A Perfect Union of Contrary Things is the authorized biography of musician and vintner Maynard James Keenan. Who is Maynard James Keenan? An ace of falsehood, of puzzle, a person who might go on visit behind a shade, or canvassed in blue paint, or wearing wigs, and who, it turns out, is not going to surrender every one of the responses to that question in his first life story. To begin, A Perfect Union of Contrary Things is not a book about Tool. The band Keenan, now 52, helped to establish in 1990 doesn't show up until page 141. Also, there will be no genuine responses for those withering to know when that long past due next record is coming. Co-author Sarah Jensen's 30-year friendship with Keenan gives her extraordinary understanding into his history and profession direction. The book follows Keenan's trip from his Midwest youth to his years in the Army to his time in the art school, from his stretch at a Boston pet shop to his place in the worldwide spotlight and his impact on contemporary music and territorial winemaking. An exhaustive depiction of an adaptable and devoted artist, A Perfect Union of Contrary Things pays reverence to the general population and spots that formed the man and his specialty. As of not long ago, Maynard's fans have had admittance to just a compressed adaptation of his story. A Perfect Union of Contrary Things displays the outtakes, the scenes of dissatisfaction and triumph, and the occasions that drove him to make one stride after the following, to alter course, to investigate now and again shocking open doors. Included are sidebars in his own words, frequently silly accounts that light up the story, and additionally editorial by his relatives, companions, teachers, and industry partners. The book likewise highlights a foreword by Alex Gray, an American visionary artist and long-term companion of Keenan. Going with the content are photographs of Keenan from youth to the present. Maynard's story is a similitude for the peruser's own development and a support to take after one's fantasies, hold quick to individual respectability, and work perpetually to satisfy our imaginative potential. A Perfect Union of Contrary Things is a long way from great. At the end of the day, Keenan is a standout amongst the most interesting music specialists of our circumstances, and any look into his cerebrum will be invited by numerous. This might be the nearest they'll get.
0 Comments
With the harsher end of techno amidst its greatest renaissance in over 10 years, it is just fitting that one of the principal bosses of the frame has ended up back sought after. It's not as though he ever went anyplace; Mika Vainio is effectively one of techno and trial electronic music's most productive specialists, with a discography that extends crosswise over kind partitions, assumed names, a couple of the range's most regarded marks, and apparently unlimited coordinated efforts with long haul accomplices and in erratic gatherings. For somebody who's put thirty or more years underway and electro-acoustics, Vainio is shockingly humble about both his methods and his objectives: a couple of basic machines, a couple of hand crafted noisemakers, persistence, and his instinctive, improvisational way to deal with music are the fundamental parts to accomplish the dispositions he looks for. Advancements are coaxed out purposely, and final products are various. Perhaps energized by his extraordinary, long running association with Ilpo Väisänen in their pair Pan Sonic, Vainio's vocation has flourished with extremes. They were most clear on the combine's records, which regularly included moderate beat tests rubbed straightforwardly against short upheavals of burning electronic clamor. The interchange appeared to get more serious as time went on; their 2004 four-collection set Kesto included a plate each of the different styles they were known for – uproarious modern, moderate rhythms, rambling tonal tests, and immaculate encompassing pieces – and their 2007 and 2010 endeavors for Blast First Petite contained some of their harshest additionally most arrestingly wonderful work yet, with sections joining live acoustic instrumentation and considerably louder upheavals of industrialisms. Vainio himself was minimal more unsurprising in this time and a while later; since Pan Sonic's 2010 disintegration, he has made surrounding records for Touch, recorded in ad libbed jazz-clamor outfits for PAN and Honest Jon's, and discharged Life… It Eats You Up, his 2011 exertion for eMego that was as prominent for containing almost unrecognizable Stooges covers as it was for being one of his harshest, most