I’ve been playing ‘Moloch’ live recently, so there’s a chance you may know it, here is a scratch track i recorded with Dirk Hugo a while back:

‘Moloch’ by Righard Kapp by darkpigraph

Ahleuchatistas – Of The Body Prone
Tzadik, 2009

I first heard of Ahleuchatistas when Ella Buckley wrote me that she had seen them in New York and that i would flip my lid when i heard them. Having finally heard their 2009 album ‘Of the Body Prone’, i say, fair enough! Ahleuchatistas’ music is, for the most part, like a cat-and-mouse chase between the guitar, bass and drums; with brisk yet disjointed time signatures, the songs move in fits and starts and are punctuated by erratic bursts of noise. There’s something simultaneously wonky and menacing about this music, a bit like a hastily patched up scarecrow that nevertheless looks all the more creepy for it.
The album is characterised by Shane Perlowan’s spidery guitar sound, but the drummer is also a big part of it’s appeal for me:  ‘Total Nightmare in a Deep Dive’ pairs a placid spaghetti western riff with a deep bass rumble and the the kind of free noise drumming that i’ve got a permanent hardon for.

Ahleuchatistas – Owls

Ahleuchatistas – Total Nightmare in a Deep Dive

Sajjanu – Pechiku
Tzadik, 2009

Sajjanu are a three piece from Japan, whose deity seems to have decreed ‘Thou shalt not repeat a riff, and if thou must, thou shalt somehow destroy it”. This incredibly perverse music can be daunting to listen to, as it is certainly as close to musical ADD as you can get. Even scarier is how tightly composed these never-repeating pieces are, i don’t know where they get the mental capacity to remember all that! But amazingly, each of the couple hundred riffs that get fired off at you within the space of a track is a gem.  Sajjanu are also more than willing to indulge in some of the more masturbatory aspects of rock’s speckled history and go EPIC on your ass, but it’s all in the name of  being as schizophrenic as possible. These guys are clearly uber-virtuosos, but an overarching sense of humour is the driving force behind this album. Not recommended if you need a groove to hold onto.

Sajjanu – Mechanical Tampopong

Bonus Rave:

Mi Ami – Steal Your Face
Thrill Jockey, 2010

I just thought i’d tack a mention of this album at the end of this post because if you haven’t heard it you are missing out. There seems to be a collective creaming of selves on review sites and even among my friends about this, and with very good reason: Mi Ami’s ‘Steal Your Face’ is one of the most satisfying, off the wall rock albums i’ve heard in ages – if i’m going to find a comparison, think Gang Gang Dance put into a blender along with Ex Models. The second track, ‘Latin Lover’, sounds suspiciously like   The Rapture’s ‘House of Jealous Lovers’ for a while, with yelped vocals and serrated guitar riding atop a disco beat, but only until the guitar part collapses in on itself and idiot-savant analog synth noise swallows the whole thing whole, while ‘Dreamers’ manages to out-Can Can themselves. Do check it out.

Skrummasjien: (l) Mark – Drummasjien, (r) Righard – Strummasjien

Skrummasjien was a two-piece noise rock outfit consisting of myself on guitar and Mark Van Niekerk on drums. The central idea was to fixate on an almost comical heaviosity based on power chord riffs, thrash metal drumming and feedback, coupled with noise loops.We liked the idea of jumping from one idea to another in a hyperactive way, so the tracks were often 10 minute sections that consisted of 5 or 6 ideas in quick succession. We gigged VERY occasionally, opening for Throatball (Ian Watson’s awesome thrash metal band) on one occasion and Action Blueprint (Paul Opie’s project after Blackmilk), and then another one in the back room at EVOL, which we played in the middle of the room with no PA.

We recorded our jams pretty diligently, though often on very rudimentary equipment, and there is hours of this stuff – not all listenable. During a recent visit to Mark he drew my attention to this section that was better than i remember.

Skrummasjien – Mmmurks

Another ‘track’ that i personally love, even though the clipping on it is positively caustic, is one we’ve titled ‘Kepler (Vessels of God)’

Skrummasjien – Kepler (Vessels of God)

We also compiled a cd-r of live and practice recordings that was kind of the inaugural release on One Minute Trolley Dash (which i still have plenty of copies of by the way)

In the time of shitgaze getting serious cred, this stuff doesnt sound THAT preposterous – but be warned, it is lo-fi city we’re talking here!

Andre van Rensburg – Unfinished Cities

(South of the Border, 2008)

“When he was 6 years old, André van Rensburg strung a guitar string to a plank of wood, attached the other end to his bedroom window bars and yanked the string until it broke. His musical vision has changed little since…”. He has, however, cast a huge shadow in the history of South African leftfield music: his previous projects include the legendary rock trio Supernature (friends of mine from a gig-going generation before me go glassy-eyed when their name is brought up), Ohm (with Brendan Jury), a stint in Battery 9, and the alt-country project Die Menere (with Battery 9 mastermind and One F label boss Paul Riekert). Van Rensburg has since relocated to Taiwan, where he has been pursuing his interest in Eastern melodicism, Derek Bailey’s brittle tone as well as John Zorn’s compositional strategies.

‘Unfinished Cities’ is the second album to contain van Rensburg’s solo compositions, but it features contributions from, among others, violinist Brendan Jury and japanese Koto player Chieko Mori, who mainly provide thin, dissonant backdrops to van Rensburg’s plucky acoustic performances. The opening track ‘Unfinished Cities pt1″ is probably the most seductively melodic piece here, a beautifully winsome composition that nevertheless sets textural tone for the more challenging material that follows.

