QA’A (pronounced, simply, “Ka”) is a Barcelona-based band on Màgia Roja, an indie psychedelic/noise record label. Their latest record, “Chi’en” (2009) was mixed and mastered at Faust Studios in Germany, with support from Hans Joachim Irmler himself. And after listening to it, it’s clear to me why Irmler might have become involved: “Chi’en” is a powerful effort that has much of the focus, daring, and breadth of vision of the great krautrock acts of the 60s and 70s.
   This is a bold, uncompromising record. QA’A feels completely assured as it explores territory that’s by turns mantra-like and hypnotic, shrieking-atonal, funky-jazzy, spare and rustic, tribal and antic, or just plain unclassifiably alien. “Chi’en” operates on a daunting scale (six songs averaging over thirteen minutes apiece) and what’s impressive is that the songs are largely justified in their length — each track is a mini-LP unto itself, full of plot-twists, about-faces, climaxes and codas that, for the most part, cohere.
   Take “Peeling Off”, 25 exhilarating, frightening minutes of everything from Cromagnon (the band, but also the early human) ritualistic mutterings, Amon Duul bonfire-chants, chiptune glitch-beats, Pollock-like tangles of guitar noise, and sax wails straight out of The Stooges’ “L.A. Blues”. This is obviously the kind of thing you’re either reading about right now and thinking: “Hell yes!” or “Umm, no” — soundscapes like this are a bit polarizing. Often, the only way a band can make 25 minutes of this kind of sound-adventure compelling is to either do what it does here and provide endless variety and richness of texture, or let the exploration unfold against a grid of pattern — something QA’A consistently does in “Chi’en” through recurring guitar motifs & catchy bass riffs. What this does is properly ground each song’s far-reaching explorations. Think of some of the more anarchic passages in “Daydream Nation”, where Shelley’s drumming can anchor Lee & Thurston’s twin Fender soundscapes. You have that kind of magic going on here on “Chi’en”, and it’s not only impressive as hell but a lot of fun to listen to — this is a band delighting in the possibilities of sound.
   Other highlights include the way the guitars tidal-waved in about halfway through the opener, “Eastdown Westdown”, after a mysterious underwater opening full of tense, hushed vocals. The squalls of feedback at the track’s close provided satisfying release. I also loved the Can-like percussion breakdown mid-way through “Speaker Box”, and the whole of “She Provides”, with its menacing bassline, demented pitch-bent guitar riff, and firestorm of catharsis. It’s the second to last track, and by this point the record has grown steadily more exploratory with each song, culminating in the free-form lunacy of “Peeling Off”. “She Provides” in this context is like a seizure after some kind of bout of chemical madness. And after this kind of frenzy comes the only thing that can or should come — rest in the form of the pastoral, restrained, acoustic closer “Chi’en”.
    The record has flaws — passages in some of the songs, particularly “Speaker Box”, overstay their welcome, even if you’re like me and don’t mind music taking its time to unfold. Also, some of the production and instrumentation feels like it’s only paying homage to the past, where involving more of the present would have been welcome (example: I would have loved more of the glitch-core breakdowns in “Peeling Off” dispersed throughout the record).
    It’s rare that a record this vast & bursting with ideas and sounds (definitely try with a pair of good headphones), is able to hang together not only song by song but in its conception as a whole. This only happens when a band knows what it wants and isn’t afraid to take itself as seriously as its vision demands. That kind of presence in the world of contemporary psych/prog is rare — compromise and lack of technique find many bands noodling away in lo-fi under-reach. Not these guys. With “Chi’en” they’ve made a fearless second record that proves the spirit of late 60s experimental music is alive and well, thank you, and is living in Barcelona in a room in the House of QA’A.
   

C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2010
   
   
More of QA’A on the web:
   
www.myspace.com/houseofqaa

Màgia Roja

I saw Azita open up for Stephen Malkmus at Irving Plaza in New York several years ago. Malkmus was terrific — all drawl and solos, and I can’t get that floppy bowl cut he wore out of my mind — but it was Azita who stayed with me until long after the show was over. I was struck by her singing, edgy and free and swooping in and around vowels, scooping out vowels with an unpolished spoon. Sharp and flat in the right ways, like Astrud Gilberto; moving in and around her head voice, from nasal to back of throat to everywhere else, lending her voice this totally distinctive elasticity. And those melodies — they completely insinuated themselves in me by show’s end, winding and complex, knotted, beguiling. I bought the LP “Enantriodromia” soon after.

