Revolt of the Apes

The written word is our paramour … or something. We like to read. And we don’t pay too much mind to what Mr. Araya has to say.

But listen: one thing we got massive reading enjoyment out of recently is the third issue of the U.K. ‘zine, Optical Sounds.

What’s so great about Optical Sounds? Is it the brilliant, long and interesting interviews with head-spinningly heavy bands like Onieda, Eternal Tapestry, The Great Society Mind Destroyers, Hook Worms, Cosmic Dead, Moon Duo, The Heads, White Hills, an Austin Psych Fest summation from The Fooookin’ Cult of Dom Keller, and so, so much more?

Yes.

Is it also the inclusion of some interview content – including the likes of The Black Angels, The Night Beats and MMoss – that originally appeared on the revolting, ape-based website you’re currently reading?

C’mon – we’re not made of stone. Of course we love that.

But more than that, isn’t it the fact that Optical Sounds is an offset-printed, black and white, tiny-fonts and gluestick-based time-trip back to our fanzine-making adolescent years, when our heads and hearts were filled with malicious thoughts like, “How can I better scam the fuck out of Kinko’s?”

Of course it is.

But you know what we might love most of all? It goes back to those written words – and the ones in Optical Sounds are written with care, knowledge, humor and – perhaps most important of all, and perhaps a trait we could bare to see more of – ENTHUSIASM.

We enthusiastically recommend Optical Sounds.

Download “Optical Sound” by The Human Expression

MAGDALENA SOLIS

“Wake Up and Start to Dream” is the title of the first song on “Hesperia,” the wickedly weird and winning debut album from Magdalena Solis – yet it might as well be read as instructions for the listener. By the time the slithering, successive track, “Seven Boys and Seven Girls,” moves from an outrageously memorable, roaring raga toward its eventual end – sounding like both their synth and your soul is exploding – it should be clear we’ve entered a kosmiche realm, one where the dreams you’ve not seen are projected directly on the Magdalena Solis screen.

“Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls.” – Ingmar Bergman

After repeated listens to “Hesperia” – after our body became weightless, after our pulse quickened, after uncommon imagery flickered across our tightly-shut eyelids – we found ourselves in those dark rooms. Luckily, Magdalena Solis member Drikka was nearby to shine a little bit of light within, by answering the questions posed below.

Our understanding is that Magdalena Solis holds its origin in the universe of the moving picture, as opposed to that of the musical instrument. When did your attention first become captured by film? What are the films that truly exposed you to the possibilities of the medium? Are there contemporary films or filmmakers that excite you today?

As a child I was already very much into drawing and painting, also making scenarios and creating comic strips. When I had the chance to use a camera for the first time it was a wonderful experience, and all my other artistic activities seemed like mere preparations. I started writing down scenes, turning them into prose I always found frustrating and I felt a need to visualize them. But I did not have the means. Only when I met the girl that is now the other half of Magdalena Solis, and who works as a video editor, things became more realistic. So before that I studied other people’s work and learned to watch films in many different ways. Growing up in a small village the only true cult movies I had access to were the late night sessions on the BBC. There I discovered the works of Pasolini, Borowczyk and Buñuel, those I remember being the most influential during my teens.

When it comes to Magdalena Solis, Jodorowsky’s films were the ones that lit the flame. Because he was a director AND music composer. A similarly inspiring masterpiece was no doubt “Lucifer Rising.”

Contemporary cinema, although we see many good movies they don’t make our brain glow like the sixties and seventies magic. For me, many films stay too much in postmodernist atmospheres. Things are still a bit in a transition phase. However today’s cinema is visually more and more interesting. Recent South-American movies often have brilliant photography and revolutionary camera work. “Cidade de Deus” I remember as a film that really took me away. “A Tale of Two Sisters,” and other Korean or Japanese films. “The New World” we also much enjoyed. A temporary good thing is that the big cinematic nations of the past are all in a deep crisis, so there is more room and interest for films from all over the world. These new different approaches are feeding and freshening up the minds of directors in Europe and America, and you can feel that the old countries are slowly moving towards a new bloom too. Anyway, there are many promising things going on everywhere and we look forward to the future.