‘Unfinished Cities’ can be purchased from CDBaby here, and is available in South Africa from One F Music (drop Clair a mail via ‘General Enquiries’).

Andre van Rensburg’s official website is here.

Nels Cline – Coward

(Cryptogramophone, 2009)

Nels Cline is unfortunately best known for being the guitarist of Wilco: a band i’ve just always found too bland to bother with. Yet Cline has a slew of other, less commercially successful projects, in which he explores many other facets of the guitar; such as The Nels Cline Singers.I also remember hearing a track of him playing with saxophonist Paul Flaherty and (my favourite) drummer Chris Corsano, which was just about the most evil, unhinged wall of noise i’ve heard. From what i know, ‘Coward’ is his first solo album, which is quite odd given the length of his career so far but also understandable in the light of his propensity for collaboration.

One of the first things that strike you about ‘Coward’ is the sheer variety of approaches represented on the album: whether this is a good or bad thing depends on whether you are assessing it as a coherent listening experience or whether, like me, you take the breadth of scope to be an almost didactic indication of syntactic possibilities.

Another thing that hits you early on is the fact that Cline has his chops, in the traditional sense. Cline could, if he wanted to, be one of those guys in guitar shops showing off ridiculously complicated licks designed to intimidate prospective young guitarists. The fact that a cluster of later tracks are titled ‘Onan Suite’ might be a wry allusion to this. The lovely acoustic track ‘Prayer Wheel’ centres around a looped motif but plays around it with some impressive, and very effective note runs. The very next track, ‘Thurston County’, however, after cycling through some spidery dissonant arpeggios and glutinous pitch-bent notes, settles into an unabashedly dumbed down two-chord chug that is incredibly ebullient and just so damn good. This is territory that most virtuoso guitarists won’t venture into, but thankfully Cline does. Throughout the rest of the album Cline puts his virtuosity at the service of his compositions, especially on the monumental acoustic piece ‘Rod Poole’s Gradual Ascent to Heaven’, on which sparse motifs evolve slowly into a dissonant frenzy.

Later on in the album, more electronic sound sources and electric guitars come the fore: ‘Onan Suite: Seedcaster’, with it’s lo-fi electronic farts and squawks, sounded so out of character that i thought i’d started listening to a Black Dice album – that alone should be ample testament to how good it is.’Onan Suite: The Liberator’ is another jaunty riff-fest over a straightforward 4/4 drum machine pattern, after which droning closer ‘Cymbidium’ bookends this remarkable album beautifully.

This album is mandatory listening for anyone with an interest in the guitar and its place in future of music.

Read Nels Cline’s notes on ‘Coward’ here.

Marc Ribot’s Ceramic Dog – Party Intellectuals

(Pi Recordings, 2008)

Marc Ribot’s Ceramic Dog (“not a ‘project’; a real band”, their myspace proclaims) occupies a strange place between a sort of vapid insouciance and blistering intensity, but i think this tension is a large part of what makes it work. Any contrived notion of cynical detachment is constantly being usurped by an inadvertent joie de vivre, or moments of intense poignancy. Tracks like ‘Todo El Mundo  Es Kitsch’ live up to their name, but on ‘Pinch’, a by-numbers disco romp gets annihilated by one of the most coruscating guitar solos i’ve heard about two minutes in. ‘Digital Handshake’ rides atop a squarewave synth bassline, collapses into close to three minutes of twiddly noise before it plows back into the original groove with emphatic vigour. The title track is, oddly enough, pretty much guitar free for the first 5 or so minutes; instead a deranged synth groove and a zombie-like rallying cry of ‘PARTYPARTYPARTYPARTY’ makes it closer to a more demented Devo or Brainiac.

Interestingly, it is the more subdued tracks that actually hit harder; ‘When We Were Young And We Were Freaks’ skates on thin ice for a while, with a  token downcast riff and a stoned-sounding spoken-word drawl, but some incredible free drumming and noise guitar, and  an obstinate refusal to ever settle into any form of groove, makes it genuinely soul-crushing, and as unhinged as any of the heavier tracks.

‘Bateau’ has a somber grace to it as well, which is quite rudely punctuated by harsh metallic guitar tones towards the end. “ShShSh” adheres to a similar template, with a stunning guitar piece contending with field recordings that sound like some sort of phantom transmission.

I suppose that this inconsistency, and the apparent contradictions contained on an album like this, could be considered  a weakness, but it is precisely for this reason that i love this album.

When We Were young and We Were Freaks (extract)

Fred Frith – To Sail, To Sail

(Tzadik, 2008)

Fred Frith’s ‘To Sail, To Sail’ is a much more focused affair, dedicated to exploring the textural range of the acoustic guitar, and extending  that range through all manner of preparations. The economy of his means are truly staggering: bowed strings, constantly being tuned up and down, cause overtonal havoc on ‘Weather Gauge’, while the skitter of a crocodile clip against the strings in ‘First Light’ becomes a microrhythmic  centre for the piece. The astonishing ‘Dog Watch’ is grounded by a rhythmic scrape, which gets enveloped by drones (either from e-bowed strings or acoustic feedback, i can’t be too sure) which trace out mournful semi-melodies through downtuning, before the piece culminates in a relentless percussive attack. Elsewhere, a Fahey-ish minimalism, and the dulcimer-like attack of the prepared guitar makes for an album on which the ingenuity of its approach is matched only by it’s lyricism.

Fred Frith – First Light

Fred Frith – Dog Watch