Ball of Wax 52 Songs: The Foghorns – “Bump”

Posted on April 30, 2018 by Jon Rooney

Ball of Wax stalwarts the Foghorns offer up “Bump” on Volume 52, a rollicking workout that takes a page from some of the best work in the band’s catalog. Whereas last year’s outstanding . . . on a Dog’s Ass Sometime was a sort of meditation on aging and mortality, “Bump” is a call-back to the folk morality of 2015’s The Sun’s Gotta Shine with songs like “Ain’t I A Man” and “Sons and Daughters of the Molly Maguires.” After the band kicks things off in a barroom tumble, lead Foghorn Bart Cameron belts out “Bump / Another bird hits the window / like we’re living in paradise / and we’re killing it and killing it,” quickly sketching the details of a certain modern dystopia we’re all sleepwalking through. Trump is alluded to, as is American militarism and environmental disaster. For Cameron, this pervasive technocratic obliviousness is both a moral and social obscenity, yet, like all Foghorns songs, “Bump” isn’t dry, preachy or overbearing. It’s light, boozy and cathartic, danceable in the way that half-drunk folks respond to extended late night sets from the band at Conor Byrne or the Sunset. There’s no better band to soundtrack our boogie-ing into oblivion than the Foghorns.

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Ball of Wax 52: May 11th at Conor Byrne!

Posted on April 26, 2018 by Levi Fuller

Ball of Wax 52 Release Show
with Gabriel Mintz, Doug Hood & the Wholly Heathens, Eggshells, and Amanda Winterhalter
Friday, May 11, 9pm
Conor Byrne Pub
$8 (includes a copy of Ball of Wax 52 CD)

It’s time to celebrate the release of another quarterly installment of excellent music and sounds from Seattle, the Northwest, and beyond!

The new volume includes music from all of the above fine people, as well as an array of wonderful artists such as The Foghorns, Xurs, Syrinx Effect, Shitty Person, and many more!

We’ll start rolling out the tracks next Monday right here on the Blog of Wax, so stay tuned.

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Album Review: The Rainieros – The Fool EP

Posted on March 20, 2018 by Casey Ruff

The Rainieros - The FoolThe Rainieros – The Fool
(2018, self-released)

“. . . no, it’s not nothing that I hadn’t heard before.”

“The Fool” is a strong opener for the eponymous EP. The song is emotionally buoyant in the “High Lonesome” hallmark of Country greatness, straightforward, and–like any first level in Super Mario Bros.–it doesn’t scare the uninitiated. It’s so evident of what Country is that it could have been a musical candidate for the cultural annals of the Voyager spacecraft- perhaps under the heading “Virgo Supercluster/Milky Way Galaxy/Sol 3/Mid-Holocene Era/Northern Hemisphere/Post Afro-European Diaspora/North American Rural Folk Expressionism/United States of America/Washington/Seattle/The Rainieros,” but alas.

Continue reading →

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Ball of Wax 51 Songs: Darryl Blood – “Killing Blow”

Posted on March 9, 2018 by Aurora Fonseca-Lloyd

I was listening to Darryl Blood’s “Killing Blow” early this morning at work as I prepared for a big biweekly meeting, wondering how I could write about the song, having listened to it in a number of situations, and really it worked best as a soundtrack, especially if I pretended I was pushing my cart of stuff around a near-empty space station instead of a near-empty office building. It has old-school-sounding synths and some noisy piano for about the first two thirds of it, nothing especially melodic, and it was easy to imagine a cabal of bad guys or bad robots plotting against me and my mission somewhere in the upper levels of my space-office while I went about my business. (Now that I think about it, I may have willed some tech problems into being through my imaginings, for which I apologize to Travis the IT guy.)

About ten minutes in there’s a repetitive laser blast kind of sound, and a low drone beneath it, which isn’t especially pleasant, but it has a compelling urgency. The most interesting part comes a minute and a half later, when some percussion comes in. I’m not a percussion expert, but it’s definitely non-western, maybe a tabla? Then a short simple melody on a marimba or xylophone starts, and a pretty synthy counter-melody that reminds me of something from ’90s trip-hop. The laser drone stops for a while, and it’s a very peaceful groove. I’m not sure what would happen in my space movie at this point, maybe a visit to a good quiet planet, maybe some very chill dancing and/or getting high with a sympathetic android.