Can you compare and contrast your experiences working in film to your experiences working in music? How have the two forms fed your inspiration for Magdalena Solis? Do you find one to be more immediately gratifying than the other?

The way we film and create visuals are very similar to the music creation process. For both we improvise and experiment, and then select the good stuff to work on more refined arrangements/edits. Music and visuals always feed each other. A piece of music can start with some images in my head, visuals can start with some sounds I’m humming. So we’re very much used to making visuals move with the music, and vice versa. We often put movies or footage we filmed while improvising on instruments. Our track “Pink Sock Parade” for example was recorded in a single two hour session, immediately after watching Fellini’s “Satyricon.” We hummed the basic melodies and exchanged the arrangement ideas while watching the film, and then just executed the plan. We have periods we enjoy more making music, we have periods that visuals are more gratifying. Music is a little easier to make. There are less logistic problems. For visuals we have to rely on other people, and save money to go and film on interesting locations, etc. … When we don’t feel like making music we have the visuals, and the other way around. It seems to be a cycle. But maybe it’s time to break this cycle and try to work on a new album plus visuals at the same time.

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To sum up: You needn’t take our word for how easy it is to fall in love with the new Sisters of Your Sunshine Vapor album, “Spectra Spirit” – download the entire album for free here and find your own way to fill the hole in your brain.

But first, a little back-story: Coming up on just two short years ago, Sisters of Your Sunshine Vapor was the very first band interviewed for this little site about apes and amplifiers.

At the time, we enthused over the Detroit trio’s “loud, infectious, riff-driven psych rock, the kind that howls, feeds back, throws punches, and oozes from all corners.” Our enthusiasm has waned not at all in the intervening months (though we’re slightly more cautious with regard to accusing any band of “oozing,” from corners or anywhere else).

If nothing more, “Spectra Spirit” works for us as a crashing confirmation of the howling, heavy sound that first drew us to this infectious Vapor. But the album is something more – its ferocity more focused, its chakras more aligned, its slithering, sin-with-a-grin, serpentine-shake more singular, yet no less sinister. Sisters, we’ll be tripping in your skies and swimming in your “Spectra Spirit” for some time to come.

Download “Black Mind” from the album, “Spectra Spirit,” by Sisters of Your Sunshine Vapor

“Nothing discernible to the eye of the spirit is more brilliant or obscure than man; nothing is more formidable, complex, mysterious, and infinite. There is a prospect greater than the sea, and it is the sky; there is a prospect greater than the sky, and it is the human soul.” – Victor Hugo

WIND

We think of wind in a variety of ways, when we think of it at all: as part of the daily weather, as energy to be harnessed, as a key component to engaging in our preferred method of travel – hot air balloon. What we don’t necessarily think of when we think of wind is a terrifyingly marvelous group of young psych and free-jazz enthusiasts from Norway.

But that has now changed.

It changed only moments after we put the needle down on the debut album from Wind, the aforementioned marvelous group of young psych and free-jazz enthusiasts from Norway. Entitled Wind and Friends (and available now from Syrin Vinyl), it’s an album built entirely out of improvisation and that undeniable spark of inspiration that comes from being bold, creative and obsessed with that one episode of “Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert” where the kids can be seen taking covert drags on their dugouts only moments before Albert Ayler stepped up to jam with Sabbath.

Of course, such an episode never occurred – but Wind and Friends did happen and continues to be happening. It’s a bizarre, powerful and ultimately beautiful album.

Cluing us in to the happenings of the Wind and more is drummer Filip Ramberg, who we thank for his considerate answers, shared here with you. Enjoy.

How do you think the area where you live – or the area where you grew up, if there’s a difference – influences the music you make? Do your surroundings inspire you, or do you think of musical inspiration coming almost exclusively from the inside, quite apart from outside influences?

Living in Norway cannot be said to hold any direct influence on our sounds, though the mountains and the fjords further north tend to produce some majestic state of mind perhaps present in the music.

When I improvise or write music, I try as best as I can to express myself without self-importance or fear, and really wish to transcend my personality or physical body. Succeeding in this, I can feel a connection to my real self, or perhaps a voice from within speaking through the instrument, which probably is the real I.

