Patrick Sisson - Writer, Journalist, Cultural Documentarian, Music Lover

PATRICK SISSON

White Hinterland: Kairos

Review
Pitchfork
March 11, 2010
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Casey Dienel doesn’t stay put for very long. The singer’s last full length with White Hinterland, 2008’s Phylactery Factory, swayed to brushed drums, dainty piano, and perky vocals. Later that year, she created prickly, sophisticated art-lounge on the Luniculaire EP, a collection of originals and covers all sung in French. Like her earlier work, there was still a strong theatrical element in those edgier songs, but it didn’t exactly point the way toward the hazy pop pulse of Kairos.

From the opening seconds of the album– a lazy tide pool of swirling synths and echoing vocals– White Hinterland strike a different pose. The graceful piano, chamber-pop arrangements, and storybook lyrics of the past were crisp snapshots; Kairos is a collection of over-exposed and landscapes– bold, blurred, and wide open.

Dienel and bandmate Shawn Creeden removed the piano from the equation on Kairos, and the result is a textbook case of addition by subtraction. Dienel’s voice, still delicate and fluttering, sounds more powerful and expressive, free and untethered from the jazzy arrangements of the past. With antiquated references stricken from the lyric sheet, Dienel’s words come off as more personal and direct. She swoons on “Cataract” and “Magnolias”, two of the gorgeous tracks in which her sweet tone and confident phrasing, along with unfurled guitar melodies, recall Bitte Orca.

Considering the album’s chugging, fuzzy rhythms and lo-fi synth wash, Dirty Projectors won’t be the only indie reference point cited when discussing Kairos. But the myriad of elements, from the dubstep-grade bass hits to looped vocals, beautifully comes together. Kairos represents a bold step for Dienel and White Hinterland, a re-imagining of the music-making process and an example of musical experimentation and evolution. As the restless Dienel sings on “Moon Jam”, “I am afraid of so many things/ But I do not fear the future.”

Peverelist: Jarvik Mindstate

Review
XLR8R
February 23, 2010
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As owner of Bristol’s Rooted Records shop and founder of the Punch Drunk label, Tom Ford (a.k.a. Peverelist) doesn’t have trouble staying current. But the dubstep producer’s full-length debut, named after the inventor of the artificial heart valve, incorporates futurist techno vibes into his dub vibrations and low-end rhythms. Boasting seven new tracks, along with previous singles “Infinity Is Now” and “Clunk Click Every Trip,” Jarvik Mindstate showcases his tight style, crisp rhythms, and junglist roots. “Yesterday I Saw the Future” rolls a bit on gentle synth currents, pitched forward by staccato beats and satisfying bass thumps, while “Valves” runs slight but solid, with swatches of sound bouncing on shifting beats. These are tracks that move forward but keep the past firmly in focus.

Strong Arm Steady: In Search of Stoney Jackson

Review
Pitchfork
February 5, 2010
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Finding patterns in Madlib’s rambling yet brilliant production work can be difficult, but on his new In Search of Stoney Jackson album, he doesn’t take long to zero-in on some recurring themes. An obscure sample ushers in “Chittlins & Pepsi”, a stick-to-your guts blend of flashy soul and food-based free association. Meanwhile, pot ramble “Cheeba Cheeba” is anchored by resonant strings and a fluid bass line inhaled and exhaled between minimal beats. It may sound like Doom’s M.O.– tracks seemingly teed-up for the masked marauder. But L.A. hip-hop collective Strong Arm Steady provides the lyrics here. Once the home of auto repair hypeman Xzibit, the crew now stands as another entry in a long line of Beat Konducta collaborators.

Stones Throw has been widening its circle of L.A. connections recently, including putting out the acclaimed Dâm-Funk album and reissuing Arabian Prince tracks. This post-Death Row SoCal crew– which has been reduced to core members Krondon, Phil Da Agony, and San Diegan Mitchy Slick for this release– has seen its underground profile rise slightly this past year due to a middling Clinton Sparks mixtape and a forthcoming album on Talib Kweli’s Blacksmith label.

