First Impressions 027: Martin Phillipps, post-rock boogie-downs, 80s cosplay, two references to The Necks and more.

Initial vibes on new music

Hello,

A friend sent me picture of an ad in the back of a music magazine from New Zealand. On the smallest square of all the spruiking spots, a songwriter offered the opportunity for you to purchase a custom-built song - any subject matter, any style. The subject matter was one thing, but if it were me taking up the offer, I’d have asked the songwriter to do it their way. The songwriter was Martin Phillipps. It must have been a tough rock bottom for the leader of The Chills, who once sung of ‘hoping to keep all the silences out of my life’. 

I’ve not seen the documentary about Phillipps, who died last week, on his life and work with The Chills, though it’s been uploaded here for free viewing until next Monday. However, from his songs I discovered a man who found a way to draw joy from pain in how he moved through the world, and did so with a defiance that stood up to observe but beat the odds. Phillipps was not exactly a sunny-side up sort of guy in the mould of one of his clear heroes, Brian Wilson. He revelled in the connection he could make wearing a dead friend’s jacket while also seeing it as a cursed gift. The pull away from home when The Chills were afforded the chance to tour the world on the back of early acclaim was both a high and banal – a mirror to the past he sought to revise, reinvent and dream in once he was happy with the new shape he’d given it, at least in song. One song where the only repeated refrain was ‘There is no harm in trying’ seemed to be more for his benefit than ours.     

His huge vision for melody and atmosphere struck a love for classic pop and yielding to idiosyncrasy to give The Chills an uncanny depth of complex feeling and pure listening pleasure. It seemed after being crushed by America’s wavering interest in New Zealand music along with the many band splits and the personal battles he faced, The Chills’ canon may have been reduced to a relic of time, though they had a triumphant second phase, beginning with the Silver Bullets album arriving nearly 15 years after the previous, Sunburnt. I would listen to these records and note they felt more boisterous than the earlier work, and I imagined Phillipps playing each song with his chest puffed out – the defiance in his DNA kicking in on his unlikely return. Still there was also the Phillipps who once sung about living in a kaleidoscope world, a realm of colour and light also bound by repeating patterns: “We’ll never die in our kaleidoscope world” Living in the memory of things was one of Phillipps’ obsessions, and the irony of his death while his music exists is one he would surely have found both curious and amusing. Thank you, Martin.     
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OK, let’s go:

Southside Girl – Jonnine: Artists will tell you songs are never fully formed, even once recorded and released. The solo work of HTRK’s Jonnine Standish takes this edict to the hilt to where any sense of varnish or second guessing would crush their spark. Jonnine’s songs are idiosyncratic approximations of her internal understandings of the things of everyday life – gardening, tea with friends, a visit to the beach - in constant exchange between imagined and real time. Like the domestic-recording heavy work of claire rousay, Southside Girl comes at cozy from odd angles. Vintage clocks play in and out of sync, rhythms and melodies look to catch onto trails of birdsong, a duo of rain drizzle and recorder - I wonder if Jonnine once spent a lot of time in the mirror with a hairbrush for a mic and now lives out the next steps with a little recording gear and a lot of imagination.  

Total Blue – Total Blue: Like the idea of Thundercat making a record for Windham Hill, Los Angeles’ Total Blue are riding a smooth freeway towards establishing a utopia for Frankengenre cosplay. Too pepped for the new age set or not jazzed enough for today’s jazz-not-jazz, Total Blue is more an emblematic outpouring of an era over style – the 80s – with the rush of virtuosity at the core of their silky expanse. They’re an engine room of three finessing oscillating beams of glassy synth washes, ambient slap bass, guitar filigrees and rhythms on the cusp of codpiece thrust into what the soundtrack for the new Beverly Hills Cop movie could have been. Except there are no cheesy moves or big grabs here – everything is played out for deep cool from places you’d least expect.

Žaltys - Raphael Rogiński: The call to this new album from the Polish guitarist was strong, with Futurism Restated’s Philip Sherburne and Zen Sounds’ Stephan Kunze both exultant about the singularity of his solo guitar. Žaltys is my introduction to his work and it’s indeed the lightning in a bottle they both suggest, his playing full of notes tumbling in freefall or climbing in ascent simultaneously to enigmatic effect. I’m not so much reminded of other guitarists than The Necks’ pianist Chris Abrahams and the more relentless movements of his playing that magically transform into the weightlessness of fine mist. I wouldn’t normally crib from a press rleease, but Rogiński says the album is intended to evoke a memory of “floating on a lake at night and looking at the stars in the sky”. He divines this perfectly.

Natur – KMRU: Nairobi’s Joseph Kamaru has built a body of work up there with the likes of Fennesz and William Basinski, inhabiting a rare space in drawing romantic gestures from static with the same intensity as a great love song. His affinity for sonic decay and detritus is to make it life’s reflection of true feeling. This longform piece casts Kamaru’s innate understanding of the immediate space around us through its sound properties with an almost hallucinatory potency. With long tones playing out in near slow motion, somewhere between tense and beautiful, Natur is a highwire rendering of nature’s absolute lack of stillness, where our connection is embedded in the sounds we least associate with it.

Are Possible – Nathan Bowles Trio: Six years since their debut and this trio of banjo, upright bass and drums cut their compositional approach right down to the bare wood, steering the mesmeric possibilities of American primitive towards the intersection of minimalism and fusion. Each member plays with a humble openness and patient measure, casting them as a kind of backporch-style take on The Necks. There’s a similar spirit-raising in their synergy, though Bowles’ six-string pluck and verve leads the way for the rhythm section of double-bassist Casey Toll and drummer Rex McMurry to bounce off each other in a rippling post-rock boogie down. It’s a bright, endearing flight.          

Onda – Drum & Lace: London-via-Florence composer Sofia degli Alessandri-Hultquist has a knack for creating works as highly propulsive as they are immersive, offering a depth charge to her compositions likely honed by her experience in the tightly-wound TV industry. With more room to move when out on her own heels, Onda’s arpeggiated synths and pacy tech-house are delicately speckled with flickering detail, vocal coos and swooping textures that rise and fall with dramatic pull. It’s an exquisite heat she cradles, the sort that frees the senses in its radiant release.

Thanks for reading.
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Andrew Khedoori is the curator of Longform Editions.
First Impressions visual by Mark Gowing.