MP3: Nic Dawson Kelly - The Musician

The musician. The lost art of whistling. A rough sort of classy folk. The shallow end of meaning reveals the music scene, rejection and mistakes made - in an admirable way. But adventure into the murky deep end and I am more likely to find myself travelling down a steep and narrow cobbled street, peering into a doorways down the way and hearing Nic Dawson Kelly playing, whistling and singing in every single one. “The Musician” feels antiquated, sorrowful and every so slightly dusty. But the dust is shaken from the off, and the wind up mechanism that must power him ticks and ticks and Nic Dawson Kelly brings colour, and a live spirit to bluesy folk (or folky blues perhaps?).

He has a nice working of London Burning on his myspace page which you may also enjoy.

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Bibio - Zoopraxiphone

The record and looped sound. The lost art of tapes. A rough sort of mechanical folk. But don’t think Germany’s industrial heartland, kraut-rock, Kraftwerk and really noisy and offensive music you wouldn’t play to your kid sister when I say mechancial. No - Bibio is the noise and rallying cry green plastic soldiers make marching into a multi-coloured plasticine war. But they are little match for the magnifying glass, the power of the Sun and little Timmy (age 7) who co-incidentally would probably hear this music, lose it on a family holiday and spend the rest of his years searching under every rock for it. Zoopraxiphone isn’t really going any where. Don’t get me wrong - there is progression but as the album title so aptly demonstrates - this music does indeed sound hand-cranked. Just as a child would, this British music producer has collected “found” things and stuck them all together. In this case it is sounds, he uses dictaphones, tapes and natural noise. And it works, at certain times of the day - with the window pushed open as far as possible.

I bought his album immediately after hearing Zoopraxiphone and a track called Marram. It is indeed (as a chap from Board of Canada discusses) “the antidote to the modern laptopia of pristine electronic music”. It is available from www.mushrecords.com/ please visit him at myspace.com/bibiofi.

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Updates shouldn’t usually be this rare - but we’ve had some good weather and i’ve been lazy. More new music of a similar vein later this week.

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