The group’s experience working the L.A. scene and slinging mixtapes shows on In Search of Stoney Jackson. In the enviable position of getting a slate of Otis Jackson, Jr. beats to work with, Strong Arm Steady do raise their game, but rarely rise above workmanlike wordplay. They provide vocal diversity but never overshadow or own a track, only accenting different aspects of Madlib’s work. Phil Da Agony’s curt, taunting flow, filled with bent phrases, darts around between measures. Albino rapper Krondon has a deeper, rounded tone, which plays well on the chorus of the dark “New Love”, and Mitchy Slick sounds passable on the few tracks he appears on. Along with a roster of collaborators, like Planet Asia and Stones Throw standbys like Oh No and Guilty Simpson, it adds up to a set of solid yet often unremarkable lyrics staking a comfortable perch atop another stellar Madlib production workout.

Filled with funky vocal samples, discursive monologues and the inevitable dry coughs, the music is the centerpiece and bears Madlib’s signature hazy melodies and blunted edges. But there’s a muscular feel to many of the tracks, meaty beats anyone would be happy to rap over. “Best of Times”, featuring Phonte on the chorus doing his best John Legend, is a slow-rolling, soulful piece built on a solid foundation, a warm bass lick and almost metronomic four-beat rhythm. “Pressure” bumps with oscillating synths and a stiff, crisp beat. “Questions”, which starts out sounding like a washed-out TV theme and then pivots on a big, bulbous bassline, is simple but effective, accented with subtle vibe hits and a single wiry guitar chord. For all Madlib’s eclecticism and supposedly short attention span, his work here sounds focused and sharp. The beats aren’t wasted here by any means, but a different crew could have brought out even more potential.

Dam-Funk: Toeachizown

Music Reviews
XLR8R
February 2
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Boogie revivalist and long-haired LA electro visionary Damon Riddick (a.k.a. Dam-Funk) wants to make music that lets your hair blow in the wind—a difficult task, but his massive Toeachizown offers just that kind of soothing experience. Full of retro-futurist ’80s funk filled with smeared keyboard melodies and dirty beats, it’s perfect for banging out of a souped-up hovercraft and is easy to soak up and get lost inside. Buoyant backgrounds and vapor-trail synths mirror the mantras and platitudes that double as lyrics. Prince-style falsetto and airy chords run throughout, create an inviting, optimistic atmosphere, especially compared to more inward strains of hypnagogic pop. Dam may be doubling down on a genre many discarded, but he’s got the style and sincerity to make it work.

Sonic Options: Yeasayer Edits and Processes Sounds Into Oblivion for Odd Blood

Article
EQ Magazine
February 2010
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After a season spent playing songs from their woozy, soaring debut, All Hours Cymbal, at outdoor festivals, Brooklyn’s Yeasayer wanted to record a sophomore album that was bold enough for the big stage. Odd Blood [Secretly Canadian], the result of a stretched-out yet deliberate recording process, reflects the band’s constant tinkering and drive to one-up their electric debut.

“There was so much creativity in creating new sounds,” engineer Britt Myers says. “I’ve done sound design and a lot of music mixing and engineering, and this was really the first record that combined both of those backgrounds.”

Vocalist/guitarist Anand Wilder, vocalist/keyboardist Chris Keating, and bassist Ira Wolf Tuton began with a set of initial demos, some recorded as early as 2007. They reworked them in a rented house in Woodstock, New York, owned by drummer Jerry Marotta (Peter Gabriel) before re-recording and mixing with Myers at Great City Productions in Manhattan. Marotta’s relatively remote home studio was fully wired and boasted a cache of gear, including Taos drums and vintage synths, such as the Prophet-5 and Prophet-VS, which augmented the Clavia Nord Lead, Nord Wave, and Roland XV-5050 used on the album.

