Sophie Ellis Bextor.

If adults in the US had any appreciation for real pop music, Sophie Ellis Bextor would be heard and seen all over. She doesn't care that her CDs aren't even released in this country. She's content seeing herself as pretty much exclusively a UK artist, where she sells millions of albums, and is pleased with her dedicated following on the continent. That seems to be enough for her. She was brought up in a show business family and, at 19, she was performing and recording with theaudience, a well-dressed indie pop band that specialized in snarky social sarcasm, a la Black Box Recorder. They received eight offers of record deals after their first public gig.

theaudience. I Got The Wherewithal:


Sophie has a heart for causes, as well as a discerning head for marketing. She publicly pledged her celebrity support for "Lights Out London," a campaign to turn off appliances for an hour to raise awareness of global warming, and has also posed in a grisly ad for PETA ("Here's the rest of your fur coat"). She appeared nearly nude in an ad for the fashion chain Monsoon, but turned down a video ad for Agent Provocateur, deeming it too pornographic (Kylie ended up doing it instead). She also famously turned down an offer to tour with Robbie Williams when anyone else starting out would have jumped at the chance. She just felt he was too "Las Vegas cabaret."

Sophie is serious and sophisticated, stylish but not fussy, smart, full of exuberance, glamorous but not posh. Her voice does possess a certain snooty, blue blood, la-di-da quality, but that only adds another angle to her persona. And she's a hard worker. While being a full-time mom, she wrote about 80 songs in preparation for her third CD, Trip The Light Fantastic (truly a terrible title, but there it is). She specializes in simple, uplifting tunes that have a staying power past the first few listens. She has the talent for finding just the turn of phrase that feels comfortable but fresh, which is the trick behind every good pop song. Her most appealing work has a spunky energy that lifts it above and beyond the ordinary:

Although Sophie will occasionally veer into tragic or introspective territories, she is at her best when creating the equivalent of a romantic comedy in song.  Charm is very difficult to manufacture.  The audience will spot a fake as easily as a knockoff on Canal Street.  The video for Take Me Home is a delightful pastiche of images evoking Avedon-era Harper's Bazaar.  Sophie looks like she was born to wear 1950's couture here:

Sophie's new album is available now.  It's wonderful and full of energy, and only available as an import in the States, of course.

From Between Trio. Sanctuary for Independent Media. September 15, 2007.

The From Between Trio is a collaboration of three musicians from three continents: Michael Doneda (France), on soprano and sopranino sax, Tatsuya Nakatani (Japan) on percussion, and Jack Wright (US) on alto and soprano sax. The group demonstrates an extraordinary sense of three minds working as one.

Although I sat in the front row for the view, the moment they began their first set I lowered my eyes away from the performers. I diverted my gaze because I wanted to absorb only the sound and not get caught up in its production. What they do would inaccurately be described as "free jazz," from my experience of it. And I didn't get the sense either that they are playing to serve their own self expression. In the way that a field recordist can document small sounds and subsequently amplify the audio, magnifying the details beyond what is normally audible, the trio created a type of soundscape of layered events approximating a natural environment. They create an ambiance of hissing, fizzing, scraping and rattling. Appropriate to this immersive experience, no particular player is a featured soloist at any one time.

Their first set lasted an hour, although it felt half that long, and it was the one most resembling the forces of nature. The second short set, before the break was about 18 minutes, and was more celestial, leaving more space among the parts. The last set was only about 15 minutes and the only part of the evening when the playing was a bit more aggressive, and perhaps urban.

When I wanted to examine how it was all being done, they were fascinating to watch. Of course, drummers tend to dominate one's attention because of the variety of movement necessary just to make a noise. However, Nakatani is a different type of percussionist altogether. He specializes in resonating his instruments not always by striking, but often by bowing, rubbing and vibrating them. At one point, he placed a small cymbal on the surface of his snare and lowered his face to blow through the hole in its center, resulting in a rich alto sax-like tone. He even got more than one note from it. For Nakatani, a snare isn't just a drum, it's a resonating surface to place a cymbal, a wood block, and a small bowl - all at the same time. Nakatani has lots of bowls, at least a dozen, which he tapped with tiny metal sticks. As he performed, bowls, cymbals, and even his tom tom, fell over at one time or another, sounding not unlike the style of his playing, which seems to be a series of orchestrated wabi sabi accidents. Only rarely did he simply take a stick and strike a drum.

