Hands of Ruin

Another mix, this time covering neo-classical music, and in particular the darkwave neo-classical music that I love. It might be obvious that some of these bands have been a big influence on me.

Here’s the playlist:

• Sect - Doom
• Puissance - Love Incinerate
• The Protagonist - The Puritan
• Hands of Ruin - Untitled
• The McCarricks - Letter From Nagoya
• Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson & Sigur Rós – Yfirum (over the bend)
• In the Nursery - Angelchrome
• C17H19NO3 - Carrier of Shadows
• Swartalf - The Shadow Gods

I’ve put together another DJ set, this time of neofolk and (sort of) related music:

Here’s the playlist:

• 00:00 - 07:56: Von Thronstahl - Ganz in Weiss und Ganz in Eisen
• 07:56 - 11:01: Spiritual Front - Border
• 11:01 - 16:00: Leonard Cohen - Avalanche
• 16:00 - 19:58: Rome - Die Nelke
• 19:58 - 24:03: Orplid - Später Tag
• 24:03 - 27:31: TriORE - Let Us Meet in the Trenches
• 27:31 - 32:47: Blood Axis - Wulf and Eadwacer
• 32:47 - 39:04: Der Feuerkreiner - Die Erde und der Krieg
• 39:04 - 42:07: Menace Ruine - Surface Vessel

Here’s the second in what will likely be a small series of mixes, and may continue as I find that I enjoy the process of putting them together. This one is mostly martial industrial, with a bit of dark ambient thrown in at the end.

Here’s the playlist:

• 00:00 - 04:00: Triarii - Neuropa
• 04:00 - 09:57: In Slaughter Natives - Skin Sore Eyes (Final Structure)
• 09:57 - 14:32: Wappenbund - Unser Blut
• 14:32 - 19:28: Hands of Ruin - Untitled
• 19:28 - 23:31: Rome - Wir Moorsoldaten
• 23:31 - 28:42: Desiderii Marginis - Blackout
• 28:42 - 32:12: Sophia - Sigilum Militum IV
• 32:12 - 37:13: Phelios - Cloud Sector α

Since looking at Mixcloud a few weeks ago I’ve been thinking of making a series of mixes. I’ve had a stab at doing a few of them now, with the guiding philosophy that there should be something that unites the musical choices, though not strictly that they all fit into one genre. Here’s my first effort, very loosely based around a theme of darkwave but venturing into other genres as well:

Here’s the playlist:

• 00:00 - 04:25: Eduard Artemiev - Stalker: Train
• 04:25 - 08:09: Ordo Equilibrio - Under the Rose, Coitus Excelsi. Pain, Bondage and Subjugation.
• 08:09 - 15:41: Lycia - The Morning Breaks So Cold And Gray
• 15:41 - 19:59: Insomnis - Farther Away
• 19:59 - 24:10: Elhaz - Glory
• 24:10 - 29:31: Peter Bjärgo - A Wave Of Bitterness
• 29:31 - 33:43: Black Tape for a Blue Girl - Given
• 33:43 - 37:37: Cocteau Twins - Otterley

I’ve been having some fun over on SoundCloud lately. It’s great for hearing new music and keeping up with good musicians, and it’s pleasant to use (as opposed the pit of horror that is MySpace). I’m using it as a place to share some of the more work-in-progress type pieces as well as the material that’s too techno-ish for Hands of Ruin. But here are a couple of tracks that will get a more formal Hands of Ruin release at some point (and titles too, with luck):

Untitled [2010-07-31] - Draft 2011-05-19 by czrobertson

Untitled [2011-02-04] - Draft 2011-04-03 by czrobertson

At the weekend my cousin Tam posted his selection of favourite lyrics over at Where’s Runnicles. Damn him for doing so, because it inspired me to stay up way past my bedtime last night drafting the list of my favourites. Like Tam, I’m restricting myself to one song per artist, and also I gave myself a limit of ten songs (more for the sake of my sanity than anything else).

I’ll start where Tam ended, with Nick Cave. He is of course a brilliant songwriter and I’m spoilt for choice here. I considered the economical storytelling in the first verse of We Came Along This Road, and the wordplay in Easy Money, but my favourite is this description of a graveyard in Gates to the Garden:

Fugitive fathers, sickly infants, decent mothers
Runaways and suicidal lovers
Assorted boxes of ordinary bones
Of aborted plans and sudden shattered hopes
In unlucky rows
In unhappy rows
In unlucky rows
Up to the gates of the garden

Luke Haines is always eloquent. While I’m no expert on his music, I do have a couple of Auteurs albums in my collection. New Wave has some wonderful poetry throughout. In particular, Valet Parking paints a wonderful picture from the first lines:

Never saw your driver’s eyes
Or me on parking street
We were planning your demise
Your chauffeur’s tired
But you’re still on heat.

