performed one of the most physical sets, alongside Mika Vainio (brute and guttural physical noise) and Francisco López (geometric sounds arranged in three dimensions). His set was a perfect complement to these two, using physical force (at times) and great spatial accuracy. At one point I actually started to get anxious almost, because I could hear the intersecting point of the sine waves in the most precise, smallest point in my head that was an unshakeable magnet of consciousness and attention. Only once he started to move it about the room and smooth it with more languid ambience did I calm down. I managed to buy his album “Imperia” recorded with Tobias Kirstein which perfectly captures some of the elements of the performance. The original was released in 2011, but the vinyl issue did not emerge until 2012 on the Posh Isolation 091 label from Denmark. The album was recorded at Barseback Nuclear Powerplant in 2004. The powerplant is located in Sweden just 20km from the Copenhagen. After years of pressure, the Danish government have finally managed to close the plant down.

 

A special prize to Czech artist Slavek Kwi (Artificial Memory Trace) who played half the set under blinding strobes with quadrophonic sound, but performed the greatest of aural tricks by weaving though the air above the audience a metal flag, that created a sound that was beyond three dimensions of space. He also performed “underwater” meaning, suspending objects and contact microphones in a tub of water. Very special indeed.

P033: Cabeza de Vaca – Dadub special

“We think that music is a strong mirror of social structures and dynamics, so sometimes we have the perception that lots of underground music in general has the same structures of the things that the artists want to criticize...and it happens because of market rules and show biz.”

 

 

“A mirror of social structures and dynamics” is perhaps the best way to describe the music of Italian duo Dadub (Daniele Antezza and Giovanni Conti). There is certainly a heavy feeling of mechanics, of wheels and mechanisms that turn the great machine. The lack of colour also suggests industrial smoke over the city or emptiness. But then there is something cosmic too. Maybe it is the black, infinite void that recedes behind them? Perhaps it is tidal flow of their tracks, building and closing in like a flower budding forwards and backwards, or a pulsating mouth ready to consume? Why else call your album “You are eternity?”

 

Dadub is thus the focus of this weeks show on Cabeza de Vaca and Scanner FM.

 

There are two good interviews out there, one at Resident Advisor  dating from March 2012 which is focused more on the technical side of things, and from where the first quote comes from, and the second is over at Juno Plus and dates from February this year on the eve of the albums’ release so is much more focused in this direction.

 

I mention the politics of their music and also of Stroboscopic Artefacts in general which is an important issue for electronic music to deal with in general. The track “Truth” features a couple of samples discussing “free market economics” and their obvious failure.
 

 

Lucy’s 12” “Why don’t you change?”, the first release from the label and still one of the best, also featured a sample from the revered Indian writer and thinker Jiddu Krishnamurti dating from 1980.
 

 

 

Strangely the sample, or a smaller part of it, also turned up in another recent track, Tube and Berger’s “Imprint of pleasure” which has been charting well by DJs, but is a rather cringey quasi-Ballaeric feel good track.

 

 

In the later track, the emphasis is on pleasure rather than the contemplation of it and the desire to change as Lucy emphasises, two opposite stand points reflected in the music itself: ne tough and smart and the other mindless and in pursuit of pleasure.

The track "Ilya" that I play from the "Moand VIII" release is also a homage to another thinker, this time Russian-born, but nationalised Belgian Ilya Prigogine, who worked on atomic physics and a Nobel laureate.

 

 
 

Dadub had a couple of tracks out on the Killekill label recently as well, one on the "Killekill Megahits" compilation and more recently on the "Krake 001" festival compilation.





I forgot to mention that Lucy also remixes one of the tracks on the Oscar Mulero EP “Black Propaganda remixes part 1”, tackling the track “To Convince for the Untruth”. A second part has just been released too. Lucy's track is great, and the third is by Shifted he we already had a special on, so I thought I would play Developer this time to mix it up a bit.
 

 

 

Next week’s show is Udacha and Russia!

Number	Artist	Track	Label	Year
1	Valanx	Daughters Of The Everfire (Yves De Mey Remix)	SonuoS	2013
2	Nubian Mindz	Hacker Wacker	Disko404	2013
3	Dadub	Life	Stroboscopic Artefacts	2013
4	Dadub	Ilya	Stroboscopic Artefacts	2011
5	Dadub	Transfer	Stroboscopic Artefacts	2013
6	Dadub	Existence (Kanding Ray remix)	Stroboscopic Artefacts	2013
7	A Sagittarian	Funky Archer (Aubrey remix)	Elastic Dreams	2013
8	Oscar Mulero	Black Propaganda (Developer Hypnotic Reconstruction Remix)	Warm Up Recordings	2013
9	Mutant	AUM	Pareto Park	2013

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