Welcome to another installment of the Aether Everywhere Radio show & Podcast – This weeks show Features the entirety of Ride’s now classic Shoegaze barn burner “Nowhere”. While it would seem logical that any show highlighting Shoegaze would focus mainly on that Colossal 900lbs gorilla of Shoegaze “Loveless” I assume anyone who’s interested in the genre has already spent umpteen hours in headphones pouring themselves over Mr. Shield’s genius megablown masterpiece.

So where do you go from there?

Might I suggest, Nowhere. No quite the boiled down wall of sound that the genre would later be defined by – Ride prefer instead to keep the instruments separated in the mix, taking painstaking steps to keep everything apparent even in the midst of some of the greatest psych freakouts this side of the 1980s (Spacemen 3, put your hands down…) – The Melodies are strong and anthemic, and the energy is in the same deep breath airy, driving and Lysergic.

Nowhere is an album as comfortable to be your secret soundtrack in headphones as it is charging out of your car stereo. One tip though – if you’re listening to Nowhere out on the open road, roll down the windows, turn it up – and take it all in. As the title suggests this is music for the moment, fuck the destination. – Tanner

Aether Everywhere #13: Shoegazing

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1.Chapterhouse – Breather // 2.Jesus & Mary Chain – Sugar Ray // 3.Seefeel – Filter Dub (1-01 Mix) // 4.Slowdive – Souvlaki Space Station // 5.Galaxie 500 – Another Day // 6.Pale Saints – Sight of You // 7.Spiritualized – Sway // 8.Seefeel – Climactic Phase No. 3 // 9.Swervedriver – Duress // 10.My Bloody Valentine – Soon // 11.Ride – Leave them all Behind

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the last free-improv band playing at this years jazzfest that i’m going to profile is called hardcell. hardcell is a three piece band led by veteran nyc downtown scene saxophonist tim berne. also featuring Craig Taborn on piano and Tom Rainey on drums, hardcell creates music that “captivates as it zigzags through wild improvisation in the service of advancing complex composition.” avant garde that grooves. mercy.

wednesday june 4th at 8:30pm

flynnspace

$23

The second show in the free-jazz realm at this years burlington discover jazz festival is trio 3. trio 3 is an all star jazz band featuring oliver lake, reggie workman, and andrew cyrille. playing everything from bop to blues, avant garde to free, trio 3 is an improvisational force that should not to be missed.

oliver lake (alto sax) got his start in the late 1960’s with the black artists group, a multidisciplinary artist collective based out of st. louis. he later went on to form the world saxophone quartet.

reggie workman (bass) joined the john coltrane quartet in 1961, appearing on the albums Live at the Village Vanguard & ole coltrane. since then he has woreked with everyone from art blakey and thelonious monk to archie shepp and yusef lateef.

andrew cyrille (drums) was the long time drummer for cecil taylor in the 1960’s. he has recorded drum duets with milford graves and is one of the originators of the non-linear style of free jazz drumming.

monday june 2nd 8:30pm

flynnSpace

$25

Yes indeed, boys and girls. For those of you who have read for years about the now-legendary late-90s/early-00s output from Wolfgang Voight’s ambient project, Gas, but have been less than interested in forking over $80 for Pop on Amazon, this is your lucky month. Long out of print, Gas’ four bulletproof albums, Gas, Zauberberg, Konigsforst, and Pop are finally being reissued as a box set and will be released at some point in May (I’m too lazy to google the exact date(-ed I can’t find an exact release date either…)). Voight tapped into something awe-inspiring on these releases, with the majority of his tracks featuring ghostly Wagnerian string and horn samples, an assortment of pops and clicks, and a steady 80 bpm house beat to anchor it all. While this may sound slightly incongruous and simple on paper, it’s nothing short of magical when you slap on a decent pair of headphones.

For the Aether Everywhere radio show, we featured the ‘98 release Zauberberg in its entirety, and followed that with several tracks from Konigsforst and Pop. Pop always seems to be the critical darling of the bunch, which is understandable, as Voight pushed his trademark sound into a more resplendent, accessible realm, but I personally find the other two albums to be right there with it. If your interest is piqued, and you missed out on the absolutely transcendent experince that is Josh-and-Tanner-awkwardly-stumbling over-words-in-a-public-forum, do yourself a favor and check out the podcast we’re supplying (if it’s not here yet, check back shortly), then hightail it down to Pure Pop and scoop up the full albums. Then try to listen to anything else for the next two months…

-josh

Aether Everywhere Podcast #12

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This year, the Burlington Discover Jazz Festival is bringing three acts in the free-jazz vein, and I plan to profile all of them for you. The first and most exciting is jazz legend Ornette Coleman.

