New Music: Low, Group Doueh, Pole

Low - Breaker (Sub Pop 2007)

Low – Drums and Guns / Sub Pop

From what I can tell (using my very amateur art interpretation skills), Bridget Riversmith’s full painting, which is cropped on the inside cover of Low’s latest album, Drums and Guns, features a ring of streaming birds entering the ears of a sheep-like creature with a wolf’s face. Painted with chalky grey gouache, it’s austere in its minimalism; it’s deceptively simple thanks to fine craftsmanship and shrouded with curiosity leaving the viewer to decide on his or her own context. You either get wonderfully lost in the hypnotic, grey landscape or moved by its odd content, and it acts as a pretty good visual representation of Low’s music: minimal, tenderly and masterfully constructed, organic yet odd, draped with a mysterious but strongly felt emotion, pleasantly awkward and undeniably hypnotic.

Alan Sparhawk, Mimi Parker and their latest bass player, Matt Livingston, have been creating this type of slow-burning music for nearly 15 years now, so I seriously doubt that my descriptions are anywhere near original, but it’s just something that seems appropriate when talking about this band. Inspired as an antithesis to the crunchy grunge scene that ravaged the early 90s, Low have stayed pretty much completely devoted to their minimalist sound, though their jump to Sub Pop a few years back and working with producer Dave Fridmann (Flaming Lips, Mogwai, Sleater-Kinney) has resulted in slightly more elaborate productions and some following negative criticism. Drums and Guns finds the Duluth, Minnesota trio once again experimenting with new elements like drum machines and looped vocals, but returns somewhat to the sound they established while on Kranky Records. While 2005’s The Great Destroyer featured more of a rackety almost wall-of-soundish approach, Drums and Guns samples that racket and lets it quietly stir beneath the surface. Almost like they wrote the album, then took those pieces and re-assembled them in a new, shuffling fashion.

The comparison that keeps jumping into my head is Califone’s Roots & Crowns; the striking combination of rustic, organic instrumentation and lush melodies with noisy (though subdued) elements like feedback and electronics. “Pretty People” opens the album with that restricted, crunchy feedback before Sparhawk begins crooning about how everyone is going to die eventually over sparse piano chords, loose guitar strums and distant bass drum knocks. “Belarus” follows with a completely different sound, loose and melodic. It sounds more Juana Molina than anything with relaxed pings, ebbing strings, throbbing bass and Sparhawk and Parker’s poignant vocal harmonies. Building the momentum, “Breaker” begins with tranquil organ chords and a simple drum machine and hand-clapping beat before the vocals and murderous lyrics come back full-force over a reversed and feedbacking electric guitar. The rest of the album continues on the same vibe: a mixture of soul-turning melodies and crunching electronics, gorgeous vocal harmonies and violent lyrics, a slow-burning mood with an incredible sense of urgency. Or in other words, Low doing what they do best. I could go on describing the tracks, the CocoRosie shuffle of “Dragonfly,” the opening a cappella and throwback sound of “Yoru Poison,” and the surprising buoyancy of “Hatchet,” but I don’t want to unearth all the subtleties of the album so you’re left with at least a few surprises.

When a band has spent fifteen years in the game, it’s all about re-inventing themselves without losing the idiosyncrasies that has kept them afloat for so long. In my opinion, Low has done a phenomenal job doing just that throughout their career, though expectations rise with each album and harsher criticism (like that for The Great Destroyer) is inevitable. It’s hard to predict how the people let down by their Sub Pop debut will react to Drums and Guns, but I’m thinking it’s going to be more for the positive. It’s an excellent record that finds a nice middle ground between their early and later styles with a continued exploration into more electronic manipulations. Hypnotic, elegant, odd and mysterious, it’s all the reasons we love Low.






Group Doueh - Wazan Samat (Sublime Frequencies 2007)

Group Doueh – Guitar Music from the Western Sahara / Sublime Frequencies

From the opening moments of Guitar Music from the Western Sahara you know you are in for a treat. After a brief introduction, Doueh's electric guitar blasts out of the raw recording with an odd combination of styles that has a sort of bluesy wah-wah deal going on while an exuberant chorus care of two ladies singing at the top of their lungs easily overmodulates within the tiny frequency bandwidth. If crisp production is your thing though, I seriously doubt you would have headed in Sublime Frequencies direction in the first place. This is for us audiophiles that listen to music just to be baffled and awestruck.