The laser drone comes back though, because, and here’s the moral, you can’t escape technology, you can’t escape the future, and weirdly, you can’t escape the past’s vision of the future. Stanley Kubrick will haunt us forever, but it’s okay, because the best parts of the past will haunt us too if we’re careful, and because there will always be dancing. Music is for that and for painting our world in bizarre and exciting colors, and helping us dream, and for that I am thankful.

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Ball of Wax 51 Songs: Small Life Form – “Penetrable Surface”

Posted on March 9, 2018 by Lattney B. Jones

Small Life Form’s “Penetrable Surfaces” begs analysis by its title alone. Nearly any surface can be penetrable to some degree and there have been numerous studies (mostly by Russian scientists, interestingly enough) regarding the effects of various forces on penetrable surfaces, my personal favorite detailing supersonic heat transfer, but I think the minds behind Small Life Form may have had a different intent. The track lacks any semblance of the human voice, so the title could be an ironic adjective modifying a remotely descriptive noun; to wit, the meaning of these aural shapes is anything but decipherable.

Small Life Form make several interesting choices in the execution of the piece. For instance, its primary element is a tone akin to guitar feedback’s lower-register cousin that fades in and out at 5-second intervals and repeats for eleven minutes over slowly-shifting series of guitar thrumming, sub-bass rumbling, and static . . . and then suddenly shifts down an octave, a half-second into the tone, no less.  Over the course of the 14th and 15th minutes, the repeating guitar note gradually fades, leaving in its place a sound that seems to be the same note an octave lower, but lacks a definite tonal frequency and feels more like a deep, disembodied hum.

It gets weirder: the entire repeating sequence drops altogether just before the final minute for a meshed screech-and-mechanical-grind that quickly gives way to pure feedback and the thrummed guitar, after which the feedback tone is subjected to a bit of pitch-bending tomfoolery that descends into electronic noise and leaves the guitar to close the track (itself an octave lower than that which opened the track).

Despite the foregoing, the strangest move is one that seems so accidental I can’t help but feel that it’s got to be intentional: the entire piece is composed of quarter tones that fall between D and E♭. On the surface, it’s maddening; penetrated through repeated listens, it’s disturbing in the best way.

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Ball of Wax 51 Songs: Tight Cannons – “Going for It”

Posted on March 8, 2018 by Jon Rooney

Tight Cannons is the latest musical moniker of Seattle’s lovable Matty P, who also sings in the Foghorns choir and writes for this very blog. Tight Cannons is a huge improvement on his last band name – Karaoke Hottiez, which is an affront to both god and man – and “Going for it” is a fine, fine slice of extended romantic lo fi pop. Acoustic guitar, hand percussion, casiotones for the comfortably alone, microphone buzz, street noise – it’s got it all. It has a scratchy old-timey boardwalk feel, like if Tom Waits had placed his mythos on the Atlantic City boardwalk rather than the Bowery. Despite clocking in at over twelve minutes, Matty croons a catchy, wistful melody with a measure of feeling and commitment that elevates this way above jokey 4-track dicking around. The layered guitar parts get hypnotic at times, the spell broken when Matty’s weary voice asserts the melody like a singalong he’s stubbornly determined to get others to join.

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Ball of Wax 51 Songs: Levi Fuller – “09.28.15 (All Good News Forever)”

Posted on March 8, 2018 by Julia Massey

The last time I really sat down with a long tune was Joanna Newsom’s “Emily,” and I relished sitting down and getting lost in it for well over ten minutes. Nowadays, and in my own catalog, it seems that short is the norm, and the opportunity to sink into a lengthy tune has shrunk. Listening to Levi‘s piece was a welcome chance. The song starts off with a lush, warm, hypnotic guitar strum with Levi’s gentle voice pushing things along in a subtle but purposeful way. It almost has a lullaby quality to it. Midway through, though, another tone gets introduced. The actual part is simple in composition, but the timbre jumps out at your ears in a way that wakes you out of your trance and asks you to jump onto another plane. The slow and gradual inflation of volume includes perfectly mixed harmonic lines that end up overlapping one another the way that I imagine dough getting overlapped by breadmakers. By the end, you almost wonder if you can hear it ringing out into the universe forever. A very peaceful song.