But Yeasayer hunkered down with Pro Tools and a Digi 002, painstakingly laying down and tweaking one track at a time. Notes blur, melt, and reform, partially due to the band’s habit of recording to Ableton Live, then adding glide between notes.
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You Should Know: Jacob and Mischa DeHart — The Threadless cofounder and his wife want to build an online community for foodies

Article
Chicago Magazine
February 2010
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The fourth-floor loft inhabited by Spaceship Collaborative—on Jackson next to Lou Mitchell’s—doesn’t look like a typical start-up. Freestanding desks, custom cabinetry, and dark wooden tables made by an Amish craftsman fill the sleek, airy office. Then again, this isn’t your typical start-up. Jacob DeHart, 28, is a Chicago internet success stories, cofounder of the pioneering multi-million-dollar T-shirt company Threadless. Along with his wife and Spaceship Collaborative partner Mischa, 25, DeHart is getting entrepreneurial again with Culinary Culture, an evolving social media hub featuring restaurant profiles, event listings, and a modern, upscale spin on the old-fashioned recipe swap.

“Our business is like a recipe,” he says. “If next month our users want a new feature, we can just tweak the recipe.”

In 2007, Jacob left Threadless, which he cofounded with Jake Nickell in 2000 while studying design at Purdue. The company solicited T-shirt designs from the public, then asked people to vote on the most popular-making the community the creative team, decision makers, and end consumers. That formula worked: one million users registered for the site.

Although happy with his accomplishments, DeHart craved the excitement of starting from scratch with a small team. At the same time, Mischa began cooking more seriously. A Columbia College marketing and public relations grad and nonprofit fundraiser, she’s an MBA at Dominican University near Oak Park, where the couple live.

They started Spaceship Collaborative in 2008 to serve as an incubator for projects like Culinary Culture, which they began designing in early 2009. By winter, when the site was open to the public after private beta testing, it had roughly 1,500 active users commenting on recipes ranging from lotus root hash browns to a drink called cherry bounce.

Right now, the community is small. But DeHart’s big takeaway from Threadless was that community engagement, not size, matters. “If you give people an opportunity to do something they’re passionate about, they’ll do it,” he says. “If you give them the ability to interact with others who are just as passionate, you will create a community. If you have a strong, loyal community, you can do anything.”

As of December, Culinary Culture (culinaryculture.com) was self-funded and without a revenue stream. But the DeHarts are considering various potential revenue options, including allowing restaurants to post menus or offer special deals. Right now, the focus is on making the site useful. And if Jacob needs to sample more of Mischa’s cooking, that’s R&D he can get behind.

Interview: Four Tet

Interview
Pitchfork
January 18, 2010
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Kieran Hebden describes his recent stint as a monthly resident at London’s Plastic People club as inspirational. Coming from him, it doesn’t sound like the typical DJ platitude. With the night to himself and an enthusiastic crowd open to anything from highlife to Art Blakey or Carl Craig, it sounds like his ideal situation. Hebden has an inclusive approach to music; from his start in the band Fridge to his solo work as Four Tet and recent duo recordings with powerhouse drummer Steve Reid, he finds way to redraw the Venn diagrams people place around genres.

While his rolling, surging rhythms often have an all-encompassing vibe, his recordings tend to be documents of specific times and places. Much of Hebden’s new album, There Is Love in You, which contains the same techno pulse that surged through 2008’s Ringer EP, was road-tested at Plastic People and tweaked to fit that crowd. When we spoke to Hebden, he discussed his need to document his progress, leaving himself hidden messages and going in utero in the club.

Pitchfork: After you made Ringer, you mentioned you had previously been doing DJ sets at the End in London, which were a big influence. Have the recent sets you’ve been doing at the Plastic People residency been as big an influence on this album?

