I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: OFF WORLD-1 [CST117] (2016).

Constellation records had been rather quiet this year in terms of new releases.  And then back in August they announced three new discs with this intriguing blurb:

Constellation’s three new fall releases by Off World, Automatisme and Jason Sharp are dropping on September 30th…  These new releases are wildly different yet satisfyingly leftfield albums that share an electric thread of sorts.  Electronic music strategies, technologies, histories and sensibilities come into play, in very diverse ways, with each of these debut records – making them stand out a little differently in the context of the Constellation catalogue perhaps, but also informing one another and making a lot of sense to our ears as an album trio (somewhat in the spirit of our Musique Fragile series).

This is the first of those three.

Off World is a collaborative project featuring Sandro Perri. As the Constellation site reminds us:

Over the past couple of years, Perri has been letting us in on a fascinating treasure chest of strange and enchanting collaborative sound recordings – rich in deconstructed melody, interplay between acoustic and electronic instrumentation, and pointillist and aleatory composition techniques. … Off World 1 is alien electronics played humanly, with real-world accents throughout. 1 was conceived almost entirely during a 2-day session in London: a meeting orchestrated by producer Drew Brown between himself, Perri, Susumu Mukai and M J Silver after learning that Perri was a huge fan of both Mukai and Silver’s work. A bounty of raw material featuring mostly vintage synthesizers – EMS Synthi, Syntorchestra, Prophet 5 – was later abetted by violin, banjo, harpsichord, guitar and piano. The result is genuinely exploratory and peculiar sui generis instrumental electronic music that sounds like it could have issued from any time in the past 40-50 years. Off World resists easy categorization: not ambient “easy listening”, not strictly “improvised”, not “retro” – but eccentrically absorbing and soothingly mischievous as it charts its own sonic trails.

There are 7 songs on the disc and they are all variants on a kind of electronic/alien sound.  “Primitive Streak” has trippy synth lines and a slightly quavery “solo” over a simple drum beat.  “Old Brain” has a kind of staccato guitar part that plays through quickly.  It is later matched by “New Brain” which explores the same rhythms in a different way.

“No Host” is 80 seconds long  full of simple almost otherworldly synths (it reminds me of Close Encounters). “Extraction” has some loud ominous chords that surge and the recede.  “Choral Hatch” sounds both underwater and other worldly.

The final song, “Wonder Farm” sounds unlike the other songs because it is full of these snapping drum sounds–seemingly at odd intervals and not playing any rhythm (it sounds like fireworks going off).  The music also has hints of Japanese music but it seems overshadowed by the crashes.

Of the three I like this one best because of its varied sounds.

[READ: March 31, 2016] Sardine in Outer Space 3

Sardine is a children’s book published by First Second.  It was originally published in France (and in French) and was translated by Sasha Watson.  There are six Sardine books out.

This time the inner flap says “No Grownups Allowed (Unless they’re pirates or space adventurers),” and I found that I enjoyed book 3 quite a bit more than the first two books. Perhaps it is because I have read a few more First Second books by Sfar and have grown used to his style and humor.  Or perhaps the stories have just gotten better.

I enjoyed the way these stories were playing off of contemporary jokes like how in the first story “The Queen of Applet” when the queen’s Golden Globe is stolen and the detectives that come to investigate are named Dotcom, Doubleclick and Clickalink and they speak in mostly acronyms.  And off they go on a surfboard to find the answer.

In The Space Boxing Championship, Supermeuscleman (the bad guy) is shrunk without losing his strength.  He aims to battle Sardine in a boxing championship.  But he forgets that he is the only one who is now small–the ending of this one is pretty funny.

I enjoyed how in “Topdog Sockabone Club,” one of the characters was called Sawkermama.  Of course soccer is hard to play when the bad guys are cheating the whole time.

The Kingdom of Yummy is a 2-parter that I enjoyed… even if it was unsettling. The whole planet is made of delicious food which appears to be alive or something.  But someone is trying to steal all of the naturally growing yumminess and packaging it as processed food (good message there, eh?)  The good guys escape by unpacking canned food (including calves brains, ew) and assembling an animal to help them.

“Why Don’t We Make a Movie” introduces a film director named Kubik.  This was a fun meta story (as many of these are–the kids often say that they are famous and in one story they give their comics to the bad guys to laugh over while the kids escape).  Kubik describes the kind of movie he wants to make, and as he describes it that’s exactly the action that is happening in the panels (in “real life”). In the end they say it’s not for them.

“Captain Ruddy” is about an old pirate imprisoned by Supermeuscleman.  And in “Get Rid of Toxin” Doc Krok creates a baby in his lab. The baby is born in an exact replica of Doc Krok’s head.  When Supermuscleman says that babies aren’t born in people’s heads, the doc explains…”babies that grow in bellies are dumb as the bellies themselves: they just want to eat and poop. But a baby built in my skull will be a genius.”  The baby, Toxin, has one goal–to rid the world of Sardine,

“The Sabotage Artist” is hilariously meta in that all of the characters are protesting because they are so badly drawn.  They shoot eraser missiles which put white streaks across the page.

The final Story “Universal Attraction” posits that the reason planets spin is because they listen to great music from the band Universal Attraction.  But Supermuscleman plans to turn the band into something else entirely–Fatal Distraction.

I feel like the stories really came together in a more fun way in this book. The overuse of Supermuscleman is still something of a problem, but at least they are varying the stories a lot more.