New This Week: Justin Timberlake, Phosphorescent & More

Excellent week for great new indie records, starting with:

Phosphorescent, Muchacho – One of the greatest records of the year.  Jayson Greene interviewed Matthew Houck for us, and Ashley Melzer wrote the review:

Two takes on the sun’s ascent bookend Muchacho with yogic serenity. They’re a primer to the fuzzy emotional place where Houck finds himself. His trademark warble starts out shrouded in soft electronic beats and yearning violins (“Song for Zula”). Then he plays to old strengths, letting lonesome lap steel cozy up to the piano and make room for a swells of horns (“Terror in the Canyons (The Wounded Master)”). There’s a hint of that old spiritual hunger, “so holy and wasted like a prayer in the wind” (“A New Anhedonia”). But even when our ragged guide is facing up to mistakes, the music meets him with tenderness (“Down to Go”).

Low, The Invisible Way –  The beloved, long-running trio’s latest is “their most sanguine in over a decade,” according to Sam Adams:

The measured tempos and fragile harmonies of the Duluth, Minnesota, trio Low — core couple Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker plus bassist Steve Garrington, who joined in 2008 — have often concealed turmoil beneath their placid surface. But their 10th album, The Invisible Way, is their most sanguine in more than a decade, less tempestuous than 2005′s The Great Destroyer and resolving the marital tensions of 2011′s C’mon. Decamping from their own recording studio for producer Jeff Tweedy’s digs, they’ve made an album that feels more suited to the inside of a church than those they’ve actually recorded in one.

Marnie Stern, The Chronicles of Marnia – The unconventionally brilliant/brilliantly unconventional indie-rock guitar virtuoso crafts the statement of her career. Our own J. Edward Keyes writes:

The first song on the fourth record from Marnie Stern is called “Year of the Glad” — a nod to Infinite Jest as well as a declaration of its theme — and crests with Stern yelling, “Everything’s starting now.” For a second it feels likeThe Chronicles of Marnia is going to be an album about rejuvenation — about letting go of the things that trouble you and kicking open the door of the dark house to let the sunshine pour in. And then the next song starts, and before long Stern is shouting, “The fear creeping in, and I am losing hope in my body.” So it goes throughout Chronicles, a breathtaking spiral of sound that fizzes and pops like a pinwheel of fireworks. It’s not only Stern’s best record, but one of the best of the year to date.

Justin Timberlake, The 20/20 Experience - Pop’s reigning do-no-wrong boy wonder returns from his long hiatus. Barry Walters writes:

“He’s so talented he can do anything!” That’s the gist of what’s typically said about Justin Timberlake, and for the most part it’s absolutely true. He’s an exceptionally nimble and unfettered singer/dancer, an extraordinary mimic with a drummer’s sense of timing. These gifts have helped him tremendously in comedy as well as drama, and despite the increasing maturity of his music and acting pursuits, he hasn’t let go of his ample boyish charm: This ex-Mouseketeer, ex-’N Sync-er still radiates mischievous yet all-American fun … These are the stats that have empowered Timberlake to make a supremely — and, at times, foolishly — confident 20/20 Experience.

 Anais Mitchell, Child Ballads – “One of today’s most creative and authentic rising songwriters,” as our own Laura Leebove calls her, returns with a collaboration with Jefferson Hamer to “interpret and modernize seven of the 305 English and Scottish ballads collected by Francis James Child in the late 1800s.” Leebove writes:

Their collection is short, sweet and intimate, with little more than acoustic guitars and vocals telling the tales of an ill-fated sailor, a quick-witted sister, and disapproving parents. (If you thought your in-laws were trouble, listen to “Willie of Winsbury” and “Willie’s Lady,” where you’ll meet a king who orders her daughter’s lover to be hanged, and a witch mother who casts a spell on her son’s pregnant wife.) Mitchell and Hamer have recorded accessible, American-folk renditions of these centuries-old songs, a fitting addition to the countless modern artists — among them Joan Baez, Nickel Creek, even Fleet Foxes — who have who have passed them on throughout the years.

Suede, Bloodsports: There is no way I’m ever calling this band “The London” Suede, so you can all go straight to hell right now. Suede are back! This one is more triumphant-sounding than they’ve been in the past — huge choruses and Brett Anderson’s fantastic, keening voice. I saw this band in the UK on one of their 2010 reunion shows and they were spectacular.

Conquering Animal Sound, On Floating Bodies: ALRIGHT!! Man, do I love this band. Their last record, Kammerspiel, was one of my favorite surprises. I didn’t even know a new record was on the way but, man, am I glad it’s here. This one sounds a little nastier than the last one — the vocals a bit sharper and tougher, the electronic production a bit more stammering and stuttery and arty — fewer soft curves, more sharp angles. I am excited to spend more time with this.

Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Specter at the Feast: Former merchants of gloom return with a record of crisp, bright rock music. Most notable is their cover of The Call’s bright-eyed “Let the Day Begin”; Robert Levon Been is the son of Call frontman Michael Been, who passed away two years ago at a BRMC show.

Alice Smith, She: A pretty radical reinvention for Alice Smith. The onetime smoky, jazzy R&B singer gets glossier and poppier without sacrificing any of her trademark warmth and emotion. The result is a confident soul record with gilded edges.

  Simone Dinnerstein & Tift Merritt, Night – The singer/songwriter and beloved classical pianist come together on record  for an unlikely but fruitful collaboration. Peter Margasak writes:

 Self-taught Americana singer-songwriter Tift Merritt and Julliard-trained classical pianist Simone Dinnerstein would hardly seem likely collaborators, but the rapport and cross-hatching of styles they achieve on Night sure makes it seem like they were destined to work together. The album’s stark beauty and seamless flow owes part of its success to the decision of Merritt and Dinnerstein to keep the work modest in scale and free of conceptual baggage. There’s a feel to the collection that harkens back to the sheet music era, when folks entertained themselves in their parlor room and playing songs rather than listening to records or the radio. Together they make transitions between some of Merritt’s most translucent balladry: Billie Holiday’s “Don’t Explain,” Bach’s “Prelude in B minor” and Johnny Nash’s indelible “I Can See Clearly Now” seem not only effortless, but also logical.

 KEN Mode, Entrench – Brutal, sharp and zero-fat hardcore/noise rock from long-running Canadian trio. Jon Wiederhorn writes:

Over the past decade, Winnipeg, Canada’s KEN Mode — who took their name from Henry Rollins’s acronym for Kill Everyone Now (as detailed in his book Get in the Van) — have evolved from a bracing hardcore metal band into something more experimental and complex. The band’s fifth album, Entrench, is their most inventive yet, matching raw musical gristle and asymmetrical acrobatics with unexpected sonic flourishes, from the scribbling violins of the opening cut “Counter Culture Complex” to the undistorted arpeggios and pensive piano of the closer “Monomyth.”

Call of the Void, Dragged Down a Dead End Path: New, nasty, grindy stuff on Relapse. This Colorado group is adept at all the things that make grind great — the larynx-wrecking vocals, the avalanche of percussion, the oil-drill riffs. Perfect loud music for warm weather.

Dur-Dur Band, Vol. 5: Another home run from Awesome Tapes from Africa. This one is from Somalia’s Dur-Dur band, who land somewhere between highlife and what we’ve all come to (incorrectly!) term Afrobeat. There are popcorn rhythms and tangled-up guitars and beaming, jubilant vocals, and the whole damn thing is RECOMMENDED

And So I Watch You From Afar, All Hail Bright Futures: Irish art rock band return with another knotty, tumultuous effort. Complicated song structures, full-body rythms and plenty of prog-like lurch for those who like their music dense and tricky.

Batillus, Concrete Sustain – Doom metal with a groove. Jon Wiederhorn says:

The 2011 debut full-length from New York’s Batillus, Furnace was crushing, oppressive, bleak and morose, one of the top dark horse doom metal albums of the year. Not content to remain within those parameters, the band has undergone a facelift for its new album Concrete Sustain. In addition to an abundance of trudging, mid-paced riffs played on densely distorted guitar and bass, Batillus have built a framework of counterpoint rhythms that provide tension and contrast: Grinding, whirring industrial samples abound, as do textural washes of feedback that border on the post-rock nihilism of Neurosis.

Thalia Zedek  Band, Via – Zedek returns with another one of her signature knotty, pleasing, and distinctive solo records.

Colleen Green, Sock it To Me: I’m a pretty big Colleen Green fan, I have to admit. Her latest doesn’t stray too far from all of the things she does best: the Casio still sounds like it was nicked from a garage sale, the guitars are tinny and fizzy and her voice is soulful and searching. Her knack for sugary hooks is what pulls the whole project together — if you are charmed by rickety indiepop as much as I am, this one’s for you.

Inter Arma, Sky Burial: Thick, murky, ashen and doomy, this is the sound of the walls closing in and hell coming to claim its sons. It’s got plenty of long, hammering passages, but also incredible moments of beauty — acoustic guitars and moody synths — making for a fascinating record that grips from beginning to end.

