In Battle There Is No Law Of Gravity

One is silver and the other's gold. Which suggests one is more valuable, which I think is not the intended moral of the stupid song.

I'm going to try to get in the habit of doing short reviews of the new music I accumlate in an attempt to make this page worth something (again?). But today I reached past the new slabs of wax and plastic in my room for some older tunes. "Old" is relative here, but since I so love discovering new music (as well as old music that's new to me), it's not often I spend an afternoon alone with the dustier pieces in my collection.

Windy and Carl - Depths

Windy and Carl are a couple/duo from Michigan who have been putting out records for a dozen years or so. They played at my college back when I was listening almost exclusively to punk, hardcore, and (ahem) ska. Their music has a lot more movement than most other "ambient" composers, but that's definitely the best label for what they do - guitar and bass with tons of loops and effects, occasionally supplemented by vocals. I guess I decided at the show that it wouldn't hurt to have some light background music within reach, so I bought Portal, their first full-length, which maintains pride of place as the first disc of ambient music I ever owned. Since it was pretty much the only CD I could listen to and still focus on homework, it got a ton of play at the time. (I remember asking a friend at the merch table who was familiar with their recorded output which record was the most rhythmic, since I definitely didn't want any of that boring beatless shit. Ha ha. Of course I love beatless music now, and I wonder why I didn't pursue more of it at the time. There is a pattern of this in my life: dubbing myself a copy of my cousin's ...And Justice For All tape in junior high, which to this day is one of my favorite albums of all time, but not really pursuing more metal back then; taking notice of a Nausea song on college radio when I was probably 15 or something but not pursuing hardcore punk and crust; hearing a Weakling song on the same college radio station maybe half a dozen years later, being floored, ordering the masterful Dead As Dreams CD from the label, tUMULt, but not pursuing black metal, a genre currently quite close to the cavity where my heart ought to be. AND, the guy who runs tUMULt is one of the owners of Aquarius Records, which I would not come across for another four or five years.)

Depths is a double LP, and I actually listened to just the second half today; the first half helped lull me to sleep last night on the heels of W+C's long Antarctica EP, which is totally blissed out and undaunting and is my favorite of the three W+C releases I own. So, really, this is as much about the musicians as it is about any particular record in their discography. Antarctica is dreamy, Depths is more aggressive but still ambient, and Portal has the most song-like tracks. Windy and Carl are probably my favorite band to go to bed to, and I mean that in the least dirty way possible.

Piano Overlord - The Singles Collection '03-'05

Why I own this but have never listened to an entire Prefuse 73 album I have no idea. Piano Overlord is Mr. Prefuse, Guillermo Scott Herren, cobbling together a jazzy trip-hop record featuring a healthy dose of that heartbreaker the Rhodes piano ("no synths, guitars, basses, just drums and pianos here"). I saw Prefuse a year or two ago, and it was ok but not great. Still, I'm surprised I've never gotten around to at least downloading a full album. But I can't imagine I'd dig any of the P73 output as much as I like this collection. Super mellow and really funky with that not-so-fast-hon trip-hop vibe. I need to listen to this more often. It seems that all tracks were pulled from two limited edition EP releases.

Growing - The Sky's Run Into the Sea

I can't remember whether it was the 2005 live CD on Archive that made me take notice of this band or if it was something I heard before that. Regardless, in the past two years I've accumulated one CD (the live one, still their best imho), five cassettes, and six slabs of vinyl with a seventh in the mail as of today. I really like Growing, but I don't listen to them all that often (I'm like this with a lot of bands). The Sky's Run is their first full-length and probably their first widely available release. I think today was only the second time I've thrown this on, but that's partly because I bought it new and the first time I listened to it there was a nasty skip or some other imperfection that annoyed the hell out of me. I'm happy to report that nothing of the sort marred my listening experience today. Most of this album is super restrained and minimal, unlike much of their more recent output. I can't give a firsthand account of a Growing performance because they always seem to elude me when they come through Baltimore and DC. I have heard that when they were in full-on power-drone guitar mode, their live shows could warp innards. They've become much more blippy and bloopy, and (with the possible exception of their second full-length, The Soul of the Rainbow and the Harmony of Light, which I don't own and have never heard for no good reason), there's not much of the Earth/SunnO))) thing on their records. I would describe their current sound as "fluttery." The Sky's Run is chill, but it's kind of a downer until near the end.

Icebreaker - Distant Early Warning

I don't know anything about this band, but that's one of the cool things about blogging about music: in order to inform you about bands, I usually have to do some investigating myself. This album came out in 1998 and is in my possession only because the cover image of what looks like a scientific and/or defense facility in the Arctic or Antarctic grabbed my attention in the used section at Som a while back. The back of the jacket illuminates: "The distant early warning system is a series of radar stations which stretch along the northern periphery of Canada and Alaska. Constructed during the height of the cold war, these stations were intended to alert North Atlantic Treaty Organization member states in the event of a Soviet nuclear strike over the pole. Although now mostly unmanned, the distant early warning system continues to operate."

This is not a musically abstract record. It starts off with a trip-hop feel, gets a little spacey, passes through some Philip Glass-style arpeggios. It's not heavy listening, but I like it quite a bit. It was co-released by some label called Aesthetics and the NATOarts project, which aims to "promote security and stability through the exhibition of works of conceptual art." There's a quote from the NYT that calls the record "an electro-acoustic polar landscape that is anything but frigid." Hardy har. Good music, regardless.