Andrea Parker "Here's One I Made Earlier" (2007)

'Here's One I Made Earlier' [iTunes Link] is a collection of Andrea Parker productions, many of which pre-date her Mo Wax years yet still show her keen ear for haunting melody, abstract rhythms, found sounds and subtle atmospheres. Predominantly recorded alongside her long time studio partner David Morley, this collection of inspirational electronics unveils long deleted and lost gems from the vaults of such esteemed labels such as Infonet, K7!, Apollo (R&S) and Quatermass. From the beautifully brooding 'After Dark' to the floating introspective tones of 'Too Strange To Be Good', Andrea Parker shows just how diverse her musical heritage is. Known for her dark, experimental sets and sublime productions, Parker has pioneered sonic abstraction and electronic beats for some fifteen years now - the grandma of electro! An avid enthusiast of classic analogue synthesizers and drum machines such as the Arp, Serge, Buchla, Fairlights and of course the 808, she chooses them over the current fashion for software. She enjoys using found sounds that are sampled and manipulated. Her music production method is both unconventional and experimental: she has used the sound of her own sneezes, car tyres running over cat's eyes on the road and strapped a mic to the bottom of her car whilst going through a car wash to create bass tones. The result of this is an open-minded innovative view. Early on she collaborated on some electronic adventures as Inky Blacknuss (with Alex Knight) producing timeless gems like 'Blacknuss', and then formed Two Sandwiches Short Of A Lunchbox with David Morley on Apollo/R&S who went on to produce the classic EP 'Angluar Art' (Infonet), both of which can be heard on this new but old collection. In time she signed to Mo Wax, releasing the singles 'Melodius Thunk' , 'The Rocking Chair' , 'Ball Breaker' and the full length album 'Kiss My Arp'. Parker's productions have many emotions and sonic textures - a fact not lost on the film and advertising fraternity who have used tracks from her output extensively. Their uses and users have been diverse. From a track on blockbuster movie 'Vanilla Sky' where Tom Cruise is dancing to 'Too Good To Be Strange' (unfortunately for Parker he's her worst actor!) and Patrick Moore's 'Sky At Night' to a documentary on NASA and a mugging crime re-enaction on Richard & Judy, her music seems to fit in just about everywhere... including a toilet paper advert in Taiwan, a porn film, The Finnish National Ballet and used by the photographer Nick Knight. Renowned for her remix work, her victims have included Steve Reich, Depeche Mode, Philip Glass, Ryuichi Sakamoto, The Orb, Patrick Pulsinger, Lamb, Tipper, Mira Calix, The Secret Frequency Crew and Nomadic to name just a few. Also featuring on this collection are tracks from 'The Dark Ages' (2000), her mini album on Belgium's Quatermass label, a subsiduary of Sub Rosa and an unreleased nugget all the way back to 1991 in the shape of 'Time Zones'. Her popularity is also shown in the work she gets as a DJ. Parker is versatile, being able to play in dark dingy warehouses to more experimental music on stage with an orchestra. She has a wide variety of musical influences from The Ultra Magnetic MCs, This Mortal Coil, Drexciya, Delia Derbyshire (Parker's idol), Negativland, Nick Drake, ART, Arthur Russel, Clara Rockmore, David Sylvian and Lustmord to name but a few. Which means you'll never hear the same DJ set from her twice (although on some nights depending on what state she's in you may hear her play the same record twice!) Some of her more popular tours included touring with Radiohead, she's experimented live on stage with Bang on a Can, Philip Glass, Steve Reich and a legendary Stockhausen gig with Mira Calix. One off gigs have included playing at a party for director Roman Polanski, fashion house Gucci, the launch of Casio G shock watches, Coca Cola, to an assembly of 2000 architects at a convention in Switzerland. She also back in the day played in Paris and Hong Kong whilst mode 2, Futura and Stash painted works of art live. Parker got fined by the Miami sound Police for noise pollution and during a British Council sponsored tour of South America she survived being beaten up by bouncers, a drive by shooting and a small landslide. Whilst at Autechre's curated ATP she fell down two flights of stairs and knocked herself out unconscious! All in a days work! Luckily, her reputation as a DJ was confirmed by the high sales of her mix for K7's DJ Kicks series. The album showcased the depth of her musical taste fusing hip hop pioneers like Dr Octagon with cutting edge artists Gescom. Other artists included Man Parrish, Afrika Bambaata, Model 500, Drexciya, 69 and Dopplereffekt. The track she made for the mix 'Unconnected' nestles neatly into this collection of abstract melody and dark, murky beats to round of a sterling collection that showcases over a decades worth of experimentation and yet feels like a new artist album. Andrea Parker has always been uncompromising, passionate about the music and loaded with a don't-give-a-shit resolve. She is incredibly hard to pigeon hole: one minute she will be in the studio making dark, haunting yet melodic music, the next she'll be climbing mountains or even appearing in Clark's shoe adverts but underneath it all she still remains a die hard B girl at heart with a healthy appetite for clandestine sonic lab alchemy. She may well be known as 'no1darker' but there is always a melody and structure lurking in the background. Dark yet beautiful, the twelve tracks on display may well have been made earlier but they still sound as fresh as the day they were made.

