This Brighton trio's third long-player, a singles-compilation-plus, is big fun to overthink. The witty lyrics toss biomatter into the same heap of vague "things" as technomatter; thus you get songs called "Photocopier" and "Cassettesingle" snugly beside songs called "Collarbone" and "Ankle Injuries". Obsessing about F&M's obsession with thingness forces one to conclude that this album is a mysterious relic from an alternate 1971.
Think about it: In 1971, British writer Alan Watts released Does It Matter?: Essays on Man's Relation to Materiality, in which he argued (among other "things") that humans aren't really true materialists, with our reverence for materials, resources and craft. Rather, he typed, we're abstractists, caught in our preference for stockpiling plastic gewgaws. Transparent Things playfully spoofs and luxuriates in how we're possessed by our possessions. One song's speaker wants to "kick it" with a girl, but first he's "got to get a new pair of shoes." Another's chorus taunts, "I'm just monkeying around with your furniture," after the verse cites spilled "bodily fluids" and how the subject "must be off [his/her] bleeding rocker." In context, "bleeding" suggests actual blood rather than the UK default pejorative. With comic detachment, the lyrics' casual violence contrasts with the music's antiseptic cleanness enough to make one recall the sterile/obscene, bodylike/inorganic sculptures from the milkbar and the murder victim's house in Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (ahem, 1971).
Anyway: Alan Watts went on to become a Nipponophile, leading temple tours in Japan and even getting accused of faking his enlightenment; Fujiya & Miyagi readily admit their impostorship in a chorus on this album, as if the whole thing was a meticulous piss-take: "We were just pretending to be Japanese." True: Fujiya's a turntable company, and Miyagi's the filmic Okinawan played by Pat Morita who instructs sullen white kids in martial arts. Fujiya & Miyagi presumably relish urban Japan's cultural gizmosis, the fixation with gadgetry and the attention to detail paid even on the level of toy eraser design. F&M's carefully constructed retro-futuristic electronica definitely suggests the quaint, boxy dawn of portable media. And what year did Sony begin selling televisions in Britain, prompting the Time Magazine cover story "Japan, Inc"? That would be 1971.
The "coincidence" continues: Can and Neu! are the acts whose production and syncopation F&M most acefully cop; both acts were either recording or releasing their crucial work in 71. "In One Ear and Out the Other" bounces with Eno-era Roxy Music's eerie psychedelic-lounge sound; yup, they formed and recorded their debut in 71. "Sucking Punch" apes the falsetto vox, pimpy guitar, and whomping, slinky bass of both Curtis Mayfield's 1971-recorded Superfly and Serge Gainsbourg's 1971 LP Historie de Melody Nelson. And the name of the lengthy instrumental that best synthesizes (the 1971-recorded) Kraftwerk 2 with the best of the rest of krautrock's stoner-jazz and metronome-prog? "Conductor 71".
To be fair, Can and Neu! aren't the only three-letter outfits that F&M echo: This band has processed bits of contemporaries such as Air, DFA/LCD, and BoC. At points, the funk and the unrhyming lyrics even mount to imply various UK greats: A muted Happy Mondays here, a stream-of-consciousness Streets there. And yet, F&M's coy pose comes off as somehow original. David Best doesn't speak-sing about commodities with the abandon of say, Sisqo harmonizing "thong-th-thong-thong-thong," but he also sidesteps the posthuman staidness with which Ladytron tried to address blue jeans and cracked plastic (during "Blue Jeans" and "Cracked Plastic", respectively) back on Light & Magic.
A kind of consumer-Zen can be heard in the way Best sings the fabulously confident title track's refrain, "I look through transparent things and I feel okay," pronouncing the last word, "O-kehh." Is he talking about seeing through eyeglasses? Drink glasses? Or, by noting the behavioral norms (of litterbugs, cyclists, and college students) and their "grids," "zones," and "boxes," is Best referring to the matrixy systems in which most of us are transparently ensnared? Either way, F&M's execution of old modes is authoritative enough to ward off soundalike syndrome, just as Interpol somehow dodge their ancestors' arrows.
