Listening Station asks a simple question every so often: What’s on your turntable?
Here’s what Oneohtrix Point Never obsessed over last year…when he wasn’t stringing together slabs of space age vinyl for his double-disc Rifts (No Fun, 2009) collection. New Yorkers, take note: dude’s opening for Small Black and Washed Out tonight at Mercury Lounge. He’s on at 7:30, though, so do not sleep if you’re even slightly into Kraut-y music that screams “We have liftoff”…
Gary War, Horribles Parade (Sacred Bones, 2009)
Imagine pop music as a massive alabaster block of musical inertia; a ‘landscape’ in which we all, whether we mean to or not, freely graze. Outside the block is everything else…space dust. We call it noise. Gary War is one of those tweener band anomalies–not inside the block, more like a weird black magician along its periphery–the shaper, the keeper of the dead zone between society and endless space.
Under close inspection, Horribles Parade yields a sort of Magic Eye effect in which, although initially lulled by brilliant melodies and damaged prog changes, blasted me with an array of super alluring phantom sonorities that I came back to rediscover time and time again like a fiend. There is a strangely synthetic ebb and flow between the rock and noise formalism of the GW universe, and the true mystery of the record is in that psychedelic space between, as easy as shifting your eyes around on a hologram.
“Carleen’s Yard” is my favorite track. It’s like sloshing around a seedy precinct inside a shitty multi-FX pedal on wheels; the unsettling future sound of the everyday urban carnival come to life in dub vision 4D. Tons of dark secrets to uncover there and all throughout this super record.
