Over the course of three years, the sounds of acoustic guitar, pump organ, piano, banjo and voice were caught on tape, rearranged, processed and, coupled with other sounds and recordings, left waiting for months on end. All the while life changed, relationships ended, new life began and older lives ended. More sounds were recorded, arranged, and left to wait.

Eventually these recordings eveloved into finished tracks, and the band enlisted the expert help of Kristopher Strom, Nils Frahm and Heather Woods Broderick. Said tracks have now been packaged into a full-length LP entitled Teeth Out. You can hear the first track ‘Worry, Glory’, which sees Broderick taking on vocal duties, in the player below:

The Silence Set are due to release Teeth Out on the 6th of November. You can pre-order it now via Mini50 Records.

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What One Could, To These Three, Be For? is Old Earth’s thirteen-plus minutes-single-slash-EP. The track has all of the things that make Old Earth’s music so enchanting, such as guitars and atmospherics and snatches of ambiguous lyrics. It feels like a bad dream rather than a nightmare, the prevailing sense one of unease rather than terror. “Is it safe to wander the woods again?”, he asks. His reply of, “No? Is it safe? NO” nicely captures the anxious aura of ill-ease.

As with other Old Earth records, there is a stellar supporting cast, including members of Field Report (who made another of my favourite albums of 2014), Altos and Twin Brother.

You can but the EP via the Old Earth bandcamp page and you should because it’s really good.

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If you’re even vaguely familiar with Old Earth, then you’ll know that Todd Umhoefer is very much his own man. His influences range from modern-day hip hop to golden oldie pop songs, a blend which he builds on a foundation of experimental folk. Using looped guitars and sparse vocals, Umhoefer creates some of the most interesting and forward-facing art that’s out there today. The album sleeve contains a quote from film soundtrack extraordinaire Bernard Herrmann, beginning with the line, “Musically I count myself as an individualist”. I’m not sure I could think of a better way than these seven simple words to sum up Umhoefer and his artistic goals.

The album consists of just five tracks (named simply ‘Track 1’, ‘Track 2’, etc.), but spans over 30 minutes, with each track shifting and morphing into a variety of guises. In fact, the liner notes show each track split into several component parts, each with a title of its own. These sections meld into one another like events in a dream, the transitions often surreally sudden and spontaneous but retaining an eerie kind of absurd logic. This novel song structure never feels redunant either. It is to Umhoefer’s credit that each element always seems necessary and appropriate.

This non-conformity is illustrated perfectly on the opening track, an eleven minute behemoth which does everything but break the listener in gently. It kicks off with a section called ‘Well Abandonment’, an insistent, driven start of barely restrained guitar and minimal drum work, before the opening line of,

“I wanted walls, for something to push against.
I wanted waves, for something to row.”

One of Umhoefer’s strengths is his ability to make such vague, cryptic lyrics sound important and relevant, with his words often seeming abstract and dislocated. To return to the dream analogy, the lyrics don’t necessarily make narrative sense but they just feel right. The track shifts around the 3:30 mark as a taut guitar line drifts in from the ether, heralding the oncoming of the second section, ‘some Gates’ll swing wide, for us’. This builds to include shuffling drums and Umhoefer’s cry of, “the whole village had their hands in!” The repetitive melody and ethereal ambience are hypnotic, and the best way to listen is to put these tracks on repeat and just let things wander. The third and final segue of ‘Track 1’ occurs around 8:40. ‘Accept that the mark will outlast you’ again features lean and focused guitar work which cuts across the song razor-like, providing a bright and uplifting end to the first track. Soon drums are added and the whole thing becomes a rollicking indie rock tune, perhaps the most conventional “rock music” moment we have seen yet from Old Earth.

Another stand-out, ‘Track 3’, starts as a sign on the horizon, a wisp of dark smoke against the blue-white sky. An ominous force gathers pace and momentum as it approaches, eventually hurtling forward in the furious motion of frantic guitar. Then the vocals are upon you:

“What the hell are these bells doing out?”