Tomasz Stanko, Wislawa – Excellent new record from Polish jazz eminence. Peter Margasak writes:

The veteran Polish trumpeter Tomasz Stanko has long been a reliable and rewarding source for jazz of smoldering intensity. He’s a deeply lyrical, probing player whose investment in free jazz is real, but he’s consistently couched his most “out” explorations in a brooding elegance. Over the last decade or so he’s made a series of gorgeously meditative and quietly scalding albums for ECM with rhythm sections half his age. While he continues to keep a residence in Warsaw, for the last five years he’s also kept an apartment in New York, fostering relationships with younger American players. The magnificent double album Wislawa is the first fruit of those new collaborations.

Discover: Finders Keepers

An enthusiasm for sounds lost, unknown, ignored or brain-meltingly weird is the principle behind Finders Keepers, the reissue label Andy Votel founded in 2005 with Doug Shipton. A mainstay of Manchester’s music scene, Votel made his name as an electronic musician, respected DJ and the man behind the Twisted Nerve label, which first brought Badly Drawn Boy to the public’s ears. Votel is a long-term enthusiastic crate-digger and his early love of hip-hop taught him to be interested in — and to buy — records wherever they came from, irrespective of the strictures of “youth culture.”

Finders Keepers is a horizon-broadening enterprise, the success of which relies not only on the interests of a curious record-buying public, but also on the passion, in-depth knowledge and deep love of its curators. The catalogue ranges far and wide — from Welsh folk music and ’70s horror-film scores to ’60s Turkish psych-punk and “Lollywood” (from Lahore, Pakistan) movie soundtracks. “Making global sound local” is the label’s motto, and Finders Keepers, which Votel describes as “pretty much genre-less” is supported in its aim by various sibling labels, each with their own focus: the on-going Twisted Nerve (contemporary releases only), Bird (music by female artists), Cache Cache (punk, new wave, ’80s electronic music), Battered Ornaments (Shipton’s own label) and a new imprint called Cacophonique (jazz — “but it’s almost like a noise label”). Votel is clearly committed to pressing forward — however much time he necessarily spends looking back.

Sharon O’Connell spoke with Andy Votel about running a true label of love.

What was the initial spur to launching Finders Keepers?

Working within the mainstream music industry got me down. It became very stringent. A lot of the records we put out on FK are 35-40 years past their sell-by date, so a desperate, four-week promotional campaign is not going to make any difference to sales. Most of the artists on FK now are — and I mean this in the most positive way possible — failed pop musicians, whether for political reasons, through a miscarriage of justice, the failure of the music industry or because they were ahead of their time, so you’re already creating a new music industry. When we set up FK, that’s exactly what it was. It was starting anew, so there was pretty much no rulebook. It was very, very refreshing.

What does the FK motto, “Making global sound local,” mean?

It’s making old records feel young, I suppose. These records were so ahead of their time that they’ve not dated, even after 40 years or so. They were never middle-of-the-road, so they still feel as fresh as the day they were created. It’s virtually impossible to be really experimental nowadays, because everybody knows you can make any sound you could possibly want, no problem. So it’s hard to experiment without restrictions. A lot of the records we’re releasing now are from the ’70s or ’80s, which was the heyday of experimental pop music.

Does a lot of the archive work you do involve playing detective?

For me, the most exciting thing about it all is meeting these artists and going round to their houses, spending time with them and meeting their families; the records are just the by product. But two things are insulting from the outset: one is when people say, “What are these weird records?” A lot of the time, they only think they’re weird because they’re sung in a foreign language, so that’s…almost racist. The other is people think that these records are from primitive industries, so you get a lot of bootlegging by various companies. And you can’t think like that. Everything that we do is on a very human level, and a lot of it is personal hero worship. Luckily, because I’d been working with Twisted Nerve when the internet was still in its infancy, I was able to contact people quite quickly and find a lot of my heroes. The question was what do you do from that point? So, we decided to reissue old records together.

What’s coming up next for FK?

Recently, I’ve been working with a tape engineer from Manchester called Andy Popplewell. He worked for the BBC for a short time, and has been making tapes for people in Manchester and London and all over the world, for a very long time. But it seems like I’m the only person to ever have asked him if he made music himself — and it turns out he did. He built his own synthesizer when he was 17. He has this unreleased album, TRASE and it’s the best thing I’ve heard in about five years. It’s amazing.

Justin Timberlake, The 20/20 Experience

“He’s so talented he can do anything!” That’s the gist of what’s typically said about Justin Timberlake, and for the most part it’s absolutely true. He’s an exceptionally nimble and unfettered singer/dancer, an extraordinary mimic with a drummer’s sense of timing. These gifts have helped him tremendously in comedy as well as drama, and despite the increasing maturity of his music and acting pursuits, he hasn’t let go of his ample boyish charm: This ex-Mouseketeer, ex-’N Sync-er still radiates mischievous yet all-American fun. And unlike so many stars who attain thoroughly mainstream saturation, he takes genuine risks that have actually increased his popularity: His last album, 2007′s FutureSex/LoveSounds, packs way more sonic, rhythmic and compositional quirks than most records that sell more than 10 million copies.

These are the stats that have empowered Timberlake to make a supremely — and, at times, foolishly — confident 20/20 Experience. As you can see, it’s 70 minutes but only 10 songs long. Most are straightforward from a songwriting standpoint: “Tunnel Vision,” “That Girl” and several others see-saw back and forth between two chords for extended and sometimes relatively static periods with minimal contrasts between verses and choruses. But most are also complex in arrangement and texture, adding and subtracting rhythm and tempo as they smoothly groove along. Although some like “Don’t Hold the Wall” accelerate into dance tracks, the overriding vibe is more bedroom/strip club than dancefloor, as if Timberlake envisioned a Prince album almost entirely comprised of deep cut ballads. Aside from the singles “Suit & Tie” and “Mirrors,” which both draw from the opposing worlds of blatant chart pop and PBR&B, there’s little indication that anyone tried terribly hard to write hooks. Instead, this feels like a deservedly rich guy’s willfully anti-commercial fantasy of bohemian retro-futurist soul mother lode.

As such, Frank Ocean’s Channel ORANGE looms large over 20/20. But where Ocean employed complex chords and fearlessly soul-searched, this uncomplicatedly happy guy simply riffs on sex, status and his favorite records. He’s still in cahoots with Timbaland, the super-producer who practically invented these lurching, squelchy electro slow jams decades ago with Aaliyah and Ginuwine. Symphonic string swells and big band horn blasts may punctuate the otherwise slinky likes of “Pusher Love Girl,” but Timbaland doesn’t take Timberlake too far from Southern hip-hop: 20/20 is mixed to favor jeep-bumping bass that tends to blur the tony details that have been showcased far more successfully in the entertainer’s televised performances of this material. As such, 20/20 already feels more like a stepping-stone for multi-million-dollar tours, endorsement deals and general world domination than an entirely satisfying autonomous listening experience. Suit and tie aside, it’s simultaneously over and underdressed.

Discover: Finders Keepers

An enthusiasm for sounds lost, unknown, ignored or brain-meltingly weird is the principle behind Finders Keepers, the reissue label Andy Votel founded in 2005 with Doug Shipton. A mainstay of Manchester’s music scene, Votel made his name as an electronic musician, respected DJ and the man behind the Twisted Nerve label, which first brought Badly Drawn Boy to the public’s ears. Votel is a long-term enthusiastic crate-digger and his early love of hip-hop taught him to be interested in — and to buy — records wherever they came from, irrespective of the strictures of “youth culture.”

Finders Keepers is a horizon-broadening enterprise, the success of which relies not only on the interests of a curious record-buying public, but also on the passion, in-depth knowledge and deep love of its curators. The catalogue ranges far and wide — from Welsh folk music and ’70s horror-film scores to ’60s Turkish psych-punk and “Lollywood” (from Lahore, Pakistan) movie soundtracks. “Making global sound local” is the label’s motto, and Finders Keepers, which Votel describes as “pretty much genre-less” is supported in its aim by various sibling labels, each with their own focus: the on-going Twisted Nerve (contemporary releases only), Bird (music by female artists), Cache Cache (punk, new wave, ’80s electronic music), Battered Ornaments (Shipton’s own label) and a new imprint called Cacophonique (jazz — “but it’s almost like a noise label”). Votel is clearly committed to pressing forward — however much time he necessarily spends looking back.

Sharon O’Connell spoke with Andy Votel about running a true label of love.

What was the initial spur to launching Finders Keepers?

Working within the mainstream music industry got me down. It became very stringent. A lot of the records we put out on FK are 35-40 years past their sell-by date, so a desperate, four-week promotional campaign is not going to make any difference to sales. Most of the artists on FK now are — and I mean this in the most positive way possible — failed pop musicians, whether for political reasons, through a miscarriage of justice, the failure of the music industry or because they were ahead of their time, so you’re already creating a new music industry. When we set up FK, that’s exactly what it was. It was starting anew, so there was pretty much no rulebook. It was very, very refreshing.

