Austin Sound

I shouldn’t worry about the future. Obama is President, the world still turns, my cats are healthy. And yet I have a nagging feeling of anxiety; maybe it’s because the economy, as I write this, is entering one of those death spirals that promises to drag us all down to depths of hobo-like destitution the likes of which haven’t been seen outside of American Experience documentaries. Maybe that’s it. And so, given our strange contemporary combination of happy political developments and dark economic ones, we need a soundtrack that speaks to what’s ailing us - some audio pick-me-up for our new Great Depression.

And then along comes the latest Many Birthdays EP, Emptiness Is Forever and we’re almost there.

I’ve been stealing online music for so long that I barely know how to buy it anymore. That’s not my fault, though — the stuff is just out there, low-hanging fruit waiting to be plucked. Just put the name of any album and the word “blogspot” into a search engine and you’ll likely find a bunch of sites with whole album files uploaded to each one, ready for you to suck onto your hard drive with a quick, digital, slurp. Until, that is, the site gets shut down by the music industry, or you get sued for perusing the site’s wares, or your ISP starts charging extra for hogging everyone else’s bandwidth. Or all three.

However, not all blogspot sites are the same. Some of the best (and potentially most legally defensible) are those that host MP3 audio streams of obscure vinyl recordings that are either out of copyright or long out of print.

As we witness the continued decline of the recorded music object and the concomitant decline of the greedy music-industry shopkeepers who have made their careers ripping off artists and the public by peddling music to us in mass-manufactured form, it’s interesting to see how the artists themselves are adapting to the new musical landscape. A band like the Octopus Project, Austin’s premier “indietronic” band, might at one time have hoped to eventually “land” a major-label contract, in the hopes that the big tall building bastards in New York or L.A. could help them to “move some product.” These days, what artist in their right mind would even want to get signed to a major? What would be the point? Stick with a local indie label and just do the rest yourself, for God’s sake.

This week we are excited to debut a new column on Austin Sound, “Music Is Happiness.” Each month, Noah Mass will feature what’s been turning his stubborn head locally, be it old garage 45s or some of Austin’s best underappreciated artists. Noah is tough to impress by nature, so you can bet that if something’s caught his ear, it’s worth hearing. After all, music is happiness, but good music is bliss. To inaugurate the column, Noah takes a look at local instrumental duo Transmography, who recently released Polydactyly on 8088 Records. You can also catch Noah on the radio every Sunday night from 11pm-12am on KVRX 91.7.

I think I was trolling around the internet, searching for music to download off of MySpace “tribute” sites, and I somehow found a site set up by two Austin musicians, Michael Frazier and James Evans, who perform under the name Transmography. Along with one absolutely embarrassing video that they’d posted on the site showing them playing to an empty coffee shop somewhere in Oklahoma, were a selection of tracks that, quite honestly, I’d never heard anything like before. One tune was called “Bhopal,” like the chemical plant in India that caused all that environmental devastation. I wasn’t really sure how the title connected to what I was hearing, which sounded for all the world like somebody scraping a piece of metal along another piece of metal in a syncopated, almost “catchy” rhythm, before the track descended into random drum beats, bass noises, and computer manipulated whooshes. Another tune, “IceCreamManFromJapan,” began with a murky bass thrum before exploding into an almost anthemic burst of drums and guitar. It was the sort of thing that Einsturzende Neubauten might have tried two decades ago if they’d had a gift for melody and a sense of humor (which they didn’t).

It was, oh, around 1989, I guess. I was in a club in North London called the Slimelight, which was only open between 12AM and 6 AM, when the underground wasn’t running—so once you got there, you were kind of stuck there. It was a pretty lousy place—lousy in the sense of lice, I mean—with lots of speed, lots of hard cider, lots of hairspray, and lots of trashy music. The djs played a weird mixture of goth, punk and noise, with the occasional early new wave oddity thrown in, like Gina X (remember her?). Sleazy stuff, really—synths, bass, drums and murky vocals about suicide or bondage or drugs or something. It suited the atmosphere, I guess.

You know those friends of yours who are in a band, and they keep asking you what you think of their music? And, you know, it’s not that they’re exactly bad, but that they’re not really so good that you can be honestly enthusiastic about them? And, O.K., you go out to their shows, and you clap and tell them that they were really good, but actually you just went out to the show because the girl who works the door at Emo’s is really cute, and you were busy flirting with her while they were playing, and, to tell the truth, you just caught the last song?

Well, IV Thieves are that band. Relocated from Nottingham, England to the far more happening Austin, TX, IV Thieves also pared down their name in the transatlantic crossing. And merging lead bandit Nic Armstrong in among the rest of the merry thieves makes a bit of sense for the album. Not only is the songwriting shared among members (unlike the Armstrong led debut The Greatest White Liar), but the group’s second release, If We Can’t Escape My Pretty, also sounds in places like a lot of bands you’ve already heard — a little Strokes here, a little Franz Ferdinand there, some Beatles-y harmonies, lots of Brit-poppy guitars. One song, “The Sound And The Fury” (no relation to the Faulkner masterpiece, I’m afraid), features synth fills that sound almost exactly like a mini-Moog, 1969 style, like the four Liverpuddlians used on Abbey Road, only with an unmemorable hook, a faceless rhythm section, and irritating, snide vocals. “The Day Is A Downer,” is almost there (meaning almost good), with a sharper chorus and some decent guitar fills, but just falls short of making you want to hit the replay button.

If you’re like me, multi-lingual pop music kind of begins with Stereolab and ends with Stereo Total, and there’s not a whole heck of a lot in between. Part of the appeal of those bands was that they were, well, European, where everybody has to speak a whole alphabet stew anyways. “How sophisticated they are!,” you’d say, as you heard Laeticia Sadier intone communist-party slogans in French, in “French Disko.” “How funny she sounds!,” you’d go, as Francoise Cactus sang “I Love You ONO” in her silly French-German accent. And, of course, you’d also be thinking about how cosmopolitan and continental you yourself were, as you appreciated such stuff. Mais oui!

It’s always nice when two friends go to bed together, even if only for one night. Octopus Project and Black Moth Super Rainbow have been flirting with each other for some time now, and it’s not surprising that they’d give each other a come–hither look: both bands trade in uZiq-like, Sterolab-ish, Neu-descended, vocal-less synth/percussion/guitar soundscapes (danceable ones, at that) that start off slow and swirling and then smack into you like goddamn gold-plated, sugar-coated sledgehammers. The two bands played a few dates together in early ‘06, too, and reportedly tore the house down every time. So, it’s sort of natural that this pair of bouncy, fun-loving electro-popsters would have a few drinks, share a cab, and wind up under the covers together at some point.

“I’m always rubbing my wings together/can’t you hear what I say?,” Cat Scientist ask their listeners on their newest release, Cicada. Sure� sure, we can. We’re just not sure what the heck you mean. Cat Scientist are five whimsy-obsessed, keyboard playing (that’s right, all five of them are on “keys,” and three of those five also play your standard guitar/bass/drums), nature-freak popsters, and I’ve heard their music compared to that of early Talking Heads spinoff combo The Tom Tom Club. There’s some truth to that, of course, as Cat Scientist also trade in funk rhythms and employ similar Bernie Worrell-like whizzing synth textures at times. The first tune on their new release, “I Saved An Airplane,” begins with a propulsive, immensely enveloping bass/keyboard/drum rhythm—the same sort of thing that fills dance-floors on Ibiza year after year. But then the words come in: “I saved an airplane/lowered it down safely with my powers/I am concerned about their safety/I’ve worked on the problem for many hours/using claws, mind, teeth and magic.” What?