non domesticated excursions ever, and in addition one of his generally concrete. Indeed, it appears that Vainio's music has as of late taken a general turn towards more solid reference focuses: Kilo is an extremely proper analogy for the pictures of gravity, gradualness and weight that the music introduced here summons. The track titles themselves go with the same pattern, refering to subjects of rotting industry mixed with nautical references: 'Rust', 'Wreck', 'Docks', 'Cranes', 'Payload'. With regards to this symbolism, the music has a moderate, stumbling cadenced base, much like the enduring forward movement of a vessel against a tempest of brutal components, and more settled snapshots of gloomy, rotting sonics substitute with more savage upheavals of commotion and power gadgets while the beat pushes on. Konstellaatio, his first full-length in three years under his incidental mononym Ø, is a flawlessly grave dream. Konstellaatio offers a few sonic and elaborate attributeswith the slow wave of doom-oriented electronic musicians that have become out of darkwave, shoegaze and overwhelming metal as of late. Over these nine tracks, Vainio juxtaposes blanketing drones with breezy consoles, cut beats and beeps with apparently no-limit bass. These moderate movement traverses treat the delightful and the undermining as fundamental supplements, just as he were a blood and gore movie chief with an eye for both stun and true to life polish. For its general hostility and mass, Vainio's back index can scare, even off-putting. However, Konstellaatio is iridescent and ghostly, the kind of liminal record where the lovely sounds evoke the creeps and the grimmest tones feel like exhalations. Likely by minimal cognizant outline, Vainio is the complex contemporary of acts, for example, Demdike Stare, the Haxan Cloak and Andy Stott, at any rate incidentally. In the event that there's a development among such gatherings, Konstellaatio justifies more than specify with it. Mika Vainio and Franck Vigroux’s collaborative album Peau Froide, Léger Soleil is portrayed “an exercise in sensitive intensity, drifting the whole space between minimalist meditations and maximalist kinetics”. The combine initially performed together live in front of an audience in 2012. Following three years really taking shape, Peau Froide, Léger Soleil was released by Cosmo Rhythmatic, the Berlin based label established in 2014 by techno producer Shapednoise as a team with D. Carbone and Ascion. ... Whatever the case the plucky Finn has rightly positioned himself as a leading light in the noisiest corners, without ever losing his grip on more structured techno creations within the sonic chaos. French composer and performer Franck Vigroux meanwhile has led an equally varied life in experimental music, working as a multi-instrumentalist with many different artists, but also spending much time performing live with Vainio as an equally dedicated investigator of tone generation and manipulation. . JUNODOWNLOAD.COM/PLUS/2015/08/26 The music for Mannerlaatta was composed from the get-go in the film's more than two year advancement, and in this way held a solid influence over the rhythm of the film's editing and visual narration. As Vainio tends to utilize a set-up of homebuilt pack (entirely no portable PCs) unaltered from his most punctual preparations, each new discharge is viably an unpretentious adjustment/refinement of his brutalist yet material procedure of creation. Furthermore, passing by that course of events of occasions, we'd hypothesize that Mannerlaatta was considered some place in the wake of his stunning Kilo LP and the astonishing Konstellaatio side as Ø, which is generally where its feel additionally lie. The hour-long score separates to 6 areas, each investigating the full recurrence range of his protected, greyscale tonal palette, to a great extent swerving a settled cadenced meter to involve a weightless, outta achieve mid-ground that tempts us headlong into his chasmic plans and, we'd envision, best suits the highly contrasting film symbolism. Key to the recording's allure - as with the best Vainio equip - is that fringe feeling of spatial element and his unusual control of sufficiency; regardless of whether dangling us over deep subbass measurements, needling with frigid prongs, or incidentally easing the pressure with prodding cushions which dissipate again into the æther just as they were never there, eventually abandoning us riveted and at his leniency for the length. Mika Vainio is the Finnish master of driving electronics. Whether for its history with the incredible Pan Sonic or for its solo