SOUNDTRACK: FALHA COMUM-“Film Do Mundo” (2019).
Every year Lars Gotrich publishes his list of favorite music in an NPR podcast called Viking’s Choice: The Year In The Loud And The Weird. I always listen to these songs because I’ll never hear them anywhere else (he mostly seems to scour bandcamp for unknown music.
One that he especially liked was by this band Falha Comum, a duo from Brazil.
He says:
The Brazilian post-punks scaled down to a duo, but opened a festering third eye. The psychedelic noise receptors of a previous decade (think Raccoo-oo-oon and Gowns) run throughout Rakta’s Falha Comum, but in levels below, the sinister grooves and cackled reverb inhabit a life all their own with primal incantations to spirits unknown.
The album is like a few things and nothing else that I’ve heard. There’s elements of krautrock–but not sterile and efficient, more groovy and cool, with a warm bass and seemingly wild, improvised vocals.
This particular song is 7 minutes long and opens with a spoken word section (presumably in Portuguese). There are synths and screams behind the speaking and then everything starts pulsing as the vocals echo and echo. The music–a simple repetitive drum and bass (I guess) line, keep a terrific groove going while on top, the high notes (vocals and other synths) skitter and flit about.
Midway through, the song goes through a phase shift–it sounds like it’s been transported somewhere else, and that’s when the bass gets cleaner and the vocals grow a bit more intense. But the groove remains.
Somewhere around 6 minutes, the groove changes slightly–a brief shift in notes suddenly gives the song a brief moment of extra melody. The following keyboard frenzy keeps it from getting too comfortably melodic though.
It’s an unexpectedly interesting and cool record.
[READ: Summer 2019] The Long Utopia
This was the fourth book in the Long Earth series. I brought it along on vacation thinking it would be a fairly slow and leisurely read like the others—something I didn’t mind putting down and picking up a few days later. But this book changed that pattern entirely. It was fast paced and quite exciting and my favorite book of the series so far.
The previous book about the Long Mars seemed to be more than anything else, a distraction. Not a lot happened, although there were some cool ideas in it. The one big thing that book 3 did that effects book 4 is the cable/elevator thing—which I still don’t understand [see yesterday’s post about book 3].
This book also introduces a new concept in Stepping. Typically Stepping is described as moving left or right, east or west through the Earths. But suddenly, in this one world, it seemed like a person could move…north. Into an entirely different world—night instead of day: “No stars exactly, it was like he could see the whole galaxy…from outside.”
This book is set in 2052. Protagonist Joshua Valiente:
will be 50 years old. He has been stepping for 35 years and has been all over the Long Earth. But some things are still unsettling—things that he can feel in his bones or his head.
The reason for his feelings date back to 2036 in New Springfield. Cassie Poulson had been digging a basement for her house when she hit some kind of opening. Not a cave or anything natural, but some kind of manufactured tunnel or the like. When she poked her head in, what poked back was a humanoid metal beetle. Obviously she freaked out and covered up the hole. Continue Reading »
SOUNDTRACK: TANYA TAGAQ-Toothsayer EP (2019).
Earlier this year, Tanya Tagaq released a five-song EP to accompany the British National Maritime Museum’s “Polar Worlds” exhibit.
I had never heard of Rahsaan Roland Kirk before reading this story. This surprises me since i rather like avant garde jazz. I looked him up and was blown away by 
I Just Read About That... 