Closely followed by one of my favourite lyrical passages on the album:

“One night, I woke up from a nightmare
One night, I woke up from the rain
One night, I woke up from the house shook
And one night I woke up from being alone”

This ominous demand is either a simple set of ambiguous statements or the documentation of some kind of personal epiphany. The track then morphs at around 4:00, a weird reverb-y disintegration paving the way for the slow-building urgency of ‘No Cerra, No’.

If you’ve read this far, then you have probably realised that A Wake in the Wells is not an album that’s going to hurry everyone to the dance floor. If you want toe-tapping sunniness or sing-along choruses then please move along. Good-time rock and roll this is not. Instead we get dynamic, instinctive music-making from a musician whose regard for “the rules” begins and ends with his own innate understanding of them.

This is an album to spend lots of time with. You need to let it wash over you, to become familiar with its dusty corners and idiosyncrasies. I find it difficult to like lots of experimental music, the super-cerebral stuff that you need an advanced maths qualification to understand. A Wake in the Wells is nothing like that. Yes Umhoefer experiments, but all the while he is focused on making something honest and true. I guess the experimentation is simply a means to an end, a way for him to attempt to convey his own personal messages.

I think what I’m trying to get at is that Old Earth’s music is sincere. And I don’t know about you, but sincerity is pretty important to me in art. In fact, I think it may be the most important thing of all. If I’m reading a book or watching a film or listening to an album, the one thing I want is for the artist to mean it. And I realised when listening to A Wake in the Wells over these last few weeks, goddamn does Umhoefer mean it. This is the man who last year (in an interview for WTD) said the killer line, “Fuck irony. I’m trying to make something to uplift myself, and it’s reassuring to me that other people can relate to it.”

So I hope that it’s pretty clear that I like this album a lot. It has drive and ambition and best of all it has heart. I think I’ll let Bernard Herrmann have the last word, his closing remarks capturing perfectly why I love this album (and Old Earth’s music in general) so very much:

“I am not interested in music, or any work of art, that fails to stimulate appreciation of life and, more importantly, pride in life…I believe that only music which springs out of genuine personal emotion is alive and important.”

You can order A Wake in the Wells right now via mini50 records. Please do, you won’t regret it.

P.S. Our American friends will be pleased to hear that Old Earth is currently on tour. You have four chances to see him this week:

Thurs. August 28th, 2014– Turntable (Jamestown, NC), w/ Twin Brother

Fri. August 29th, 2014– Daisy Dukes (Nashville, TN), w/ Twin Brother

Sat. August 30th, 2014– 27 Live (Evanston, IL), w/ Twin Brother

Sun. August 31st, 2014– Club Garibaldi’s (Milwaukee, WI) ALBUM RELEASE w/ Twin Brother
& Joe Crockett

P.P.S. The super-cool cover art is by Jennifer Mehigan.

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The press release promises “an album of mature focus and intensity” and a record “propelled by innovation, competition, and a sense of hustle more associated with hip hop than folk rock”. Like previous Old Earth releases, A Wake in the Wells will feature contributions from some of Milwaukee’s finest musicians, including regular collaborators Nick Berg and Chris Porterfield (of Field Report) and Jon Meuller of Volcano Choir.

The album is due for release on the 31st August. You can pre-order it now via mini50, either as a download, or 12″ vinyl. This is not the work of some multi-national major label, so pre-orders are vital to cover the costs of production. The album is also guaranteed to be great, so grab yourself a copy of the vinyl, and everyone is a winner.

Expect to hear a lot more from us about this album in the coming months.

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Edinburgh’s Now Wakes The Sea seem to exist at numerous points on this spectrum, with nods to pop music, lo-fi indie rock and downright weird psychedelica and drone. Originally the solo project of Alan McCormack, Bildungsroman sees NWTS become a band, a band which utilizes a whole manner of weird and wonderful sounds to create their schizoid songs. Imagine locking The Antlers, You Won’t, The Microphones, Owen Ashworth and goodness knows who else in a haunted junk shop and demanding they record an album with makeshift instruments crafted from whatever they could find. The result is every bit as good as it sounds.