Different forms of meditation have existed for thousands of years and I feel that music is the form that speaks to me the most. It can give you a sensation of being present in the whole body, and at the same time you can in some sense be present in the music, as if the music took a physical shape or form. When trying to express this feeling or state of consciousness in words … almost all the meaning is lost. Perhaps our music at best is an expression of this feeling or sensation.

All the music we listen to is of course the big influence, but I feel we are mostly inspired by a few choice musicians. John Coltrane for example really speaks through his instrument. He somehow got over the physical barrier of using the hands, fingers, mouth and lungs and was able to freely express his whole palette of emotions and feeling in music. He and the sax don’t really matter; he is talking or channeling God’s own divine language.

Are you able to identify ways in which you think about music differently than you did just one or two years ago? In what ways? What are the two or three major musical turning points in your own personal musical evolution, the events, people or music that truly altered your perspective on what music can be, and by extension, how music can be made?

If there is one thing I could pinpoint, it would be the increased appreciation of details. That is one thing studio work has taught me. A tune could be as dynamic and organic and majestic as anything, but it is the detail work that colors the song and truly makes it interesting. Although we largely set out to make music of a spiritual nature, it requires a lot of technical precision work as well as musical insight in order for it to succeed. Apart from that, musical progress is a continuous search and I most probably was in a quite different place a few years ago. You cannot really tell because it’s so gradual. It’s like you are developing and fine-tuning some natural understanding of music. When you stop thinking and instead play exactly what you feel, something vital is achieved.

I have for the past three years used the method of not practicing. Instead I walk around trying to tune the ears, hearing drumbeats while walking the stairs, or a guitar solo in a big truck passing by, or a vocal harmony in an infants scream. When I first pick up an instrument I often feel inspired, as if it was the first time, and the music is a mirror of all my experiences and thoughts up to that point. Before this, I for many years used all my spare time learning the basic technique of the instruments, reading and practicing in many different styles and genres.

Although there are many turning points in my musical evolution there are a few milestones. Hearing John Coltrane for the first time surely was one of those. Trying to grasp the inventiveness that worked on so many levels was like being reborn into the musical world, being an infant again, realizing that everything you thought about music to that point could only be a footnote to this. No one had blended technique with spiritual feel in such a way before and it raised my own ambition bar by a mile. Another important turning point, a few years earlier, was hearing Skip James. I never knew that much could be expressed so minimally, by guitar and voice alone.

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“Vive les choses invisibles,” we say in salute to the new compilation from Hands In The Dark Records – a concept born of an idea as simple as the ultimate results are hypnotic.

“Vive les choses invisibles,” we say largely because we sense a search for the unseen, an aural investigation of the inner-space race that we all run, in these seven songs from four artists – Cankun,Holy Strays, Je Suis le Petit Chevalier and Voodoo Mount Sister. All are French bands – or artists, or magicians, or conjurors or whatever the appropriate term is – which brings us to the “simple” part of the aforementioned concept.

That concept? Bring a handful of experimental artists together for a compilation, along with the help of another label (Ruralfaune), and all from the same country. In this case, it’s France … so … voilà!

Download “Chief” by Holy Strays, from “Travel Expop Series #1: France”

But more than that, we say “Vive les choses invisibles” … because while we haven’t been this taken with a geography-specific collection of transcendental time-trippers in quite some time, we fear we have neither the depth or breadth of knowledge to say anything meaningful about the connection between these songs and the land from where they sprang.

Rather, we find ourselves listening to this compilation not as an international effort – but as an interstellar effort. Placed within this context, we thrill to the like-minded sounds presented on “Travel Expop Series #1,” which we hear as the perfect soundtrack for exploring what is known by the unknown, exploring the images that reveal themselves to us only in dream and darkness, and exploring the shared, invisible, overlapping cosmic-consciousness that binds us all together. Yes, even you!

We urge the skeptical to unburden themselves of hesitation and take the ride-sharing opportunity afforded by these four French freakazoids.

This is music for wondering, staring, dreaming – music for the inhale and the deep exhale.

It’s in the slightly distorted lullaby-motif that propels Cankun’s “Psych Night Ride” directly toward the center of the brain.