The album's weaker spots are its louder numbers about actual monogamous desire, which seem banal next to the whispered, anchorless prosaic observations of the songs that would only count as "rave-ups" at some secret librarian party held on a monastery's roof. A group so adept at merely creating an irresistible pulse seems overextended when trying to concoct a banger. I mean, come on, they begin this album with shy in-house brand enthusiasm, chanting "Fujiya" and "Miyagi" in barely audible voices!
The relatively effete and Euro-centric American poet Wallace Stevens is famously supposed to have said to the relatively dudeish and homelandy American poet Robert Frost, upon meeting: "The trouble with you is you write about things." To which Frost replied: "The trouble with you is you write about bric-a-brac." Via fiery slightness, Fujiya & Miyagi humbly request that you dance to both.
William Bowers / Pitchfork
Romare Bearden was an artist and musician who chronicled African-American life and culture during the jazz age. Romare is an artist and musician who has adopted Bearden’s collagist approach and uses it to fuse decades of African-American musical styles into a format familiar to modern dancefloors. It’s an album full of warmth: Rainbow pairs a snatch of smoky, soulful vocal with the groove of old garage house; Roots mixes an ecstatic piano hook with African drum loops and a sample of Malcolm X. Romare’s skill and his affection for his sources mean Projections’ component parts all hang together beautifully, but this is more than just an act of curation: it works for the dancefloor, often hitting on grooves that are as timeless as they are difficult to resist. Reminiscent of the early-00s output of Saint Germain, Caribou’s side project Daphni, or even early Basement Jaxx, Perceptions might not feel entirely original, but it is thoroughly winning.
Paul MacInnes / The Guardian
Meditations on Afrocentrism. Sounds like some heavy stuff, doesn't it? Somehow it isn't. Londoner-via-Paris Romare succeeds on his Black Acre debut by avoiding both the scratchy collagist aesthetic of crate-diggers like Onra and the submerged, quashed quality of most footwork, for high-intensity percussive music that doesn't sound a whole lot like anything else out there. Opener "Freedom Aspirations of a Prisoner" opens with cinematic strings and hollow rimshots—no bass to be found anywhere—before Romare brings in tiny little clips of orchestral mayhem that serve as an ominously throbbing bassline. "I Wanna Go (Turn Back)" features more traditionally frenetic footwork rhythms, a flurry of cascading hollow drums and decaying synths, but even this incorporation of familiar structures sounds totally unique.
The other two tracks are much slower, abandoning the footwork mission for their own skewed takes on bass music. The 88 BPM "Down The Line (It Takes a Number)" is a sticky-slow hip-hop jam with a funk guitar more languid than lashing, but the EP peaks with the 122 BPM "The Blues (It Began In Africa)." Splaying a house-friendly flute panned to the extreme peripheries of the stereo spectrum, the undulating bass riff at its centre totally eclipses everything, the kind of eminently physical frequencies that feel like they're enclosing around your entire head rather than just your ears. Though the track might not technically be footwork, it plays around with footwork's dread-inducing dislocated bass clouds, inflating them to a grotesque level. It's an uncanny tune that remains breathtaking from the first play to the tenth, and a little stroke of genius that raises Romare above the level of just another producer jumping on the footwork bandwagon.
Andrew Ryce / RA
Jonathan Uliel Saldanha chama a este seu projecto “cybernetic voodoo dub”, mas a designação só nos prepara para uma parte do que vem neste “Beheaded Totem”, o segundo título discográfico dos HHY & The Macumbas – aquela em que se enovelam uma electrónica derivada do ambientalismo (a cargo do próprio Saldanha e de Nyko Esterle), uma misteriosa e muito, muito escura dose de ocultismo tribalista, garantida pelos percussionistas Brendon Hemsworth, Filipe Silva, Frankão e João Pais Filipe, e o tipo de manipulações de gravação do reggae que resultou em todo um subgénero. Não nos prepara, por exemplo, para o que permanece nesta música das mundividências que Sun Ra aplicou na sua Arkestra ou de certas incursões pan-africanistas que surgiram nos territórios do free jazz – lembro-me, por exemplo, de “A Message From Mozambique”, dos Juju.