A bildungsroman is a coming-of-age story, and this album sees NWTS evolve not just in terms of numbers but in sound and maturity. Listening to their previous releases, you get a sense of the arc that their music is taking, and appreciate their efforts to explore new territory. The promo information from label Mini50 Records quotes John F. Kennedy: “If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.”

Mini50 Records are one of the very best labels in their willingness to release albums that push boundaries and challenge expectations. We have covered this before with Old Earth, discussing how his music stands up as pieces of art, refusing to bow down to conventions and compromise ideals for accessibility. With NWTS this is thrown into sharp relief as they prove in parts of the album that they are more than capable of doing the popular bouncy indie rock thing. They could easily have put together a solid, entertaining collection of songs which would have been well received. No listeners would have questioned their choices. No-one would be thinking ‘why didn’t they try to explore some weird stuff here? Why did they settle for this great little lo-fi pop album?’

The conclusion is that their forays into the bizarre and challenging were not a choice but a need. This is not a band peddaling imitation in an attmept to get ahead in the Big Blogosphere Popularity Contest, nor is it an act that was not thinking of the listener when writing and recording. This is an attempt to communicate a specific interpretation of what it means to be human, and it is up to us listeners if we want to put in the effort to understand and appreciate it.

This album opens up an interesting debate on the value of effort (on the part of the consumer) in relation to art, and how this should be balanced with accessiblity. How effort and reward should be related, and how instant gratification could ultimately limit the effectiveness (intensity?) of said gratification. There are probably far more knowledgable people than myself discussing this very topic, so I won’t go any deeper than that, but I feel it should be known that art which requires some effort on the part of the reader/viewer/listener is always taking a chance, as a big investment requires a big payoff. While this album does require an investment (even the title demands further reading), rest assured that it is an investment worth your while.

You can buy Bildungsroman from Bandcamp or via Mini50 Records.

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The product of the tour was a tour album, entitled Milwaukee To Edinburgh, 2013, comprised of recordings made at various venues that Umhoefer visited whilst in Scotland. The tracks range from recordings from shows (e.g. ‘Less Words’ at Henry’s Cellar Bar) and live sessions for Song, By Toad, to rather more intimate performances in less conventional environments. A personal favourite is ‘Unanswered Echo Verse’ from Small Hours, a field recording at Euan and Ali’s (presumably the home of mini50’s Euan McMeeken), with its ambient baby noise and resulting shushing from its parents.

There is also a video of the tour, filmed by Lindsay Slepekis, basically a short film, a collage of performances in a multitude of locations. The film ends with an incredibly intimate shot of Umhoefer’s performance of ‘Unanswered Echo Verse’ which I mentioned above, in which he is approached by the baby from the front and a cat from behind.  The whole thing is great and serves as a collage that perfectly illustrates the trip. It also shows that Old Earth’s songs hold up well in the live setting, and sort of proves what I already knew in that I could sit and listen to him play guitar for hours.

You can buy Milwaukee To Edinburgh, 2013 via Old Earth’s Bandcamp page.

P.S. Old Earth are playing a show with White Hinterland and S. Carey on April the 24th, so if you’re in Milwaukee get yourself along!

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“I’d eventually drift off (i think) but i wasn’t sure if i’d gone to sleep or not. i’d hallucinate and see spiders dangling over the bed and ants crawling over me and then wake up, do my normal just-woken-up things and then wake up for real. if not spiders and ants it would be drowning, being dragged under the waves and unable to pull myself up. it wasn’t actually sleepwalking as far as i can remember but it was a strange time and that all filtered through to make the record.”

The album opens with ‘drift’, which itself begins with a gentle acoustic guitar over some ambient recordings, before eventually spiking in several bursts of post-rock-style guitar. ‘from the bottom of a well’ is a Grouper-esque drone-pop track, with gloomy guitars and a shimmering, dream-like atmosphere, accentuated by guest vocals from Maryliz Guillemi of Twin Limb. The track was inspired by a recurring theme/event in Haruki Murakami’s novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, in which the main character, after the sudden departure of his wife, descends into a dry well in search of solitude, and experiences a series of bizarre events which may or may not be dreams. The lyrics are a clear nod to the novel, “i tried to find a place the rope won’t reach, all this time i fell it’s chasing me, all i could do was miss you for all this time”. I’m a sucker for literary songwriting, and this is no exception. It works very well and provides a striking parallel to the artist’s own surreal dream confusion.

