Archives : all posts by Sean

Kwaw Kese & Black Prophet - "Let Me Do My Thing". Their request is simple: let them do their thing. This "thing" is more or less unelaborated. Just because they ask does not mean you have to accede. But I like their attitude. They say, When you asleep / mi a work hard. This sounds genuine. Afterhours, they are not playing video games or reading comics. They are working hard. Maybe they are hustling. And so there is something chivalrous simply in asking for your permission. They could hustle without it. They could do their thing. They want you to want them do their thing. They want you to appreciate it. And then they'll take you out on Thursday, Friday, Saturday nights, whenever you want, on motorcycles full of gas. [This music is from Ghana / video / MySpace]

Stefan Christoff and Matana Roberts - "Duet for Abdelrazik (Winter Morning Blues)". The highlight of Christoff's Duets for Abdelrazik LP, for which the pianist collaborated with six different musicians.

Abdelrazik is Abousfian Abdelrazik, a Sudanese-Canadian who was arrested during a visit to Sudan in 2003. Suspected of ties to terrorism, he was tortured. Canadian, French and FBI agents stood in the room with him.

Abdelrazik was ultimately exonerated. But past suspicion led to his listing on UN 1267, the United Nations security council blacklist. It became almost impossible for him to return to Canada. Any Canadian who tried to help him, offering money for a plane ticket, would be breaking the law.

In March 2009, 100 people jointly purchased Abdelrazik's flight home to Montreal.

In November 2011, Abdelrazik was finally removed from UN 1267.

Duets for Abdelrazik was recorded over two winters. Each song features Christoff and another musician. Abdelrazik stood in the room with them.

Sometimes presence is not a small thing. Sometimes it is everything. It is friendship or collusion, solidarity or hate. It is bravery or cowardice, a political act. So listen to Christoff's and Roberts' "Winter Morning Blues" and hear not just their seeking, their tender hearts, their doleful celebration. Hear the air in the room, the wait and glance, the close-to-touch. Hear the particular, personal sadness. And the hope.

[buy]

(album cover by Nazik Dakkach)

Wind-Up People - "The First Train Out of Town". A smoky holler, a fumbling parting, a gas lantern bumping in the rattling trunk of a car. Wind-Up People have listened to albums by Constantines and Cloud Nothings, or maybe their predecessors', and they have made the kind of record, like those, that you need to put on when certain rotten things are sparking in your chest, snicking and buzzing, like the dancing end of a powerline. You turn the volume knob and you put your palms flat on the wall, above your head, and you click your molars, and then you can no longer hear the click of your molars, because the music is too loud, that smoky holler, and you will yourself to forget the fact that every part of your house is utterly unchanged. (Deep breath.) Thank god for this fucking rock and roll. [free at bandcamp]

Julie Doiron - "Our Love". Half a song. Less than that - an eighth of a song, a tenth, a twentieth, not a song but a sentiment, a single rosy sentiment. Julie takes this tiny vast sentiment and doubles it, redoubles it, makes three minutes and thirty-two seconds out of just that little thing, repeated, like the tolling of a golden clock, the blinking of those familiar eyes, the drowsy nightly ritual. Every evening you get into bed and it is different and the same, another one counted in, a duplicate, and the lamplight is unabating. (A song for lovers, certainly; a nonsense for the ones who are without.) [buy]

[Photograph is of the USS Akron, by Margaret Bourke-White]