I haven’t listened to the album in probably 8 months. So when I put it in this evening — it’s still playing now — I had this thrill, this shock of glad recognition. Don’t you love that? When you realize a forgotten record has burrowed deeply into you, into strata you had no idea it had possessed the power to penetrate. Maybe its her melodies — I believe that part of the power of a well-constructed, complex melody is its capacity to imprint the brain more deeply, sink down into its trenches, its Marianas, like a kind of tremendous galleon, sink down and stay there for centuries, attracting kelp and wolf eels and endless glittering shoal. Like Van Dyke Parks’ melodies, like Brian Wilson melodies, like certain melodies of Debussy or that of Chopin’s ‘Barcarolle’… the density of the melody helps it anchor down in the peat of the brain, slowly effervescing up through the soil, leaking good rust for months and years, blooming, ripening, gaining emotional power.

I love this record. I love her honest voice, honest and open like Oldham’s, Guthrie’s. Simple despite its restlessness and leaps and changes in timbre. I particulary dig “Birds”, its buoyant scatted passage, its arresting chord change right at “Birds have grown up singing in the trees”. I love her piano playing, instinctive and serving well those endlessly-surprising slanted harmonies of hers. Tons of extended chords, diminished chords, so much tension and suspension that so richly satisfies and never feels confrontational or difficult for the sake of it: a kind of dancing slowly and to one side, with unusual but necessary bodily contortions, like a kind of aural Butoh.

This record is a spell: long and hypnotic incantations, multiple languages, strange symbols woven into the air, complex results that reveal themselves in time. Letting this record into you is like waking up one day in a house of gordian-knotted ribbon and vine; such rare pleasure in stretching your limbs, admiring the whorling braids, pulling it all in and over you like blankets.
   

AZITA’s Offical Website

   
C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2009

A man in the corner rattled a horn.

Another man with a long braided beard-tail carried a cymbal on a rope. He let it brush against the floor and shivered it there, giving the room some shimmery metal hiss. Sometimes he’d use his feet to play with it and pick it up. Then he would hover it and swing it, slowly & carefully, with purpose. Like you would wave and shake a censer.

This man would walk back through the seated crowd sometimes, through the aisle, not in confrontation, but just as you would move your arms in a stretch and kick your feet out in a stretch because you want to uncoil.

A woman flailed against a piano, her palms rapidly striking blocks of keys. Sometimes she slapped a cymbal. I think I saw her on the floor.

Another man played drums. What he played was sturdy and necessary. A frame for wild ivy to grow in and around.

They kept moving and changing position. They kept bringing out different drums, different instruments. Their restlessness soothed. Restless the way birds seem. Constant motion without tension.

Sounds emerged and died over time, naturally and without fuss. Guitar sounds, percussive sounds, breathy pants and moaning sounds, organ-like keyboard rumbles. All of it shifting in and out of place naturally and imperceptibly, like a star fading as dawn begins to glow, like leaves of certain tropical plants turning to face or unface the sun.

The music they brought was not a song, it was without beginning or end, it was like a jungle waterfall you approach, sit beside, feel the rushing misty balm of, and then leave behind: it was falling before you got there and it will keep falling when you’re gone. It doesn’t care about you and at the same time will always need a witness.

   
C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2009
   

No Neck’s Myspace

   

Soundatone Records [order No Neck stuff here]

I just got into the Greek music known as Rebetika. I first read it about it in Eugenides’ Middlesex, and not long after, my friend Anthony by good chance happened to get a Rough Guide Rebetika compilation. I devoured it, loved all of it.

But one song consistently on that record consistently leaves me breathless. I don’t understand what’s being sung and I don’t need to:
   

Andonios ‘Dalgas’ Dhiamandidhis: ‘Manes Tsergiach’
   

The gasping, arcing vocal, the shivery vibrato, the fits of melisma. The sighs at 2:47 and onward, death sighs, lust-sighs, grief-sighs. The recessed commentary right after. What is this? Where do you go from this? I think Pavement came on right after on my Itunes and the disconnect was so profound I had to stop the track cold.

This music, this haunted and alien music so anxious to be known, like old Dust Bowl pictures and the families in them squinting into the camera.

I hear it and I know the heart can — almost perversely — suckle pain and dread like freshly bitten strawberries.
   