Four Tet: Even more so. After the End closed down, Plastic People gave me a monthly thing and I’ve been doing that for the last 14 or 15 months. I was there throughout the whole making of the record. I’d do five to six hours, starting at 11 p.m. and going on to 4 or 4:30 in the morning. It would just be me, and that’s what I liked about it. I had all the space in the world and could play whatever I wanted. Pretty much all the tracks on the record were tried out in that club, and I worked on the tracks so they sounded as good as possible in there. “Love Cry” was probably the first track I did for the album, and I’ve been playing that every month for the last year or so. I wanted to make something that was for the night.
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Rjd2: The Colossus

Music Review
Pitchfork
January 18, 2010
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Independence is thrilling, but after those first tentative or defiant steps towards freedom, the urge to look back and survey the situation you just left can be hard to resist. That seemingly contradictory perspective, looking both forward and backwards, was at play when Rjd2 wrote The Colossus. His fourth solo album arrives at a pivotal moment, and not just because it follows the lyrical trainwreck and one man-band overreach of The Third Hand. The producer is now more than a successful yet hungry talent; he’s the boss, head of the new RJ’s Electrical Connections imprint. Taken in tandem with the recent release of the vinyl-only career retrospective 2002-2010, it’s unsurprising he’s in a reflective mood.

The Colossus, as its name implies, strives for scale, but also strains a bit under a heavy burden. While Rjd2 excels at sonic collages, the mixed motives on this album– a current spin on past techniques, a synthesis of old songs and a turn toward the future– are difficult to balance. After years spent mastering instruments and recording techniques, he still finds a new way to overachieve, adding his own passable, if sometimes bland, live drumming to five tracks. But, as if admitting his DIY ethos and perfectionist tendencies on Third Hand went too far, he brought in a team of guest vocalists and instrumentalists to augment his own performances. Interlude “Salud”, featuring a goofy British voice similar to the one on Deadringer, says as much: “I’ve assembled a healthy bunch of folks who are much more talented than I am.”

But more important to anyone put off by his unique foray into singer-songwriter territory, he rediscovers, or at least indulges in, some of the mood-setting backgrounds and rattling, rigged-to-explode instrumentals that originally made him such a vital producer. “Let There be Horns” opens the album with stretched-out, Looney Tunes strings and a vaguely Latin beat, jumping between staccato breakdowns and guitar riffs. The applause during the song’s conclusion might as well be the sound of some fans breathing a collective sigh of relief on a partial return to form, since the dust-heavy samples have long been replaced with more electrified melodies.

But just as quickly as he comes out of the gate, “Games Can Win” re-enters more shaky singer-songwriter territory. While his lyrical abilities, which still haven’t caught up to his compositional skills, produce some clunkers (“Play your hand close/ Like you have a glass chin”), he takes a step forward in terms of balance with appropriately toned down percussion. The rest of the album trades off between rumbling tracks like “Small Plans” and a few songwriting efforts like the “The Glow”, which –with it’s smug focus on having “the glow,” overseas accounts and living a life of leisure– seems like the interior monologue of a bailed-out banker. It’s still pretty creaky but better than the cringe-inducing moments from The Third Hand.

Rjd2 showcases a grasp of mood and a talent for arranging on The Colossus. His backing of Phonte Coleman’s soulful vocal turn on “Shining Path” and the springy, triumphant synths on posse cut “A Son’s Cycle” are both understated yet fitting. But on tracks like the eerie “The Stranger”, rolling with punched-up drums and clipped guitars, or “Giant Squid”, which bounces on a guttural beat, the career fusion concept pays off. His instrumental skills, and the synth-funk of Since We Last Spoke (in full overdrive on the movie theater sound check that is “A Spaceship for Now”) help bring more string tones and textures to the mix, but he manages to capture some of that foreboding yet funky mood from his early work. He’s spent the last few albums trying to go beyond sampling songs to creating them from scratch, and he still can sound like he’s cramming tributes to half of his record collection on the same track. But when his relentless drive and sense of restraint match up, they make parts of this album a forward thinking look back.

Let It Bleed : Recording In A Small Mexico City Studio Helped Chuck Prophet Get Aggressive

Article
EQ
January 2010
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When San Francisco guitarist and singer Chuck Prophet set out to record ¡Let Freedom Ring! [Yep Roc] last spring, he assumed a change of environment, specifically Mexico City, would inspire him and add some manic energy to the album. He didn’t count on periodic power outages ruining takes at Estudio 19, the old-school studio he picked to lay down tracks, nor a 6.4 earthquake shaking the building’s foundations. And nobody expects a pandemic.