It’s in the moans and drones that grow like cloud cover on the decidedly strange journey toward “Amish Amish Land,” provided by Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier.

And it’s in the buried bass and uprooted emotions of “Nehtotilo,” the ten-minute bliss brigade of Voodoo Mount Sister, helmed by a legitimate high-priest of the form (and previous “Band of the Week” victim), High Wolf  and his partner in crystal vision, Chicaloyoh, that brings this journey to a temporary close.

Vive les choses invisibles! Let’s seek the unseen.

“Voici mon secret. Il est tres simple : on ne voit bien qu’avec le coeur. L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

Just shy of a year has passed since we last checked in with Spindrift – we know this because it’s just shy of impossible to think of Spindrift without thinking of the past. There’s a strange, sweaty, sideways energy in their utter musical and cinematic commitment to reanimating and reverb-ing the ghosts of the conflicts of the West. But the latest confirmation of this commitment – the instant classic, “Classic Soundtracks Vol. 1” – doesn’t sound anything but timeless to us.

Because while we may think of the past when we think of Spindrift, there’s not a moment when the songs of “Classic Soundtracks Vol. 1,” in either note or spirit, are constrained to the cage of nostalgia. Spindrift’s sounds seems to inhabit that place where the past folds over top of us, the very weight of which propels us toward our inevitable future. Put more simply (perhaps even coherently): “Classic Soundtracks Vol. 1” is driving music par excellence, the quintessential score to the act of moving forward while keeping on eye on the rear-view.

Download “Showdown” from “Classic Soundtracks Vol. 1” by Spindrift

We think about the past when we think of Spindrift. Indeed, we think about the hours we have passed wondering how the idea came to open this album in a way that so dramatically captures the relationship between the past and what it means to what comes next.  Less than a minute long, the album opens with “Japexico,” heralding the arrival of an album made up of tribes and caravans, of scouts and squaws, of Arizona plains and God, of Bear Flaggers and the Great Spirit … and then follows immediately with “Space Vixens Theme.” It’s not just great – it’s perfect. And not merely because we don’t know how to make a guitar sound quite so awesome (few do!).

And so the album goes, past and future intertwined (a minute and twenty-five seconds into “Theme From Confusion Range,” we hesitantly dub the band the Hawkwind of the American West), themes turning to songs turning to anthems, guitars (and everything else) sounding consistently awesome (with the penultimate eight minutes and nineteen seconds of “Theme From Drifter’s Pass” making a strong run at “Riff of the Year” honors).

Time and time again, in the future and the past, we’re struck by the utter ambition of the music Spindrift create. But it’s more than that – it’s the potent, powerful execution of those ambitions. And “Classic Soundtracks Vol. 1” is perhaps the most successful execution since that of Tom “Black Jack” Ketchum, with an equal capacity to knock your head off.

“Theme from Drifter’s Pass” Spindrift from Lavender Lee on Vimeo.

“The implications of this argument are many, but one important lesson to be drawn, I think, concerns the widespread popular ambivalence about the frontier in the late nineteenth century. For many years now, historians have explained the frontier myth … as an unswervingly triumphalist story. We live in an anxious age, and it would be foolish to assert  that the nineteenth century was not more confident than our own in many respects. But if there is one thing that William Cody’s biography teaches us, it is that the nineteenth century was characterized by doubts about frontier conquest, racial degeneracy, the industrial order, and the failure of the Western farm landscape to generate the wealth and security that the story of progress had promised. To construe frontier expansion as a moment of supreme confidence untarnished by reflection or hesitation is to ignore all the dark fears that underlay it.”

– Louis S. Warren, “Buffalo Bill’s America: William Cody and the Wild West Sideshow”   

TTOTALS

The totally mesmerizing sounds of Ttotals are made by only two people in total. The numbers aren’t the story, in and of themselves – rather, it’s how the Nashville-based duo apply their minimal membership to achieve maximum impact.