Nakatani solo:


Doneda and Wright, the two wind players, have a repertoire of personal approaches toward their instruments. Doneda coaxed animal rasps from his sopranino, as well as modulated wind noise, and sometimes the sound of a broken tape player in fast-forward. Wright sat with his mouthpiece turned on its side so he could mute the bell of his alto with his leg. His soprano, when muted, emulated a bassoon, shortwave radio, or the chanting of the Koran. It would seem destined that these three would meet and match their talents as a trio. Each of them has played with dozens of others over the years, but together they have an extraordinary way of orchestrating intuitive sound-making.

The Blue Nile. A Walk Across The Rooftops (1984).

We have all had a moment alone, while looking out the window of a train, bus, or restaurant, caught in a state of in-between-ness, remembering the past, anticipating the future, but locked in a present where time has shut down, waiting, alone with one's memories, the only reality being the stagnant present.

At the center of every cherished moment is a kernel of failure. At the heart of every incidence of beauty is the reflection of death. Paul Buchanan is a master of recreating these liminal moments when submerged thoughts break the surface of consciousness. When he sings in "A Walk Across The Rooftops," "I am in love, I am in love with you," it's not banal, it's startling and uncomfortable.

These amazing tracks, now over 20 years old, still sound contemporary, with minimal drums, atmospheric field recordings, synthesizer, stark piano, and fretless bass. Although delicious, one should not overindulge on The Blue Nile. It's best to savor them when you have an interrupted span of time, and sink into their deep meditative spaces. You cannot immediately resume your normal pace after listening to this band. It will take a period of adjustment to come back. So, don't overdo it.

Here's an excerpt from Flags And Fences, a documentary featuring The Blue Nile's 1990 tour of the US. 1990 never looked so nostalgic. Don't miss the scenes of the WTC, and a billboard advertising Goodfellas.

Annie. Anniemal (2005).

Annie makes serious pop music. Serious on two levels. Serious in the sense that it's hardcore pop: brief, repetitive, insouciant, and ingratiating. But also serious in that some of the songs present a fragile vulnerability that is rather startling. Annie is from Norway, and although she seemed to come out of nowhere when Anniemal was released, she had already been a veteran musician, having been almost signed to a label by Bob Stanley of Saint Etienne when she was only 16, singing in a band called Suitcase. Later she DJ'd for a while before writing songs with Tore Andreas Kroknes. She had released one single, The Greatest Hit when, at age 23, Tore died from heart problems. This haunting loss is reflected in the song My Best Friend, one of the lyrically arresting tracks from her CD.

Annie has been compared to early Madonna, Bananarama, as well as both of the Minogue sisters. Her vibratoless voice is as thin and transparent as an icicle, barely breaking above a whisper, but the intonation and rhythmic subtlety of her singing is marked by razor-like precision and accuracy. Again, in the song My Best Friend, the melody of the verse is rhythmically broken into irregular divisions that would present a challenge to transcribe even for a graduate student of music theory. Another surprise in the same song is how the verse modulates from the tonic to the supertonic for the chorus. It's unconventional, but not jarring.

On a purely sonic level, the CD is peppered with all manner of brittle, clicky, percussive claptrap, squirrelly synth parts, and slippery bass. The tracks are intruded by strange sci fi hits and accents, vocorder, pitchshifted voices, and cartoonish sound effects. Not too mention Annie's deadpan, Norwegian accented, spoken word sections. Layers of this cheerful noisemaking rush by at brisk tempos. Repeated listening almost always reveals at least a few more details missed the last time through. Headphone listening is not usually a requirement for pop music, but in this case it would be recommended.