What does the FK motto, “Making global sound local,” mean?

It’s making old records feel young, I suppose. These records were so ahead of their time that they’ve not dated, even after 40 years or so. They were never middle-of-the-road, so they still feel as fresh as the day they were created. It’s virtually impossible to be really experimental nowadays, because everybody knows you can make any sound you could possibly want, no problem. So it’s hard to experiment without restrictions. A lot of the records we’re releasing now are from the ’70s or ’80s, which was the heyday of experimental pop music.

Does a lot of the archive work you do involve playing detective?

For me, the most exciting thing about it all is meeting these artists and going round to their houses, spending time with them and meeting their families; the records are just the by product. But two things are insulting from the outset: one is when people say, “What are these weird records?” A lot of the time, they only think they’re weird because they’re sung in a foreign language, so that’s…almost racist. The other is people think that these records are from primitive industries, so you get a lot of bootlegging by various companies. And you can’t think like that. Everything that we do is on a very human level, and a lot of it is personal hero worship. Luckily, because I’d been working with Twisted Nerve when the internet was still in its infancy, I was able to contact people quite quickly and find a lot of my heroes. The question was what do you do from that point? So, we decided to reissue old records together.

What’s coming up next for FK?

Recently, I’ve been working with a tape engineer from Manchester called Andy Popplewell. He worked for the BBC for a short time, and has been making tapes for people in Manchester and London and all over the world, for a very long time. But it seems like I’m the only person to ever have asked him if he made music himself — and it turns out he did. He built his own synthesizer when he was 17. He has this unreleased album, TRASE and it’s the best thing I’ve heard in about five years. It’s amazing.

Marnie Stern, The Chronicles of Marnia

The first song on the fourth record from Marnie Stern is called “Year of the Glad” — a nod to Infinite Jest as well as a declaration of its theme — and crests with Stern yelling, “Everything’s starting now.” For a second it feels like The Chronicles of Marnia is going to be an album about rejuvenation — about letting go of the things that trouble you and kicking open the door of the dark house to let the sunshine pour in. And then the next song starts, and before long Stern is shouting, “The fear creeping in, and I am losing hope in my body.” So it goes throughout Chronicles, a breathtaking spiral of sound that fizzes and pops like a pinwheel of fireworks. It’s not only Stern’s best record, but one of the best of the year to date.

Part of that is due to its keen focus. The name Marnie Stern rarely appears in print without the phrase “guitar virtuoso” somewhere close behind it, and while that descriptor is accurate, it often felt in Stern’s past work that the songwriting was second to the string-searing. Chronicles remedies that, offering Stern’s most assured melodies to date and burning out the dense thicket of guitars that previously ran wild. In interviews promoting the record, Stern has referred to this process by producer Nicholas Vernhes as “clearing out the clutter,” but the result is that Stern’s playing actually feels more astounding because it’s less obscured. The title track, with its alternating broad slashes and giddy squiggles, feels like an outtake from gone-too-soon Baltimore band Ponytail, and “Noonan” seems set on creating some strain of avant-Tropicalia, a jittery, dancing guitar providing its sinuous spine. The construction of the songs throughout is ornate without being gaudy and, if such a thing is possible, subtly spectacular.

But it’s more than that: As the title implies, Chronicles feels deeply personal, Stern as a 36-year-old cataloging the last few years of her life and assessing what she sees with a combination of pride and panic. Advancing age has a way of stripping the romance from adolescent dreams, and Chronicles is bracingly clear-eyed and unafraid, staring down what happens when the thing you’ve spent your life doing no longer feels like the thing you can spend the rest of your life doing. It’s also one of the most honest assessments of what it means to be a full-time musician — and, specifically, a full-time indie musician — ever written, translating intangibles like “critical acclaim” and “artistic integrity” into real-world things like rent payments and the price — and worth — of personal stature and reputation. It’s not for nothing one of the songs is called “Nothing is Easy”; Stern mingles determination with defeat, consistently refusing to come to clean conclusions or to sink into bland reassurances. When she sings “Don’t you wanna be somebody? Don’t you wanna be?” it’s clear the “you” in that sentence is herself, and the line feels less like an exhortation and more like a chastisement.

All of this makes Chronicles sound like a drag, which it absolutely is not. It is, instead, a nervous, leaping record, where high-wattage guitars illuminate songs that don’t fear the darkness and where a new economy of sound results in music that feels thrillingly infinite. Stern spends much of Chronicles concerned about her legacy; fittingly, it is also the record where she secures it.

Low, The Invisible Way

The measured tempos and fragile harmonies of the Duluth, Minnesota, trio Low — core couple Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker plus bassist Steve Garrington, who joined in 2008 — have often concealed turmoil beneath their placid surface. But their 10th album, The Invisible Way, is their most sanguine in more than a decade, less tempestuous than 2005′s The Great Destroyer and resolving the marital tensions of 2011′s C’mon. Decamping from their own recording studio for producer Jeff Tweedy’s digs, they’ve made an album that feels more suited to the inside of a church than those they’ve actually recorded in one.

With Sparkhawk often playing acoustic guitar and Garrington spending as much time at the piano as on bass, The Invisible Way keeps a hushed profile, with Parker uncharacteristically handling nearly half of the lead vocals. Their lyrics, as usual, focus on the larger things: On “Plastic Cup,” Sparhawk turns a drug-test receptacle into a reminder that plastic will last forever, but bodies sooner or later turn back into dirt. On “Holy Ghost,” Parker strains for something to “feed my yearning for transcendence,” her tranquil vocals suggesting she’s well on her way to finding it. As with most Low songs, the spiritual undertones are there to take or leave, although it might be tough to come up with a secular reading for “Mother”‘s allusion to the Second Coming. Ultimately the songs don’t need a higher power to sound sanctified: The way Parker and Sparhawk’s voices vibrate as one when they harmonize is worth worshiping on its own.

Phosphorescent, Muchacho

Cribbing a line from the Man in Black, Phosphorescent’s Matthew Houck sings of those that “say love is a burning thing.” Whatever that feeling was that Cash knew so well, Houck has never felt it. For him, love’s been “fading,” “fickle,” “a cage [that] calls.” These are old bruises. Houck’s laid them bare in past recordings, playing the gutted bluesman, shambling ghost and beer-soaked crooner. Never has the music played such a majestic counter-point, though. Houck may sing how sick of love he is on “Song for Zula,” but the music betrays him.

Muchacho blooms in these incongruities. Two takes on the sun’s ascent bookend the record with yogic serenity (“Sun Arise! (An Invocation, An Introduction)” and “Sun’s Arising (A Koan, An Exit),” respectively). They’re a primer to the fuzzy emotional place where Houck finds himself. His trademark warble starts out shrouded in soft electronic beats and yearning violins (“Song for Zula”). Then he plays to old strengths, letting lonesome lap steel cozy up to the piano and make room for a swells of horns (“Terror in the Canyons (The Wounded Master)”). There’s a hint of that old spiritual hunger, “so holy and wasted like a prayer in the wind” (“A New Anhedonia”). But even when our ragged guide is facing up to mistakes, the music meets him with tenderness (“Down to Go”).

“I been fucked up and I been a fool,” he sings on standout track, “Muchacho’s Tune.” “Like the shepherd to the lamb, like the wave unto the sand, I fixed myself up and come and be with you.” It’s a promise made knowing full well the heart is fickle, but music, like hope, never fades.

Who Is…Carmen Villain

Though modeling might sound like a dream job to some, Carmen Hillestad looked the part in front of the camera, but was all the while dreaming of another fantasy occupation. Music was always on her mind, beckoning her to abandon the silence of magazine shoots and finally unveil the songs that had been incubating in secret for six or seven years.

Her earliest musical endeavors involved classical piano and clarinet lessons but upon falling in love with the electric guitar, she turned lo-fi multi-instrumentalist, eschewing perfectionism for the beauty of off-kilter beats and bent waves of distortion. Her otherworldly vocals and noisy cut-and-paste experiments that pile layer upon layer of wandering guitar lines, hypnotic loops and primal beats eventually caught the ear of Emil Nikolaisen (of the Oslo noise-pop band Serena-Maneesh). He soon joined forces with Hillestad, co-producing and playing drums and keyboards on her entrancing debut album Sleeper and subsequently connecting her to the venerable Oslo indie label Smalltown Supersound.

Hillestad now technically lives in London, but she’s spent much of the last three years in Norway recording, mixing and performing. While Hillestad was winding down from a music festival in Oslo, she spoke with eMusic’s Amre Klimchak about her love of lo-fi rock, finding her voice, and making the leap to full-time musician.

On becoming an experimental multi-instrumentalist:

I’ve always played instruments. I started learning the piano when I was about eight or nine, and I also played the clarinet, so I learned a lot about musical theory. I stopped playing piano when I was about 15 because I got bored — I was a stupid teenager. I wasn’t necessarily bored of the piano, but I was kind of bored of the restrictive method I was learning. It was very classical training, and I was more interested in learning the pieces quickly so I could sit and improvise, or play the pieces a lot faster and keep the sustain pedal in — because I like reverb a lot, as you probably can imagine from listening to the music now. What properly brought me into writing music again was being given [an electric] guitar [at age 19], and sitting by myself and playing on it and experimenting with different pedals.