It’s a spaced-out, ghostly sound, driven at its core by the deadly crimes against hearing that we all know and enjoy, spawned from from overdriven guitars and abused drum kits. Tucked between the cracks of this sound are the echoes and whispers and cries of their supersonic forefathers/mothers and future generations of travelers – echoes, whispers and cries that we hear as loops, reverb and feedback. “Portrait of Man” – a song from their knock-out release “Drum Is Our Parent,” twelve inches of cool, cool yellow vinyl – begins with what sounds like a bit of chanting, before sliding easily into its comfortable rhythm and then takes a detour to the third ring of Saturn before bringing us back around (as Saturn is wont to do).

They call it “other blues,” and who are we to argue? Singer/guitarist Brian and drummer/wacko Marty were kind enough to answer our questions and get us all ttotally up to speed.

What is Ttotals able to accomplish as a duo that would not be possible as a larger entity – or, phrased another way, what flexibility is offered to you as a duo? Do the two or you have experience playing in other bands with a higher head count? How did those experiences color your ambitions with Ttotals, if at all?

Brian: We tried a few people out and they just didn’t work well for one way or another. We just found we could accomplish exactly what was needed with just two of us. Also we think we bring something rather unique to the table and work really well together. Early on we had an idea to use this thing we called the “Peav.” It was a Peavey hollowbody guitar tuned to drone and feedback. Marty manipulated its feedback with foot pedals. Now we use samples of this old Italian suitcase organ we have. It sounds really neat. Especially when Marty does his magic on it.

Marty: How many dudes do you want in the van?  ‘Nuff said.

Is there an etymology to the name Ttotals aside from it being a unique spelling? Does the word itself hold any significant meaning for yourself that you can relate to us? 

Brian: It started out as a misspelling, but we liked it so much we kept it. It is pronounced “Totals” in case anyone needs to know.

Marty: I was beaten up in middle school by this kid who had a horrible stuttering problem.  One time he and his friends got   hold of me in the bathroom after school and he almost “c-c-curbed” me on the edge of a urinal, but I got away.  The band name is for revenge.  F-F-Fuck you, Chad.  This is what you get when you pick on people smaller than you.  They start bands.

Brian: We gotta find this Chad guy.

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Given their very name, we have little hesitation calling “Cold Living” by Spirit Vine – an advance number from the L.A. band’s upcoming EP – a spiritual song.

Whether it’s a song of sorrow or a song of joy is not for us to say – and not just because, in all likelihood, it’s a little bit of both. We as listeners will invariably bring our own emotional biases to the experience. So it’s perhaps not worth noting that in “Cold Living,” we hear a song that begins with what sounds like a prayer, a song that moves forward with an absolutely relentless power, and a song that largely rides atop a monstrous sea of guitars – guitars that snap, bite and generally scorch the earth, and some other parts of the cosmos, too.

And if we could sing a song so gloriously, let there be no doubt: we would never shut up about it.

That scorched earth feel renders nothing in “Cold Living” feeling all that cold, but all the same, you wouldn’t call it sunny, either. This should come as no surprise to anyone fortunate enough to have fed their head with the previous Spirit Vine release, which owed as much to ouija boards as the warm California sun. Still, “Cold Living” sounds like transformation, with Spirit Vine offering a song that can alter your emotional reality, through a sound that infests your body. We’re ready for whatever comes next.

“It doesn’t matter how long we may have been stuck in a sense of our limitations. If we go into a darkened room and turn on the light, it doesn’t matter if the room has been dark for a day, a week, or ten thousand years – we turn on the light and it is illuminated. Once we control our capacity for love and happiness, the light has been turned on.” – Sharon Salzberg

WEIRD OWL

“He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man,” declared Dr. Thompson – and true or not, you’d be mistaken in moving past the idea too quickly. Which brings us to Weird Owl.

“Build Your Beast A Fire” is the recently released album by Weird Owl, and even without the band having a doctor in the bunch, it succeeds spectacularly in administrating its own peculiar medicine. It’s a perspective apart from that quoted above, but one that we’ve also found quite impossible to move past too quickly. Not that we want to. From the opening intergalactic-busking of “No Time Nor No Space” to the repeating, retreating, revolving refrain that gives the album its title, it’s an incredibly welcoming piece of art, especially if you find songs and saucer-shaped shadows that leap pyramids in a single sound welcoming. And we do.