“What I didn’t predict was that the swine flu scare would start three days after we arrived,” Prophet says. “The CNN paranoia, if you crank that stuff up to 11, makes everybody start to feel a little off. People got itchy. We put on blue masks and had a driver take us to the studio.”

Also, according to producer Greg Leisz, Prophet didn’t remember how small (roughly 12 feet by 20 feet) the high-ceiling main room was at Estudio 19. Reacting to his last record, Soap and Water, which included sections with arranged strings and a children’s choir, Prophet wanted to dial things down. The former member of ’80s L.A. cowpunk band Green on Red wanted a light touch and a raw performance. Normally, tight spaces complicate the situation. But with a few deft arrangements of equipment and a willingness to use bleed and leakage to their advantage, the musicians and engineers working on ¡Let Freedom Ring! made it sound both spacious and fully charged.

“People think isolation is the way to go,” says Jason Carmer, who engineered the album. “But getting the bleed reinforces the stereo imagery. You can hear the guitars from the perspectives of all the mics in the room. I find that the bleed gives you great depth of field.”
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Radian: Chimeric

Music Review
Pitchfork
January 6, 2010
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The cobbled-together beast from Greek mythology known as a chimera should be a recognizable concept for fans of electronic music, a genre that has evolved via the repurposing, re-contextualizing, and splicing together of sounds and samples. The instrumental, electro-acoustic Austrian trio Radian has spent more than a decade as a seemingly contradictory hybrid itself. Perched between precise composition and improvisational creation, members Martin Brandlmayr, Stefan Németh, and John Norman wear their glitch-heavy, avant-garde pedigrees on their collective sleeve, making sure their songs are sculpted and pockmarked just so. But on Chimeric, they stretch out and breathe a bit more, elongating melodies and placing more accent on organic sounds, such as wisps of brushed snare drums and the vibraphones’ soft echo.

The band’s last album, 2004’s Juxtaposition, blended labored-over microtones and billowy bass; on “Rapid Eye Movement”, Brandlmayr’s taps, scrapes and brushes don’t accompany as much as sync up with oscillating, mechanical screeches and tones. Chimeric is relatively looser and less dense, owing to more reliance on live interaction. While it’s arguable how loose the micro-managing trio allowed themselves to become during mixing, since recordings were re-organized and spliced together as if working with a tape machine, Chimeric sounds like the product of less tense and more spacious recording sessions. The band considers the record raw, broken, and unpolished, but they have nothing to be apologetic about. By loosening up they sound invigorated.

The hum of a switch being slowly flicked on and off at the outset of opener “Git Cut Noise” could be a gesture toward the analog and imperfect. It continues stomping forward in fitful starts, eventually picking up a caustic tone and a bass line with a slow, creeping gait. The 10-minute “Feedback Mikro / City Lights” indulges in a slow-burning crescendo, with interplay between a bright, churning guitar line, wavering tones, and a circular, ramshackle drum pattern. Songs like “Chimera” find the band occupying a more open landscape. It’s a dusty plateau dotted with lonely snatches of guitar notes and sweeping cymbals, one of the many finely tuned sounds Brandlmayr coaxes out of his drum kit. In his hands, the drums seem as rich a source of textures and tones as a sampler, ranging from slow, sweeping pulses to chaotic, jagged fills.

Unlike Rec.Extern and Juxtaposition, Chimeric was not recorded with producer and Tortoise drummer John McEntire. But between Brandlmayr’s swirling, textured percussion and the band’s more breezy approach– compare the jazzy brushes and washes of sound on the Chimeric track “Subcolors” with the more taut variations on “Rapid Eye Movement” and “Shift” off Juxtaposition — the new album sounds more informed by the trappings of Chicago post-rock and improv. That’s one of the main reasons Chimeric is much more a rearranging of existing elements and past themes than a reinvention. Despite the slight advantageous shifts, it isn’t the new creature its name might imply.

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