On being influenced by American hip-hop, ’90s guitar rock, experimental post-punk and world music:

When I started playing the guitar I mainly listened to hip-hop. It was very much Wu-Tang and that whole crowd, the kind of slightly darker, a little bit psychedelic hip-hop, as well as the popular stuff like Dr. Dre. I was really into the beats. Guitar music was always around as well. It was the ’90s, and there was a lot of great stuff going on like Nirvana, Sonic Youth and the whole New York thing. And after a little while I started discovering stuff like This Heat and Sun City Girls and world music, and it all came in bits and pieces.

On being attracted to lo-fi music:

For a long, long time, even as a young teenager, I was always drawn to the stuff that wasn’t perfect, that was slightly off or a bit dark, something slightly weird and lurking around. I find the less perfect things are, the more beautiful and effective they are. Sun City Girls, especially, a lot of their stuff is so terribly bad that it’s admirable that they just went for it and put it out there anyway. I always like something that’s on the edge rather than something that’s perfect and produced too well.

On leaving modeling and becoming a full-time musician three years ago:

I decided to become a musician, to take that step, because I felt like there was something that might be worth trying for. Before that, I wasn’t sure whether it was good enough yet to risk leaving a well-paid job for, because it’s kind of crazy. But at the same time, I was very tired of that whole job. It was a decent work life for a while, and it was interesting for a couple of years. But I didn’t feel like I was learning anything new anymore, and I didn’t feel like I was providing anything that mattered or of substance. You’re meant to be silent all the time, and I was tired of it.

On being introduced to Emil Nikolaisen:

I showed a couple of my songs to a really good friend of mine, and she was like, “That’s cool. I’m doing an art exhibition, and you should play.” And I thought, “Oh, Jesus. How scary.” So I had to throw myself out onto it. Her show was in Norway. I played and a friend of a friend of mine saw it, and he’s in music. He thought there was something there. So we started talking, and I sent him a few more tracks, and he was like, “You have to meet Emil.” I was like, “Who’s Emil?”

So he talked to Emil Nikolaisen, who is basically the mastermind behind Serena-Maneesh, and Emil listened to the tracks and was like, “This is actually quite good.” In the beginning, he was a bit skeptical — as I would be as well if I was told what I did. A month after we met for the first time, we started recording. I was really lucky to work with him, because he is incredibly passionate and goes into the project like there’s no tomorrow.

On recording with Nikolaisen in a decommissioned nuclear bunker:

I was in a weird place in my life, so it was almost like a live-or-die situation emotionally. Emil’s very intense, and I think I’m pretty damn intense, so the combination of the two of us…A couple of sessions went from 10 in the morning to 5 or 6 the next morning, and we went all night. The other thing was that we were recording in this old bomb shelter in Oslo, and we didn’t see the sun, so we forgot what time it was quite often. It was a great experience, actually, the whole thing. And I guess there’s definitely a feeling of entering a slightly different world in quite a lot of [the music].

On the inspiration for the album title Sleeper:

Lyrically, the album’s about detachment and this need to sleep and escape everyday life, because I just felt very detached for a long time. So “sleeper” is a small joke toward my family and friends, but also it just felt like the right title for the theme of the album.

I was just mentally not in the right place in life, and I didn’t feel like I was doing anything particularly of substance. I felt a bit detached, and there was always a sense of not belonging somewhere.

On choosing the name “Carmen Villain” for her musical project:

I felt like I needed a sense of detachment from my previous name, because there’s a lot of judgment based on what I’ve done before. I felt like I needed a bit of distance from it. There wasn’t that much thought that went into it; I [just] wanted something different from what my name might represent to some people. I just like the word [villain]. It’s a word that I’ve always loved since I was a tiny kid. It looks great, and it feels good. It’s just a vibe, I guess.

Discover: Finders Keepers

An enthusiasm for sounds lost, unknown, ignored or brain-meltingly weird is the principle behind Finders Keepers, the reissue label Andy Votel founded in 2005 with Doug Shipton. A mainstay of Manchester’s music scene, Votel made his name as an electronic musician, respected DJ and the man behind the Twisted Nerve label, which first brought Badly Drawn Boy to the public’s ears. Votel is a long-term enthusiastic crate-digger and his early love of hip-hop taught him to be interested in — and to buy — records wherever they came from, irrespective of the strictures of “youth culture.”

Finders Keepers is a horizon-broadening enterprise, the success of which relies not only on the interests of a curious record-buying public, but also on the passion, in-depth knowledge and deep love of its curators. The catalogue ranges far and wide — from Welsh folk music and ’70s horror-film scores to ’60s Turkish psych-punk and “Lollywood” (from Lahore, Pakistan) movie soundtracks. “Making global sound local” is the label’s motto, and Finders Keepers, which Votel describes as “pretty much genre-less” is supported in its aim by various sibling labels, each with their own focus: the on-going Twisted Nerve (contemporary releases only), Bird (music by female artists), Cache Cache (punk, new wave, ’80s electronic music), Battered Ornaments (Shipton’s own label) and a new imprint called Cacophonic (jazz — “but it’s almost like a noise label”). Votel is clearly committed to pressing forward — however much time he necessarily spends looking back.

Sharon O’Connell spoke with Andy Votel about running a true label of love.

What was the initial spur to launching Finders Keepers?

Working within the mainstream music industry got me down. It became very stringent. A lot of the records we put out on FK are 35-40 years past their sell-by date, so a desperate, four-week promotional campaign is not going to make any difference to sales. Most of the artists on FK now are — and I mean this in the most positive way possible — failed pop musicians, whether for political reasons, through a miscarriage of justice, the failure of the music industry or because they were ahead of their time, so you’re already creating a new music industry. When we set up FK, that’s exactly what it was. It was starting anew, so there was pretty much no rulebook. It was very, very refreshing.

What does the FK motto, “Making global sound local,” mean?

It’s making old records feel young, I suppose. These records were so ahead of their time that they’ve not dated, even after 40 years or so. They were never middle-of-the-road, so they still feel as fresh as the day they were created. It’s virtually impossible to be really experimental nowadays, because everybody knows you can make any sound you could possibly want, no problem. So it’s hard to experiment without restrictions. A lot of the records we’re releasing now are from the ’70s or ’80s, which was the heyday of experimental pop music.

Does a lot of the archive work you do involve playing detective?

For me, the most exciting thing about it all is meeting these artists and going round to their houses, spending time with them and meeting their families; the records are just the by product. But two things are insulting from the outset: one is when people say, “What are these weird records?” A lot of the time, they only think they’re weird because they’re sung in a foreign language, so that’s…almost racist. The other is people think that these records are from primitive industries, so you get a lot of bootlegging by various companies. And you can’t think like that. Everything that we do is on a very human level, and a lot of it is personal hero worship. Luckily, because I’d been working with Twisted Nerve when the internet was still in its infancy, I was able to contact people quite quickly and find a lot of my heroes. The question was what do you do from that point? So, we decided to reissue old records together.

What’s coming up next for FK?

Recently, I’ve been working with a tape engineer from Manchester called Andy Popplewell. He worked for the BBC for a short time, and has been baking [restoring] tapes for people in Manchester and London and all over the world, for a very long time. But it seems like I’m the only person to ever have asked him if he made music himself — and it turns out he did. He built his own synthesizer when he was 17. He has this unreleased album, TRASE and it’s the best thing I’ve heard in about five years. It’s amazing.

Aaron Diehl, The Bespoke Man’s Narrative

Any ensemble fronted by piano and vibes is going to garner comparisons to the Modern Jazz Quartet, but by his biography, his compositions and arrangements, his song choices and his approach to music, it is apparent that Aaron Diehl welcomes the association. Two years after touring with Wynton Marsalis, and while still a teenager at Juilliard, Diehl spent six months helping the widow of MJQ pianist and musical director John Lewis archive her late husband’s scores, tapes and manuscripts. Diehl’s cerebral, conservative yet thorough command of Euro-classically tinged jazz precociously harkens to Lewis’s conceptual depth, and in vibraphonist Warren Wolf, he has a foil with a quicksilver elegance akin to Lewis’s MJQ partner Milt Jackson.

Citing Lewis and Duke Ellington, Diehl says he wanted to write and arrange songs that showcase his longtime quartet. (Wolf and bassist David Wong have been with Diehl for nearly five years and drummer Rodney Green for more than two.) The Bespoke Man’s Narrative opens with three originals: the suave “Prologue” (repeated as the closing bookend, “Epilogue”), the fleet, cavorting “Generation Y” (a wonderful vehicle for Wolf’s flying mallets), and the hushed, contemplative “Blue Nude.” Then a trio of covers improves on this auspicious beginning. “Moonlight in Vermont” unfurls with an effortless glide that reminds us how enjoyable hoary standards can be when invested with enough love and scholarship. Diehl’s near-solo piano rendition of Ellington’s “Single Petal of a Rose” plumbs for all the melancholy beauty stored in the tune, enriched and amplified by Diehl’s boyhood stint playing services in his father’s funeral parlor. And the entire quartet nails the delightfully airy agility of Milt Jackson’s “The Cylinder.”