It's fizzy and cute, no doubt. Chewing Gum, which reduces boyfriend turnover to the level of chewing fresh sticks of gum, is utterly addictive, and can hold the attention of a 4-year old. Daily. For months. (I know this as a fact). It starts with an unusual arrangement of beat phrases, a group of 6 beats, followed by a group of 8, then a group of 2. The lyrics are straight out of the Shangri-las' songbook. The sound combines a big buzzy bass, a percussion part that sounds like cowbells being spun in a frontloading washing machine, and a sputtery gated synth line.



A track like Heartbeat has a propulsive throb and a cycle of chords that refreshes itself by modulating to the subdominant, but because the last chord in the verse is the dominant, and the first chord in the chorus is the VI chord in the new key, the intervallic gap between the two sections is a tritone, and that harmonic shift is a surprise every time. The lyric to Heartbeat is about going out for a drink at a party on a Friday night and dancing with a guy for whom the girl has a growing attraction, although she doesn't know his name. That's about it. However, the song has the pull of a vortex and achieves the aching ecstasy of a Mahler symphony, in just 3 minutes. Skeptical? Let's have a look:



One last thing about Heartbeat: the drum track is identical to the one in Milk Bottle Symphony by Saint Etienne on Tales From Turnpike House, released the same year. Coincidence? I think not. It's evidence of a vast, world-wide indie pop conspiracy.

Every track has something notable, and unusually creative. The gritty sounds are the perfect foil to Annie's colorless soprano. The more introspective tunes like No Easy Love are never sappy, but have a boppy, funky groove that offset the heartbreaking lyrics.

Annie told Prefix Magazine last year, she would like to be remembered "as a songwriter and hopefully a good songwriter and just a woman that's making good music. As long as they think that, I'm happy." We already do, so you can be a happy little poplette! Annie will have a new album out by the end of this year.

Tune (Out)))side 2007 - the Wave Farm, July 7, 2007, Acra, NY.

I felt very lucky to be included in one of free103point9's tenth anniversary events, the Tune (Out)))side 2007, held at the Wave Farm in Acra, NY. On this absolutely radiant summer day, the Wave Farm hosted live performances by over 30 sound artists. This was a headphone festival broadcast on 4 different frequencies. Each attendee received their own little FM transmitter and a printed program which listed all the performers and performance times. Performance stages were set up at various locations. One could wander the fields and paths through the woods to visit various stages or just camp out and switch between channels.

I was in a group of sound artists that I've become acquainted with from previous performances associated with Phonography. Think of "phonography" as being analogous to "photography." We capture sounds from the world around us and present them back as they are, unedited and "unretouched." Taken out of their original context and reproduced without a visual component, the recordings reward the listener with a rich auditory experience. Being primarily a visually oriented culture, we tend to focus our attention foremost on what can be seen, often actually "tuning out" what can be heard, let alone what can be listened to with attention. Purely listening, without the "picture," as it were, is still to many an unfamiliar way to experience the world, but we're trying to change that.

Our stage was set up on a hillside in a pine forest, fairly removed from the action down on the field, reachable only by a 10 minute walk over a winding pathway. A generator humming in the distance provided us with the power for our laptops and mixers. The ten of us took turns keeping our channel live for 6 hours, as we played raw field recordings, digitally processed field recordings, and a final, "anything goes" set. We finished in the dark, up on our mountain base camp, surrounded by the flames of tiki torches that gave us our only illumination and helped somewhat keep the mosquitoes away.

Because I was pretty intently focused on what I was doing, along with the others in my group I didn't hear too much of what was playing on the other channels. However I did spend time listening to Elliot Sharp and Shou Wang's guitar duo, which was as pretty as diamonds dropping on a glass floor. I also enjoyed seeing Edmund Mooney, Jonny Farrow and Andrea Williams do their sound experiments in clean suits. They were the only artists who brought a theatrical element to a performance. They went about taking notes on each other and measuring things in the weeds. I think one of them even checked me for radiation. They let me go.

I set up a flickr page of some photos of the event. Please visit here to learn more details about this particular event. free103point9 is an amazing resource for artists and listeners. Galen Joseph-Hunter and Tom Roe have an ever expanding and far reaching program for the promotion of transmission arts - read more about them here in Chronogram magazine.

