Make Mine Music Flow (Compilation). Diversity is not the key word to employ when describing Make Mine Music. Even though ostensibly they have traditional "guitar" acts and non-traditional "electronic" acts commingling on the same label they all work towards the same goal. It's a less than purposeful drift towards artful vagueness. All of the personalities seem interchangeable, bedroom dwellers with their samplers, guitars and genderless affectations. First track is by Schengen. It's a looping riff with some twinkles sprinkled in among the repetition. It could have come of of a Avrocar record (when's that new one come out by the way? I am keen to hear it, depserate perhaps, I need something to look forward to as the Camera Obscura record is surely months and months away even though it is allegedly complete), or a July Skies record or a Portal record, or an Epic45 record. I think they play on each other's records. it's some sort of collectivist suicide pact where they share all costs and proceeds equally. It's a quaint idea, it seems to be working so far but their impact is minimal at this point. July Skies clearly commands the most attention and this perhaps is due only to his penchant for portraying the rustic nostalgia of the youth of those charged with revieweing his records and well he's fabulous, there is that too. This one is unchanging, it's warm and inviting, a nice start to the recod, the sample itself ingratiates while the twinkles swirl about leavening the heart. Second track is by Epic45. This is before they started releasing records every few weeks. It's mainly guitar. Before they incorporated more electronics. It's a brilliant song. Multi-tracked guitars, sounds like a Portal song actually. Until the vocals come, then it sounds like a slavish testimonial in devotion to Bark Psychosis. But what better band to ape than Bark Psychosis? None. And not the godawful Codename:Dustplucker version, no no, the Independency version. Woo! Vocals are multi-tracked and on the fringe, I am not sure if we are meant to pay attention, it's more effect, it works splendidly. They were inspired to start a band by listening to July Skies, I think, I could be wrong, I seem to recall they wrote him a letter and he helped them out when they started. That might be a bit of misremembering. Antony Harding still appears on their records. He must help pick the lovely photographs that always adorn their record sleeves. He's Make Mine minister of the department of nostalgia, surely. This is absolutely lovely, simple and montotonous but dreamy and romantic all the same. False ending, building back up to something slight, or not, banging on a five gallon pail and louder guitars and more insistent vocals. This is my favorite Epic45 song ever. I think. Unfortunately they are one of those bands whose songs are so boundary less and identifier free that I couldn't hear a song and match it with its title for the life of me. No reason to be concerned about that, it is the same way with July skies, well except for Berkwell but that's only because I start almost every mix cd with that song. I am predictable. it is the repeating riff here that charms, it's a slow relentless march towards something. Over. Simply marvelous. Next track is by Avrocar. This is Cinematography, allegedly Radiohead were highly influenced by Avrocar when they made the most important record in the world ever, the wizard's cap, the cat's pajamas, Kid A. I can understand the adulation and how on this song, a sinister hum, some fractured electronics beneath and in stark contrast to the Head a shy, non-mumbling vocal, a whisper, chant-like. It's a bit like the other two songs we've discussed so far. A pretty concept is trundled about and they don't veer far from the center line, this one is sinister, that is its purpose, no need to muddle minds by introducing change or human emotion. It's fantastic mind, who needs emotion, I am thoroughly enjoying the unbending moroseness. This record came with a postcard. I seem to recall that. Other Make Mine releases have come with bits of asphalt from old RAF airfields. I don't have a slice myself. I think I received another postcard, if I recall correctly. Next track is up, one of the more forward sounding bands Innerise. If this was 1998. It's a bit trip hop. Sinister is the word, vague again. But this time with a soulful female vocal, it's excellent. Press closely to your cheek and there is a bit Liz Frazier working with Massive Attack in this. They are from Bristol, surely in another life they would have been on Planet Records. They share some things in common with Movietone and Third Eye Foundation, they could pass for the offspring of both of those bands, should they have married and reproduced. There are random moans and wails, very nice, again the music is a locked runout groove, most of the change comes from the voice. I have never found myself all that interested in Innerise, this song is making me question my judgement. Make Mine albums are all nice but I've yet to have been captivated by one. Well July Skies of course and that Portal Waves and Echoes thing is really quite good as well but everything else is mostly only pleasant. Next song, next band, Portal Arion 2. I think Portal person is the person who started Make Mine Music. He released a lot of music as Portal. The alleged way forward is that he plans on releasing no more under that name. Has he released anything under his new non-Portal name? Who knows. I could look at the website. This one is a nice bit of ambient fedback and a groove. Just like all of the other songs. perhaps