Diehl’s “Stop and Go,” brims with clever time changes, highlighted by Diehl’s hammering right hand and Green’s efficient and exquisite drum solo on brushes. An ambitious 11 minutes of Ravel’s “Le Tombeau de Couperin” includes another notable Green solo and Diehl’s brittle, almost harpsichord-ish piano tone. And Gershwin’s “Bess, You Is My Woman Now,” like the Ellington cover, respects the original to the point of reverence yet still triumphs, this time on the basis of Wong’s beautifully bowed work, Green’s brushes and Diehl’s twinkling passages.

How to Write for Violin in the Nuclear Age

At 14, when my ears were fresh and my soul pliable, I attended a string quartet concert that I remember vividly — though at a distance of more than three decades, I have begun to suspect it never took place. The program, which at that time only the Kronos Quartet could possibly have come up with, consisted of Beethoven’s late and gnarled Six Bagatelles for String Quartet, Op. 9, from 1913, and George Crumb’s Black Angels, a work full of the ecstatic despair of the early 1970s. It sounded to me as though one continuous nightmare shuddered across the centuries, bursting out into Crumb’s first movement, “Night of the Electric Insects,” a wild scene of screaming strings.

That program gave me a frame in which to place the avant-garde weirdness of the ’60s and ’70s: It had all begun 150 years earlier with Beethoven, that rude churl of Hapsburg Vienna, whose urgent dissonances and angry rhythms could still rattle the establishment. The fact that the apparatus of concert music — the purpose-built halls, the genius-worship, the cult of quiet listeners — was created to honor his music made Beethoven’s ferocity all the more vital. Long after he had died and been deified, he was still throwing the moneylenders out of the temple.

It took me a while to understand that the composers who dominated musical life when I was growing up spent a lot of time trying to wriggle free of Beethoven. Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, György Ligeti, Jacob Druckman — these erudite revolutionaries wanted nothing to do with the massed melodic panting of an orchestra, or the triumph of a heroic theme. Theirs was music of fragmentation, of society’s doubts laid bare and left unreconciled. Composers have always been torn between convention and radicalism, but this generation felt the tension more desperately than most. The symphony orchestra was an especially fearsome bugaboo. The Vietnam War and the student strikes that spread all over Europe in 1968 had made it perfectly clear: Institutions were suspect and ranks of identically dressed men moving in lockstep constituted a form of oppression, even if they wielded violin bows rather than riot clubs.

It wasn’t just the orchestra that seemed antique; so did the old tools and genres. How could you write for violin in the nuclear age, or blow an oboe after the Holocaust? How could anyone just pen a tune? This kind of thinking could have led to a period of musical nihilism, a highbrow form of punk. Instead, composers dismantled the very tradition that had produced them, then got to work on the fascinating pile of springs and bits of wire. Rather than abandoning the previous century’s instruments, Luciano Berio methodically picked apart their techniques in a multi-year series of solos he called Sequenze. By the time he was done with an oboe, it sounded like a completely different creature. In the third “Sequenza,” he reassembled human song into a psychotic soliloquy of toneless consonants, phonemes, squeaks, giggles, pitches and assorted other forms of expression.

In the ’60s and ’70s, composers found themselves mirroring the period’s violent extremes. They exploded traditional genres, reinvented rules from scratch, rejected the orchestra or amped it up with electronics. Many were entranced by the challenge of wringing maximum complexity out of minimal means. Stockhausen was fired by the trancelike experiences he’d had in Mexico. “I’d spent a month walking through the ruins, visiting Oaxaca, Merida, and Chichenitza, and becoming a Maya, a Toltec, a Zatopec, an Aztec or a Spaniard — I became the people,” he recalled. He recreated that exaltation in Stimmung, for six amplified singers who pass around the five notes of a B flat ninth chord for more than an hour, producing an effect like shimmering heat.

But the orchestra wasn’t dead yet. In his 1961 Atmosphères, György Ligeti had a symphonic ensemble pour out a churning bath of sound, a sound so infinite, weightless and dark that Stanley Kubrick used it to give his 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey its apocalyptic mood. Ligeti had scraped away virtually all the traditional ingredients of music — just try to find a pulse, a key, or a tune in that! — and was left with a great sonic mural. That search for tone-pictures, for great glowing landscapes of sonority, replaced habitual kinds of beauty. This naturally unsettled audiences.

The traditional concerto, too, refused to be killed off, partly because the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich strong-armed every composer he admired into writing him one. Henri Dutilleux complied with Tout un monde lointain.The title (meaning “a whole distant world”) refers to a poem by Charles Baudelaire, in which a woman’s “black ocean” of hair evokes a geyser of exotic fantasies. The score, too, moves from languor to heat. It’s a Technicolor work, amplifying the subtle orchestral hues that Dutilleux learned from Ravel and Debusssy into an ever-changing polychrome vista.

Rostropovich also tapped Witold Lutoslawski, who took the opportunity to rewrite the roles that a soloist and orchestra play. His concerto (from 1970) opens with a single note on the cello, repeated slowly, an irritating number of times. Think of it: All those people sitting there on stage, representing a long tradition of complexity and drama, and what does the virtuoso do? Play a beginner’s exercise. The ordinariness doesn’t last, of course. The cello begins to argue with itself, sigh, mutter, and return to its fixed idea, while the orchestra stands by, as if the planet had stopped spinning, waiting for the conclusion of a single meandering thought. The world finally arrives in the form of a single trumpet blast, and then it’s the orchestra that goes giddily berserk while the cello keeps plodding along on the same damn note. What follows is a series of bleakly colorful episodes, crafted bursts of insanity: the cello emoting soulfully while percussionists tap madly in another part of the stage; angry fusillades of brass, the black-on-midnight-blue nocturne of a low cello against a growl of strings. Like Beethoven before him, Lutoslawski understood that the old established order didn’t need to be destroyed for a revolution to occur.

Interview: Low

Low’s albums have followed a fascinatingly diverse arc during their tenure on Sub Pop: The life-affirming electric bombast of 2005′s The Great Destroyer, their first for the label, was followed by the moodier, tightly-wound and politically-fueled Drums & Guns. Their 2010 record C’mon is majestic and intimate, an uncharacteristically clean recording with lyrics that can almost be read as a conversation between the band’s founders, husband and wife Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker. Their goal for The Invisible Way, Low’s 10th album in twice as many years, was to keep a minimalist aesthetic, and they enlisted Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy to help them stick to their instincts at his recording studio in Chicago.

The pristine sound is made from little more than guitar, soft drums, bass and a prominent but unintrusive piano presence that backs the album’s most soulful moments, songs like “Holy Ghost, “Waiting” and “Just Make it Stop.” Sparhawk’s and Parker’s voices create some of the fullest sounds on the record, and the scope of their lyrics is wider than Low’s past few collections: In “Plastic Cup,” they imagine people in the future digging up artifacts from today; “Holy Ghost” is about having faith that a higher power will “keep me hangin’ on”; and “Mother” is about teaching reality to future generations.

eMusic’s Laura Leebove spoke with Sparhawk about Parker’s growth as a songwriter, using nonsensical names in songs, and Jeff Tweedy’s hands-off approach to producing.

You’re celebrating 20 years as a band this year. If you could go back to when you started and give yourself career advice, what would it be?

I don’t know. I think I’d be cautious about that because a lot of what helped develop us over the years, or maybe contributed to the fact that we’re still around, is not knowing that we can’t do that or it would be this hard. I think I look back sometimes at how frustrating and sort of demoralizing sometimes it is to try to write songs. Sometimes it’s kind of depressing, when you work for a while and don’t come up with anything. It can be frustrating. I think some of that’s gotten better over the years because I tell myself, ‘It’s OK, I’ve tried this before.’ So maybe a little bit of that. Some of that frustration, years ago might have actually made for better material and made me work so much harder.

Your kids [Hollis, 12, and Cyrus, 8] have had a pretty unique experience being born into the touring-band lifestyle — are they interested in what you and Mimi do for a living?

Yeah, more or less. They kinda grew up around it, came on tour with us, so they’re sort of used to it now. They come with us from time to time.

What do they listen to?

Hollis seems to like the Beatles and some of those kinds of things. And the boy likes pop radio, I’m afraid.

When you’re all able to tour together, what music can you all agree on?

They’re always pretty tolerant of whatever. Mimi usually puts up with a little bit of reggae from me and then after an hour gets tired and puts up stuff that she likes. We usually agree on most everything.

I think “Mother” is one of the prettiest songs on the new record. Is it autobiographical?

Yeah, more or less, inspired by [my mom].