work, either in its own name or as Ø, Mika Vainio is a name that can not be avoided in a dissertation on the experimentation and exploration of industrial sound exhausts. One of the most influential ambient musicians Geir Jenssen is synonymous with the cold. It goes through his 30-year discography like frigid ice winding through a valley, from the solidifying symbolism that denoted his initial record covers and track names (and prompted to the 'Cold surrounding' label he's been stuck with since the 1990s) to the story topics of his work and his all around archived love of mountaineering. It’s a pervasive aesthetic yet one he's prominently moved far from over the previous decade. Departed Glories, his new record on Smalltown Supersound, marks the pinnacle of this move. Jenssen was born in 1962 in Tromsø, a little Norwegian city situated far north, inside the Arctic Circle. In spite of occasional unlucky deficiencies – most as of late a short migration to Krakow – he's constantly stayed in the territory, and as of now lives on the pleasant island of Senja, advancing our sentimental picture of the separated electronic auteur living in a frozen world. That persona first emerged in 1986 with the release of White-Out Conditions by Bel Canto, the cold, 4AD-obliged dream-pop band with which Jenssen composed two albums. 4AD-obliged dream-pop band with which Jenssen composed two collections. A couple of years after the fact he recorded a LP of acid techno as Bleep, 1989's The North Pole by Submarine, before settling on his present alias investigate more abstract, monochromatic fields. As Biosphere, Jenssen has released a little pile of ambient, minimalist techno and drone records over the past 25 years. He's generally viewed as a pioneer of the previous – 1997's Substrata is routinely trundled out as an ambient touchstone – but he's far risen above the affiliation, investigating field recording, drone and sound art over a rich assemblage of work, to a great extent on Touch and his own Biophon label, and drawing on a variety of motivations and sound sources. He's diverted the Alaskan journey of self-denying saint Chris McCandleless (2000's Cirque), twisted and cleaved Debussy's La Mer (2002's Shenzou), composed around Jules Verne's interstellar books (2004's La Autour de la Lune), grasped jazz rhythms (2005's Dropsonde) and reviewed the weakness of Japanese atomic stations (2011's N-Plants). He has also released a set of field recordings from a Himalayan mountaineering trip under his own name (Cho Oyu 8201m – Field Recordings From Tibet) and took a shot at coordinated efforts, establishments and film soundtracks, including the score of the first Norwegian rendition of Insomnia. Inside the wide pantheon of ambient and drone – classifications inclined to limit surfaces and simple excellence –Jenssen’s records stand apart because of their narrative ballast. Indeed, even in a discography so differed, Departed Glories speaks to a change of approach. Imagined while living in Krakow, the new album deserts the aesthetics of snow, science and dead industry, and finds a narrative focus in the Polish city's resistance against Nazi occupation amid the second world war and nearby 'mental injuries' drawn from before periods ever. While human voices can be heard over his past records – not minimum on Substrata's Twin Peaks tests – Departed Glories is made exclusively from vocals, with Jenssen controlling old people recordings into eldritch, encompassing soundscapes. The record’s cover image is an apt signifier of the music inside, assumed control over a century prior, Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky's initial shading photo of a Russian worker lady is both striking and startling. It's the atmosphere of that photograph– the sentiment a far off apparition dragged into distinctive life – that he inspires with Departed Glories. In opposition to his frigid notoriety, Jenssen was warm and connecting with when he addressed me from his home on Senja, apologizing occasionally for his not-exceptionally broken English as he discussed the histories of Krakow's spooky woods, the viable confinements of field recording, ungainly mountain salvages and the calm interest of residential area living. "Imagine if you had a field recorder where you could record back in time, actually record something from the 1930s or ‘40s? I wanted to have that kind of sound, to have it kind of lo-fi. The sound is hi-fi, but I was also thinking about those kinds of old recordings. " - Geir Jensen about Departed Glories |
Archives
February 2019
music as particular art, musicmakers, music critique, albums reviews ... |