‘Slow Wave’ could be described as “underwater-drone”, the distorted vocals sounding as if they’re bubbling up from the depths, and ‘Never There’ builds into a buzz of feedback and post-rock percussion. The final track, ‘Two Moons’ is also a reference to Murakami, this time his novel IQ84, in which a small, misshapen, moss-coloured moon hangs in the sky, right beside the regular moon. Without spoiling the books, the song proves a rather fitting soundtrack to the final scene. Guillemi returns lends her vocal talents to a track that is robably the most straightforward “folk” song on the album. I think that the opening lyrics sums the feel of the album up pretty nicely, “i wish i could tell if I’m asleep or i’m awake”.

You can buy Sleepwalking right now via the Invisible Elephant bandcamp page. It is available either as a digital download or on a really nice purple cassette tape. Be aware that the tapes are limited so grab one now if you fancy it.

P.S. Invisible Elephant also contributed a track to the excellent Mini50 Records’s Winter Sampler. It’s definitely worth checking out.

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The atmosphere is otherworldly and ever-so-slightly ominous, the vocals abrupt, lyrics opaque and indistinct. Last summer, Umhoefer was kind enough to do an interview with us and here’s what he had to say about his lyrics,  “They’re intentionally vague, contradictory, and sometimes irrational. I like homonyms and multiple interpretations- sometimes the lines are a conversation, sometimes narration, and sometimes simply a human voice needed to be present and it felt good to sing there.“ This instinctive attitude to songwriting is evident on All Kill, and the results make me very excited indeed to see which direction Old Earth decides to take things next (we wont have too long a wait to find out as there is an LP due later this year).

You can get All Kill right now as a digital download courtesy of mini50 Records.

P.S. If you missed Umhoefer’s excellent session with Song, By Toad, I’d highly suggest you check it out.

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The above is a quote attributed to David Foster Wallace (as a scribbled note at the bottom of a manuscript of ‘Good Old Neon’, a story featured in Oblivion: Stories). It’s a comforting thought, in a way. That ghosts aren’t these creepy figures that wander around at night, rattling chains and tapping on the window pane, they’re just what we have left of the people we used to know. I found myself thinking about it after a few consecutive spins of Fireworks and the Dead City Radio, the new album from Sketches For Albinos. The album uses voice recordings to provide the sole vocal accompaniment to the music. Some of the recordings are clear, others almost unintelligible.  We hear men, women and children. I have no idea who these voices belong to, and I don’t think it matters.

Sketches For Albinos is the recording project of composer and “sound artist” Matthew Collings. Fireworks and the Dead City Radio is the project’s first album since 2010’s Days Of Being Wild and Kind, although Collings does also release music under his own name, as well as comprising one half of Graveyard Tapes with Euan McMeeken of The Kays Lavalle. The album has been brewing for six years, and symbolizes a period of great development and upheaval in the life of its creator, “a time where the possibilities of life unfolded in a profound and life changing manner… where euphoric joy and great sadness collided.” The album is being released on the ever-brilliant Mini50 Records, home to WTD faves Old Earth, and fans of any of their previous releases would be well advised to check it out.

Collings experiments with electronics to create something truly unique. The strange mix of ambient, drone and noise creates a surreal, dream-like atmosphere, an atmosphere only heightened by the juxtaposition between tracks. A good example is the transition between track five, ‘the sailor in the city is buying up time’ and track six, ‘she drew a pentagon’; the former sedate and peaceful with this almost underwater-sounding piano, the latter buzzing with reverb or feedback and is more garage rock than drone. The other notable aspect of the album is the aforementioned voice recordings. They add something that traditional vocals could not and, for me, really make the album what it is. I wish this album had been around when we were trying to get our Voicebox mixtape together many moons ago, it would have been perfect.

