The one time I met Twelve Canons main-man Jim DuRocher in person, I was in Iowa City to play trumpet as part of a dozen-piece all-star lineup backing up Samuel Locke-Ward for a set for the 2008 Mission Creek Festival. The lineup included Rachel Feldmann (Lipstick Homicide) on double bass, Ross Meyer (Rusty Buckets) and Grace Locke-Ward on drums, Alex Body on keyboards, sax-man Pete Balistrieri, Brian Boelman on trombone, and some other folks I hardly know, plus Sam of course, and Jim, who played one of those long-necked banjos that looks like it’s supposed to have a dancing skeleton playing it. We’d had a couple rehersals before that but I didn’t recall seeing Jim at those. As we drove ’round to Jim’s apartment to pick him up, Sam kept telling me, “you’ve got to get some stuff from Jim’s band Twelve Canons, it is awesome.” And indeed they ended up hooking me up with copies of the Volume One/Volume Two and Volume Three: Holy, Holy, Holy CD-Rs. Back at Sam’s place a bunch of us pitched in cutting out and assembling CD-R covers for Sam’s merch. Jim found a bottle of whiskey in a cupboard and invited me to join him in a drink or three. We probably polished off the bottle, and got to chatting. I got hyper-drunk-mouth and ended up later outside the gig trying to convince Jim that he had formerly lived in Cedar Falls because I thought he looked really familiar. He didn’t recall having lived there, and in fact he probably never did, but I think I had him wondering. Anyway, it’s a good memory, I really liked the guy and really liked the Twelve Canons stuff once I got back home and gave it a listen. I ended up keeping up on Twelve Canons, a project established for the purpose of making “evil, evil folk music,” via the internet.

Jim DuRocher’s creaky vocals and nimble fingerpicked banjo or nylon-string classical guitar, perfectly suit the creepy themes of his lyrics. Twelve Canons songs conjure a dark, disturbing, haunted world and then pull you into it. One would be justified in being concerned about what’s inside Jim’s head. I had caught rumors here and there that he tended to drink over-much and moved from one living arrangement to another as he got thrown out of them, but when I heard a couple years later that he was in a mental institution, I actually wondered for a moment to what degree it might have been a bit of either artistic stunt or method-acting on his part. A video surfaced on YouTube of Jim performing his scary songs solo for an audience of his co-residents at the facility he was in, who are hidden in the video by large black rectangles at the bottom of the frame. “This song is about my favorite hallucination, the DT’s,” he introduces one paticular number. It’s a great document of his live performing style.

The man does have real issues, though they mainly have to do with the intense hold alcohol has on him. He has since moved among a few different facilities in Iowa, but this hasn’t stopped him from making another album with the help of an old friend from Des Moines, Justin Norman. (I didn’t even know Jim was originally from Des Moines until I read the recent Cityview article.) That album, Volume Four: Sacrifice is the first Twelve Canons release to sport a pressed disc and a glossy full-color cover.

The difference in format and packaging is matched in production. Where Volume One/Volume Two and Volume Three: Holy, Holy, Holy sounded clean but homemade, probably recorded live in somebody’s living room with Jim, Sam Gold on violin, Alex Body on keyboards and the occasional saxophone or recorder, and possibly one or two others seemingly all gathered ’round the microphones playing and singing together, Sacrifice places Jim and his guitar in front of lush, impressively detailed, but nonetheless entirely computer-constructed orchestra-in-a-box arrangements by Norman, who besides composition and sequencing is credited with bass guitar and some vocals. This has to be at least in part by necessity, as Jim can’t very well invite a group of buddies over to the institution for a jam session.

It’s quite impressive what Norman is able to do with sequencing — you hear pianos, strings, woodwinds, organs, harpsichords, bells, various sound effects and bits of percussion, all rendered realistically enough to be comparable to what admittedly little I’ve heard of Chad O’Neal’s Left Is West stuff, adding drama at almost every conceivable moment with dynamic swells, though occasionally Norman has enough sense to just let Jim and his guitar speak for themselves for a few seconds. Still the production values are a bit of a double-edged sword: the professional recording quality reveals the striking beauty of Jim’s guitar playing, but in comparison to the grittier early works, the perfect cinemascope sound and “performance” of the arrangements can come off a bit Tim Burton, especially on “High Ho”, a song about murderous hallucinatory gnomes coming after children.