More than that, it constructs its reality so completely that you’ll want to stay awhile, and maybe return shortly thereafter to see if you hear what you thought you saw. We believed it when time declared it good to warm our bones beside the fire – and we believe Weird Owl have built a bright, bold fire of their own.

Sit beside the fire with vocalist/bassist Trevor Tyrrell, who was kind enough to battle the beast of our burdensome queries below. 

One of the many things that makes “Build Your Beast A Fire” such a compelling listening experience is the very real sense on behalf of the listener that Weird Owl is taking us on a journey, possibly from Point A to Point B, but just as likely to Point C, D and E as well – for lack of a better term, we’ll say the album has a “flow.” Do you see the songs collected here as being part of a larger whole, of a story arc, of a bit of “destination listening”? How much forethought went in to the sequencing of the tracks on “Beast”? What are some other albums or artists that you admire for their ability to construct a singular journey from such disparate elements?

We definitely constructed the album intentionally to create a sense of growth or movement from one moment, or song, to the next. Thematically, it was very important to suggest that the album represent a process. Just think about the album’s title. It is an exhortation to engage in an action, not a statement that is a reinforcement of passivity. You, the listener, are being asked to join an ongoing rite or act.

It is our hope that the listener not feel the same at the end or the record as he/she did when the album began, nor should your environment be unchanged.

And that is a very basic definition of Magic.

Looking back now, in what ways would you characterize your approach to the creation of “Build” as different to its predecessor, “Ever the Silver Cord Be Loosed,” if at all? Sonically speaking, was there something different you were trying to capture in the sound of “Beast”? It’s a very sharp and shiny sound – though not necessarily polished and still cast from the fringes. How close does the album come to capturing the sounds in your head?

The creation of the two records were quite different. We had very little time or resources to complete ETSCBL. The songs were not written as a cohesive unit conceptually, so in my opinion, that record has wildly different things going on from song to song. But in that way, it is a perfect document of where we were as a band at the moment of the album’s creation. With BYBAF, we had a more exact approach: songs were written for the album specifically, the lyrics were all penned with a definite framework in mind, and most importantly – we had a lot more time and space to see things to their intended fruition.

As far as the differences in sound, I would chalk that up to using different engineers in different studios for the two records. I am still searching for the exact sounds I can hear internally to be made real in the physical realm. I am not even sure the instruments exist yet.

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We cannot help but be enthralled by the velocity at which Chatham Rise move through their new EP, “No One” – velocity, perhaps worth noting, or the lack thereof.

It’s fitting that a band that calls Minneapolis home would crash through these four songs with the slow, steady and deliberate power of a nuclear-powered icebreaking vessel, piloted with stern resolve, crashing and driving forward effortlessly, affording little hope of survival to anything unfortunate enough to be trapped beneath its massive weight.

But this is no simple search and destroy mission – Chatham Rise do their damage while still being propelled by nuance, subtlety and the appropriate use of twenty- thousand leagues of amplification.

The journey begins with the appropriately named “Tranquilized,” a hazy, slow-motion organ joining hand-in-hand with a sonically-sedated vocal approach that seems itself buried under blankets of sound, the melodies laser-guided and able to escape only by bending around the corners. Sufficiently numbed from that initial tranquilizing dart, you’ll be forgiven for believing its follow-up (“Fall In”) takes you away from the icy depths altogether and instead goes far, far into the stratosphere.

“Autopilot” comes next, its title and anchoring, impenetrable bass making it tempting to believe the band has given control over to forces beyond their control – how else to explain to its hazy, heavenly sound?

Download “Autopilot” from the “No One” EP by Chatham Rise

The beginning of the end is the “Hollow” that follows, the atmosphere here almost mistakable for the funereal, save for the bright lights that swing from the guitar strings throughout the chorus. More impressive is when the realization sets in that “Hollow” is more of a rebirth than a death, returning the listener to the tranquilized state that “No One” put forth some twenty minutes prior. Slow ride? Sure. Take it easy? Not a chance. “No One,” here, gets out alive.

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket — safe, dark, motionless, airless — it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.” – C.S. Lewis, “The Four Loves”