Through to the last verse:

Never thought I’d see the day
When your pale face turned grey
Got no guts, got no fame
Your epitaph
Sorely missed
Your unfaithful slave

It seems to me that all ROME songs contain some wonderful turn of phrase within them. Jerome Reuter’s skills seem to get sharper with every album and I think that perhaps their two strongest songs lyrically are La Rose et la Hache and Les Isles Noires, both from their most recent album, Nos Chants Perdus. My absolute favourite though is this metaphor from We Who Fell in Love with the Sea which often gets stuck in my head:

You say „why weep over what?“
We say weep until the weeping’s done
And we shall weep for another day
For what binds us to our grief
Binds the sculptor to his clay

From the sublime to the ridiculous, perhaps, but no less sublime for it: Freezepop. They’ve always struck me as being on the intellectual side of synthpop, whether it’s with mischevious songs like Bike Thief or Do You Like My Wang™? or with the quirky romance of Duct Tape My Heart. But for sheer lyrical joy, it’s hard to beat these lines from Chess King:

You’re looking sassy and you know it cause you sport the Benetton
You walk right past me and don’t show it but you wanna get it on
Hiding in the food court I know that I may not get a second chance
I’ve got a car, I’ve got Drakkar and now I’m looking for romance

And then from joy back into misery again with Arab Strap. They spent ten years writing eloquently about relationships gone wrong and I was hard pressed to choose between some of my favourites such as Don’t Ask Me to Dance and The Shy Retirer. But I think one of their great lyrical moments comes near the end of Fucking Little Bastards:

They’ve scrutinized the mistakes I’ve been makin’
They know who I’ve fucked, they know what I’ve taken
They’ve seen me in the shower with shit down my legs
They’ve seen me searching a stranger’s house for dregs

I used to think they loved me but now I know it’s pity
Because they know that they can always flee this fucking city
They even said they’d help me out and give me a head start
But they know that these days my cock’s as numb as my heart

Tam chose One Of Us Cannot Be Wrong from Leonard Cohen’s large catalogue of extraordinary songwriting. It’s one of my favourites too, but for my absolute favourite I’ll have to go with these two lines from Sisters of Mercy:

Yes, you who must leave everything that you cannot control
It begins with your family but soon it comes round to your soul

I can barely think of those two lines and remain dry-eyed.

Sometimes lyrics don’t have to be perfect to be superb. In the case of Spiritual Front, their great ideas often shine through despite the errors of grammar and pronunciation (English not being their first language). But I think this from Song for the Old Man shows them at their best:

Twenty years in the tropics
One hundred years of regrets
Life is to long to repent and too short to deify the bitterness
Your ironed shirt, your brushed hair, your perfect dye go beyond
Every political conviction and against every classfight
I loved your style and your hatred for, your hatred for mediocrity
God will not give you an honoured place but he will envy your shined shoes

I will sing my worst South American song at your funeral, my old man.

Back to the ridiculous for a second time, this time with Bal-Sagoth. Their 1996 album, Starfire Burning Upon the Ice-Veiled Throne of Ultima Thule, tells an epic tale of bloodthirsty, Tolkien-esque sword and sorcery. It’s not so much that there’s a particular moment of lyric brilliance in it, more that it’s just such a singular work and I wanted to pick something here that would be representative of the whole. I’ll go with these lines from To Dethrone the Witch-Queen of Mytos K’Unn (The Legend Of the Battle of Blackhelm Vale):

A staggering sea of crimson, a towering mountain of ravaged flesh,
All enraptured by the searing kiss of steel,
All surfeit from supping deep of the grim chalice of battle…

Brooding gods of the north, display to these outlander thralls thine ire,
Envenom our blades with the death-kiss of a thousand serpents,
Unfetter the dread war-wolves within us,
That their claws may rend, and their jaws may be reddened.