There’s a line there about holding you to the fire; were your parents strict with you growing up?

Yeah, actually, my mom was pretty strict. A little bit of strict and it also kinda evokes showing a kid the truth, showing them the way as harsh as it is sometimes.

You’ve said that part of what keeps you making music is the thought of “Can we do this?” while you’re making a record — whether or not you’re able to pull something off. Where was that moment in recording The Invisible Way?

I guess there’s sort of the “throw caution to the wind” or “OK, let’s jump in” kind of moment. I guess we just visited the studio and [thought it was] pretty cool. I think when we first started doing our takes and started listening, we realized that we were on the right side of the fence that day and things were going better. Sometimes [it helps] just having the right person there to reassure you that you’re not completely in the dark. There’s a little bit of mystery, I guess, not knowing how it’s gonna sound when it comes out the other end. I think when I sort of realized that Jeff Tweedy might be an option, that was the perfect mystery. I don’t know what that’s gonna sound like, but I feel like I could trust that process enough to jump in.

What was it that made you finally commit to doing this record with him? You’ve known him for a while and the offer to record with him had been on the table.

Last year we stopped in to check out the studio, we were on our way through town. I guess it took actually checking the place out and then hearing some stuff they were working on with someone else at the time. It had a really good sound and [we got] a great vibe…that’s when it kind of dawned on me that that was the way to go.

Did anything surprise you about working with him?

Well, I think there’s a little part of me that felt, “OK, Jeff’s a songwriter, he’s really into tunes and I was curious as to whether he was gonna go a little more surgically in and go, “OK, let’s move this around, maybe change this song.” I was pleasantly surprised when he didn’t do that. Early on just said, “Well, you guys already have your songs, you know what you’re doing, it’s good, you already know how to make those decisions.” It’s more trying to make sure we get a good sound. I guess part of me deep down kinda knew that he would be cool and he wouldn’t do that, but it was a mystery at the time. After the first day I didn’t know exactly what he was gonna do.

You already had these songs written and demoed before going in, but even though Jeff was hands off with the actual songs, was there anything that happened in the studio that wasn’t planned ahead of time?

Not too much. I think we were trying to stay to a certain aesthetic, a little minimalism, but I don’t know, yeah, I mean, I was surprised that Jeff helped us stick to that more so than I thought, which was a nice surprise. He helped us when we were second-guessing that, that was really key [with him] keeping us on task and sticking to our own rules, so to speak.

There are a few spots on this record where there’s a lot of soul and some places musically that seem like there was some kind of gospel inspiration. I’m particularly thinking of “Just Make It Stop” and “Holy Ghost” and “Waiting.” Was that in your mind at all while you were working on those songs?

Well, yeah, those are things just in the songs. That kind of stuff is just the heart of the tune, or emotionally the weight of it. I don’t know if you want to call it the drama or whatever, but that’s pretty much inherent in the songs. That’s always been something that’s there from time to time with us. Different songs kind of enhance it more, for sure, but that’s the songs, we don’t have to overthink that.

What’s the story behind “Clarence White”?

Well, there’s someone who played guitar in the Byrds named Clarence White, and the song is not about that person. Both those names in that song are more meant to be random, and not necessarily a reference to him. Those were the first few words that came out…and sometimes the first few words are sort of nonsensical…and you try to go back and fix them and sometimes those initial phrases end up becoming vital so you have to leave them. We couldn’t think of a better one.

Mimi sings lead on more songs here than most of your previous albums. Did anything change in the writing process to create that?

Yeah, she wrote more. In the last couple years with the kids going to school she’s had a little more time to write, and we’ve been encouraging her a lot the last few years to write more. Maybe someday she’ll do the whole record, but it’s a pretty good start so far.

I imagine sometimes when you write a song it’s obvious to her what it’s about and vice versa, especially with C’mon where it seemed like a lot of the songs had a back and forth between you. To what extent do you actually share with each other where the lyrics are coming from?

Probably never. I don’t think we ever… we don’t really talk too much about what songs are about until people ask us, I guess. We don’t really feel like we have to explain what the song’s about to each other.

Because you assume that she knows what it’s about?

Yeah. Or she knows about it as much as anybody’s gonna know about it. One person’s interpretation is [as valid] as anybody else.

Tomasz Stanko New York Quartet, Wislawa

The veteran Polish trumpeter Tomasz Stanko has long been a reliable and rewarding source for jazz of smoldering intensity. He’s a deeply lyrical, probing player whose investment in free jazz is real, but he’s consistently couched his most “out” explorations in a brooding elegance. Over the last decade or so he’s made a series of gorgeously meditative and quietly scalding albums for ECM with rhythm sections half his age. While he continues to keep a residence in Warsaw, for the last five years he’s also kept an apartment in New York, fostering relationships with younger American players. The magnificent double album Wislawa is the first fruit of those new collaborations. The album is named for the Polish poet and Nobel Laureate Wislawa Szymborska, with many of Stanko’s compositions inspired by specific writings.

He’s surrounded by a remarkable band — the inventive and highly original Cuban expat pianist David Virelles, the unassumingly flexible, sturdy bassist Thomas Morgan, and the great Detroit drummer Gerald Cleaver — and while he clearly maintains his trademark sound, he wisely cedes his band plenty of leeway. In fact, it’s hard not to notice conceptual parallels to the great Miles Davis Quintet with Wayne Shorter; this band doesn’t sound much like that unit, but it does borrow from its pin-drop intuition, heightened interaction, and love of wide-open spaces. The surfaces aren’t always placid: On the mildly turbulent “Mikrokosmos” Stanko unleashes a solo of raw power, his burnished tone cracking with a burst of emotional volatility, while on “Faces” there’s a delicious tension between the trumpeter’s visceral, slashing lines and the blocky, subdued chords hammered out by Virelles. Despite the generational gap between Stanko, who’s 70, and the rest of his band (Morgan is 32 and Virelles is 29), there’s no artistic divide. On Wislawa, the quartet is seriously locked in, and the trumpeter sounds as hungry and fiery as he did four decades ago.

Discover: Finders Keepers

An enthusiasm for sounds lost, unknown, ignored or brain-meltingly weird is the principle behind Finders Keepers, the reissue label Andy Votel founded in 2005 with Doug Shipton. A mainstay of Manchester’s music scene, Votel made his name as an electronic musician, respected DJ and the man behind the Twisted Nerve label, which first brought Badly Drawn Boy to the public’s ears. Votel is a long-term enthusiastic crate-digger and his early love of hip-hop taught him to be interested in — and to buy — records wherever they came from, irrespective of the strictures of “youth culture.”

Finders Keepers is a horizon-broadening enterprise, the success of which relies not only on the interests of a curious record-buying public, but also on the passion, in-depth knowledge and deep love of its curators. The catalogue ranges far and wide — from Welsh folk music and ’70s horror-film scores to ’60s Turkish psych-punk and “Lollywood” (from Lahore, Pakistan) movie soundtracks. “Making global sound local” is the label’s motto, and Finders Keepers, which Votel describes as “pretty much genre-less” is supported in its aim by various sibling labels, each with their own focus: the on-going Twisted Nerve (contemporary releases only), Bird (music by female artists), Cache Cache (punk, new wave, ’80s electronic music), Battered Ornaments (Shipton’s own label) and a new imprint called Cacophonic (jazz — “but it’s almost like a noise label”). Votel is clearly committed to pressing forward — however much time he necessarily spends looking back.

Sharon O’Connell spoke with Andy Votel about running a true label of love.

What was the initial spur to launching Finders Keepers?

Working within the mainstream music industry got me down. It became very stringent. A lot of the records we put out on FK are 35-40 years past their sell-by date, so a desperate, four-week promotional campaign is not going to make any difference to sales. Most of the artists on FK now are — and I mean this in the most positive way possible — failed pop musicians, whether for political reasons, through a miscarriage of justice, the failure of the music industry or because they were ahead of their time, so you’re already creating a new music industry. When we set up FK, that’s exactly what it was. It was starting anew, so there was pretty much no rulebook. It was very, very refreshing.

What does the FK motto, “Making global sound local,” mean?

It’s making old records feel young, I suppose. These records were so ahead of their time that they’ve not dated, even after 40 years or so. They were never middle-of-the-road, so they still feel as fresh as the day they were created. It’s virtually impossible to be really experimental nowadays, because everybody knows you can make any sound you could possibly want, no problem. So it’s hard to experiment without restrictions. A lot of the records we’re releasing now are from the ’70s or ’80s, which was the heyday of experimental pop music.

Does a lot of the archive work you do involve playing detective?

For me, the most exciting thing about it all is meeting these artists and going round to their houses, spending time with them and meeting their families; the records are just the by product. But two things are insulting from the outset: one is when people say, “What are these weird records?” A lot of the time, they only think they’re weird because they’re sung in a foreign language, so that’s…almost racist. The other is people think that these records are from primitive industries, so you get a lot of bootlegging by various companies. And you can’t think like that. Everything that we do is on a very human level, and a lot of it is personal hero worship. Luckily, because I’d been working with Twisted Nerve when the internet was still in its infancy, I was able to contact people quite quickly and find a lot of my heroes. The question was what do you do from that point? So, we decided to reissue old records together.