The album is deep and challenging, but not oppressively so. Collings leaves room for the listener to breathe and to think and, perhaps most importantly, to feel. It’s an emotionally charged record, despite not having conventional lyrics, perhaps even for that very reason. It feels like Collings put something tangible into making this, as if each track is a little slice of his mind, of his thoughts and wishes and memories. Of the ghosts of his past, the voices inside his head. Perhaps that’s what those voices are after all.

Sketches For Albinos’ Fireworks and the Dead City Radio is out on the 24th of March on Mini50 Records.

EDIT: You can now purchase the album here.

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First of all, how did Old Earth come into being? Was it something personal that developed into something bigger? Or did you always plan to have collaborators?

It started out personal by necessity… I’ve always been a collaborator for other people’s projects, but didn’t write full songs until I was about 26 (I’ve been playing guitar since I was 15, and I turn 34 tomorrow). In ‘05, I didn’t have a band, so I bought an acoustic guitar and started from the ground up.

I met most of my collaborators in ’06 doing open mics around Milwaukee. They focus on Field Report now, but back then, we regularly shared members and shows. I drummed for Conrad Plymouth, which became Field Report, and it was the most fun I’ve ever had as a collaborator. I think of Berg, Porterfield, and Whitty as my core team. They’re my go-to guys when I start recording, and my network grew through them. We’re friends first, though, because I’m hard to work with. I’m untrained. I use my own tuning, my own structures, and I don’t know a thing about theory. When people ask what key I’m in, they might as well be speaking another language.

The pool I’m able to draw from right now is incredible, and there’ll probably be about a dozen people on the next record.

What inspires your song writing process? Are you mostly influenced by other musical acts? Or do things like literature play a part too?

Rap has inspired me since I was 11. That genre is propelled by innovation, competition, and a sense of hustle that isn’t present in the indie rock scene. I’m equally motivated by acts that disgust me by their lack of ideas, energy, and hard work… Small Hours was very driven by things I don’t like. It’s what I’m NOT doing on that record that’s important to me.

Yes, other mediums play a huge part, and finding ways for it all to interweave makes for a rich experience. I have my hands in a lot of disciplines and my mind in even more. I like poetry (esp. the Beat poets) and short stories, visual art, and always have movies on (mainly for atmosphere).

For me, many Old Earth songs are cinematic, not in way that the word is often used (you know, big orchestral sounds and over-production) but in that they conjure imagery. This is very difficult to properly describe but the sounds have an underlying sense of action or violence that produces pictures or events without the need for words. Maybe it is because the music is so psychological, with abstract sounds and phrases rather than a traditional narrative.  Does film have any impact on your work? Or is this just a consequence of releasing your mind through your music?

Film has a huge impact on my work- movies are about pacing and dynamics, creating and changing a mood in an instant, and marrying words and images to sound. I’d say that has more to do with my work than any other medium. I even think of certain riffs or words as characters, because they recur and represent a time, place, or person to me. When I do recordings, I put myself in the role of director, composer, and most often, curator. I’m also doing more scoring for other people’s film work, and it feels very natural.

The process of writing music such as this is really interesting to me. I find the idea of sitting down with the intention of putting together a song that will eventually sound organic and fully intended overwhelming in the extreme. I can see how people sit and write traditional folk songs, with maybe a poem or a story set to guitar strumming, but when the instrumentation plays such an important, visceral role I find it hard to imagine someone sitting down and working it out. How do you assemble something so convincing from the basic units of notes and words? Do you focus equally on the lyrics and the music? Or are the words governed by the music (or vice versa)?

Well, you have to bear in mind that I’m never starting from scratch. I have riffs and words and half-formed songs that I’ve been playing on for years, and I don’t have rules about one element governing another. For me, the song is the basic unit, and the riffs and words arrange themselves around it. Patiently living with the songs will tease out what they want to be… Writing never happens the same way twice, and it’s best for me to think of it as magic and leave it at that.

I’ve found that working on a few songs at once is really useful because they innately speak to each other, and the motifs become inherent. And, sometimes, you have to write three (or more) to get the one you want. Sometimes a song will spring from practicing an older one, or trying to play someone else’s.

