Scott Walker "Bish Bosch"

Not so much its Scott Walker, rather its that species who had a chart hit and now are doing this thing which won't get any wide attention but more than your neighbourhood aargh avant outfit (much of this began with the likes of Eno, then Robert Wyatt, etc.) Something that is marvelled at more than it should be.

There's nothing too novel about that, nor this track - lots of his macabre cabaret. Its ok, will be praised for being different and so on, don't think its moving far enough sideways from The Drift (as that was from Tilt).

Might give the record a listen though.

I disagree about the lack of novelty -- this kind of music doesn't usually attempt to swing that hard, and Walker's emphasis of the swing rhythm is obviously tied to the lyrics in an important way, and that's absolutely something he does that nobody else does much.

He also sings the hell out of this song -- once you adjust your ears and realize it's extreme crooning more than failed bel canto you realize how very flexible that voice is, on this track much more than anything on Tilt or the Drift.

My abiding feelings about his music since Tilt is that it really must be so much fun to assemble these tracks and put it all together in the studio.

Check out the documentary about the recording of the previous album - there's a bit where they build a huge wooden box in the studio just to get a 'thumping a huge wooden box' sound.

yaaay this is terrific and fun

TWU otm

Wow, so 4AD. Gotta get!! Perfect for winter nights.

This album is neither as radical nor as harrowing as "Tilt" or "The Drift." Like I said earlier, a whole lot of odd guitar riffage scattered throughout, which I don't recall hearing before.

I like what seems to me to be the increased accessibility.

this sounds way different than the last two albums. the new song. doesn't remind me at all of the drift.

the creepycrawly david lynch vibe is similar but the way it comes together sounds very different to me.

wonder if scott is a jandek fan. i'm just glad these albums exist. i don't play tilt or the drift much but i like knowing they are out there in the world.

i play Tilt a lot (probably too much). The Drift I'm not keen on but "Clara" is absolutely my favourite "song" Scott ever made. What a thing that is! really!

but Julio on here, just a post on ILX, gave The Drift the best and most honest review it ever had.

i reviewed the drift for decibel magazine. which is a metal magazine. i thought metal fans would like it. i was happy that my editor let me review it. i don't think it's online. came out pretty good.

well, The Drift is a heavy, heavy album. i think a lot of people attuned to the methodology behind some of the more interesting metal artists would at least appreciate it.

Hey, if someone else is doing this thing as well as Scott Walker, please point me to those records.

xpost Opeth dude said The Drift was one of the biggest influences on the Watershed album.

circa 1916, yeah i don't think anyone does Drift-style music with anywhere near the same intensity or effectiveness as Scott Walker, particularly given that his sound and approach are made up of so many strikingly unique constituents. that said, i was listening to Origin's Hesitation by Fushitsusha the other day and noticed that that album share's SW's flair for creating tension and an all-round discomposure through its excessive and unpredictable application of silences.

Jon, yeah i remember reading about the SW influence on Opeth's music. it seems kind of strange, given that Watershed still strikes me after close listening as quite a tepid, wishy-washy album overall. maybe it shares The Drift's tendency to hop all over the place, but even in that regard, SW has a better handle on creating a uniform and encompassing atmosphere that holds firm through the album's various detours.

(jed tx for the kind words..)

I think it was a fairly, yes, easy-ish assemble of horn -- some abrasive, thers not -- and gtr sounds. I just found a settling down to the strange world of Scott Walker that isn't really strange.

But I'll see how it'll work with the rest of the record. Feeling anxious as The Drift was a big deal for me..

charlie h - that's an interestng leap to Origin's Hesitation. That's Fushitsusha's most panned alb bcz they weren't doing what they were meant to.

are any of you guys fans of this guy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mV8bOaxDMJI&feature=related

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkiOnPNFH-o&feature=related

i ask cuz THAT guy ghedalia tazartes has a new album out with some other guys credited to REINES D' ANGLETERRE on bo weavil and its really good and strange and reminds me a little teeny bit of SW at times. but just glimmers of it. the vibe. they are different things. but in answer to who are some of the people making records like this...

anyway, i highly recommend the new album on bo weavil. called GLOBE ET DYNASTIE.

and jon voight as the general...

oops rong thread...

Hahah I'd LOVE to hear Jon Voight on a Tazartes OR a Walker album.

fiy: spotify took down the two new tracks.

FYI

I have to go to bed now an that brass loop from epizootics! is going round an round

*and - stupid iPhone

I will look up that Julio post. I've only listened to "The Drift" five times or so. I think I posted something once about how it's not a record that needs to be listened to that often.

On a nerd note I was really surprised to read "this is an analog recording" on the liner notes of "The Drift", as if it was all recorded to tape? I don't believe it, there is no hiss on that recording and there are many, many nearly-silent sound sources

I read the same thing about The Drift, and I seem to recall a brief shot or two of analog tape during the studio bits in 30th Century Man. But yeah, a friend of mine who's a huge Scottophile remarked on first hearing, "Ugh, why did he have to use Pro Tools?"

