Podcast Episodes 725 & 726 are now live
This week we celebrate 20 years of podcasting!
December 13th, 2004 was our very first podcast episode. Enjoy two brand new episodes.
Episode 725 has brand new music by Godflesh, ЛІЗА ПАДЛІЗА, Soft as Snow, Edvard Graham Lewis, Alvin Curran, claire rousay (remixed by Maral), The Last Poets and Tony Allen Ft Egypt 80, unkle G, Prison, Nathan Amundson, and Laibach & Silence, plus a newly available song from the vault of Jason Molina (Songs: Ohia).
Episode 726 features new tunes from The Legendary Pink Dots, Body Meπa, B. Rupp, Kenneth Kirschner, David Grubbs, Klara Lewis, William Ryan Fritch, Lifted, KRM & KMRU, Dead Pioneers, and Laurie Anderson & Marshall Allen, plus a classic from HTRK.
Photo outside of Anacortes, Washington by Ryan.
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One thing that I particularly love about Christian Fennesz is that he only seems to surface with a new solo album when he has undergone some sort of significant creative breakthrough and has a fresh new vision to share. In recent years, those masterworks have settled into a reliable rhythm of roughly one every five years and Mosaic is the latest installment in that incredible run. Notably, Fennesz did not have clear vision when he began work on these pieces, but instead devoted himself to assembling the album piece by piece every single day until "the full picture" was revealed and the vision felt complete. Interestingly, the album is described as an echo of Venice in which the passing time has made "the division between the land, the horizon and the deep blue sea is more extreme," but it feels more like a descendant of Endless Summer to me. In this instance, however, the shimmering, sun-dappled beauty of the beach feels like a bleary and elusive memory of a past summer fitfully darkened by glimpses of a weightier melancholy. That said, the beach vibes prove to be impressively tenacious, so Mosaic feels more like the bittersweet final days of a summer on the seaside than it does a rueful reflection on happier past days.
I never know quite what to expect when a new release from the Mouse on Mars camp surfaces, but their unwavering commitment to both derangement and bold artistic choices has certainly kept me curious enough to remain a fan despite the occasional frustrating or disappointing misfire along the way. This one (very much not a misfire) is both an archival release and an unofficial score to Werner Herzog’s unconventional 1971 mirage documentary Fata Morgana. The film itself has a notoriously rocky history, as Herzog and his crew were imprisoned and beaten in Cameroon in the wake of a coup (and Herzog himself almost died) and the finished film was apparently greeted with hostility "almost everywhere." Fortunately, It eventually gained a following who appreciated its more psychedelic elements and Mouse on Mars chose to perform a live score in real-time for it at a 2007 Italian film festival. Fittingly, it turned out that the film festival had not actually been able to clear the rights, so this endearingly wild vision has been tragically languishing in the vaults until now. While I am not normally a fan of soundtracks and scores decontextualized from their visual accompaniment, Herzog Sessions is a rare exception and easily features some of Mouse on Mars’ most fun and exciting work.
A Rift in the Horizon’s Wall features Paris based composer and current INA-GRM director François Bonnet (as Kassel Jaeger) creating a single work (split across two sides of vinyl) within in a very specific, contextual framework. Recorded at Epsilon Spires, a former Baptist church turned cultural space/venue in Brattleboro, Vermont, and using the church’s 1903 pipe organ as the foundational instrument, Bonnet adds other instrumentation in addition to utilizing the natural acoustics of the space in which it was recorded. The final product is a sweeping, heavily varied piece that conveys the history from which it was created, and also Bonnet’s compositional touch in a colossal, expansive work.
Not far-removed time wise from his double bill of Don’t Ever Let Me Know and Images from last year, Colin Andrew Sheffield has created a succinct, 20-ish minute work in 2024 (in addition to a collaborative tape with Andrew Anderson). It shares qualities with his two 2023 records but is clearly a stand-alone project. Constructed from a similar approach to those previous works—namely utilizing commercially available soundtrack recordings—Moments Lost, itself a soundtrack to a short film by Sheffield of recycled footage, taps into that same sense of familiar and mystery, with passages of what may or may not be cinematic drama peeking through.
This album has been a long time coming, as Blackshaw has mostly been on an extended hiatus from performing and recording since 2016, as the eternal instability and financial stresses of life as a musician nudged him towards a life in the food scene instead. Eventually, however, his creative urges began stirring once more and he announced his return to music in 2019, but his plans took some serious hits from the pandemic, the deaths of a close friend and a beloved dog, and a broken shoulder along the way. Thankfully, he persevered regardless and Unraveling In Your Hands marks the first new James Blackshaw album since 2015’s Summoning Suns and it is a damn good one too. In fact, Blackshaw almost makes it seem like no time has passed at all, as these three pieces are as compositionally ambitious, virtuosic, and deliciously compelling as ever. While the centerpiece here is ostensibly the nearly 27-minute tour de force of the title piece, it is actually a shorter collaboration with multi-instrumentalist Charlotte Glasson that steals the show for me. 