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Ball of Wax 51 Songs: The Antenna Project – “Calm Culture Sample 1”

Posted on March 7, 2018 by Jon Rooney

Clocking in at over 27 minutes, the Antenna Project apparently submitted only a sample of a”Calm Culture,” which I imagine could be a near-endless piece. Longtime attentive followers of Ball of Wax and deep Seattle scene aficionados might know the artist behind the Antenna Project as the Music of Grayface, one of many monikers of one Christopher Hydinger. Whereas the Music of Grayface is vocal-driven art pop, the Antenna Project seems to be about ambience and minimalism, a la Stars of the Lid or La Monte Young.

“Calm Culture” opens up with a gurgling single-note drone, which sustains for a while before smatterings of padded percussion and other distant sound details float into the audible field. What sounds like a palm-muted electric guitar part emerges at one point, hinting at a soft-LOUD-soft Mogwai-esque movement before settling back into the calm sea of drone. Other musical motifs emerge from time to time, but none change the dynamics any post-rock-ish way.

It’s hard not to describe this music as meditative, as I found myself losing track of both the time and shape of the piece while still enjoying it.  I periodically found myself mulling over ideas like “feelings are not facts” and “just because I have a jarring or upsetting thought, that doesn’t mean I have to follow it and feed it.” Make no mistake, though, this isn’t the kind of gossamer new age music that might soundtrack a deep tissue massage. At one point, a high pitched, percussive sample (maybe a hammered dulcimer?) approaches like a swarm of locust or bees, turning the dream feverish. But a steady, pulsing guitar sample serves to soothe before a percussive part like some sort of double dutch pattern gently shifts the mood again. Gradually, everything else in the piece melts away, leaving only the percussive pattern like some sort of alien heartbeat before fading to silence and it ends.

The Antenna Project will create some more calm culture live at the Ball of Wax 51 release show this Friday.

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Ball of Wax 51 Songs: Mark Schlipper – “1000 Seconds in the Chapel”

Posted on March 7, 2018 by Geoffrey Cox

Mark Schlipper (familiar to Ball of Wax followers for his significantly louder work in The Luna Moth, Perish the Island, and more), contributes a song here as his eponymous, droneful self. Beautiful and obscure(d), the evocatively titled “1000 Seconds in the Chapel” slowly builds from ambient, scratching guitars that may or may not be the (circuit bent?) hybrid of a Buddha machine and an electronic Indian tanpura drone box, or simply the organic sound of electricity, wound strings and leaning into an amplifier. (I’m reminded vaguely of Bruce Licher’s intro parts in Scenic, but Schlipper repeats and loops, doubling down on the drone where Licher shifts gears towards more familiar “songs”). Schlipper’s drones gradually become denser over the first third of the piece, until joined by a plucked note pattern. Just as the drones could come from any number of sources (electric guitar, loops, contact mic on the Tacoma Narrows bridge, metal flagpole in the wind slowed to a quarter speed, etc.) the melodic figure obscures its origin (piano? acoustic guitar? prepared autoharp? does it matter?) as it builds and begins to shiver and glitch, somewhat solidifying into a stable(-ish) melody before gradually dissipating, crumbling and fading. Lovely stuff.

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Ball of Wax 51 Songs: Trash Lights – “Second Movements”

Posted on March 7, 2018 by Zach Warnes

“America is many things to many people”

For music that is self-described as “aimed directly at putting people to sleep,” Trash Lights grabs a thought provoking sound bite to open their track Second Movements. In this incredible time of political uncertainty, there are plenty of examples out there for us. Just turn the television to your local news channel, open your social media apps, call your parents . . . you know you are due for a call. Amidst public (and not so public) opinion I think you will find an over-arching motif of fear. Maybe somewhere deep down in our collective consciousness, even if we personally haven’t been affected yet, we know that we could be watching the death of the American Dream. And because we don’t know what would happen next if that were true, we are afraid.

Second Movements sounds a little bit more hopeful. The opening synth lines weave in and out of phase while swelling and ringing out. It feels like the soundtrack to a sunrise over our Olympic Mountains here in Washington State, or maybe a time lapse of high and low tides in Elliott Bay. Static and overdriven guitar add movement to this song. Trash Lights is more than capable of crafting ambient soundscapes using a variety of instrumentation.

Brendon Helgason and Steve Andrea are no strangers to long composition. In their previous outfit, Lowmen Markos, they helped created intricate instrumental music influenced by a wide variety of rock, jazz, and fusion. Hints of these styles can be found within the textures of sound in Second Movements, creating an ambient noise song with a distinguishable pop sensibility. This song would easily be effective in almost any documentary format and if you don’t smoke too much weed and stay up all night worrying about the future of our nation, it could even help you fall asleep . . .

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