Born in Fort Worth Texas in 1930, Coleman burst onto the scene in 1959 with ‘The Shape of Jazz to Come’ his first major release which has been called “a watershed event in the genesis of avant-garde jazz, profoundly steering its future course and throwing down a gauntlet that some still haven’t come to grips with.” Featuring long time Coleman collaborators Don Cherry, Billy Higgins, and Charlie Haden (all three important free-jazz musicians on their own) this album established Ornette as a major player in the jazz avant-garde.

The very next year Ornette Coleman released ‘Free Jazz: a Collected Improvisation’ Recorded with a double quartet, ‘Free Jazz’ featured Coleman, Don Cherry, Scott LeFaro, and Billy Higgins in the left channel and Freddie Hubbard, Eric Dolphy, Charlie Haden, and Ed Blackwell in the right. With this album, clocking in at over 40 minutes, Ornette coined the term ‘free jazz’ as well as setting the standard for large group improvisation- influencing everything from John Coltranes ‘Ascension’ to the Peter Brotzman Octets ‘Machine Gun’

For the last 50 years Ornette Coleman has been at the forefront of the jazz avant-garde. Since the release of ‘Free Jazz’ he has continued to push musical boundaries, and has collaborated with the likes of Jimmy Garrison, Elvin Jones, Dewey Redman, Pat Metheney, and even Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead. In 2007 he won the Pulitzer Prize in Music for his album ‘Sound Grammar’

His current band features Ornette Coleman, alto saxophone, trumpet and violin; Denardo Coleman, drums; Tony Falanga, acoustic bass; Al MacDowell, electric bass; Charnette Moffat, electric bass.

Saturday, June 7th 8pm

Flynn Mainstage

Tickets $75/$47/$37

Just getting around to listening to the web stream of The Radiator; now I’m hooked. Today is Saturday, which means SpittingOutTeeth, if I’m not mistaken. I’m feeling dark ‘n’ heavy (or is that just the Guinness?) so it should hit the spot.

End Transmission.

The MXR M-169 Carbon Copy Analog Delay
Review by Jay Blanchard (Spitting Out Teeth)

It wasn’t really my intention to buy an MXR Carbon Copy analog delay. I had been reading a lot about the new Boss RE-20 Space Echo pedal, and I was convinced that I needed one so I went to Daddy’s music shop to try it out. While I was there, I noticed the Carbon Copy and thought it wouldn’t hurt to have another delay/echo unit to compare it to.

While I didn’t dislike the RE-20 (it’s actually a really cool pedal; Boss is doing some amazing stuff with COSM), it just didn’t compare with the lush, warm analog tones of the Carbon Copy. I thought the RE-20 was going to sell me with the weird tones, but the Carbon Copy is a fine pedal for experimental music in its own right, with some wicked self-oscillation (more on this later).

After playing around with both pedals for an hour (and severely freaking out the rock dudes at Daddy’s with my spacey noise & drones), my decision was made—the RE-20 stays, the Carbon Copy is going home with me.

I’ve had the pedal for a couple of weeks now & I’ve been able to test it out pretty thoroughly with everything from clean guitar slap delays to doom metal riffage to running an analog synth through it & a half-dozen other pedals. As a result, I think I’ve discovered most of its strengths and limitations.

PROS:

Gorgeous analog tone
Incredibly simple to use
Small footprint
Plays well with others

CONS:

Hard to access modulation controls
Blinding LEDs
Quality control issues
Not “true” bypass

I’ll go into a bit more depth on each of these, staring with the pros:

TONE: For a $150 pedal, this thing sounds damn good. I never really considered buying an analog delay before because A) they were too expensive (AD-999, Moogerfooger) and B) I already had my DD-20 Giga Delay. After five minutes with the Carbon Copy, I realized that my DD-20 would be relegated to only effects work and looping from now on. The DD-20 just sounds so sterile now compared to the CC.

EASE OF USE: Three knobs and a button. You have controls for mix (wet/dry signal), regen (number of delay repeats) and delay (timing of delay, from 1-600ms; most analog delays only go to 300ms). There is also a small button to activate the modulation, which adds a nice, subtle chorusy sound to the repeats. The only noobie issue may be with learning the limitations of the settings before the pedal goes into wild self-oscillation. You’ll learn quickly though on the first time you set the Regen to max and the Delay to min—it’s LOUD! That said, once you learn the boundaries of the oscillation, you can play around them to create some really cool spacey sound effects, great for experimental ambient/drone recordings.

SMALL FOOTPRINT: Most analog delays (such as the previously mentioned AD-999 and Moogerfooger) are large pedals that take up a lot of space on the pedalboard. The Carbon Copy is anorexic by comparison—it’s the same size an MXR Phase 90, which is about 75% of the size of an average Boss pedal. The CC also looks nice too—an eye-catching dark green paintjob with blue sparkles mixed in.

