Brooke RobertsonAs a music director at a college radio station, I am lucky to be spoon-fed hundreds of albums a week to review, devour and share with our listening community. Of the CDs that come in – an average of nearly 200 a week – about 120 are complete garbage. Once we filter the crap to its proper holding receptacle, we have another 50 albums that are not complete crap, but half-crap. Countless bands sound unoriginal and cheap, parading as Radiohead rip-offs and indie-rock imposters. But occasionally, in that pile of unsolicited, unmentionable and unforgivable stabs at art, some gems arise. For me, this makes the hours of work and reviews worth it.
Such gems have a mysterious quality about them, as they did not come from a familiar promoter and do not have a recognizable label backing them. These musicians prove themselves while truly standing on their own, surprising the most skeptic of ears. Over the past year, albums of this nature include the neo-electro blues of Mattress; the heavy, sludging doom of Mammal; and the highly nuanced bedroom-pop CD-R of soon-to-be K Record’s star Jeremy Jay. These records represent the cutting-edge musicians KCPR strives to best represent and support. Our mission is to provide alternative programming that entertains and informs, that opens local listeners’ minds to the vast array of sonic innovations taking place in the nooks and crannies untainted by mega-corporate moneybags, industry stooges, Internet-hype machines and hipster bullshit.
The most recent finds that continue to make my job worthwhile are releases supported at one time or another by the reliable and underground Time-Lag and Digitalis labels. Though I was roughly familiar with these labels (Tower Recordings and Mudboy, respectively) when these albums arrived, I could not have anticipated the strikingly emotional, original and innovative sounds these CDs encompass.
Cursillistas, a project by Maine-based Matt Lajoie, first received recognition from a cassette distributed through Time-Lag records. His tribal, fully realized, organic and haunted songs comprise his album “wasp stings the last bitter flavor,” out now on Digitalis and currently in rotation at KCPR. During more quiet moments, Lajoie’s percussion resembles the natural rhythms of a dripping faucet, and as the tempo increases, the sound of a drum circle surrounds the audience while grounding the hazy acoustic guitar for a background of full atmosphere that frames and embodies his remarkably layered and repetitive vocals.
The second Digitalis release that blew me away was Scott Tuma’s “Not for Nobody” LP, which struck me with the same emotional response I had after hearing Burial’s self-titled LP for the first time. Few recordings can capture such a riveting, melancholic loneliness. Such music should be heard on headphones in your room. His guitar comes closer to Fahey’s ghost than any of his contemporaries, its layers making James Blackshaw look like an emotionless machine. Tuma embodies a fresh and timelessly sparse Americana guitar album, where the notes he leaves behind create atmosphere as thrilling as the chords he commands. This ambience, full of creaks and found sounds, coupled with the fiendishly lonely vocals on the tracks that bookend the otherwise instrumental album, captivate and surround the listener while alienating the music emanating from Tuma’s intricately recorded guitar. This album will enter KCPR’s rotation next Monday.
Finally, as we’ve enjoyed a slew of amazing Time-Lag Records releases over the past weeks, my personal favorite is Ilyas Ahmed’s “The Vertigo at Dawn.” Born in Pakistan, raised in New Jersey and now residing in Portland, Ahmed’s music is otherworldly, possessed and beautiful. I have not been able to stop listening to this album for a few weeks now. After an abundance of self-released CD-Rs, the first two of which Digitalis has packaged together for re-release, this proper full-length album shows Ahmed as a master of the reeds, strings and vocals, in a manner unparalleled in the often-contrived “psych-folk” field.
The album sounds like something Sublime Frequencies would re-release from an outsider psychedelic folk musician from Pakistan in the ’60s. But Ahmed makes these sounds today, displaying a natural disposition toward guitar, which he keeps clear, precise and distinctively Eastern in tradition while layering reed instruments for drones, percussion for dizzying oscillation and his voice to tie the whole affair together. He makes music that interacts with space in order to transcend time, and succeeds in producing an artifact not dependent on any frame of reference or solicited guarantee to envelop the listener and challenge his or her imagination.
These albums are all rather esoteric and, admittedly, somewhat challenging listens, since they lie beyond “accessible” pop categories, but they are worth the time it may take to appreciate them. Many listens will reveal idiosyncratic intricacies, caverns of droning experience, whirls of percussive primitivism, and melodies surprising and complex enough to keep you listening for long days to come.
These are only my picks, and if you were to ask any KCPR DJ for theirs, I’m sure they would easily offer five completely different albums for completely different and legitimate reasons. That is what I love about being a part of college radio – it offers a group of people a common ground for intellectual growth and stimulation with infinite resources and tireless ears.
Brian Cassidy is an English senior and a music director for KCPR, San Luis Obispo, 91.3 FM. He’s also completely full of it.