Writing is constant, though. Singing with a guitar is only part of the process… As I’m doing a chore, running errands, or riding the bus, I’m working in my mind or on paper. I don’t think I can completely isolate the process from myself and describe it, it’s just what I do.

I once heard Damien Jurado speak on his writing process, something I’ve mentioned before on the blog, where he stated that songs always exist in some unknowable place within an artist, and that there is a spontaneous moment where each song is realised and takes form. Is this the case for you? Do songs tumble from your mind in something like a cohesive manner? Or is it more of an arduous process of trial and error, experimenting with different things?

Some seem to pop out fully-formed, but again, that’s only because I’ve played guitar basically every day for over half my life. You could argue that every song I make now has taken my entire life to write, rendering any spontenaity an illusion.

Trial and error plays a role, and it can be challenging at times, but I’m lucky if music is the most arduous part of my life. Cohesive moments are rare and can’t be counted on, so I just keep working. As for what Mr. Jurado is saying, I instead think of my songs as existing somewhere outside of myself, and I’m just witnessing and interpreting them.

For me there is a duality in your music, two aspects which combine to form a very convincing whole. The instrumentation represents the atavistic emotions and sensations, the instinctive things like fear and joy and unease, and the words are the complex thought, the reasoning that tries to bind the first category together into something that can be understood or shared. The music and lyrics together form something that is very human. Is this something you ever consider? Or is it a by-product of writing your mind?

I don’t think reason enters into it, especially with the lyrics. They’re intentionally vague, contradictory, and sometimes irrational. I like homonyms and multiple interpretations- sometimes the lines are a conversation, sometimes narration, and sometimes simply a human voice needed to be present and it felt good to sing there.

Music is inhuman if it isn’t saying “I love everything and it all makes sense” one moment and then “I’m confused and hateful” the next. The duality is more honest about the experience of being alive.

In our review of your album we included a quote where you essentially say that you take risks in order to make your art, and that pleasing people is not at the forefront of your thinking when trying to create something true to yourself. I read an interview with the Steinberg Principle where you go on to say that it is easy to pad yourself against criticism by being ironic. This remark brought to mind an essay by David Foster Wallace on TV and literature where he basically says that whole generations have grown up into superficial/empty people because they have been continually pumped full of ironic and clever TV characters who make fun of everything to appear ‘cool’. He pointed out that cynicism and irony can only ever be destructive, and truly brave art will stop poking fun at things and be itself, however hideously revealing that may be. Do you think this applies to music too, where it’s maybe not as clear as Family Guy or The Simpsons or a Mark Leyner novel? I’m thinking of artists such as yourself versus the current trend of ‘folk’ bands.

Overall, much of what’s popular is very sad and shallow to me, and I don’t need that kind of trash in my life. I’m not worried about any current trend because I’ve seen so many of them come and go. The joke’s on those bands, really. They’ll look back and feel foolish for dressing up and behaving that way. Fuck irony. I’m trying to make something to uplift myself, and it’s reassuring to me that other people can relate to it.

Finally, could you name 4-5 artists that you are currently listening too? They could be brand new or decades old, whatever you are enjoying at the moment.

My lady plays a lot of 60’s country and punk, I love Golden Oldies, I always have Gucci Mane in my headphones, and I couldn’t fairly list all my friends who are doing music that excites me. Milwaukee is an amazing place to be right now. The stuff that I’ve bought on bandcamp and shows up in the “collection” tab has a lot of good suggestions.

To better answer your question, though, the last month has been a lot of Drake’s Take Care, Fabolous’s The Soul Tape 2, J. Cole’s Truly Yours 2, and as for rock stuff, Ladyhawk’s No Can Do is ruling my world.

Jon: If you want to get some Old Earth music then head on over to his Bandcamp page. Mini50 Records have put out Small Hours, and a low place at The Old Place is now available on vinyl.

Also, in some strange twist of fate, Old Earth is playing with Small Sur and Peals, bands we featured just last Friday, this Tuesday (11th June ’13). If you are in the Milwaukee area then you would be silly to miss it. More information can be found here.

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