Milk Teddy - "Come Around". 36-year-old Murray Schelm, MFA, sat in his panelled office, reading students' art school applications. A boy from Morocco who makes sculptures out of cocktail gherkins. A girl from Carolina who swallows paint and vomits it onto canvases. An old man from Timmins, ON, whose performance art consists of swallowing wedding rings. Murray yawned. He brushed muffin-crumbs off the next spiral-bound manuscript. NEW WAVE, read the title page, by R.E. Dudamel. Dudamel's thesis opened with a 50-page essay laying out the pretext, context and subtext of their work. Experiments in the imaginary, Murray read. Invented nostalgia within the jubilant absurd. Murray dozingly scanned the pages. More words began to catch his eye: The Raincoats. Hawaii. Surfboard. "Wait, wait, wait," Murray said, out loud. He leaned into the text. While the machinists worked on my 'mass surfboard' schematic, I began recruiting musicians from among the peninsula's surfers. Murray turned the page. 'Shark' promised that the only thing better than his Morrissey impression was his facility for 'catching waves' at the turn. "But it can't be serious, they didn't--" Murray said, flipping pages, but there, past the photocopied blueprints and pencil-sketches, the photographs begans. Photographs of men and women in swimsuits, crowded together, holding electric guitars, on a bizarre elongated surfboard. A drummer in a wetsuit. A sopping rock'n'roll band on a sunny raft. The man in front, biceps bulging, dripping forelock, was a dead ringer for Morrissey. Beside him tottered a woman who unerringly recalled Johnny Marr. A tall bro held a harmonica between his lips. There were photographs of the band at dawn, at dusk, on cresting waves under stormy skies. They had flown to Cali, to the Bahamas, to Miami's Art Basel. Dudamel's surfin' Smiths, pretexted and contexted and subtexted. Murray flipped and flipped and flipped. He was imagining this band like a clear fuzzy new old Polaroid memory. He was looking for a URL, a bandcamp or soundcloud, somewhere to hear the songs. "Who is R.E. Dudamel?" he wondered, "a man or a woman? A kid or a geezer?" He punched the name into Google. R.E. Dudamel was from Lufa, Minnesota. R.E. Dudamel was a little-known automotive corporation. R.E. Dudamel was a publicly-traded company. R.E. Dudamel was looking for investors. [buy this terrific record / thanks so much andy]

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Again, I'm soliciting songs for my annual Best Songs of the Year list. What were the best things you heard? Please send me mp3s or links to bundles of mp3s, the very best things, any genre at all, from pop to fizz, rap to folk, jazz to pop. But uh please do a quick search on Said the Gramophone to make sure I haven't written about something from that album already. Thank you so much! I rely on your help!

Alicia Keys ft Maxwell - "Fire We Make". Like Timothy Bloom & V Bozeman's "Til the End of Time" this feels intimate as two bodies; like Beyoncé's "1+1" it feels luxuriantly slow; like Alicia's own "Gummi Bears" it, uh, seems a trifle oversung. But I love this kind of old R&B slowjam, the sound that feels above all like two singers singing to each other, physical bodies, presences, inside four walls, with a closed door. What is modern is in the texture of the production, not the fact of handclaps, guitar solo, horns, but the woozy way of them, the weather on this particular fall day, purple clouds in a grey sky.

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If you live in New York and need photography, my friend Charles has relaunched his website. I met him years ago, in Edinburgh, on his first gig. Now his music photography is all grown up.

Speaking of friends, Richard Parks is about to premiere his old-timey radio drama, Wayne Coyne's Human Head-Shaped Tumor. Airing Saturday and Sunday, Nov 24-25, on KCRW, the show features the voices and music of (among others) the Flaming Lips, Eleanor Friedberger, Will Sheff, Paul F Tompkins, Bill Callahan, Edward Droste, and basically everyone we adore. More info at McSweeney's.

Finally, it's almost that time, and I'm soliciting songs for my annual Best Songs of the Year list. What were the best things you heard? Please send me mp3s or links to bundles of mp3s, the very best things, any genre at all, from pop to fizz, rap to folk, jazz to pop. But uh please do a quick search on Said the Gramophone to make sure I haven't written about something from that album already. Thank you so much! I rely on your help!

(Image is of Helen Keller meeting Charlie Chaplin.)

Chris Malinchak - "So Good To Me". A rosy little Monday morning gift. Small, translucent, like a pink bead. So slight that you could forget it somewhere - on a windowsill, a nighttable, a bench. You could forget it in your own pocket. You could take it for granted - this song that is itself about not taking love for granted, about knowing that feeling in every wakeful moment. You forget the reminder that you should not forget. This is a rosy little Monday morning gift; take care that it does not send you spilling out into loneliness. [soundcloud]

Aidan Knight - "A Mirror". I feel like Knight has written the kind of story I have written before: a man at the back of the corner shop, in the corner of the keg party, doing his work, doing his life, and full of longing. Knight does not overburden the story - he sings it lightly, wry, a little aloof. The arrangement gives the tale its colour, its sprays of red and neon green, its willful blues. Neat ratatatting drums, flourishes of organ, stately cello and nudges of horn and then a distant crackle of feedbacking guitar. There is something of "Penny Lane" in it - "Penny Lane" more than "Eleanor Rigby" - but Knight's disappointed aspirations are all British Columbia. [buy]

(image by Sam Irons)

Fou - "Don't You Know". Ruzzy bloo songs, cooll like lilax, zinc pinc & frostid, all early wintr. Smokng outdors. Lovleeness & noize, nears & fars, stumbled longng, a brokn down pome. [bandcamp]