it is a ruse, all of these band names, could be that it is all one person behind each project, only the singers shall change. There isn't much in the way of dynamics here. It's repetition, it's loveliness, it's prettiness. Portal has a singer on their other records, she's really very good, it took me a few songs to get acquainted because she is often presented in stark contrast to the music with her upfront style and the music's inhrent bashfulness. I wonder how long it takes him to record something like this, once he has the delicate sound does it take long to marshall the other resources, the drum machine programmed to mimic a preset. Pretty. Now to July Skies. I already know that I love this song, because I love July Skies and it is on his best release-the Where the Days Do compilation that he released a few years ago. That record is the most wonderful thing ever. Especially in the dark, in the rain, in the undergrowth beneath the place where everyone dwells. He sings, it approximates a shy boy's take on Ian Masters, there are ringing plucked guitars in different directions and there are epiphanies and shadows and melancholy spread across the listening spectrum. There is something about July Skies music that just touches my heart like nothing else. I wonder what he will come up with now that July Skies is over. What will I come up with now that July Skies is over? His new direction is meant to be more electronic. I hope it's a continuation of the dour landscapes he;s featured in this line of work just with a different palette. We will see. Yellow6 next, another of the really prolific bands. I would say he's a lot like Portal but I would probably offend both of them with that statement, there are surely subtle differences but I am not fan enough to appreciate the gradations of tearfulness on display. This is lovely lovely stuff. A folky plucked guitar, some pleasant romantic hum underneath , a few guitars, echoes, an encroaching uneasiness, a nearness from the atmosphere that envelops the whole thing a slowly the resonant noise takes hold of the song and the guitars become less prominent. Marvelous. I should get out my Yellow6 cd. I am not sure I've ever listened to it. I must be missing out on some heartfelt melancholia for certain. Make Mine Music is a brilliant silliness. Is that a strange compliment? Over, so softly done. Next back to Avrocar, more of the sinister low end rumbling and fractured electronics, I heard samples from the new album, more of the same. That's comforting, nourishing, reassuring. It's a victory when things ar approachable, when there isn't this barier put up between listener and creator because motivation is a secret. Clearly MMM artists are all working within the same confines and to the same ends, it's a nuanced approach to loveliness. It is an interesting sensation that is conferred when listening to this, it is reminiscent of the way the semi-arid landscape here shrinks with the heat. On a clear, cold day the horizon stretches out past the imagination but with the encroaching heat and suffocating power of the sun it feels as if the distant sun has moved just beyond the outstretched hand and it is oppressive. Avrocar recreate that feeling. It's stimulating. Now to Epic45, once more, a gently does it strum of a song, it reminds a bit of My Autumn Empire but then as I've never heard anything other than a snippet of My Autumn Empire clearly I have demarcated myself as a liar. Apologies. It's so comforting and warm. I can picture the entire gang getting together in a pub and playing scrabble while listening to Loren Mazzacane Conners on a tiny tiny little boombox in the corner that is powered by 8 C-cell batteries and is in the shape of an Aston Martin. Next up is Inerise, whereas earlier they entered a track with a singer this then is an instrumental. All of the music here is very of the four basic elements, earth, fire, air and water. This seems to be a proportional mixture of water and air. It flows(a propo, given the title) into crevices and corners and consciences with marvelous grace. Again, I bet I could at least claim the ability to record something like this, it isn't wizardry, one wouldn't hear this and with mouth agape ponder over the complexities of its creation like say the evoluiton of the human eye though Dan-Erik Nilsson has proven it's rather simple to make an eye. Why is his name hyphenated? That's the more interesting logical dilemma. Ben Stein did that Intelligent Design movie, so bizarre, there is absolutely no proof of a designer and how intelligent is a designer that has allowed me to lose all feeling in the fingertip of my left midle finger just because I slammed it in a car door. I close my eyes and pretend I have alien hand syndrome and my left middle finger fingertip is living a much more exicitng life than the rest of me because it is free of the constraints of my personal inhibitions. The song is no treatise on evolution or anything at all, it sounds like something they made for their friends and their friends think it is pretty cool. Next is july Skies. He took a long time to make an album but hey it wasn't a resulting heartbreaking work of folly. It was what he always does, only a bit louder, a bit more fleshed out, a bit more like Jonas Munk, really. Jonas Munk has stopped releasing records every other week. Why is this? When will the Jonas and Ulrich show be released? Ulrich Schnauss was here recently. A long way from Germany. Last when I was in Germany I met an Ulrich and asked him if anyone in his family had been a member of the Nazi party. I didn't