IUMA HAS IT

Andromeda

Thu, 21 Jun 2012 17:26:50 -0400

First, apologies for the absolutely ludicrous delay; I’ve been alternately swamped and in rural Pennsylvania (sometimes, swamped in rural Pennsylvania) for the past few weeks.

Now, without further self-deprecation, here’s Andromeda, whose site boasts the most eerily accurate X-meets-Y-meets-Z description I’ve ever read. (Madonna, Pink Floyd and Red Hot Chili Peppers are all involved.)

Trawling through dozens of bands’ self-written bios means slogging through so much amateur, unenticing copy. You can’t blame them — the intersection of up-and-coming bands and bands who know or can afford seasoned copywriters isn’t as big as you’d think — but it does mean that the good ones don’t grab you so much as shove you to attention. So it is with Andromeda:

Andromeda was formed at the behest of its maniacal robotic drummer, Andromeda Crush, who was self- assembled from genuine toyota parts on a rainy day in a Chula Vista junkyard.

I know, right? Perhaps you find this twee or contrived; I find it fantastic. Andromeda Crush sounds like a long-lost member of Jem and the Holograms who got her own twelve-episode spinoff. I would listen to her music on name alone.

Biographical copy means never having to listen to music on name alone. Google doesn’t have much on Andromeda, but it has enough: an old-HTML relic boasting a lot of photos that don’t exist online anymore, a few mp3 samples that also don’t exist anymore, mentions of two CDs that might exist in a box in California somewhere, some talk of “soul sourcing” and “destiny cards” that’s exactly as useful as you think it sounds, and — the part that makes this enough — a link to IUMA and their SoundClick page. On there, we find a description:

Pink Floyd meets Madonna at a Chilli Peppers Show.

This is stunningly accurate, as you can assess for yourself by listening to “Suspicion” on that site. The instrumental frippery really does sound like Pink Floyd, the vocals really are processed like Madonna’s, and there’s some RHCP to the bassline. It’s great stuff.

But IUMA’s track is “MicroMythology,” which either acquired or lost the “Micro” in the transition to or from SoundClick. It’s equally striking, piano and synth lines slicing and reeling through production fog and the vocalist (whose name I, sadly, have yet to track down; their IUMA bio mentions no band members by name, and their official page mentions no vocalists) soars over it all like Madge would had her career — late-’80s perhaps, from the sound of this — taken her to this sector of space. The song’s called Mythology and the band’s called Andromeda, which cant be coincidental; sure enough, it’s from the Greek figure’s perspective, and it unties her from the subtext non-scholars probably forgot was there, with lines like “I don’t need your heroes, I’ll save myself” and “I can’t depend on Medusa’s head / don’t need your feathered heels or Zeus’s bed / time to change the author.” Whether this was meant as a one-off or as part of a larger concept album, I’ll almost always take a second or third listen to this sort of re-appropriation. Particularly when it’s this listenable.

Oh, And One More Thing: From their “Write to us, and we might put you in a song!” Like most statements found on the Internet years later, this request is like something in a bottle, washed up on the shore who knows how long after the fact. This probably won’t happen. But if anyone’s reading this, and if the crew’s still together, well, if it’s OK with Saint Etienne….

3. Robyn

Tue, 05 Jun 2012 14:06:21 -0400

Yes, that Robyn.

This isn’t quite the spirit of the project, but it’s interesting — to me, at least — so it’s worth a post.

Why? Well, One misconception I see a bit about the IUMA project is that it’s one of two things:all dreck, or all nobodies. The former is the point of this project; there’s dreck here because there’s dreck everywhere, and quibbling about the various proportions is missing about five points at once.

But the latter? With this many artists listed, you’ll probably run into a familiar face at some point if you follow local music, or Internet-local music, or, hell, music. It happens to be really convenient for blogging purposes that Robyn’s career is now having a hell of a third act.

That said, it wasn’t as if she was a complete nobody when this came out — “Monday Morning,” the track here, was from her second album, My Truth (i.e. post-“Show Me Love.”) Check out this old bio:

Robyn was born in Stockholm on June 12th 1979. She grew up travelling around in Europe with her parents and their theatrical company, from the age of six months until she turned 7 and started school. In the age of 16, she became famous in Sweden because of the single “Do You Really Want Me [Show Respect]”. That hit single placed her debut-album “Robyn Is Here” as #1 at the album top-list.

Robyn wrote her first song when she was 11 years old. It was called “In My Heart” and was about her parents divorce. In the age of 12 she performed this song in the swedish TV-show “Söndagsöppet”.

That, right there, is an entirely different league of PR. It’s practically an artifact. And who knows whether it’ll be edited in the future? (Some bands have edited theirs.)

