Geoff Farina, Luther Gray, Dan Littleton - New Salt

Xeng



Rating: 9/10

Geoff Farina is one hell of a guy. As the front man of the innovative Karate, he has deployed a battery of guitar techniques and instrumentation for almost a decade and a half. Dissecting music as if profanating corpses was allowed, the trio - with Jeffrey Goddard on bass and Gavin McCarthy on drums - explores the listener’s inner sanctum by stealing his or her virginity from minute one. Nevertheless, Karate’s music represents a huge challenge to the incurious, casual enthusiast. In fact, pummelling off-centre chords served with loose beats that blur like an overreacting spermatozoid is not an easy meal to digest.

Like I said, Geoff Farina is one hell of a guy. I don’t know him personally, but I wish I did. His music, along with the other Karate folks or any of his multiple collaborations, has soul-stealing properties, and succeeds in hybridising the post-everything tactics of all stripes. One year after forming Karate (1992) - whose last year’s Pockets was dubbed an “indie gem” by no less than CNN - he co-founded the folksy Secret Stars with Jodi Buonanno. Since then, he has been busy working with an array of musicians, and in 1998 he finally dropped his solo debut, the cohesive Usonian Dream Sequence.

This New Salt record is the first output coming from Geoff Farina as accompanied by guitarist Dan Littleton (known for his album with Tara Jane O’Neil) and the jazz drummer Luther Gray. It’s a 7-track cerebral journey which purposely sutures your brain while extracting your attention from the outside world. Its ill-tuned guitars insist on sharp, contemplative spasms while Gray’s beats trap themselves in locked, panoramic grooves.

What makes this new collective cuts above the generic, post-90s space rock norm is its ability to sound fresh, anaemic and simultaneously powerful within the incidental, microscopic details it releases. The final track, “Pouring Water on Stone,” proves just that; it instinctively seeks a direction but, in the end, is more than willing to resignedly pack its instruments and leave the room to come again tomorrow. Considering that the idea of New Salt came after they sonically illustrated silent movies live - notably Beckett’s and Ray’s classics - suddenly everything makes sense.

But the languorous path was drafted from track one; the 3-minute “Harmonia” would possibly work better as an interlude than as an opener, particularly because it then segues to the epic title track. “Song for Che” is as political as Godspeed You! Black Emperor dared to be on Yanqui U.X.O., that is to say, barely. This hasn’t been a poor year in analytical music after all; if you enjoyed David Pajo’s solo debut, you should love this. Just try and fill it with the words you like and it will soon become the best soundtrack to over-caffeinated mornings, guaranteed.

http://www.lostatsea.net/review.phtml?id=146779095043373619537c0

Portable - Version

2005



~scape/Flur

Este último fim-de-semana foi aquele em que os peregrinos vermelhos entopem os transportes da margem sul do Tejo. A Quinta da Atalaia, pólo de oração dos comunistas no último mês do tempo quente, recebeu-os num contexto especial. A Festa do Avante deste ano aconteceu depois da debochada popular e mediática que foi levar o líder espiritual do clã a enterrar. O partido dos reformados e das gentes reaccionárias todos os anos prepara um acampamento de jovens e tenta atirar areia para os olhos de muita gente. No fundo, é tudo malta inofensiva cujo único crime é trajar uma t-shirt do Che, mas também não se pode assumir que toda a gente conhece a História. Ao mesmo tempo, mas na parte norte do rio, acontecia um festival de reggae e derivados na Ericeira. Estes, sabe-se, estão lá pela música e têm a vantagem de não venderem a alma a Estaline.

As tribos existem, embora sempre vá havendo quem tenha a mente suficientemente aberta para picar mais do que um género, e rivalizam entre si. Tudo isto é saudável, tudo isto acontece desde que há jovens a habitar a superfície do planeta. Mas desconhece-se música tão apátrida como o dub. A resistência que a maior parte das pessoas tem quanto ao dub só o torna mais querido dentro dos círculos em que ele se mexe. A ~scape é morada de muita coisa que está para lá do lancil da magra via mediática. Já editou Deadbeat, Triosk meets Jan Jelinek, Pole ou colaborações ovni tipo Burnt Friedman e os Nu Dub Players, só para citar alguns. E agora edita Portable, ou antes Alan Abrahams, um tipo que soube crescer na África do Sul do pós-apartheid e que deu um salto a Londres para aí se estabelecer enquanto músico. Version é um disco do mundo, antes de ser qualquer outra coisa. Cruza idiomas tão aparentemente inconciliáveis que, só por faixas como “Thought in Action”, merecia ser conhecido por uma rua inteira. Os únicos temas em que ele mostra as raízes descarnadinhas da sua música encontram-se, logo a seguir, em “Temporal Distortion” e em “Tempura”, peças desavergonhadas que buscam inspiração em samples permissivos.

Mas, voltando atrás, ainda à boleia de “Thought in Action”, temos um pedaço de infusão africana. Uma espécie de remake pós-(inserir termo aqui) das partituras sonoras do King Kong, a clássica obra cinematográfica da dupla Merian C. Cooper e Ernest B. Schoedsack. Aliás, não se percebe por que raio os gritos da actriz sempre que vê o gorila não foram samplados para aqui. Avante, camaradas, que há ainda “Typhoon”, um chamamento dos deuses, uma centopeia rítmica que induz uma preguiça tal, só disfarçada pelos tambores e pela voz que se mete no meio.

As miudezas electrónicas não podiam faltar e ocupam sobretudo a primeira metade do disco. Percebe-se um house que se sabe importado, um techno a brotar do coração da Europa, uma lipoaspiração de toda a tralha acessória que faz a programação das noites dos bares da Expo. Mas, como ovelha tresmalhada que é, Portable não poderia ficar-se pelo continente negro, onde se demora nos vinte minutos que se seguem aos primeiros de Version. É que, à última faixa – “The Opened Book” –, abre o livro e aponta a sua verdadeira filiação, uma linhagem transpirada de influências rítmicas, geograficamente demarcadas, mas uma adoração especial por Berlim. Não está mal.

