local fidelity continues their series of local artist q&a’s by interviewing sydney soundscaper tommy mcsmith aka cleptoclectics. asked to describe his music, he responds with “swinging interval meditations” and “syncopated granulation edits”, and mentions that his dream collaborator would be rahsaan roland kirk. he also reveals:

I find Sydney isolates people a little, I’ve found it easier so far to get gigs in other cities. I’ve played almost as much in Melbourne, without really trying, even though I hardly knew anyone down there when I started. So my music isn’t made with much consideration for my immediate context, which is I think something that a lot of music from Sydney has in common, a kind of spatial dislocation, which paradoxically comes from the city perhaps.

read more here. local fidelity has also recently posted q&a sessions with catcall, firekites and me too.

tom from cleptoclectics recently put together a mix of jazz and downbeat sounds for our radio show - including faust, tarentel and sun ra - which we’re hosting over at the to and fro website. its a thoughtful mix that will probably make your brain expand a little. also, something you may have missed - a cleptoclectics remix features exclusively on the itunes release of my “changes” ep, which is available here. its his remix of an unreleased faux pas track called “live shine see.”

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and speaking of the radio show - tomorrow night dave and i speak to evan mast from new york’s ratatat about the recording of their new album LP3. i think that the new ratatat album is basically the greatest thing i’ve heard all year, so i had to do my best to avoid completely slobbering all over evan during our pre-recorded interview. it goes to air at midnight australian eastern standard time, tomorrow (tuesday) night, on 3RRR 102.7 FM.

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i’ve noticed some way off the mark reviews of this new ratatat album. the pitchfork review starts off by linking the album in with the concept of production music - on the one hand an interesting way of trying to put ratatat in context (as instrumental composers with a history of commercial placements for their music) - but on the other hand a potentially really lazy way of engaging with instrumental music in general. more worrying for me is the dismissal of the album as merely “a solid instrumental record…” -

“Aside from what visual or informational stimulus someone else augments Ratatat’s music with, there isn’t really that much content there - or, conversely, there’s potential for the music to be and sound like anything but no one discernable identity… Even the best beats on this album feel unfinished without vocals. There’s nothing intrinsically flawed about what’s otherwise a solid instrumental record, but so much of it feels so close to many of the things happening on the radio and the pop charts right now that, 90 seconds into a song, the mind might start wandering and wondering what this kind of stuff would sound like with Wale or Rihanna on top of it.”

Even the best beats on this album feel unfinished without vocals. as someone who has heard more than once the recommendation that i should get some vocals happening on my primarily instrumental music, i find this kind of approach to evaluating ratatat’s music, well, a little offensive. i have no beef with rihanna… mmm, beef with rihanna… but one of the reasons why this album is so captivating, to me anyway, is because of its overwhelming ‘musical-ness’. no vocals required. i know that a lot of people struggle to appreciate instrumental music on its own terms - but, believe it or not, there’s a lot of things to appreciate about music even after lyrics and vocals are removed from the equation (melody, rhythm, ambience, structure, texture, wow its like a whole world of sound)… even saying “removed from the equation” unnerves me a little because it implies that music without vocals is somehow lacking, somehow minus something. anyway, i understand some people don’t get that, but i’d expect more from a reviewer. i think its a credit to ratatat that their music is so laden with melody, structure and instrumentation that it can rival vocal-driven pop music in terms of holding a casual listener’s interest. for me at least, there’s more narrative, more dynamics, more fun in any of the tracks from the recent ratatat album than on most of the fawning indie pop that i hear championed on the radio recently. but of course, i am biased.

for a truly wayward review of the ratatat record, check out the one over at popmatters. i’ve always had a soft spot for the pseudo- (and, in fact, often very non-pseudo, but on-the-money “for-real” booksmarts) academia of the popmatters music reviews, slightly nerdy and bookish, much more likely to light a fire of cultural analysis in your hedgerow than, perhaps like pitchfork, simply try to establish markers of whats cool or not. but their LP3 review is really not so hot. i mean, only in a popmatters review will you have a reviewer attacking an album for not “establishing a leitmotiv or achieving cultural transcendence or musical syntheses.” leitmotiv? at least with popmatters reviews, i’m always learning.

more troubling than leitmotiv is this perhaps very casually thought-through idea of “cultural transcendence” - i’m not entirely sure whats being hinted at here, but i think the implication is that the “international” instrumentation of the album (his word, not mine) is some kind of tokenistic grab at exotica… and thats definitely not what i hear when i listen to the album. i think the use of “international” instrumentation is much more a case of them using what instruments they had at hand to create melody and rhythm. in fact, where other albums maybe falter by too overtly tagging their non-western (or read non-”rock”) elements as ‘ethnic’ or exotic elements - i’m reminded of some of the issues raised in the comment boxes of cyclic defrost last year over emmy hennings’ review of unkle ho’s self-consciously ‘exotic’ album - i think ratatat astutely avoid engaging with that by keeping the focus on ‘musicality.’

i mean, if this dude hears a tabla and immediately starts making assumptions about cultural transcendence or lack there of, it says maybe more about his hang-ups about “western vs exotic” instrumentation than any kind of cultural short-sightedness on the part of ratatat. and well, when he criticises the album for being “culturally amorphous”, i mean… welcome to the 21st century! in this grand paint-bucket blend of culture and globalisation, i’m not sure an album can be criticised for blurring the lines, if thats even what ratatat had in mind. its a shame that he doesn’t hear the album for what it is - a celebration of melody and sound - and instead takes to, in one particularly jarring paragraph, cataloguing the various “international” influences (Middle-Eastern, Japanese, Turkish…. Rasta!) like some kind of dirty laundry list.

anyway, thats just one way in which the review rubs me wrongly. he criticises “Flynn” for not having a beat (! - ); he concedes that “Imperials” succeeds in generating a carousel atmosphere but bemoans its lack of “allegorical motif”; his musical reference point for “Shempi” is, somehow, Justice; and he wraps it up with what reads like a punchline: “After peaking with their tried and true formulas, the group—unintentionally reaching predictability and mediocrity—should look to evolve their sound beyond the arcade and into the dance clubs, and one’s soul.” now thats either criminally misguided music writing or an elaborate and hilarious music-reviewer in-joke.

man it feels good to be a fanboy and come out swinging for one of your favourite bands, on one of the most inconsequential forums for doing such a thing, the goddamn internet! but yeah. they are not the only two “damning with faint praise” reviews i’ve read of LP3, and its just kind of shocked me because i think its one of the better things i’ve heard in ages. it reminds me a little of some of the reviews of the last few air albums - do a bit of googling and try and gauge the critical response to every air record since “moon safari” and you just get a lot of confused people writing reviews that seem to heavily praise them but at the same time kind of slap them with the back of a glove, like, “yeah air, they’re doing what they do, its really amazing, but, um, how boring”. i don’t know. i wonder if ratatat and air both fall into that category of bands who are actually way left of the norm, but accidentally hit upon some kind of wider level of awareness.. celebrated at first and then kind of ignored or castigated later. another example: some of the poor reviews of the last hot chip record. their sound and approach didn’t change much - but reviewers’ reaction to them did. anyway.

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and now, to lighten the mood… here is rahsaan roland kirk, live in 1969. i don’t know what that thing he’s playing right at the start is - before he gets into his trademark, playing five saxophones at once, including two with his nose and one with his ear - but i have a feeling it may be a very early hacked nintendo DS synth controller prototype… i’m happy to stand corrected if someone can tell me what that thing is (i ain’t no expert on these things)