Nada nos desvenda, igualmente, quanto à dimensão umas vezes de fanfarra bêbada e outras mais parecendo militar ou wagneriana, tal a sua pujança épica, dos sopros (Álvaro Almeida, André Rocha e Rui Fernandes), ou o que nos planos circulares dos temas reunidos há de devedor às estratégias do minimalismo norte-americano dos Sessentas e do rock alemão dos Setentas. Uma coisa é certa: fora dos domínios da música electroacústica “erudita” e da, experimental, que surgiu nas franjas do techno e da media art, este grupo propõe um outro entendimento da psico-acústica, o que quer dizer que é na nossa individual percepção que os temas se trabalham e se “resolvem”. Ou seja: é preciso escutar este disco activa e exclusivamente, não servindo como fundo para fazer a contabilidade doméstica, para viajar pela Internet ou para conversar. Ouvir apenas está hoje em desuso, mas este sincretismo futurista é nisso deliciosamente retro.
Rui Eduardo Paes / jazz.pt
Lurking somewhere between Sun Ra's Arkestra and the Chemical Brothers is Beheaded Totem's jarring, rocky soundscape. Every turn seems to loop back on itself in a never-ending cycle of music. The wide expanses of the synth and percussion combo create a sense of openness and space. Of a plain of sound where the horizons stretch out in both directions. And the brass, more concentrated and precise, mirror the sunbeams that blister the ground. Their spare riffs colour the sound with flaming hues of orange and yellow.
The hi-hat groove of "Wilderness Of Glass" puts teeth in its jaws. Broken glass fangs that sharpen the edges. While the hand-drums' circular rhythm is an earthy contrast to that bite. A grounded, tribal beat. That keeps the dirt between the track's toes. Even as the trumpets echo and the synths whirl like the milky way.
As the industrial-strength beat of closing-track "Swisid Mekasine Rejiman" evokes images of deep mine shafts, the electronics float ghostly atop the rhythm. And the processed trumpet cuts the thicket of sound like a comet through the cosmos. The comic-prophet Bill Hicks said that space "both inner and outer" was humanity's to explore. On records such as this the first reconnaissance teams move into those territories. To map out their mysteries.
The Kubrick-esque synths of "A Scar In The Skull" are percussion-less. Nebulous and spaced-out. Reminiscent of Wendy Carlos' soundtrack for A Clockwork Orange. But on "A Scar In The Bone" the synthesisers are stormy. Like a flood of radio static. Towards its end their pulsations intensify until they suddenly give way to the aforementioned "Swisid Mekasine Rejiman." A shocking, off-kilter shift. That curves one last bullet before the record moves towards its close.
Between the album's bookends, "Danbala Propaganda" moves to a fractured rhythm. A single synth-note pulses in the background. That lures in the unwary with its hypnotic, mechanical exactness. Before the higher electronics rise out of the percussion's waters. Dragging the tension up as they ascend to the stratosphere.
Rhythm is the central idea here. It's the common thread running through the tapestry. In lieu of melodic themes, HHY & The Macumbas have used rhythmic motifs. And those possibilities are explored to their fullest potential on "Ergot Glitter." It moves like Frankenstein's monster on a skewed 3/4 beat. Powerful, slow, menacing. With reaching hands and a synth-growl at the back of its throat.
This is a unique record. Where technology meets tradition. It moves constantly in a hypnotic loop. But just as the sandman is descending it fires one of those curved bullets. Bullets that never miss their mark. HHY & The Macumbas have dared to meld disparate influences in an increasingly divided planet. As the free world's leaders try to isolate it from its brother-lands, HHY & The Macumbas seek to unite all cultures. So that those spaces, "both inner and outer," can be explored as one, universal race.
James Fleming / All About Jazz
"If you're in to melt yourself down, you're gonna love this"— Mary Anne Hobbs | BBC Radio 6
Hailing from Porto, HHY & The Macumbas is an ensemble comprised of bass, brass, percussion and electronics, written and dubbed by producer Jonathan Uliel Saldanha aka HHY.
Comprising an ever-mutating ensemble of musicians from the Portuguese underground music scene, The Macumbas range from five to ten players on stage, presenting frantic and enigmatic live shows, between the film works of Kenneth Anger, the dubbing of Sherwood, the Portuguese melancholic marching bands, as well as the raw trance-inducing rhythms of Haiti.