What’s coming up next for FK?

Recently, I’ve been working with a tape engineer from Manchester called Andy Popplewell. He worked for the BBC for a short time, and has been baking [restoring] tapes for people in Manchester and London and all over the world, for a very long time. But it seems like I’m the only person to ever have asked him if he made music himself — and it turns out he did. He built his own synthesizer when he was 17. He has this unreleased album, TRASE and it’s the best thing I’ve heard in about five years. It’s amazing.

Interview: Low

Low’s albums have followed a fascinatingly diverse arc during their tenure on Sub Pop: The life-affirming electric bombast of 2005′s The Great Destroyer, their first for the label, was followed by the moodier, tightly-wound and politically-fueled Drums & Guns. Their 2010 record C’mon is majestic and intimate, an uncharacteristically clean recording with lyrics that can almost be read as a conversation between the band’s founders, husband and wife Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker. Their goal for The Invisible Way, Low’s 10th album in twice as many years, was to keep a minimalist aesthetic, and they enlisted Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy to help them stick to their instincts at his recording studio in Chicago.

The pristine sound is made from little more than guitar, soft drums, bass and a prominent but unintrusive piano presence that backs the album’s most soulful moments, songs like “Holy Ghost, “Waiting” and “Just Make it Stop.” Sparhawk’s and Parker’s voices create some of the fullest sounds on the record, and the scope of their lyrics is wider than Low’s past few collections: In “Plastic Cup,” they imagine people in the future digging up artifacts from today; “Holy Ghost” is about having faith that a higher power will “keep me hangin’ on”; and “Mother” is about teaching reality to future generations.

eMusic’s Laura Leebove spoke with Sparhawk about Parker’s growth as a songwriter, using nonsensical names in songs, and Jeff Tweedy’s hands-off approach to producing.

You’re celebrating 20 years as a band this year. If you could go back to when you started and give yourself career advice, what would it be?

I don’t know. I think I’d be cautious about that because a lot of what helped develop us over the years, or maybe contributed to the fact that we’re still around, is not knowing that we can’t do that or it would be this hard. I think I look back sometimes at how frustrating and sort of demoralizing sometimes it is to try to write songs. Sometimes it’s kind of depressing, when you work for a while and don’t come up with anything. It can be frustrating. I think some of that’s gotten better over the years because I tell myself, ‘It’s OK, I’ve tried this before.’ So maybe a little bit of that. Some of that frustration, years ago might have actually made for better material and made me work so much harder.

Your kids [Hollis, 12, and Cyrus, 8] have had a pretty unique experience being born into the touring-band lifestyle — are they interested in what you and Mimi do for a living?

Yeah, more or less. They kinda grew up around it, came on tour with us, so they’re sort of used to it now. They come with us from time to time.

What do they listen to?

Hollis seems to like the Beatles and some of those kinds of things. And the boy likes pop radio, I’m afraid.

When you’re all able to tour together, what music can you all agree on?

They’re always pretty tolerant of whatever. Mimi usually puts up with a little bit of reggae from me and then after an hour gets tired and puts up stuff that she likes. We usually agree on most everything.

I think “Mother” is one of the prettiest songs on the new record. Is it autobiographical?

Yeah, more or less, inspired by [my mom].

There’s a line there about holding you to the fire; were your parents strict with you growing up?

Yeah, actually, my mom was pretty strict. A little bit of strict and it also kinda evokes showing a kid the truth, showing them the way as harsh as it is sometimes.

You’ve said that part of what keeps you making music is the thought of “Can we do this?” while you’re making a record — whether or not you’re able to pull something off. Where was that moment in recording The Invisible Way?

I guess there’s sort of the “throw caution to the wind” or “OK, let’s jump in” kind of moment. I guess we just visited the studio and [thought it was] pretty cool. I think when we first started doing our takes and started listening, we realized that we were on the right side of the fence that day and things were going better. Sometimes [it helps] just having the right person there to reassure you that you’re not completely in the dark. There’s a little bit of mystery, I guess, not knowing how it’s gonna sound when it comes out the other end. I think when I sort of realized that Jeff Tweedy might be an option, that was the perfect mystery. I don’t know what that’s gonna sound like, but I feel like I could trust that process enough to jump in.

What was it that made you finally commit to doing this record with him? You’ve known him for a while and the offer to record with him had been on the table.

Last year we stopped in to check out the studio, we were on our way through town. I guess it took actually checking the place out and then hearing some stuff they were working on with someone else at the time. It had a really good sound and [we got] a great vibe…that’s when it kind of dawned on me that that was the way to go.

Did anything surprise you about working with him?

Well, I think there’s a little part of me that felt, “OK, Jeff’s a songwriter, he’s really into tunes and I was curious as to whether he was gonna go a little more surgically in and go, “OK, let’s move this around, maybe change this song.” I was pleasantly surprised when he didn’t do that. Early on just said, “Well, you guys already have your songs, you know what you’re doing, it’s good, you already know how to make those decisions.” It’s more trying to make sure we get a good sound. I guess part of me deep down kinda knew that he would be cool and he wouldn’t do that, but it was a mystery at the time. After the first day I didn’t know exactly what he was gonna do.

You already had these songs written and demoed before going in, but even though Jeff was hands off with the actual songs, was there anything that happened in the studio that wasn’t planned ahead of time?

Not too much. I think we were trying to stay to a certain aesthetic, a little minimalism, but I don’t know, yeah, I mean, I was surprised that Jeff helped us stick to that more so than I thought, which was a nice surprise. He helped us when we were second-guessing that, that was really key [with him] keeping us on task and sticking to our own rules, so to speak.

There are a few spots on this record where there’s a lot of soul and some places musically that seem like there was some kind of gospel inspiration. I’m particularly thinking of “Just Make It Stop” and “Holy Ghost” and “Waiting.” Was that in your mind at all while you were working on those songs?

Well, yeah, those are things just in the songs. That kind of stuff is just the heart of the tune, or emotionally the weight of it. I don’t know if you want to call it the drama or whatever, but that’s pretty much inherent in the songs. That’s always been something that’s there from time to time with us. Different songs kind of enhance it more, for sure, but that’s the songs, we don’t have to overthink that.

What’s the story behind “Clarence White”?

Well, there’s someone who played guitar in the Byrds named Clarence White, and the song is not about that person. Both those names in that song are more meant to be random, and not necessarily a reference to him. Those were the first few words that came out…and sometimes the first few words are sort of nonsensical…and you try to go back and fix them and sometimes those initial phrases end up becoming vital so you have to leave them. We couldn’t think of a better one.

Mimi sings lead on more songs here than most of your previous albums. Did anything change in the writing process to create that?

Yeah, she wrote more. In the last couple years with the kids going to school she’s had a little more time to write, and we’ve been encouraging her a lot the last few years to write more. Maybe someday she’ll do the whole record, but it’s a pretty good start so far.

I imagine sometimes when you write a song it’s obvious to her what it’s about and vice versa, especially with C’mon where it seemed like a lot of the songs had a back and forth between you. To what extent do you actually share with each other where the lyrics are coming from?

Probably never. I don’t think we ever… we don’t really talk too much about what songs are about until people ask us, I guess. We don’t really feel like we have to explain what the song’s about to each other.

Because you assume that she knows what it’s about?

Yeah. Or she knows about it as much as anybody’s gonna know about it. One person’s interpretation is [as valid] as anybody else.

Anais Mitchell and Jefferson Hamer, Child Ballads

One of today’s most creative and authentic rising songwriters, Anais Mitchell is constantly finding new ways to reinvent folk tradition. She’s spent much of her career promoting Hadestown — her folk opera based on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, set in a post-apocalyptic American mining town — and the lyrics on her other albums are often timeless, even when they’re fueled by today’s politics. Here, she joins one of her Hadestown collaborators, singer/songwriter Jefferson Hamer, to interpret and modernize seven of the 305 English and Scottish ballads collected by Francis James Child in the late 1800s.

Their collection is short, sweet and intimate, with little more than acoustic guitars and vocals telling the tales of an ill-fated sailor, a quick-witted sister, and disapproving parents. (If you thought your in-laws were trouble, listen to “Willie of Winsbury” and “Willie’s Lady,” where you’ll meet a king who orders her daughter’s lover to be hanged, and a witch mother who casts a spell on her son’s pregnant wife.) Mitchell and Hamer have recorded accessible, American-folk renditions of these centuries-old songs, a fitting addition to the countless modern artists — among them Joan Baez, Nickel Creek, even Fleet Foxes — who have passed them on throughout the years.