C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2009

    (Photo credit to red nails, wrongcity)
   
     

      “Hungry Saw” was not a favorite Tindersticks record of mine when it was released. Aside from abut three or four cuts, it struck me as a very respectable effort which suffered from mediocre performances & material in its first half and which was lopsidedly rich in emotion and re-playability in its second. No Curtains, but what the hell is?
      But last night, live, the record — which they played in its entirety aside from a middle suite of older material and an encore — ripened and grew into itself, lent strength by the urgency of the band’s delivery. Terry Edwards and the brass/woodwinds accompaniments in general helped the songs reach intense emotional swells of force only hinted at in studio. And Stuart with his slight bodily stutter, his seductive and slightly-medicated sway, his maracas-shaking rhythm-keeping, helped fulfill each “Hungry Saw” song to what was promised on record.
      I recognized many of the songs as if for the first time, like people who I’d seen through rainy windows. “Yesterdays Tomorrows” is a good example, lent drama onstage which never hit me on LP. “E-type” too was so amped with swagger & sheer drive. “Boobar”, a favorite of mine on record, emerged stronger live as well — the band storming out of the hushed bridges, jovial and grinning at one another, mastering the song’s swells in and out of hush and gentleness.
      Total truism, but this is why seeing music live matters. To see loved songs not so much transformed as fulfilled, like sketches blooming with color before your eyes — to have your later listenings enriched with memory, as if memory was another instrument, another section in the orchestra — there aren’t words for that magic.
      My only disappointment is the continued absence of Dickon Hinchcliffe [I think it was your standard creative-differences split between he and Staples, but not sure] — or some other live violin player capable of rounding out the Tindersticks’ sound with some of Hinchcliffe’s gorgeous arrangements. Hinchcliffe’s contributions to the band’s sound were enormous, defining — and I miss his touch on “Hungry Saw”, I miss his baroque and anguished lines, his dissonances, his sweep and pathos, and his soulful vocal lines on “Waiting for the Moon” and “Can our Love…”. Still, they did a hell of a job live trying to patch over the hole left by his leaving.

      Other things I remember –

      “My Oblivion”, that swoony crescendoing opiate, a little edgier than on record, absolute fucking lotus.
     
      “My Sister” — I song I never expected to hear live — played with a palpable sense of discovery and spell-casting by the ensemble, especially the delicate otherwordly percussion in the beginning, and that pindrop-hush interlude — the “orange and mustard planets” passage — executed as it needs to be: with wonder, tragedy, enchantment.
     
      Stuart’s gentle, endearing, half-lidded way with the audience and with his band; his searing, brief solos and tremolo-bar chords at the end of “Her”.
     
      What a band. By turns morose, noirish, soul crooning & fanfaring; day of the dead, lullaby gondola-sway, flamenco explosive, carny wobble; raking up love’s gutters and tambourining amid the refuse.
     
      What does everyone else think? Who went?

   
C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2009

Here’s what I remember:

Timed strips of vertical light that glowed hot,
like radioactive piano keys.

Avey’s hunching shoulders, his face scrunching up and widening out,
contracting and dilating as emotion hit him, like a pupil responding to light.
His hoots and barks and punctuating shouts.

Geologist’s spelunker light while he bobbed like a boxer. In front of his wires & equipment, reminding me of a surgeon seen over forceps & tubes and an open chest.

Panda Bear’s big fluffed christmasy sweater, his tender vocals, the way he surprised me by how hard he came down on his drumset, like axes on stumps.

And their sound, all that good wide-eyed flushed swirl lathering up my brain, cleaning it up with kind hands, kind but also startling with its mass and power: Hiss of waves. Propellers. Inhalations. Tropics, crowded bazaars, arguments, coos, marina wave laps and boats leaving. All of it balm, and a little painful at the same time, like scratches on your back.

“Fireworks” and its flangy percussion holding it together like a spine, a long perforated spine, and its melody, its chorus’s wordless melody curving around like a desert snake, curling around and up and down, restless, a gusted ribbon.

“Comfy in Nautica” for the encore, saturating the air with its mantra, the refrain building and building, the sound massing, like children making a sandcastle that’s big enough to scream and sleep in, a soft cathedral built up in you, from outside you.

And all the people around me, glad and dancing, loud & full of thanks.

   
   

After, I was a little raw, almost sad. I couldn’t understand why. It wasn’t because it was over, or too short, or anything like that.

I decided that a show like this can leave you raw, longing for something undefinable. It can peel you back like fruit. As if music was a paring knife, skinning you. A knife with prayers and poems etched in the handle.

   
C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2009