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Marianne Faithfull Biography

Few stars of the '60s have reinvented themselves as successfully as Marianne Faithfull. Coaxed into a singing career by Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham in 1964, she had a big hit in both Britain and the U.S. with her debut single, the Jagger/Richards composition "As Tears Go By" (which prefaced the Stones' own version by a full year). Considerably more successful in her native land than the States, she had a series of hits in the mid-'60s that set her high, fragile voice against delicate orchestral pop arrangements: "Summer Night," "This Little Bird," and Jackie De Shannon's "Come and Stay with Me." Not a songwriter at the outset of her career, she owes more of her fame as a '60s icon to her extraordinary beauty and her long-running romance with Mick Jagger, although she offered a taste of things to come with her compelling 1969 single "Sister Morphine," which she co-wrote (and which the Stones released themselves on Sticky Fingers later).

In the '70s, Faithfull split up with Jagger, developed a serious drug habit, and recorded rarely, with generally dismal results. This occurred until late 1979, when she pulled off an astonishing comeback with Broken English. Displaying a croaking, cutting voice that had lowered a good octave since the mid-'60s, Faithfull had also begun to write much of her own material, and addressed sex and despair with wrenching realism. After allowing herself to be framed as a demure chanteuse by songwriters and arrangers throughout most of her career, Faithfull had found her own voice, and suddenly sounded more relevant and contemporary than most of the stars she had rubbed shoulders with in the '60s. Faithfull's recordings in the '80s and '90s were sporadic and erratic, but generally quite interesting; Strange Weather, a Hal Willner-produced 1987 collection of standards and contemporary compositions that spanned several decades for its sources, was her greatest triumph of the decade. In 1994, she published her self-titled autobiography; the biography -As Tears Go By by Mark Hodkinson is an objective and thorough account of her life and times.

Faithfull returned to recording in 2002 with Kissin' Time, an eclectic collection of songwriting collaborations with Beck, Damon Albarn, Billy Corgan, Jon Brion, and Jarvis Cocker among others. In 2004, Before the Poison was released in the U.K., making its entrance into the U.S. market in early 2005. This album continued in the vein of its predecessor, with songwriting and production contributions from PJ Harvey, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, Brion, and Albarn, but with far more consistent results.

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White Stripes Album Details

Jack and Meg have emerged with their sixth album, their first for Warner Bros. (which has also taken on the band’s Third Man imprint) and, most importantly, their first with bagpipes. Those are a couple of the surprises on the ultimately straightforward Icky Thump, which will see daylight in June. CMJ was treated to a special advance listen of the 13-track record, which was recorded in a super-long (at least for the Stripes) three-week session in a super-modern studio (for the first time) and clocks in at a super-sized (relatively speaking) 48 minutes.

As long as the Stripes continue their minimalist-duo tradition, their formula for lo-fi blues-punk won't so much continually expand as it will vary ever-so slightly and then snap back to basics. Less ornate and spacious (i.e., no piano whatsoever) than Get Behind Me Satan, Icky (the title's a bastardization of an English term that connotes excitement) isn't exactly De Stijl either. Although the second track, "You Don't Know What Love Is (You Just Do As You’re Told)," is a ferocious melodic rocker not dissimilar from another song with parantheticals, "You’re Pretty Good Looking (For A Girl)." Elsewhere, things jump around from the wild solos of the title track and "Little Cream Soda" (which is more or less no-bullshit garage-metal) to the strange, mariachi-esque madness of "Conquest." (Remember in Election, when that crazy nature call would play when Reese Witherspoon got that wild look in her eye? Think that, but with guitars and horns.) And naturally, as the album draws to its close, we get the more traditional acoustic blues of "Effect And Cause," which sounds like the grandchild of the Stones' "Dead Flowers" (with G 'N R's "Used To Love Her" perhaps being the latter's initial offspring) and "Catch Hell Blues," which lives up to its name by smashing slide-guitar up against a vigorous punk rock chord progression. In between, they even get a little Waterboys on us with the Gaelic jaunt of "Prickly Thorn, But Sweetly Worn."