PLAYS WELL WITH OTHERS: I ran the Carbon Copy in the second spot of a pedal chain which included an Effector 13 Synth Mangler, the DD-20 and a Holy Grail reverb. I was expecting to have all of the analog sucked dry by having it in a chain with a bunch of non-true bypass digital pedals, but surprisingly most of the nice warm attributes of the CC’s tone were retained.

Sounds pretty great so far, huh? Well, here are a few of the cons:

MODULATION: While the Carbon Copy offers modulation, it probably would have been better if MXR just left it off completely & saved a few bucks. While the modulation on/off switch is conveniently located on the front of the pedal, the controls to set the modulation amount are housed INSIDE of the pedal (one of the payoffs of such a small pedal is limited real estate). You can adjust the amount/rate of modulation by adjusting the internal trim pots with a jeweler’s screwdriver. Kind of a pain, especially for experimental music where you may want to adjust modulation on the fly.

Also, even once you crank the modulation to max, it’s still really subtle—nowhere near the nice warbly effects you get with, say, an Earthquaker Devices Disaster Transport. You can always remedy this by just adding a pitch shifter and chorus pedal into your mix though.

LEDs: Ok, this isn’t necessarily a con for some people, but the blue LEDs (there are two of them) on the Carbon Copy are bright. No, not “bright”, BRIGHT. Blindingly bright, to the point that they will light up a small darkened room. Like I said, for some performers this may be a plus, as it gives you a better view of your board at shows. But for performers who rely on a dark ambience for their shows (or just don’t like to be blinded while tweaking the pedal during rehearsals/recording) might find it annoying; I know I sure do. My solution—just put some small pieces of masking tape over the LEDs. You can still see that they’re on, but it tones down the brightness quite a bit.

QUALITY CONTROL: Apparently a lot of users have had to return their CC’s due to issues with the Regen control—it goes from a single repeat to 6 or 7, instead of a gradual increase. This wasn’t a problem with mine, but I figured I’d mention it as it seems common. A good way to avoid this is to demo & buy your pedal at a local music store instead of online. I haven’t really found the price on this pedal to be much better on Musician’s Friend or Amazon anyhow.

BYPASS: There’s a lot of controversy as to whether this pedal is “true bypass” (i.e hard-wired so that you don’t lose tone). MXR apparently claims it is, while all the tech geeks out there are saying that it isn’t—while it uses a bypass method it isn’t “true” true bypass. Whatever. It sounds damn good to me and I don’t notice any tone loss at all, especially when compared to my DD-20, which is a real tone sucker.

So that’s it. The cons really aren’t that bad in my opinion, and the syrupy analog sounds more than make up for it. And it’s great for all types of music, from doing cheesy U2/Edge covers to Floydian echoes to spacey experimental soundscapes. If you’re looking for a true bucket-brigade analog delay pedal at a relatively low price, you can’t go wrong with the MXR Carbon Copy. Any questions or comments can be followed up in the forums here

MSRP $149.

For last night’s radio show, we featured some fantastic minimal techno, courtesy of the Basic Channel/Chain Reaction family. Basic Channel was a production team and label formed in the early ‘90s in Berlin, Germany, and it began as a collaboration between Moritz Von Oswald and Mark Ernestus. The two set out to put a new spin on Detroit techno, infusing it with dubby textures and grainy production that often makes you feel like you’re listening to the music from another room.

Each producer released vinyl-only cuts under various monikers, and some of these tracks were edited and compiled on Basic Channel’s lone self-titled album, released in 1995. That’s what we served up for our first set. The diversity of these tracks is staggering–one minute you’re hearing Manuel Gottsching’s E2-E4 being played from the bottom of a canyon, the next you’d swear you were listening to a lost track from Zuckerzeit-era Cluster. Needless to say, this stuff helped to establish a whole new strain of dance music–you know, the kind you really can’t dance to–and created ripples that can still be detected in some of the best music being released today.

Basic Channel branched off into other notable entities, and probably the most important of these is the Chain Reaction label. For our second set, we included four long tracks, and three of these were culled from artists on Chain Reaction–Monolake, Porter Ricks, and Fluxion. (The fourth artist, Maurizio, is one of the pseudonyms for Von Oswald.) Each track highlights different avenues being explored while still adhering to the minimal dub-techno template established by Basic Channel. If you have a penchant for experimental dance music and interesting production techniques, you’ll be all over this. Check out our second set, and as always, if you like what you hear, track down and buy the albums. Also, feel free to drop us a message–we’re always open to suggestions and feedback. Enjoy the sunny Friday!

Aether Everywhere Podcast #11 – The Basic Channel Family