And then back into this world again, Tam picked Seven Signs of Ageing by Phillip Jeays. I’ll take the opportunity to pick another of Phillip Jeays’ songs, October, which is neither humorous nor political, but contains this violently romantic image:

I will love you like a hooligan
I will smash the windows of your heart
And steal your days away from him

(Incidentally, it’s Tam who introduced me to the music of Phillip Jeays via his non-blogging brother.)

And I’ll end with someone who I think is an extraordinary songwriter, Joanna Newsom. Her album Ys is a sprawling mass of poetic beauty. I was leaning towards picking Emily for its wonderful cosmic imagery, but then I read these lines from Only Skin and the tears in my eyes made the decision for me:

All my bones they are gone, gone, gone
Take my bones, I don’t need none
Cold, cold cupboard, Lord, nothing to chew on!
Suck all day on a cherry stone

Dig a little hole, not three inches round
Spit your pit in the hole in the ground
Weep upon the spot for the starving of me!
Till up grew a fine young cherry tree

Well when the bough breaks, what’ll you make for me?
A little willow cabin to rest on your knee
Well what will I do with a trinket such as this?
Think of your woman, who’s gone to the west

But I’m starving and freezing in my measly old bed!
Then I’ll crawl across the salt flats to stroke your sweet head
Come across the desert with no shoes on!
I love you truly, or I love no-one

Last weekend I was at TEDx Aldeburgh. It’s a TEDx conference devoted to music and it fits into the Aldeburgh Festival. The organiser, Thomas Dolby, explains the origins of the event. Here, in no particular order, are some of the things that grabbed my attention:

Tim Exile was part of the reason that I went to conference in the first place. I find the tools that he’s built for live music-making fascinating. See this video explaining his live setup. One of the points he made that I found interesting was that he’d had difficulty making live music in the sorts of clubs where he usually ends up playing because, while his music was impressive as live music, it wasn’t so perfectly engineered as the studio-recorded dance tunes that the DJs would be playing before and after his set.

Tod Machover spoke about the crazy projects that they work on at the MIT Media Lab. Most interesting to me was a piece called Spheres & Splinters that he’s doing with the cellist Peter Gregson. In this work, while Gregson plays the cello, there’s also a computer system running which interprets the movement of the bow and uses that information to generate an accompaniment. I was so impressed that I went along to a full performance of this piece last night at Kings Place.

Ashraf Nehru from United Visual Artists told us about the work that they do with light and visuals, often working with musicians. Indeed, they were also involved in Spheres & Splinters and contributed beautiful lighting to the performance using many thin pillars with LEDs surrounding the cellist. I hadn’t realised it, but I’d also seen their work before, including the sculpture, ‘Volume’, and the backdrop they made for a live performance of the Blade Runner soundtrack a few years ago.

William Orbit’s segment was conducted as an interview, with Thomas Dolby as interviewer. He spoke about being a producer and remixer of pop stars. He also spoke about the pressures of the industry, and how, despite the pressure to continually keep pushing out music, it actually was perfectly fine to take the time to create the best music that you can. Your fans don’t forget about you.

Felix Thorn’s Machine is a wonderful piece of engineering. It’s a collection of drums, melodic percussive instruments and a harmonium, all activated with servomotors and connected to a sequencer over MIDI. He was playing music that sounded like the sort of thing that Plaid or Aphex Twin would make. The quality of the engineering is impressive in itself. There are countless moving parts and it all worked seemingly flawlessly. (By contrast, most artists tend to be poor engineers, in my experience.)

Sarah Nicolls seems to think about pianos in the same way that I do: They can make so many interesting sounds if you just bypass the keys. She was also, in my opinion, one of the best speakers at the event. That’s perhaps what comes of being a university lecturer.

Sadly, one of the problems with getting musicians to talk about what they do is that they are often far better at making music than they are at speaking about it. Imogen Heap was very much in that category: under-prepared, wrestling with an uncooperative PowerPoint presentation, and lacking a clear message or structure. Which is a pity because she had some interesting things to say. She interacts with her fans via Twitter, YouTube and a forum on her website to an extraordinary degree, involving them intimately in her work. To someone like me who works very much in private it was astounding to see how much she involves her fans. I wonder whether the effect on motivation that it might have should make me try to break my hermit-like habits.

All in all, I had a great time at TEDx Aldeburgh. I hope that it becomes a regular event.