We have a Studer 2-inch 24-track deck here in our studio, and, when freshly calibrated and demagnetized, it is quite incredibly clean sounding. In tandem with external noise gates and noise reduction devices there's little to no perceptible hiss, even at high volume - a lot of this depends on the mixing board and outboard devices as well. And virgin tape too. Scott, I assume, is working in very high-end studios which are much better equipped, with better outboard and presumably very skilled engineers, so whatever little surface noise survived the mixing process could easily be killed in the mastering stage. It's not surprising that it all sounds so clean with the kind of resources he's working with, though it also wouldn't surprise me if there's some digital in there too.

i'm pretty sure it was assembled digitally. it certainly sounds like it was. i dunno what pro tools is but it's a badly pieced together record imo. it sounds so computery.

they're not really comparable but the new cat power album was put together on pro tools and it sounds terrible. i mean there are a few good songs on it but even they sound like shit. it's like there's no reality to it.

jed I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that 99.5% of the music released in the past five years was recorded to a computer

:-)

i have no idea what i'm talking about but sun sounds awful and the drift sounds wrong.

saw ghedalia tazartes perform a live soundtrack to Haxan not that long ago, it was great, tho' a bit more homemade/lo-tech than scott tbh, but yeah there is def an absurdist-gothic thing going on in both their stuff.

there's an interview w/scott in the wire this month where he fairly firmly rejects improvisation ("jamming") in the studio, so he wld prob never collab w/ someone like tazartes... or the bohman bros...or graham lambkin etc - scott always seems a more 'high-end' guy

Nah I wasn't trying to josh you, I think I've read you or others comment on the computeriness of both records and it's an interesting point!

@ alb lucky you with a studio. There are no good tape studios where I live. I don't doubt that Scott has the capacity to record in an A+ room but serious, put on studio monitors and compare "The Drift" to any other similarly quiet analog recording from any era and the different is remarkable. "The Drift" is one of the cleanest sounding records I've ever heard and I just assumed "this is an analog recording" meant that they mixed to tape or something

fwiw I have noticed a computery sound on Cat Power records but it might be a psychosomatic reaction to a photo of her playing guitar into a clamshell Mac

oh i know! but i really don't know what i'm talking about :)

i thought the drift sounded cool. i've only heard the vinyl though. i don't know what it sounds like on cd.

would it not sound computery if he had added virtual reverb?

This computer discussion is pretty wearisome TBF.

you don't say

yeah god forbid people should actually have to make this shit and want to talk about how it is made

I don't generally go round being a content fascist on ILX - people can talk about whatever boring shit they like - but here we are, on the brink of one of the most highly anticipated releases of the last six years from possibly the most dynamic and challenging artists around today, and we're discussing whether the SILENCES were recorded on a computer or a tape.

On a more positive note, Christmas can't come any sooner for me :-D

i appreciate the the modern Scott Walker sound. i like the sound and the production.
he IS one of "the most dynamic and challenging artists around today",
as he WAS at the sixties, but something important is missing (to me, at least): a melody. the new song sounds almost like a spoken word.
i wonder if it's just me.

I hate to use a cliché, but his music's very much like a Magic Eye picture, I find. At first it sounds like operatic singing pasted haphazardly over an atmospheric collage, but over time they do tend to reveal themselves as song songs, just arranged and framed in an unorthodox way. Someone upthread mentioned the difference between bel canto and crooning, and I'd be inclined to agree. You could totally turn something like "This is not a cornhusk doll/Dipped in blood in the moonlight/Like what happened in America" into an (albeit sinister) swing tune. Far-fetched as it may be, I like to think of songs off the Drift as a deconstructed bizarro/Silent Hill/alternate reality version of what he's always done. After subjecting myself to the Drift almost every day for the last few weeks I find the more melodic/song-based stuff even up to and including Tilt to be almost bludgeoningly and transparently accessible by comparison. And so I'm actually glad to hear a further abstraction of his sound from what I've heard of Bish Bosch.

Melodies are so 20th century, so its just you I'm afraid :)

dog latin - tough shit if you don't like the discussion.

would it not sound computery if he had added virtual reverb?

― marguerite yourarsenal (clouds), Sunday, 11 November 2012 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

How would you know he added reverb as oposed to it being an element that is just there? One answer would be in the randomness of the placement.

But Scott's last few records sound very calculated too (this is not to imply they are stiff; this is an inference I'd reject). So the question could also be about adding randomness as if its calculated??

Really don't know, just trying to think this through.

"Melodies are so 20th century"

yeah, i forgot Scott is a 30th century man, but it still sounds melodic to me:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AexzqFLquG8