Icky is another step in a semi-lateral direction for a band that commendably sticks to its humble guns, despite the obvious juxtaposition of being privy to bigger budgets and getting further removed from the true garaginess of their roots. It's very possible that, despite Jack's incredible talent as a musician and songwriter, the Stripes' routine could wear thin if they don't eventually give in to something drastically outside of their comfortable red-and-black box. But for now, there's just enough thump and careful creative leaps in these tunes to keep their Detroit motor runnin'.

Tracklist For Icky Thump:
01. Icky Thump
02. You Don't Know What Love Is (You Just Do As You're Told)
03. 300 M.P.H. Torrential Outpour Blues
04. Conquest
05. Bone Broke
06. Prickly Thorn, But Sweetly Worn
07. St. Andrew (This Battle Is In The Air)
08. Little Cream Soda
09. Rag And Bone
10. I'm Slowly Turning Into You
11. A Martyr For My Love For You
12. Catch Hell Blues
13. Effect And Cause

www.whitestripes.com

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Guillemots "Through the Windowpane" (2006)

With their EP From the Cliffs, the Guillemots introduced themselves as daring, energetic, inventive performers for whom traditional pop notions of harmony and rhythm could be discarded, or at least tweaked, if a better opportunity presented itself. And despite all the warning signs of pretension and inaccessibility, the Guillemots were able to create in From the Cliffs something that was very listenable and fun. Of course, there were problems, but they were problems of over-ambition and -eagerness, and they seemed easy enough to remedy without disrupting the band's rather intricate overall sound. So it comes as somewhat of a surprise that their debut full-length, Through the Windowpane, is a little empty in comparison. Instead of following the lead of the standout EP tracks "Trains to Brazil" and "Made-Up Lovesong #43" (both of which were singles and both of which are among the best cuts on the album), most of the other songs on Through the Windowpane take a slower, more melancholic, and sparser approach, presenting an almost sonically disconcertingly juxtaposition. "If the World Ends," "Redwings," "Little Bear," and "Blue Would Still Be Blue" are all very quiet, relying more on the strength of leader Fyfe Dangerfield's voice — which is often mixed at a very low level — instead of any kind of instrumental arrangement, and in doing so the albums ignores the strength of the band as a whole and ends up as something fairly ordinary sounding, while letting predictable chords and phrases dictate the tone instead of the band's musical ingenuity. The fact that many of these songs are well over three or even four minutes doesn't help the fact that they seem to drag on without ever doing anything, or going anywhere, or showing us anything we haven't seen before. Because the Guillemots are certainly capable of giving us what we haven't got. They're interested in, even obsessed with, the idea of physical space (particularly through the imagery of a windowpane, which is alluded to numerous times throughout the album) and of making space where there is confinement, but it is these slower, emptier songs that are the most claustrophobic, the most constrained, and the most forced. However, and perhaps this just attests to the talents of the musicians and the arranging skills of Dangerfield, their faster, more complex pieces — including and even exemplified by the 12-minute cinematic opus "São Paulo," which moves from Morricone to Brubeck to symphonic swells to a Latin groove — give the feeling of expanse and freedom. Nothing is tied down, everything can move freely and where ever it wants, yet each comes together as part of a very well-constructed whole. It's adventurous but it's still accessible, and contrasts sharply with the near stifling silence of the other pieces. But there's still a kind of inconsistency in the development of Through the Windowpane, an inconsistency that can't quite work itself out in sweeping strings and vaguely dissonant chords, and unfortunately, this diminishes the power of what the album really could be.

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Joan As Police Woman "Real Life" (2006)

2006 debut by this band, who have been receiving rave reviews since their UK live debut at the end of 2005. Joan herself has quite a bit of musical history as a member of The Dambuilders, Black Beetle and Those Bastard Souls as well as backing Rufus Wainwright and being a key member of Antony's Johnsons. Joan's voice has been compared to Dusty Springfield, Chrissie Hynde and Annette Peacock, while the shimmering, melodic music encompasses everything from torch songs to basic Rock 'N' Roll. Contains the singles 'The Ride', 'Eternal Flame', 'Real Life' and 'Christobel'. Reveal.