Oh, right, the song. There’s a chance you’ve heard it, but in case you haven’t — any of you remember that whole debate when “Fembot” and “Dancing On My Own” came out about whether Robyn was R&B? She wasn’t then, but she certainly was for “Monday Morning”; there’s melisma in her voice and a certain massing to the background vocals (and a key change) that’s almost anachronistic. It’s an R&B album-track, in other words, and by those standards it’s decent. By the time the soft percussion and off-kilter orchestral touches come in, it’s more than decent. I have no idea how Robyn fans now will approach this, and obviously this makes that debate make a whole lot more sense, but as someone raised on ’90s R&B, I’m basically missing everything it’d take to resist this.

(More to come, possibly….)

2. Ebsolus Blue

Mon, 04 Jun 2012 13:32:00 -0400

Here’s Ebsolus Blue, a group who claims to be “pushing the limits of what music can become.” Is this true? Let’s find out!

Ebsolus Blue doesn’t have quite as much info on them, but here’s what we know from Google: they’re from Eugene, Oregon; at least two Livejournal users liked them. Their bio’s pretty sparse, too: the standard promotional stuff, a bit of puffery about pushing the limits of music, being strange and beautiful and melodic, the same sort of thing you’ll read in any band’s bio.

There are two tracks here: “Apple Orchards” and “Everlasting.” Both are indeed melodic, and sections of them are quite beautiful; I’m not sure “strange” is an adjective really called for, but neither is it automatically a compliment. I’ll take beauty where I find it: the tremors midway through the first, the way the second spools itself out like fields over film credits. I’ll take the fact that everyone involved resisted the obvious urge to add faux-Fleet Foxes vocals (an anachronism, but you know exactly what I mean) over this. For two basically-anonymous tracks, you could get far less pleasant.

1. Sofia Gradin

Thu, 31 May 2012 15:59:00 -0400

(Two explanatory notes, first. One, I’m not going to post negative writeups here. This isn’t because I like everything — I’m quite picky and have already gone through about 10 acts I didn’t deem worth writing about — but because I think it’s pretty damn useless to shit on probably-obscure music that’d been all but nonexistent online for years. It is easy not to listen to any of these artists and hard to decide which to listen to. That’s my goa.

Second, at least at the beginning, what you’ll read here is strictly about the music, the artists and what’s Googleable about those. I’d love to do interviews with musicians or Internet Archive folks [hint hint], but that takes more time to set up than a day.)

Now then! First up: Sofia Gradin, a Swedish singer-songwriter of the decidedly non-saccharine sort.

First, a little anecdote to disprove everyone still blithering about how the Internet or Google or Spotify or the cloud or whatever makes everything available. Sofia Gradin, according to this writeup, released, or once released, or idly thought about releasing an album called Gazing at Stars. The Internet knows absolutely nothing about that album besides what IUMA tells you. You can extrapolate some of what might’ve been on there by removing “Not Relevant,” “Subjectivia,” “Them All” and “We Have Beer” — all of which are on Snakeskin, whose existence was documented — but any other hypothetical tracks? Who knows? At the time of writing, Google returns this page and nothing else. Not even Discogs or wally.was.his.name (which can go fuck itself forever) has scraped its name. Perhaps a copy’s left in somebody’s attic, or rattling around in a hard drive that’s started to make its own rattling sounds, or lingering in the bins of a Swedish record store near closing, or an estate sale, or a cardboard box someplace. Perhaps you could stop the right person in their thirties on the street in Stockholm and hear all about it. Perhaps I’ll awaken to an email a few weeks later with information. Serendipity like this happens all the time; it just happens sporadically you can’t depend on it. For all intents and purposes, Sofia Gradin’s music no longer existed before IUMA was rehosted.

“Sofia Gradin’s music,” mind you, comes with a caveat. Specifically, this: ”The songs have been recorded in low-budget studios and are to be considered as demo recordings only,” Gradin cautions. If this is the case, Gazing at Stars and Snakeskin in their mastered forms would constitute a really promising debut and an even more promisingly polished follow-up, among the highlights out of Sweden that year.

Whatever impression you’ve gotten from that writeup, forget it. I suspect I know what it is, as a reader of a lot of Swedish music and/or pop blogs for work and/or amusement. Over the years, I’ve found that either they or their fanbases have a bit of a disconcerting obsession with coquettes: pretty, floaty, alluring indie-pop tracks with swooning voices and fluttering instrumentation. I like a lot of this sort of music, but the aggregate admiration does start to give you roughly the same feeling you get when you read about disconsolate Stateside dudes idolizing foreign women for being dainty or feminine, wife or Manic Pixie Dream Girl material. It’s not strictly limited to this genre — some J-pop and K-pop discussion, for instance, seems to have undercurrents of this, at least when it doesn’t have undercurrents of superstandom — but it’s definitely a thing. (More on this.)