Their debut album, Throat Permission Cut, is a five track piece that captures the space-age voodoo turbulence of this oblique and one of a kind horde.
Bancamp
Very few bands display such dedication to constant self-reinvention as Pere Ubu, whose highly methodological madness always seeks new ways of evolving their sound, whilst paradoxically keeping their DNA essentially unchanged. Perhaps only The Fall (who John Peel once famously described as "always different, always the same") can be said to have walked such a similarly fine line over such a lengthy career arc.
Ubu began performing live soundtracks to classic black-and-white cult films starting in 2002 with Jack Arnold's 1953 science-fiction epic It Came From Outer Space and moving on two years later to Roger Corman's X: The Man With The X-ray Eyes. Given David Thomas's often stated acknowledgement of the influence of Ghoulardi (the anarchic fictional persona of Ernie Anderson, presenter of late night B movies and father of the film maker PT Anderson) in imparting a sense of 'otherness' to Cleveland bands of the 70s, such films could hardly have found a more apt band to underscore them. Indeed, Pere Ubu's inherent sense of inner darkness and use of widely ranging electronic textures–including the classic sci-fi instrument the theremin–made them the perfect B movie house band. The soundtracks were performed with such attention to detail and with such respect for the films in question that they were always hugely successful.
As an Ubu fan, however, as much as I enjoyed them, I always wanted to hear the band play more than the spaces in the film allowed for–as great as their soundtracks were, I wanted to hear songs. Happily, with the release of the new album, the dichotomy has been solved. The live score for the film Carnival Of Souls was first performed at the London East End Film Festival in 2013, and ideas taken from the soundtrack were further developed and mutated whilst the band were on tour. The album takes the more electronic direction of 2013's Lady From Shanghai further still, towards what Thomas describes as a mixture of Suicide and Kraftwerk, and accentuates the prominence of newcomer Darryl Boon's clarinet in the mix. The result is a beautifully eerie song cycle whose pulsing analogue heart is even darker than the penumbral territories the band usually inhabit.
In many ways, Herk Harvey's 1962 low-budget shocker Carnival Of Souls is the perfect Pere Ubu source material - a spectral road trip undertaken by an outsider into an increasingly alienating landscape. The other element in the album's stated intent, the "fixing of prog rock" is not immediately apparent, although the 1971 Van der Graaf Generator album Pawn Hearts (which Thomas claims as an inspiration prior to beginning the recording process) is certainly one of the darkest and most tortured sounding examples to be found in the genre, equal parts punk and krautrock in spirit and an avowed favourite of both John Lydon and Julian Cope. Opener 'Golden Surf II' - easily the most direct and rocking track on the album - is something of a red herring in terms of the songs that follow. It's as though the band are saying 'see how well we can still do this', before heading off on another tack entirely. 'Drag The River' contrasts doom-laden bass and booming drums with clarinet and theremin, the woodwind instrument rising crystal clear above the otherwise murky atmosphere. It's a startling combination, a simultaneous evocation of ancient and modern that is used to great effect throughout the album. 'Visions Of The Moon' shimmers and twinkles like starlight over a steady heartbeat pulse before dissolving into chaotically oscillating swathes of electronic sound. 'Dr Faustus' is one of the most far-out tracks on the album, a spooky spoken word piece which finds Thomas screaming 'I am damned' in a way that surely echoes Peter Hammill's 'I know I'm not a hero [...] I hope that I'm not damned' from 'Man-Erg' on Pawn Hearts.
By the time we get to 'Bus Station', 'Road To Utah' and 'Carnival,' the band are really hitting their stride. Propulsive, dark and hypnotic, its easy to see these tracks being inspired by the road scenes from the movie, as is aptly demonstrated by the video to 'Road To Utah.' Taken together, these three songs are for me, the highlight of the album and as compellingly powerful as anything Ubu have ever done. Following on from the intense climax of 'Carnival,' which showcases the band at their most driving and machinelike, 'Irene' changes direction once again with a lovely, serenely atmospheric melody. Given all that has gone before, the effect is like coming out of a dark tunnel into a spacious, calm night with a clear open sky.
