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Exactly one year on from his last album, Steve Hauschildt returns with his most commanding work to date. Dense and lush arrangements conjure introspective atmospheres that reveal not only his contribution to the band Emeralds, but his ever-evolving strengths as a solo artist. Recorded in Vancouver and Cleveland, nearly 20 different instruments were culled from the 1960s to the present. This lends the album a much wider palette than its predecessor, Tragedy & Geometry. It is still, however, a logical follow-up to that work as the title Sequitur subtly implies. Because of its rich instrumentation, there are classic yet cutting-edge soundscapes fashioned out of the idiosyncrasies innate to the copious synthesizers, drum machines, and vocal processing used on the album. A substantial work, Hauschildt hones in on the place of voice and androgyny in music.
From Steve Hauschildt: "I was very interested in the artificiality of vocal or choir-like sounds that emulate a person or group singing, and how this has evolved with the advancement of musical technology over the decades. I also sang myself and used a vocoder. This was not to sound robotic or to auto-tune notes, but instead used to remove the connotations of gender inherent in the vocal formants that define how we naturally assign gender qualities to sounds, particularly the human voice. It was interesting to discover that certain replicable sounds become 'androgynous' when they carry both masculine and feminine characteristics. I was inspired to carry this idea into music mainly because of the work of Camille Paglia, Rosalind Picard and Donna Haraway. In a sense, the album treads the imaginary boundary between Nature and Artifice. Of course it is within a postmodern trajectory, but not necessarily a statement on cyborg theory or feminism. Rather, Sequitur is a musical domain where these ideas freely collide and coalesce to form emotive states for the listener."
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Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe has been through many shifts in his musical career, from playing with influential Chicago rockers 90 Day Men and forging haunting vocal drones as Lichens all the way to becoming a member of transcendent rockers Om and collaborating with Lucky Dragons and Doug Aitken, and Timon Irnok Manta marks the beginning of a brand new stage in his process. Recorded under his full name and based on fabled British science fiction series "The Tomorrow People," the record establishes Lowe’s format perfectly, with a single mantra-like piece followed by a 'version' in classic dub fashion."‘M'Bondo" follows closely in the footsteps of Lowe's recent slew of highly limited private-press releases, taking tumbling electrified rhythms and setting them up against slowly modulating analogue patterns, gradually building into something even more revenant. A far cry from the maximalist synthesizer music that has come to represent the norm, this is bass-heavy and precariously stripped bare, leaving only skeletons of influence and form.
On "M'Bondo (version)" we are given a closer look into Lowe's wide range of influences as he touches on Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works II, early Popul Vuh and Rhythm and Sound in one fell swoop. The basic building blocks of the original track are still present, but graced with Lowe's unmistakable voice and punctuated by warbling tape hiss and chilling echoes. This is a brave step from one of the most compelling voices in experimental music, and the beginning of what promises to be a very rich musical seam.
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Quarter Turns Over A Living Line is the debut album by Raime.
It follows the duo's self-titled 2010 EP and two subsequent 12" singles, If Anywhere was here we would know where we are and Hennail.
Moving away from the sample-based strategies that characterized their early work, Joe Andrews and Tom Halstead have looked increasingly to live instrumentation for their first full-length, mounting intensive recording sessions for percussion, guitar and strings before painstakingly piecing the album together at their home studio. The gothic and industrial signifiers in their music remain, but more submerged and oblique than ever - no more pronounced as influences than jungle's rhythmic dynamism and doom metal's oppressive weight, or aspects of techno, modern composition and dub.
The 7-track album is due to be released on November 19 on 2x12", CD and digital formats. The cover art is derived from an original photograph by William Oliver, produced in collaboration with Raime and featuring dancer Rosie Terry.
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Since upsetting the techno multiverse with Man With Potential last year, ex-Yellow Swan Pete Swanson has tirelessly continued his exploration of the form, quickly breaking it down and moulding it in his image. Pro Style is the result of those experiments, and finds Swanson at his most explosive, with his archetypal searing synthesizer blasts directed over warehouse kicks worthy of the Downwards catalogue. This is possibly Swanson's most technoid investigation to date, but any 'mainstream' form is peppered with more than enough failure to put a smile on the faces of unconvinced Yellow Swans fans. Pro Style is far from Berlin's precise minimalism, instead taking a raw, hands on direction that we haven't heard in the genre for many years. Whether you're in the club or in the basement, Swanson's pounding kicks and (surprisingly) booming basses should keep the apocalypse at bay, for now at least.
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Twinsistermoon is the solo project of Natural Snow Buildings co-founder Mehdi Ameziane, and is subsequently the benefactor of the massive cult following that NSB has accrued since forming in 1997. With a string of limited releases on a variety of credible labels such as Blackest Rainbow and Digitalis, both Medhi and his counterpart Solange Gularte (who plays as Isengrind and did the full color original art for this Twinsistermoon release), have created an underground phenomenon that continues to craft some of the most forward thinking music in decades. Though impossible to categorize, Bogyrealm Vessels alternates between drone vignettes and Nico-esque psychedelic folk, whilst being threaded together by sci-fi motifs. The result is a landmark work from Twinsistermoon that is sure to be a contender for year-end lists.
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