UNIQLOCK

"WORLD.UNIQLOCK was launched as an online campaign, UNIQLOCK, for Uniqlo's summer line-up on the theme of "Dry". This UNIQLOCK is the 2nd series of UNIQLO MIXPLAY, which was launched last autumn, this was somewhat the talk of the town. The theme of this campaign is to spread the approach of Uniqlo globally through communication in fashion, music and dance beyond the language barrier.

The blog parts feature dance movies, and 4 female dancers, who were selected out of 16 in an audition, dance along with the time signal. Special dance sequences featuring a dance unit, core of woomin, are also shown at certain times. The music was composed by Tomoyuki Tanaka of the Fantastic Plastic Machine, specially for this campaign."

OK, so it's an ingenious form of advertising, however it's coolness factor cannot be denied, and it's a creative way to foster a sense of connectedness among people with similar interests and tastes. Plus you've got the musical participation of Tanaka - what's not to love?

Roisin Murphy. Ruby Blue (2005).

During her 10 year gig as half of the electronica duo Moloko, Roisin Murphy reached the UK top 40 four times, and the top 10 three times. The group hit the Billboard top 10 in the Hot Dance Music/Club Play charts a couple of times. Their spooky track, "Fun For Me," got some attention as part of the Batman soundtrack in 1997. When her solo release dropped I had no idea who she was but my musical life has been enormously enriched since finding out.



For this record, Roisin collaborated with producer Matthew Herbert in fusing together house-inflected pop with jazz and experimental sampling. It's not confusing to listen to, but the continually evolving layers of fine details cannot be absorbed in a quick listen. Even a more stripped down tune like "Sow Into You" will have you wondering, "What was that?" before something else catches your ear, taking you in a different direction.Roisin became noted through the 90's as an eccentric and wacky nutter, embodying quirky personas in outlandish costumes. The video for "Sow Into You" demonstrates she is still interested in offbeat visual representations. (Unfortunately, the video uses a less bristly edit of the audio track than the complete version on the CD, but you get the idea).



Moloko's songs could be humorous, but at times they were dark and eerily unhinged, or just bizarre, but always with a solidly swinging rhythmic underpinning. Ruby Blue is less cartoonish and more about the life of the heart. Roisin confessed that she didn't know how she could possibly do a record on her own. The songs she came up with by herself after the professional and personal heartache of Moloko's breakup are mature for someone under 30. Still, myth, metaphor and personal fantasy come into play on a number of tracks, as in "Night of the Dancing Flame."Roisin's palette of voices make up a fair amount of the musical details. Vocals jump between the speakers, they seem right in front of your face, then they jump back into the distance. They're processed, pitch shifted and EQ'd in a variety of ways as they dovetail and provide counterpoint to the main melody. She sings backup to herself in a style reminiscent of Motown in Dear Diary, or The Andrews Sisters in "Ramalama."The instrumentation is unusual, with what sounds like hammered dulcimer, harpsichord, alarm clocks, tupperware, cutlery, along with horn sections, electric piano, and a fuzzed out riff in the title track that sounds like a baritone rubber band. There is a definite jazz influence noticeable in the harmony and swing feel present throughout, which is fused with a house-pop beat. There are no programmed or acoustic drums on this CD. All percussion instruments are sampled from common household objects.Whether she is aware of it or not, Roisin is essentially a jazz singer. She stretches the melodies across implied rhythms and bends notes like a sax player. She even reminds me of Anita O'Day. In fact, I can imagine the final track being covered by another singer such as Cassandra Wilson. Accompanied only by piano and occasional flugelhorn, "The Closing of the Doors" captures the desire to renew a relationship in trouble, while realizing it is already too late to do so. It includes the haunting refrain, "Don't you remind me of someone," delivered in degrees of distance and intimacy that it is extraordinarily chilling.Obviously, Roisin's creative gifts are immense. What's wonderful about her is how inspired her vision is. Like Bjork, she is a lateral original, creating an oblique alternate world of her own, which is at once fractured and experimental while still being accessible, and "pop."

She has a new single out on iTunes, "Overpowered," and a new full length CD is on the way.