win many friends that evening. I was curious. Just the same as when I was in Dallas earlier this year and I spoke to someone for hours on beekeeping. July Skies song over, an incidental bit of nostalgia, of the sorts that seep slowly from his pores. Next song is from Portal. With the awkwardly upright singer, it's an elegant posture she sings in but with the languorous tide of the music in the background it's like two diverging paths loosely tethered are the starkness of her human emotion and the ambience of the spheres ebbing and flowing underneath. I keep mentioning the flow. I don't mean to. This is slow motion melancholy, a dream in half-speed, at the speed of the past. Yellow6 now. Quarantine. I love their quaint use of technology, almost as if they have discovered artifacts while visiting the past via yard sales and thrift stores. The drum machine here is this rudimentary beacon from 1973 from the BBC radio workshop and over top is this sprawling universe of loveliness. Splayed across all directions of the compass so that it sems aimless and wonderful all at once. It's noise sculpted into something delicate, chipped away the rot of precision and merciful notes until they have ended up with fingers pushing vibrations back and forth across an empty room with Paul Theroux's pen duelling with VS Naipaul's narcissism. I need a mentor. I should take applications. Where I work I sometimes feel on an island because I am privy to information that is not available to those just beneath me but then I am not intimately involved in high level decision making and so each morning anew there still presents a surprise or three and I enjoy those moments more than the dread of knowing what hangs ovr some people who seem blissfully unaware. But then I live detached, with few close relationships with anyone, alone with my caustic blend of peculiarness and pedantry. This compilation could be my soundtrack. One day I will write an entry using only the words that appeared in my personality profile. It's shockingly accurate. I went on a date on Thursday. I had a lovely time. I just asked hundreds of questions of my date and hardly spoke of myself at all. I am not sure I am truly interested in dating. I have this vague notion of someone appearing to me as if plucked from a dream, arriving ready for marriage and ideally suited for me and my oddities. Is that strange? Exploring someone's hidden depths seems daunting. I would rather just have them read these thoughts and recognize the innate genius that I possess, that is indecipherable most times, but that is genuine and honest and worth a leap. Next song now, back to Schengen, they bother less with the guitars. It's about motion at the city's edges, it seems slightly less pastoral and fey, well no, it is absolutely fey and fairy. It just has some instruments of progress that seem more of these days than of a romanticised era. No words. I think there are a few sung songs on the Schengen album. That album is quite nice really. I've always intended on purchasing everything that is still available from Make Mine Music but I've never gotten around to it. Perhaps now that Sterling is taking a hit I can reassess my earlier motivation. Or, perhaps Shoegazeralive.blogspot.com will take an interest in all things Make Mine Music and make my life that much easier. He's posting Pale Saints demos now! Glorious! Another site posted the entirety of the Veronica Lake discography, cheers, Tim Sendra, he's a god. I met him a few times because of my secret connection to Madison Electric. You won't see me filed in any of their official biographies but I was the secret link between them and Drive-In Records. Yes, you're welcome. Next song now, Northern Lakes End of Resolution sounds like a band rather than a one man or two man project. Reminiscent of say ColdHarbourStores. Whatever happened to them? They made that fabulous record with Graham Sutton and then disappeared, maybe they were caught in the gravity of Rocket Girl's plunge into the void. This number is a bit of a drag, not a whole lot happening, a Codeine-esque drum beat, three or four notes on an acoustic guitar and some sighs and breaths of contentment mixed equally into mundanity. I think this was their introductory release, perhaps a trial balloon, more lead than mylar. I have a lot of entries written I just need to edit them for typos. I have been writing less and less here because I have another website where I am writing short stories for a poetry reading night. I don't write poetry but they don't discriminate against me based on that, moreso on my ludicrous performance art pretentiousness where I played Mum's There Are A Number of Small Things while I read a story about a young man who places pheromones, harvested from the deodorant of his secret crush, in liquid fertilizer that he is applying to the lawn professionally in hopes that he will have an amorous interest in him but there is a chemical reaction deep within the turf an the bacteria have mad escapades and the byproduct of all of their mitosis and gaiety causes an allergic reaction and she dies. Everyone dies, at least recently. I wrote a story about a young lady, myself posing as a young lady, who lives her life according to the slightly altered libretto of Even As We Speak's Feral Pop Frenzy and she dies one day just as the spell is broken and she falls in love with the object of her affection. Death is a small price for heaven could always be my chosen last line but it has already been taken. Last one, Weyland a sort of pop art collage of hawaiian samples and vocal snippets, over.