Portable vai passar por cá já amanhã, dia 9, para uma data única, a acontecer no Castelo de Linhares da Beira. Os bóinas vermelhas já estão dispensados. É que é muita música para um revolucionário!

http://www.bodyspace.net/album.php?album_id=500

Crónicas : feature

Shooting a psychological thriller in a location where one might actually happen in real life is a detail passed over by most filmmakers, but not by Sebastián Cordero. As the Ecuadorian director points out when discussing his new film, Crónicas, Babahoyo is a town where houses don’t have running water, but they do have television, a situation that creates an interesting, unpredictable dynamic. I'll buy that, even when a movie that tries to operate on remove the vertebrae of journalistic ethics (are there any left?) couldn’t be more acridly out of tune with my cinematic tastes.

In the film, which debuted earlier this year in the Cannes Film Festival's Un Certain Regard section, John Leguizamo plays Manolo Bonilla, an ambitious journalist who works for a tabloid TV series. He and his crew – a cameraman and the beautiful Marisa – are willing to sell their souls to the devil, if they must, in the eternal quest for career advancement. The crew's anything-goes mentality is the best part of the movie, really: their readiness to disregard any sense of ethics or deontology they might harbor. Marisa is the only one who truly regrets having overlooked some basic principles.

In a reversal of human and God roles (and we all know how feverously religious Mexican people can be), everyone plays God here. From the mutinous people seeking to lynch a Bible salesman for accidentally running over a boy, to the “monster of Babahoyo” himself, a killer famed for targeting children, and Leguizamo's character, salivating for his biggest story, there is no power more righteous than one's own. And so an odd alliance is made, somehow reminiscent of Faust, if you look carefully: Vinicio Cepeda, the traveling preacher who finds himself behind bars after indivertibly killing a boy with his truck and, in a desperate attempt to free himself from jail, is reduced to selling his story of the monster rather than selling the Bible.

Crónicas underlines the dense variety of human fauna populating Mexican villages, but the story fails to divert our view from the traditional, commonsensical approach of people eager to be seen on TV. Cordero seems so anxious to set and scan the voltage levels of human behaviour that he completely forgets to deliver an interesting story, serving the usual, kitsch-like menu instead. His camera even sprinkles extra lemon juice over certain sordid moments of the film, making it a tabloid-esque, arid and dreary modern tale, hollow of any real meaning or value.

It is obvious that the director weighed every camera move cautiously, his lenses traveling through the village to detail the setting, but it ultimately fails to compromise our view of fractured cinema. In the end, it leaves itself ambiguous, unable to put a time-signatured footprint in our minds. Shot with a glossy production and wrought with careless close-ups, Crónicas falls short in texture, leaving many unsolved problems hanging in the air.

The best films are the ones which we recall in detail, not only the content but also our relationship to it, where and when and with whom we saw them. Crónicas is ultimately ambiguous, lacking that intimacy of human experience. Even though Cordero deserves applause for delivering a human touch to every character, including the monster of Babahoyo, the human experience presented languishes as entertainment, failing to develop a connection with the viewer, always remaining distant, a video collage that is cold, detatched and vaccum sealed under the glaze of the lens.

SEE ALSO: www.cronicasthemovie.net

http://www.lostatsea.net/feature.phtml?fid=1756569747431db04f6ce0a

The Capitol Years - Let Them Drink

Burn & Shiver



Rating: 5.5/10

It should be no surprise that any band claiming to belong, or righteously belonging, to the garage revival chunk of these last years will, as time goes by, embody no less than a penny in a slot machine. To kick things off, I should clarify that the Capitol Years are no different than the Mooney Suzuki or the Warlocks - or even the Strokes, to raise more than a couple of eyebrows - in that every two tracks, they mimic.

There’s no use in elaborating on my resistance to most garage revivalist bands (the Walkmen should always be mentioned as a clear exception), so let me put it this way: most of them seem to have picked an era and chosen to live there forever.

Therefore, most songs from the Capitol Years’ first true full-length sound no stronger to me than if they were hit by a reversing truck (and no, Morrissey’s words about dying by her/his side, after being hit by a double-decker, and that being “such a heavenly way to die” do not apply here). Let Them Drink’s first two songs speak to the attention deficit disorder in each one of us; they send us into a head spin, but just when we were all crossing our fingers - thinking it’s about time they added insult to injury - their music proves to be plain and harmless.

Throughout the rest of the 40-minute album, these Philly folks maintain a cool poise while playing risibly at moderate volume. At times choosing to travel faster than the speed of comprehension, they cast a shadow on their musical skills, which seem to disappear as suddenly as they arrived. Jeff Van Newkirk’s guitar, for example, gets tossed into a river of foaming harmonies, the sort that cleanse any dirty material that could have erupted and heightened their performance.

And therein lies their biggest problem: the Capitol Years create a trap for themselves - like a two-way spectrum between whirled harmonies and heavier clusters - and can’t find their way out of that maze. On the other hand, on tracks like “Ramona” or even “Everyone Is a Skunk,” with their ascending or descending power chords, feel like a sombre wizard showed up and left a stain - like a blessed splash of ink - in the otherwise void sound-mantra. Needless to say, these are the best cuts taken from Let Them Drink. Every other hot-fingered guitar interlude lacks a grain of salt or two. To put matters briefly, although they do show some potential, the Capitol Years do not rightfully deserve the hype they are getting.

http://www.lostatsea.net/review.phtml?id=31807272431c337236816