Pitchfork
April 21, 2011
Link
7.7
On March 11, a devastating earthquake and tsunami hit Japan, killing at least 13,000 people and spawning an ongoing nuclear crisis. In the month-plus since that tragedy, musicians worldwide have been trying to help. Along with benefit concerts, charity auctions, and other fundraisers, the music world's Japanese relief efforts have also included a few compilation albums, including the classical-oriented Classics for Japan - Music for Healing and hit-parading Songs for Japan.
Benefit for the Recovery in Japan is a different kind of benefit compilation. Clocking in at nearly five hours, this sprawling 64-track set sees no contradiction between disaster relief and musical adventurousness. Credit Antiopic label co-heads David Daniell and James Elliott, experimental electronic musicians who picked the album's tracks with help from Regina Greene (whose Front Porch Productions books shows for many of these artists), fellow electronic experimentalist Greg Davis, and Thrill Jockey founder Bettina Richards. Their choices span ambient drone, fleet-fingered folk, and leftfield rock, with an artist lineup that should have many a music nerd drooling on their tattered back issues of The Wire.
Every cent of the $15 you spend on Benefit will go to Civic Force, a Japanese nonprofit emergency responder, so the cause is clearly worthy. At less than a quarter per track, this mp3-only album offers pretty good value for the money, too, and if you're skeptical you can stream the whole thing. As for musical enjoyment, I definitely don't recommend trying to digest it all in one sitting, and the collection sometimes lapses toward seemingly aimless minimalist exercises more likely to please formally educated musicians than typical music listeners. But if you're looking for a thoughtfully conceived survey of the avant-garde underground, please, look no further.
A somber electroacoustic instrumental from Austrian composer/producer Christian Fennesz opens the compilation, which gives you a pretty good indication of what's to follow. These are thickly textured tracks, sometimes orchestral in scale, which often achieve their emotional effects more through their incredibly detailed sonic palettes than through anything you can transcribe in a songbook. It's a lot to take in, but give it time and the best part about this release is how it allows you to stumble into so many different, miniature sonic worlds, one after the other: the hypnotically layered vocals and bass-heavy pulse of School of Seven Bells, the barely there piano and whispery singing of Grouper, the heavily fucked-with 1980s soft-rock vibes of Matthewdavid, the squalling lushness of Lawrence English, the icier hum of Ben Frost, the articulately jagged punk of the Ex, and the shaggy improv of Jackie-O Motherfucker. Benefit is an appropriately cosmopolitan affair.
The names perhaps most familiar from the indie rock festival circuit are not necessarily the ones responsible for Benefit's most rewarding tracks. An arty contribution from TV on the Radio's Tunde Adebimpe, working with Stars Like Fleas' Ryan Sawyer under the cheeky moniker Stabbing Eastwood, is probably best left for completists (and fans of hilarious growling). Deerhunter/Atlas Sound man Bradford Cox, collaborating with White Rainbow's Adam Forkner as Bradley & Geofrey, gives Das Racist fodder for some future update of their reggae-voice satire "Fake Patois"; you get the sense Cox has a hard drive full of casual little experiments like this he could post on his blog. Then again, there's an appealing frailty to the Arthur Russell-ish chamber-pop of "In the Hollows", by Dirty Projectors bassist Nat Baldwin. Akron/Family's "Deep Kazoo" does, indeed, get in deep with kazoo; Bear in Heaven's tenderly plainspoken "The Days We Have" is a glistening electro-folk pleasure that could warrant a Cornelius remix.
But Benefit isn't really about cherry-picking hits. There are other compilations for that. It's best if you let this one wash over you, accepting the breadth and depth of its varied sonic experiences with, yeah, an open mind and open ears. Plenty of listeners could get their first exposure to luminaries like Rhys Chatham (who closes the set's first half on an ambient, meditative note), Sam Prekop (though the Sea and Cake frontman's blips and bloops here are certainly no Oui), or the Boredoms (leader Shinji Masuko's airy, ethereal "Botsuon"). Or they could be introduced to much-loved younger talents, from the densely intricate guitar playing of James Blackshaw to the hauntingly immersive sound fields of Tim Hecker to the spaced-out electronic innovations of Oneohtrix Point Never. Look, I'm dubious about benefit compilations in general, and the wanky wind-chimes avant-garde scene in particular. But if good things can ever come out of horrible events, what Antiopic has accomplished here is surely worth getting behind.
