Hope Sandoval and the Warm Inventions Until the Hunter, Iannis Xenakis La Légende d’Eer
Hope Sandoval and the Warm Inventions
Until the Hunter
(Tendril Tales)
Hope Sandoval is best known as the effortlessly sensual, distant and compulsively shy singer of the post-Paisley Underground band Mazzy Star, whose hazy, seductive and lightly psychedelic ‘90s work such as the surprise hit “Fade into You” quite possibly had a measurable impact on fertility rates among Generation X.
Her outfit The Warm Inventions, formed with My Bloody Valentine drummer Colm Ó Cíosóig, feels like a logical and spiritual extension of Mazzy Star, and it’s a project that is unhurried in both style and execution, having only released its third album, Until the Hunter, after sixteen years of existence.
The 9-minute opener “Into the Trees” brings to mind the woozy, psychedelic wandering of Mazzy Star’s track “She Hangs Brightly” with entrancing organ drifting and low tom-tom beats, using mallets to soften each blow. The haunting “A Wonderful Seed” offers vague glimpses of what sounds like an invented folk tale involving a woman’s possible ocean drowning and reincarnation as a temptress; however, it’s a track that’s best simply felt rather than examined, with lazy rhymes and loose poetry that could have benefited from some refining.
“Let Me Get There” pairs Sandoval with singer Kurt Vile, offering a laid-back Californian soft-rock vibe with gentle-yet-brisk lead electric guitar lines; they sing the refrain of “It’s all in the groove” with a straight face and trade lines like a Lee Hazlewood/Nancy Sinatra duet.
About halfway through the album, the listener might think it has settled into a routine, but that notion is dispelled with the lively “Isn’t It True” shaking off the dust and the closing “Liquid Lady” that lays on a thick blues veneer. One wonders why more artists haven’t mined this territory rather than, say, faux Americana; while Sandoval and friends make it sound easy, it’s a delicate operation to pull off right—the details here often don’t make a strong impression, while the mood is what lingers in the listener’s head.
Iannis Xenakis
La Légende d’Eer
(Karlrecords)
When this writer is feeling particularly jaded, being insufferable and making sour, frowny facial expressions while skipping ahead through countless underwhelming new releases on Spotify, one of his go-to music sources for a refreshing jolt is the late Greek composer Iannis Xenakis who left behind an overwhelming body of work that is often mind-boggling in its complexity.
It’s an understatement to say that he was ahead of his time; people may never catch up with him and his work, which sometimes was based on mathematical functions and scientific concepts with a deep interest in architecture and engineering. He thrived using electronics and electro-acoustic techniques, as well as orchestras, to present bold, truly ground-breaking sounds and multi-media experiences.
The release at hand is Xenakis’ electro-acoustic work La Légende d’Eer, produced in a new vinyl edition (and also available digitally) using apparently the only original version Xenakis presented in 1978 at the Darmstädter Ferienkurse and correcting some problems with previous releases of this piece. It was intended to be presented in “Le Diatope,” an architectural space of Xenakis’ design, with a visual component with hundreds of lights and mirrors, and the piece was created for the opening of the Pompidou Centre in Paris.
The main source of inspiration for the work is Plato’s “Myth of Er” from Republic, an account discussing the afterlife and rewards versus punishments for a virtuous life, and Xenakis—an atheist—also drew from the theological musings in Blaise Pascal’s Pensées. Xenakis used computer-aided composition and stochastic functions (the fancy-pants way to say “randomly generated”) to create patterns, and it’s a piece that is not for the faint of heart.
The “Myth of Er” mentions openings to the sky (a sort of heaven, if you will) along with openings into the ground (a sort of hell), and with that in mind, LLa Légende d’Eer sounds like it begins and ends in heaven with a lengthy excursion in hell. It’s bookended with high frequency tones, wandering between the right and left stereo channels, that twinkle and sparkle, while the middle section is nightmarish, with an impossibly complicated maelstrom of extended squeaks, harsh noise, metallic clangs, percussion that sounds like skeleton bones falling apart and much more.
It’s a piece that is truly sublime—to borrow Immanuel Kant’s definition—being both awe-inspiring and terrifying.