It could be the clearer recording of Jim’s voice lifting a veil of mystery over the lyrics, it could be trying to compensate for the gloss, but it seems as if Jim is going for a bit less subtlety in these songs. Heck, the first line out of his mouth on the album is “let me kill you.” About as blunt and to the point as it gets. This amplifies the disturbing factor of the songs to an almost painful extent by refusing to shroud their meaning in too much abstraction, especially when it comes to the kinds of themes explored in the lecherous depravity of “Goddess Of Love”, the kidnapping tale “No Getting Out”, and especially “Daddy Longlegs”, wherein the protagonist extols the love of an incestuous father who apparently is the Devil himself. “When the Spirits Leave Me” addresses Jim’s alcoholism directly and is probably (hopefully?) the most personal song on the album, and a surprising but welcome moment of tenderness is found in the form of the two-part “The Spirit of Pregnancy and You In the Nude.”

Justin Norman marshals swirling sounds and voices into playing the part of the darkness that encroaches and closes in through the final trio of songs, beginning with a look back at better times in “Those Were the Days”, and by the end of “I Guess It’s True What They Say”, all hope is gone, crushed. In reality though, the album shows quite a lot of hope for Jim, since the fact that it exists at all is testament to his unwillingness to let his circumstances get him down or stop him from doing what he is driven to do, which is to create some of the darkest songs ever conceived. With some of his most harrowing writing yet given the most realized and accessible treatment his work has ever had in recorded form, Volume Four: Sacrifice has high hopes of drawing as many curious new visitors as possible into Jim DuRocher’s dark world.

By which I really just mean Ames’s Matt Dake, he whom is also You Are Home, a drummer in The Jerkles, and former drummer of Longshadowmen, among his many activities. This new digital single from You Are Home just popped up the other day, a greatly enjoyable trancey, grooving, high-energy, polyrhythmic, eight minutes. Check out that gnarly Yes-y bass tone, too!

Matt reports to be be hard at work on the next YAH full-length too. In the meantime, he has other cool things up his sleeve, as he, Bryon Dudley, Tom Russell, are Stratum — a kind of supergroup, really — and have just debuted with this EP of very cool shamanic percussion-and-drone, reminding me of perhaps a more technical Big Drum In The Sky Religion, or Battles floating in outer space. I’m drawing the Thou Art connection just on the assumption that Matt probably recorded it, but I don’t know this for sure.

UPDATE: Matt informs us the Stratum EP was collaboratively recorded at Byron’s studio, and there are definite plans for more recordings and live shows (yes!)

Lo-fi sci-fi. Wacked-out home-recorded instrumental space-rock. This thing is rockin’ my work day today like mutha. Spacey synthesizers and effects on a foundation of keep-it-simple riffs. Ominous and goofy and groovy all at once. Download has PDF booklet and bonus tracks including a “blooper reel” and remixes.

Troika is the soundtrack for a story of three Soviet comrades stationed at a radio observation post in a remote part of the Irkutsk Oblast region during the early 1970′s. During one of the Soyuz missions, something goes awry….

A fitting liner note indeed. buzzing and blurting no-input mixer and possible analog electronics evoke the sounds of old radio equipment. Fragments of speech and numbers seemingly spoken over short-wave in multiple languages. Even if you factor out the siren in track 3 Don totally nails the Cold War/Space Race vibe here.

And here even more Navonski on Soundcloud:

Hal McGee brings together a compilation of experimental music prominently featuring the various flavors of the Korg Monotron, a line of cute li’l battery-operated, pocket-sized, insanely fun analog synthesizers:

(Incidentally, I didn’t make it onto this one, but a lot of good stuff did.)

In particular, “I <3 Feedback", new today from Muchausen Sound:

This compilation focuses on Feedback, Harsh Noise, HNW & just plain extreme chaos.

So with that said, BE WARNED that due to the nature of this release, artists and recording styles, volume levels WILL vary from track to track. Enjoy your tinnitus!

Compiled and released concurrently, but with no Distant Trains among its many stellar artists, a compilation of dark ambient called “Overcome By Shadows”:

“Cell Your Soul is compilation consisting of tracks by 37 international audio artists. Artist made recordings with the voice recorder function of their cellular telephones.”