On the far west side of the Sahara, somewhere between the fuzzy borders of Mauritania and the Morroco-annexed territory known as Western Sahara, Baamar Salmou aka Doueh, his wife, son and friend jam under the name Goup Droueh. Their style is one in its own led by the unpredictable and intricate fingers of Salmou on his unrelenting electric guitar. While based in the local Mauritanian modal structure, Salmou relies as much on the psychedelic stylings of Hendrix and the energetic funk of James Brown as the hypnotic, trance-like Gnawan music from Morocco and other regional styles. He plays with almost the same fractured manner as, believe it or not, Tim Kinsella in his Make Believe guise, but with a phase shifter and in scales we could only dream of understanding. Elliptical melodies gallop out of the unhinged virtuosity of Salmou while being joined by loose percussion, almost unrecognizable keyboards at points and the jubilant screams of his wife and her friend. It's joyous and you don't know why, and I doubt you'll care after being immersed in the sound for a while.

Personally, I think the album gets better as it progresses. The first couple tracks grab your undivided attention, but not until "Fagu" do you realize that you are listening to something special. Salmou runs up and down foreign scales very quickly in a jerky yet loose method that doesn't sound unlike Spencer Seim or Kinsella, as I mentioned earlier. "Dun Dan" begins a bit more subdued but builds into a chugging tune with oddly placed drum machine toms in one of the many wonderful what-the-fuck-that-was-awesome moments of the disc. "Wazan Samat" follows with an irresistible hand-clap rhythm and roundabout vocals as Salmou snakes in the background, and the final track, "Cheyla Ya Haiuune," is the poppiest of the group that almost effervesces at points when Salmou's tight harmonic bubbles meet Hendrix-like solos. Group Doueh produces music that is innately foreign to our ears but not all-together alien. You can understand where he's coming from, but it's nearly impossible to predict what's next which makes Guitar Music from the Western Sahara so much jaw-dropping fun.






Pole - Pferd (~scape 2007)

Pole – Steingarten / ~scape

Sefan Betke has never made music for the dancefloor though it’s hard to separate him from his fellow post-techno Berlinites. Under the moniker Pole, he pushed the boundaries of minimalist experimentation drawing elements of dub, hip-hop, techno, IDM and musique concrète to create the subtle mechanical throb of sound-architecture. Built from the idiosyncratic crackling-hum of a damaged Waldorf-4-Pole filter, Betke established himself through three numerically-named (1, 2, 3) albums in the late 90s and opened the doors of experimental electronica label ~scape with Barbara Presinger in ’99 which has released records by Jan Jelinek, Safety Scissors, John Tejada and other similar-minded artists. In recent years though, Betke has been incorporating more and more familiar structures in his music and with Steingarten, Pole is closer to the dancefloor than he’s ever been.

Now don’t get me wrong, Betke has not scrapped his filters for synthesizers just yet, but these songs have easily distinguishable bpms and head-nodding if not danceable rhythms. The mechanical hums and clanks still make up the majority of the building materials and subtle melodies are created out of the harmonic vibrations made from two pieces of metal clanging together and filtered through dub-like echo triggers. Think John Tejada with broken equipment. His clever manipulation of static white noise and feedback reappear on many occasions adding texture and depth to the sparse arrangements. “Jungs” for example rides an offbeat bass thump and bright, crackling spritzes of melodic static dipped in dub-like reverberation and builds over seven minutes from a groovy club number to disorienting and fraying noise. I’m a bit partial to the more minimal, exploratory tracks that reach back to early Pole like “Mädchen,” which builds from high-pitched glass hums and sparse, crunchy beats or the much more rhythmic “Düsseldorf” that features a number of different throbbing mechanics slowly coming together into one smoothly running engine. Closer, “Pferd,” has to be the strongest track though thanks to a much more relaxed IDM beat and ghostly melodica echoes; in fact, if the entire album was more in that style, I’d probably be ranting and raving all over the page. Like 2003’s Pole, Steingarten finds Betke utilizing more and more techno-oriented structures with his patented factory-damaged sound. It does not approach his early minimalist experimentations, but the increasing accessibility will bring in a lot of post-IDM fans. As for me, I can’t shake the image of a CGI animated factory chugging along in happy rhythm to Pole’s mechanical bounce.