Back in August, inspired by @mayttvw on Twitter, I listed the music I love. The rule was that I would go through the alphabet, one letter per day, and for each letter I would pick my favourite albums or EPs by three artists whose names started with that letter. It gave me a good excuse to spend time thinking about what I appreciate in music and rediscover some albums that I hadn’t listened to much lately. For those of you who don’t follow me on Twitter (@colin_zr), this is the list I came up with:

• Autechre: Envane
• Aphex Twin: I Care Because You Do
• Arab Strap: Monday at the Hug and Pint

• Bal-Sagoth: Starfire Burning Upon the Ice-Veiled Throne of Ultima Thule
• Black Tape for a Blue Girl: As One Aflame, Laid Bare by Desire
• Bright Eyes: Fevers and Mirrors

• C17H19NO3: Terra Damnata
• Coil: Gold is the Metal with the Broadest Shoulders
• The Cure: Disintegration

• David Sylvian: Secrets of the Beehive
• Depeche Mode: Violator
• Desiderii Marginis: That Which is Tragic and Timeless

• Elhaz: The Black Flame
• Emperor: In the Nightside Eclipse
• Enduser: Form Without Function

• Faith No More: Angel Dust
• Forma Tadre: Navigator
• Freezepop: Fancy Ultra-Fresh

• Godspeed You Black Emperor: F♯ A♯ ∞
• Gridlock: Formless
• Gescom: Key Nell

• Haujobb: Solutions for a Small Planet
• Henry Purcell: Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary
• Hope Sandoval & The Warm Inventions: Bavarian Fruit Bread

• In Slaughter Natives: Enter Now The World
• Inanna: Day ov Torment
• Insomnis: various tracks I downloaded from the old mp3.com

For those who want to look it up, the Insomnis I’m referring to is Eric Paul Lyman—not the other band with that name.

• Joanna Newsom: Ys
• Johann Sebastian Bach: The Art of Fugue
• Joy Division: Closer

• Kate Bush: Hounds of Love
• Kraftwerk: The Man-Machine
• Kryptic Minds & Leon Switch: Lost All Faith

• Labradford: A Stable Reference
• Leonard Cohen: Songs of Leonard Cohen
• Lisa Gerrard: The Mirror Pool

• Mazzy Star: Among My Swan
• mind.in.a.box: Crossroads
• Miranda Sex Garden: Fairytales of Slavery

• NEWT: 37°C
• Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds: No More Shall We Part
• Nine Inch Nails: The Downward Spiral

• Ordo Equilibrio: Conquest, Love & Self-Perseverance
• Ordo Rosarius Equilibrio: Apocalips
• Orplid: Nächtliche Jünger

• Philip Jeays: October
• The Protagonist: A Rebours
• Arvo Pärt: Kanon Pokajanen

I cheated by replacing Q with compilations:

• The Tyranny Off the Beat, Vol. 2
• Ambient 4: Isolationism
• Kompilation (Kranky/Southern, 1998)

• Raison d’être: The Empty Hollow Unfolds
• Rome: Confessions d’un voleur d’ames
• Ryoji Ikeda: Test Pattern

• Satyricon: Nemesis Divina
• The Smiths: Meat is Murder
• Sophia: Sigillum Militum

• Tarmvred: Subfusc
• Triarii: Pièce Héroique
• Twentysixfeet: No Signal

• Ulver: Nattens Madrigal
• Ultre: All the Darkness Has Gone to Details
• Underworld: Second Toughest in the Infants

• Venetian Snares: My Downfall
• The Velvet Underground: The Velvet Underground & Nico
• Von Thronstahl: Sacrificare

I cheated some more by combining W and X:

• Wumpscut: Böses Junges Fleisch
• Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Requiem
• Xanopticon: Liminal Space

And I replaced Y and Z with soundtracks:

• Yann Tiersen: Amélie
• Howard Shore: Lord of the Rings
• Wendy Carlos: A Clockwork Orange

At the beginning of last year I wrote one tune per week for five months. The more techno-ish side of my work is going up on ReverbNation for now. But here is a track with a darker martial-industrial sound. As with A Reminiscence, I’d intended to get it onto a compilation but for various reasons that never happened. So I present it here now and hope that you enjoy it.

Download

Around this time last year, I made a track specifically for a Dark Ambient Radio compilation. This was a good exercise for me, since I don’t have much experience with writing ambient music, so I got to learn a bit more about how that style works. In the end my track got rejected for the compilation. (We had about twice as much material as we could fit on a CD, so we voted for the best tracks.) I wasn’t surprised, since it’s not as good as a lot of what went onto the CD. But in case anyone is curious and might enjoy it, here it is:

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