Sofia Gradin’s music is nothing like that. It’s a lot closer to Stina Nordenstam’s Dynamite / This Is guise or Cecilia Nordlund’s grittier stuff (to stay within the country). That’s what I hear, at least; she’s made her own list of influences — as an image map, even! — and they range from The Cure to Bjork to Catatonia to multiple Alanis albums. There are more, but those three are pretty representative: defiant, often dark and really earnest. You don’t see that last in combination with the first two nearly as often as I’d like, and for a set of rough demos — or, really, in general — this is fantastic stuff.

“Abbreviation Spree” (itself abbreviated to “Abbrev. Spree,” like that one Kat Primeau song) starts with guitar grumbles a lot like Stina’s “Dynamite,” then becomes something a lot like what’d happen if Sleater-Kinney got sick of reading “S-K” all over the place. You can hear the guide lines for how the chorus would’ve soared. “Fall Into Decay” lilts and keens but does the opposite of its title; give it its five minutes for its layers to bloom. “Fit Me” is a sprightly piano tune about how poesy and chipperness and sprightly piano tunes aren’t Gradin’s thing. “People don’t fit me when they talk about their future and their craziness and call themselves outrageous,” she sings, as her alto makes deadpan small talk in the track’s direction.

“So Relevant” is the first from Snakeskin, which I’m guessing is newer because the production values get exponentially higher (not that the previous few were lo-fi at all; if IUMA hadn’t specified these were demos, I’d only suspect that of one or two.) The production’s a dense mire of synth buzzes and guitar drones, something like a synthesized Warcraft battle dirge; it’s supposed to be a summer song, if “school’s out” is any indication, but this is some summertime sadness, omnidirectional despair about a relationship that probably could’ve gone a bit differently. If there’s a better line written by someone other than Katy B on a one-night stand (I’m guessing?) than “It was like a ritual / and yet it was so special,” I’ve yet to hear it. There might be a parent involved, or a caretaker; it’s all rather ambiguous, but the way it churns itself down into the muck toward the end (much like Stina’s “CQD,” to belabor that comparison) is anything but.

“Postcar” could almost be a Fiona Apple outtake, from some hypothetical period where she experimented with bedroom production between albums instead of pacing up and down hills. “Subjectivia” is about subjectivism, and it’s polite enough to keep its sitar subtle if it’s already saying “queer as fuck.” “Them All” could’ve been blogged about everywhere, or at least everywhere that covers Swedish pop, had news cycle spun just a little bit differently. “I don’t care, I want it all / … I want to see it all, I want to live them all” soars enough already that I’d love to hear the full studio take, and if Icona Pop can get praised for those words, so can she. “We Have Beer” is a deceptively languid track about drinking to ease social anxiety, somewhere between an indictment and a dispatch from the floor. “Man, I ain’t calling this a party if I can’t regurgitate my alcohol,” followed by scatting, is just unsubtle enough, ironic but not played as irony. Who knows how many of these worries would be smoothed away by larger-budget production or distribution? Who even needs to? These songs accomplish everything they need to for me, and if there’s a slight overlay of missed opportunities, it’s the fault of anything but the music.

Highlights: “Not Relevant,” “Postcar”

Intro

Wed, 30 May 2012 10:51:00 -0400

a.k.a. Katherine’s Esoteric Jaunt Of The Summer

WHAT IS THIS? As you may know, but should know either way, the Internet Underground Music Archive was a massive collection of music from more than 45,000 artists and bands, founded in the early ’90s that perished the way much of what was on the Internet back then did. It was recently rehosted was re-hosted recently thanks to Jason Scott and the Internet Archive. That’s more than 45,000 bands and artists, or more than 680,000 tracks of music, all of which you can browse through in a nice, neat linkdump.

WHY BLOG THAT? 45,000 artists. 680,000 tracks. This is a lot of music. It’s daunting to even begin to listen to, even without considering the music critics’ adage that the hardest thing to persuade someone to hear is the unknown. And when the IUMA was lost, a lot of the context for the music was lost as well. This is my piecemeal attempt to rectify that. (Credit for inspiration goes to 49th Parallel Pop, which is essentially this except for CanCon artists.)

Plus, it’s always fun to hear and possibly love new — or at least new-to-you music. I expect many of these artists have further work out, or associations with other bands — it’s 45,000 separate rabbit holes to tumbl(e) down. Won’t you join me?

HOW ARE YOU CHOOSING SONGS? At random, or depending on which artists seem interesting, or depending on recommendations if you have any. It all depends.

WHO ARE YOU? I’m Katherine St. Asaph, a NYC-based music writer and nerd about archives and ’90s obscurities. Here’s a somewhat more official bio.

HOW CAN I GET IN TOUCH? katherinestasaph@gmail.com, generally. That bio has a ton of other ways.

IS THAT REALLY AN ADELE PUN? SERIOUSLY? Yes. noregretschicken.gif