Jamaica Kincaid, See Now Then

The painful tension between hate and love, the two strongest and most complicatedly intertwined of emotions, drives See Now Then, Jamaica Kincaid’s newest novel. Mr. and Mrs. Sweet live in a small New England village with their two children, “the young Heracles” and “the beautiful Persephone.” Mr. Sweet hates (or loves) his wife enough to compose a nocturne entitled “This Marriage is Dead,” or, “This Marriage Has Been Dead for a Long Time Now.” Mr. Sweet also hates the young Heracles enough to engage in frequent fantasies of his beheading, but he makes clear that he doesn’t want to murder his son, only to kill him. Heracles worships his mother, who loves gardening and writing and who arrived from an island in the British West Indies on a “banana boat,” yet at the same time finds her deeply ridiculous. And Mrs. Sweet? She is at once a victim of her families’ enmity and a conscious participant in it: She knows what she does to make herself hated, and, though she won’t apologize for her ways, she doesn’t blame her family for the hate her ways inspire in them.

Readers with a cursory knowledge of Kincaid’s story will recognize the Sweet family as bearing a deep resemblance to her own: Mrs. Sweet’s first name is Jamaica; she quotes from Autobiography of My Mother and Kincaid’s other previous books; and Kincaid, like Mrs. Sweet, grew up in Antigua, and lived in a small town in Vermont with her two children and composer husband, who she later divorced. This unignorable resemblance adds to the novel’s tension, which is both heightened and balmed by Kincaid’s precise, lyrical sentences, heady with repetition.

It is hard to imagine the audiobook being voiced by anyone but Kincaid, who reads the text the way she wants us to understand it; words like hate and kill sound as casual as the weather, while words that define our contemporary lives — Crate and Barrel, Verizon, Ninja Turtles — are pronounced with a kind of denaturalized incredulity. It is this pervasive denaturalization of what we have come to expect as normal — that family members should love and not hate each other, that one should not accept hate as if it were love — that makes See Now Then a source of great insight and wonder.

Anais Mitchell and Jefferson Hamer, Child Ballads

One of today’s most creative and authentic rising songwriters, Anais Mitchell is constantly finding new ways to reinvent folk tradition. She’s spent much of her career promoting Hadestown — her folk opera based on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, set in a post-apocalyptic American mining town — and the lyrics on her other albums are often timeless, even when they’re fueled by today’s politics. Here, she joins one of her Hadestown collaborators, singer/songwriter Jefferson Hamer, to interpret and modernize seven of the 305 English and Scottish ballads collected by Francis James Child in the late 1800s.

Their collection is short, sweet and intimate, with little more than acoustic guitars and vocals telling the tales of an ill-fated sailor, a quick-witted sister, and disapproving parents. (If you thought your in-laws were trouble, listen to “Willie of Winsbury” and “Willie’s Lady,” where you’ll meet a king who orders her daughter’s lover to be hanged, and a witch mother who casts a spell on her son’s pregnant wife.) Mitchell and Hamer have recorded accessible, American-folk renditions of these centuries-old songs, a fitting addition to the countless modern artists — among them Joan Baez, Nickel Creek, even Fleet Foxes — who have who have passed them on throughout the years.

Sacred Steel Goes Secular

Sacred steel is one of America’s ultimate outsider musics. Most who are aware of it first became so in 1997, when Arhoolie Records began issuing albums recorded by Florida folklorist Robert Stone. The music, made primarily on lap steel guitars, is the ecstatic sound of the Pentecostal House of God, but it took its first tentative steps away from gospel in 2001, when young House of God pedal steel whiz Robert Randolph joined with the North Mississippi Allstars and organist John Medeski to record The Word, a scorching fusion of secular and sacred. The next year Live at the Wetlands, the debut album of Randolph and his Family Band, had its greatest impact among jam-band devotees. Today, in addition to The Word and the Randolph catalog, eMusic carries albums by the Campbell Brothers (one with vocalist Kate Jackson and another with Medeski), one each by Glenn Lee and by the Lee Brothers, and a host of compilations. But with the exception of Randolph’s hybrid, sacred steel has still been heard by few outside the church.

Now, with the release of Robert Randolph Presents The Slide Brothers, co-produced by Randolph and John McDermott and featuring steel players Calvin Cooke, Aubrey Ghent and Chuck and Darick Campbell, the style gets its best shot yet at a wider audience. The album’s made up mostly of pop and rock songs with a spiritual bent (George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord”) and spirituals with established crossover appeal (“Wade in the Water”), but also includes secular tunes (The Allman Brothers’ “Don’t Keep Me Wonderin’”). The musicians — unfortunately, not a single track features all five — show off their funk, blues, country, rock, pop and jazz licks while staying true to their faith. “It’s always sorta been my vision to get everybody together and do this the right way, in a good studio, using songs non-church people could relate to,” Randolph says.

There’s a price for taking their music outside the House of God. After that first wave of Arhoolie albums, the Campbells began playing occasional festivals and venues (like coffeehouses) where alcohol wasn’t served. Although they still performed only religious material, they were banned from playing in the church. Randolph left the church by hitting the road to play his secular material, and never tried to return; Cooke, the patriarch of current musicians after playing services for 57 years, was dismissed for touring with Randolph. Ghent likewise was banished from his Florida church after doing sacred material at secular gigs, but was taken in at a Nashville House of God; because he’s now its pastor, he participates here only on songs that have a spiritual grounding. Most of them still worship in the House of God; they just don’t play services anymore, and they’re okay with the tradeout. “I enjoy exploring my music more,” Cooke explains. “I wanted to venture out.”

This music differs from their church music in more than one way. In 1999, I joined Ghent one Sunday at his church in Fort Pierce, Florida. He played nonstop through the entire service — improvising behind the pastor as she built her sermon to a climax, at which point she’d ease off as he either burned his improv to a crescendo or broke into a recognizable song the congregation began singing; then he laid back and she retook control. They passed the lead back and forth between music and preaching, amping it up and then softening it, congregation members speaking in tongues or shaking and writhing in the pews and aisles, for about three straight hours. Ghent played lines that emulated the tones and cadences of the preacher’s voice with a seemingly calm intensity that left his face and suit soaked in sweat. Even the best sacred steel albums, great as several of them are, can’t duplicate that — and similarly, The Slide Brothers can’t match those CDs.

In short, it’s likely to disappoint those who’ve heard any of the sacred albums. “Basically,” Ghent admits, “Here we simply play the songs. In church it’s different: We’re helping the preacher.” Still, there’s much here to love, especially if you’ve never heard any sacred steel. That’s apparent from the opening track, the Allmans’ “Don’t Keep Me Wonderin’,” with Chuck Campbell’s sharp, knifing pedal steel and Darick’s fat lap steel swirling out sheets of sound while bro Phil lays down jagged funk and rock lines on guitar. Factor in Cooke’s equally driving vocals and the fiery outro jam and it’s a thrilling cut by any standards. Fronted by different guest vocalists, the Campbells likewise recast “My Sweet Lord,” Fatboy Slim’s “Praise You” and the churning, traditional “Motherless Children,” while starting their instrumental “Wade in the Water” with shimmers and ending it with screams. Cooke brings deep, urgent empathy with both voice and lap steel to his revivals of slide guitar blues king Elmore James’s “The Sky Is Crying” and “It Hurts Me Too,” effectively obliterating distinctions between blues and gospel, and also contributes his original, secular/sacred “Help Me Make It Through.” Ghent, who I hadn’t remembered as much of a singer, proves me wrong on Mylon Lefevre’s “Sunday School Blues” and concludes the album with a bit of levity on “No Cheap Seats in Heaven.”

All five steel men are adamant that despite House of God’s rigorous insularity, the sound has a strong future both inside and outside the church. Cooke notes that there are more teenagers within the HoG taking up the instrument than ever before, while Randolph adds that Jack White, Kid Rock, Luther Dickinson and current and former Black Crowes Chris Robinson and Jeff Cease are now playing gospel-based lap steel styles; Chuck Campbell has a Finnish student. “It’s an ongoing thing that everyone wants to do, now that they’re getting to understand the story behind the music,” Randolph insists. I just hope they do it right.

KEN Mode, Entrench

Over the past decade, Winnipeg, Canada’s KEN Mode — who took their name from Henry Rollins’s acronym for Kill Everyone Now (as detailed in his book Get in the Van) — have evolved from a bracing hardcore metal band into something more experimental and complex. The band’s fifth album, Entrench, is their most inventive yet, matching raw musical gristle and asymmetrical acrobatics with unexpected sonic flourishes, from the scribbling violins of the opening cut “Counter Culture Complex” to the undistorted arpeggios and pensive piano of the closer “Monomyth.”

Throughout, frontman and guitarist Jesse Matthewson alternates between propulsive power chord volleys, scribbly post-hardcore configurations and terse melodic licks and the band responds with correspondingly varied tempos, from the barreling “Your Heartwarming Story Makes Me Sick” to the militant, mid-paced “The Terror Pulse.”

Most of the vocals are harsh and abrasive, but Matthewson throws a striking change-up into album highlight “Romeo Must Never Know,” which builds and dips in intensity over seven-plus minutes of minor-key melodies that are equal parts Fugazi and Sonic Youth. For KEN Mode the heaviest music is only limited by imagination.