Sparklehorse & Fennesz – In the Fishtank 15
The In the Fishtank series is something I think is great, something I wish I could emulate and yet nevertheless, and rather oddly, something I rarely like the results of all that much. Dutch label Konkurrent book out a studio for a couple of days and invite two bands who happen to be around to take advantage of the time to record… well, whatever they want, really.
There are a lot of things I hugely admire about this project. Firstly, I generally do not like covers at all, but I love collaborations for some reason. Not rubbish like Monsters of Folk (that’s getting a review this week, and it’s fucking awful), but musicians getting together and genuinely experimenting together in a loose sort of manner like this. They only have two days after all.
Secondly, I love the attitude the label take – we’ll bring you together, you guys do what you want. No pressure to record pop songs, singles, skew the collaboration towards certain styles, divvy the writing up equally, or even to produce anything listenable at all. The results may not always work, but projects like this, at the edge of what we’d call pop music, are important for pushing everyone forward, be it labels, the audience or musicians themselves.
Sparklehorse are one of my favourite bands, but I don’t really know much about Fennesz. Listening to this there’s none of the fairly traditional song structure I am used to on a Sparklehorse record, so I assume a lot of that came from Fennesz, but you can certainly hear an awful lot of familiar sounds so Linkous’ involvement is clear enough.
The experimental nature of a lot of this – Shai-Hulud is, er, a little much for me – means that this is another of those collaborations which I love to hear of but at times don’t exactly like to listen to. I am, for all the readers of this site make fun of my taste for low-fi noise, still pretty much a song-based music fan and there’s a fair bit of this collaboration which is simply too lacking in traditional song structure for me to be able to really relate to it.
Nevertheless, there are a few gems, and when Fennesz fuck with Linkous’ songs, bringing all sorts of mess to the recording, then I really do enjoy it. Some of this is really, really good. It’s another In the Fishtank record I guess I would classify as something I admire and something I find interesting rather than something I necessarily would always listen to for pleasure. But then, that’s how I’d describe Joseph Conrad’s books as well, so it’s no insult.
Sparklehorse + Fennesz – Goodnight Sweetheart
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Sparklehorse + Fennesz – Shai – Hulud
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Fennesz website | Sparklehorse website | In the Fishtank website | Buy from Boomkat