This latest album from Rafael Anton Irisarri was partially inspired by an overheard malaprop in Italy years ago in which someone at a restaurant mistranslated The American Dream as “The American Myth.” That unintentionally damning phrase naturally resonated with Irisarri, who hails from Puerto Rico, and it came back to him in 2020 when he was researching brutalist architecture and Potemkin villages (a portable façade built to create the illusion of a real town). It is not terribly hard to see how Potemkin villages are a perfect readymade metaphor for the illusory promises of The American Dream, of course, but making an anticolonial power ambient album that channels that revelation in an interesting and unique way is quite a bit harder. Irisarri ingeniously solved that problem by mirroring the “cyclical nature of our tumultuous political history” with roiling storms of distortion and hiss, which he envisions as a series of tempests and receding tides that leave behind only “dust, delusion, and memory.” Some pieces admittedly pull off that trick better than others, but the best moments beautifully evoke something akin to a glimpses of a flickering mirage through a raging sandstorm.
I’ve been enjoying the musical union of Zachary (Magpie) Corsa and Denny Wilkerson Corsa since they first surfaced as Lost Trail during the height of the DIY tape label golden age that blossomed around 2010, but the couple’s vision unexpectedly ascended to a even higher plane when they moved to Memphis, TN and reinvented themselves as Nonconnah. Since then, their run of releases has been quite incredible, as I’ve been properly blown away by at least one Nonconnah album every year since 2021. This latest one (their first for the recently resurrected Absolutely Kosher label) happily keeps most of the familiar Nonconnah themes intact (plenty of guests, complexly layered shoegaze-inspired soundscapes, an “anything goes” approach to weaving together disparate passages and motifs, meaningful use of spoken word samples, etc.), but it is also marks a significant departure in other ways. Given that, it took me a bit longer to warm to this one than previous instant classics like Don't Go Down To Lonesome Holler & Songs For And About Ghosts, but I got there eventually and now find this album to be one of the more fascinating releases in the couple’s lengthy discography. 
This is Kevin Martin’s first solo instrumental release as The Bug, which is a bit surprising given that he has been devoted to dread-soaked industrial dub mutations for roughly three decades now. These particular dread-soaked mutations were originally released as a series of five EPs of self-described “floor weapons” on Martin’s own Pressure label. I cannot argue with the “floor weapons” claim, as Machine is essentially an unbroken run of slow-motion bangers and seismic bass throbs, but the unifying aesthetic of those bangers is the more interesting bit, as Martin envisioned a new strain of “ice cold and dystopian” futuristic dub. That may seem like an eyebrow-raising claim, given that Martin is no stranger at all to futuristic/dystopian/mechanized menace, but I was legitimately caught off guard by how much the absence of any recognizably human element would transform my listening experience in both obvious and less obvious ways.
Allegedly recorded back in 2003, then resurrected and reworked last year for the 30th anniversary of Libythth,Uvwxyz is a strange record from an even stranger project. With a heavy misuse of sampled instruments and random sounds, what could be pure chaos somehow is anything but. Libythth somehow solidifies sputtering samples and found clips into memorable songs and miraculously congeal the most random of sounds into something catchy and memorable.
This second full-length from composer Joy Guidry came as quite a revelation, as I was definitely not expecting to have my head blown off by a gospel-inspired jazz album by a bassoonist this year (or really any year, if I am being honest). There were some subtle clues beforehand, however, as Guidry got serious about practicing radical acceptance in the wake of the Radical Acceptance album and decided to celebrate the power of community in a big way with its follow up. As alluded to by the title, religion is a big part of that community, as Guidry grew up deeply immersed in gospel during her childhood in Texas, but Joy also found a welcoming place in other communities as a trans avant-garde jazz artist and Amen captures the ecstatic nexus where all of the important people and influences in Guidry's life collide. To paraphrase an old saying, it takes a village to make an album this wonderful and joyous, but a talented ensemble needs a band leader with a bold vision in order to reach its full potential and that is a role in which Guidry truly excels. Of course, there are also some lovely solo bassoon pieces throughout the album, but they are unavoidably eclipsed by the deliriously rapturous highs of killer ensemble pieces like "Angels" and "Members Don't Get Weary."
Back in 2018, the Opalio brothers released The Sky With Broken Arms, an album which was partially inspired by the surface noise on a bunch of Roberto's records that had been mysteriously ravaged by oxidation. On its newly released sequel, the sounds of crackling vinyl dutifully make their return, but that feature is now a bit eclipsed by a different and new twist, as Maurizio plays recognizable electric guitar and dabbles in more earthly melodies and scales than he usually does. Whether that constitutes a softening or an enhancement of the MCIAA ethos is in the ear of the beholder, I suppose, but I personally enjoy the grounding contrast between the earthly and the otherworldly and I am not actually sure that the Opalios could meaningfully go further into the outer limits than they already have (though I do expect to be proven very wrong in that regard by some future release). In any case, The Sky With Broken Arms Vol. II is still a characteristically excellent psychotropic deep-space mindfuck and its two longform pieces are instant MCIAA classics (and if there was ever a MCIAA album that could draw in the more adventurous fans of space rock/psych bands like Flying Saucer Attack, this is probably it). 