Link

For Ben Bennett, any implement is fair game if it makes a sound, but especially if it’s cheap, homemade, broken, or just generally not something you’d find sold in a music store. For the second half of track 6 on Wiperwill, “How to Make an Important Decision”, the main sound seems to be of a chair being dragged around the floor; “I Was Sleeping On Top of Pine Trees, A Giant Pack of Wolves Knocked Over My Bed” sounds like a close-miked recording of Ben’s own heartbeat and breathing. In a performance video that the Vaudeville Mews used on their web site for the February 26 show, Ben plays from inside a cardboard appliance box, eliciting sounds from the box itself. Drum heads not attached to drums, pots and pans, cans, various bits of metal, wood, and rubber, and droning atonal homemade wind instruments (played with circular breathing?) are the main sources of sound used in his work, such that at his more rhythmic, percussive moments he might just as easily be a street musician as someone you’d find performing in art galleries. A blurring of the boundaries between primitivism and art may actually be part of the point, and Ben isn’t messing around. The titles of the tracks on Wiperwill suggest having been made up post facto, but track 9 is called “It’s Not Just Willy-Nilly”, and then there’s the bio I read that actually opens with the phrase “Ben Bennett is a totally legit musician” — perhaps meant to make you wonder why one might feel the need to clarify that point right off the bat.

Any way you look at it, however, Ben is fascinating to watch or hear. He evidently started out as a drummer and/or percussionist and started getting more experimental ideas, about stripping down his instrumentation to its most basic elements of things that vibrate, about the essence of sound itself and the physicalities of its production. He makes use of the acoustics of whatever room he’s placed in, even moving about the venue in search of the best spot for his sound waves to reverberate against each other. Wiperwill consists of unaltered live acoustical recordings of short pieces ranging from blasts of driving, clattering percussion rhythms some might describe as “tribal”, to drones that sometimes sound like a time-stretched honking of a goose. It is impossible to let this music fade into the background — it is bracing, demands your attention, and positively begs to be played out in the open room on some good speakers, where it is likely to make your neighbors wonder what the hell is going on at your place.

Some months ago hanging around the Contact Group on Facebook I realized I’d seen the phrase “no-input mixer” a few times but had no idea what it meant. So I decided to do some research and a’googling I did go. What I found out is that it is a technique that uses a mixing board as a musical instrument by connecting outputs back into inputs, creating a feedback loop, and manipulating the feedback tones either with the mixer’s own controls or through effects within the loop. Among its pioneers are Toshimaru Nakamura and Merzbow, and it’s become a popular technique in experimental music. I realized I had a mixing board just sitting around in a closet that I wasn’t doing anything with, a beat-up Equinox ACM-1262 that somehow fell into my possession in the waning days of No Consensus. So I had to give this a try.

I posted on the Contact Group about it and soon Eric Crowe (he of Marax and Muchausen Sound) was proposing a no-input compilation, then taking submissions. And so it is that today (a little late perhaps) I am pleased to introduce the latest compilation for Distant Trains to end up on, To Gain Is To FX Send. Approaches to and interpretations of the no-input concept vary on it. Check it out:

I also did a live performance on no-input mixer recently at Vaudeville Mews, opening for Ben Bennett, on a Sunday night when Reverend Horton Heat was playing elsewhere in town. Chances are, you weren’t at the Mews for that show; almost nobody was. But I did record it:

I also managed to get Office Park to come down for the show, and recorded them as well, you’ll find that on my Soundcloud page also.

Getting a board recording of Ben Bennett was pretty hopeless, since his thing is pretty much acoustic percussion and he moves around the room too much while he plays to keep microphones on him. Didn’t matter; working with the acoustics of the environment, letting the waves mesh and interplay, is a big part of his sound and thankfully the Mews is a live enough room to do it in, especially once he had completed relocating his assemblage of frame drums, homemade wind instruments, odd bits of metal, a snare drum and an old bugle, from the stage to the audience area, while simultaneously playing on them. I did get a microcassette recording but I intend to get his blessing before doing anything with it.

Also here’s a recent collaborative album by Andrew Chadwick a.k.a. Ironing and Roger H. Smith a.k.a. Chefkirk, who someone on the Contact Group called “the Hendrix of the no-input mixer.” You can see that Chefkirk favors jagged ultra-high tones whereas I (currently at least) tend to go for long, slow, low sounds and use more effects.

And here’s a Chefkirk album available from Public Eyesore, the label run by Bryan Day, the instrument-inventor who is in Office Park and Seeded Plain and this and that.

EDIT 3/15: Here’s that microcassette recording of Ben:

And just because I might as well, here’s Office Park’s set from that night:

These won’t be up forever, I’ll probably take them down when I need more space on my Soundcloud account and am sure that they have downloaded copies for themselves if they want them.

ORIG∆MI – Memories (EP)
Sounding like a pop album set in the world of Blade Runner, Beau Manancourt creates a world cold and distant, yet not disingenuous or contrived sounding as many of his contemporaries.  This is my first exposure to Beau or the label he belongs to Disaro Records, but both seem very interesting and well worth the investigation. You can stream it over at bandcamp.