'Brother Ray,' the final track, available only on the CD version, is a 12-minute long improvised piece that Thomas describes as a prelude to Nathanael West's 'Day Of The Locust.' An epic exercise in delayed climax, it really hits home when the payoff finally arrives. The vinyl version omits the final track, instead opting for a series of minute-long 'strychnine interludes' made up of stretched out guitar notes, shortwave interference, Thomas reading from 'Last Of The Mohicans' and Morse code spelling out 'Merdre Merdre', thereby referencing both the infamous first word of the Alfred Jarry play from which the band took their name, 'Ubu Roi', and their song 'The Modern Dance'.
Sean Kitching / The Quietus
In a press handout that accompanied the original release of Pere Ubu's Cloudland, David Thomas quipped "We'd never been asked to write a pop record before. I guess it never occurred to anyone." Given the sonic Dadaism of much of Pere Ubu's work, what's most startling is not that it took so long for someone to suggest they make a pop record but that they were able to comply so successfully. Stephen Hague, who had previously worked with the Pet Shop Boys, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark and New Order, produced these sessions, and Cloudland boasts a glossy surface that was unprecedented for Pere Ubu's work; the drums sounded crisp and tight, the songs included traditional melodies and melodic keyboard lines, Allen Ravenstine's noisy punctuations were pushed to the back of the mix, and the harmonies sounded as if they were performed by actual professionals. However, beneath the hipster friendly production, Cloudland remained a Pere Ubu record -- David Thomas' yelping vocal style was as unrestrained as ever, and while the tunes here lack the sharp angles of Pere Ubu's first era, the lateral sway of the melodies is still cheerfully off kilter. Lyrically, Cloudland finds Ubu moving cautiously from their passionate defense of the Midwest's industrial wastelands to a look at the broad plains that lurked elsewhere, as if they were looking for sunnier climes like many other denizens of the Rust Belt and finding many strange, troubling and wonderful things in their new surroundings. Ultimately, Cloudland showed that however much you dressed up Pere Ubu's music, their heart and soul would show through, and that is a very good thing. [In 2007, Mercury Records reissued Cloudland in a new remastered edition created with the input of the band. The new disc includes two non-LP B-sides, "Wine Dark Sparks" and "Bang the Drum," as well as a live BBC recording of "Bus Called Happiness" and alternate mixes of "Breath" and "Love Love Love." David Stubbs' liner notes describe the circumstances behind the making of the album as well as Thomas' lyrical themes on this material.
Mark Deming / AllMusic
It was possible to hear a budding provocateur lurking behind Tender Pervert, and its follow-up, Don't Stop the Night, unequivocally puts Momus on the path of his hero Serge Gainsbourg. Musically, it also makes him a full-fledged synth-pop artist, with a strong club flavor (and coolly ironic outlook) highly reminiscent of the Pet Shop Boys, who accordingly nominated Momus as 1989's most promising artist. But where the Pet Shop Boys' disco updates mirrored the jaded decadence of the Reagan/Thatcher/yuppie era, Momus went a step further into outright perversion. Song after song features characters using sex to gain power, or vice versa; some are merely quirky, and others genuinely disturbing: a doctor who molests his patients, a guitar teacher who molests his 12-year-old student, a social climber who pimps his sister to the rich and powerful, a necrophiliac, a jilted lover who fantasizes obsessively about his ex-girlfriend masturbating, a couple hoping to get caught making love one more time. While there's a lot of potential for adolescent glibness, Momus' literary bent leads him to flesh out these characters, to give them depth, history, and viewpoints. It's their recognizable humanity that truly makes the album shocking. Overall, Don't Stop the Night is just a little less successful than Tender Pervert; toward the end, the lively club beats disappear, and although the production remains skilled, Momus falls back into old hookless habits -- it's a shame that the music of "The Guitar Lesson" and "The Cabriolet" isn't as attention-grabbing as the lyrics. But for the most part, the record works very well. The synth-dance sound is cold and emotionally disconnected, to be sure, but that's an intentional reflection of the subject matter. Overlooking a couple of awkward hip-hop references, Momus' production is sleek and stylish, an amazingly convincing transformation for someone who'd been a Leonard Cohen disciple just two albums prior. And with its provocatively perverse sensibility, Don't Stop the Night set the tone for much of Momus' best work in the future.
Steve Huey / AllMusic
