Podcast Episodes 721 & 722 are live!
Mid-November midweek special
Two new episodes are now available.
Episode 721 features Throwing Muses, Eros, claire rousay, Moin, Zachary Paul, Voice Actor and Squu, Leya, Venediktos Tempelboom, Cybotron, Robin Rimbaud and Michael Wells, Man or Astro-Man?, and Aisha Vaughan.
Episode 722 has James Blackshaw, FACS, Laibach, La Securite, Good Sad Happy Bad, Eramus Hall, Nonconnah, The Rollies, Jabu, Freckle, Evan Chapman, diane barbe, Tuxedomoon, and Mark McGuire.
Wine in Paris photo by Mathieu.
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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). 
This latest solo album from Swedish composer Klara Lewis is billed as “a heartfelt tribute to her friend, mentor and former label boss, Peter Rehberg” and a “precise homage” to his “methodology and spirit.” Notably, Editions Mego released Lewis’s debut album Ett in 2014 when she was only 21 years old and her vision has undergone some rather dramatic evolutions since then. For example, one of my favorite aspects of Ett was Klara's near-complete avoidance of conventional melodies or instrumentation. While that stance has certainly softened over the ensuing decade, Lewis is still every bit as adventurous and unpredictable in 2024 as she was back then–her songs just happen to have stronger melodic hooks now. In keeping with that “anything goes” spirit, Thankful is fascinating miscellany that delves into everything from solo ukulele performances, unhinged techno mutations, Disintegration Loops-style slow-motion melody obliteration, and an achingly gorgeous elegy. Unsurprisingly, all are wonderful, which makes Thankful yet another characteristically excellent Klara Lewis album.
Madeline Johnston’s fourth solo album as Midwife borrows its title from The Carter Family’s timeless and transcendent classic about leaving one’s worldly cares behind. The title presumably has some aspirational meaning, as the darker side of life is an eternal theme for Midwife, but it is also a nod to both Johnston’s life on the highway as a traveling musician (with a dying tour van) and to the many other road warriors that came before her. In keeping with that “road album” theme, Johnston also name-checks “outlaws” and “the psyche of America’s underbelly” as big influences and notes that most of the album was written almost entirely from the back of tour vans. That claim rings true, as this entire album feels unusually intimate, nocturnal, and stripped down and most songs are centered upon little more than Johnston’s voice and a few simple chords or arpeggios. In fact, almost every song on No Depression could literally be played on an unamplified electric guitar in the back of a van. Impressively, that stark minimalism suits these songs extremely well, as there are enough great lines and killer hooks here to make it clear that Johnston does not need much more than six strings and her voice to craft a memorable and emotionally heavy song. This is the Midwife vision distilled to its absolute essence.
This latest album from English violinist/avant-folk visionary Laura Cannell is billed as “an offering of contemporary minimalism to a 12th century composer, a thank you to a lost uncle and a way to process an anxiety disorder.” Cannell was first turned onto Benedictine abbess/polymath Hildegard von Bingen back in the late ‘90s when her uncle played her Sequentia’s Canticles of Ecstasy album and the iconoclastic German nun’s compositions have been an alternating source of comfort and inspiration ever since. In keeping with the "inspiration" theme, The Rituals of Hildegard Reimagined is essentially a great new Laura Cannell album rather than anything resembling a conventional homage. As Cannell describes it, she broke down and reconstructed selected Hildegard pieces and interspersed them with her own work. She also set aside both her violin and her usual working methods, as these pieces were improvised and recorded in single takes using a simple palette of bass recorder, 12-string medieval harp (“tuned in unequal temperament”), and a delay pedal. As it turns out, that is all Cannell needed to cast quite a wonderfully hallucinatory, haunting, and timeless spell. It’s frankly a shame that Hildegard herself isn’t around to hear it, as this album would be an ideal soundtrack for anyone looking to have otherworldly religious visions. 
Being a duo consisting of JR Robinson (Wrekmeister Harmonies) and Mark Solotroff (Anatomy of Habit, Bloodyminded), it is not at all surprising that the debut from The Mercury Impulse is heavily rooted in the world of synths and electronics. Across eight songs, however, the sound cannot be so easily summarized. The result is a rich blend of light and dark, fluctuating from noise to melody effortlessly, often within a single composition.
Unsurprisingly, I have been following Holy Tongue since the project first surfaced with their killer self-titled EP back in 2020, as few things could more obviously be more right up my alley than a dub project from one of the most reliably fascinating drummers on the planet right now (Valentina Magaletti). While I have certainly enjoyed the project’s entire discography thus far, my experience has been that there are plenty of times when Holy Tongue has sounded exactly like what I would expect from a Magaletti-centric dub project (a stripped-down, post-punk-influenced On-U Sound homage), but those pieces are sometimes interspersed with transcendent flashes of inspiration that feel like something considerably more adventurous and unique. Notably, those left-field moments of brilliance started to appear a bit more frequently once the other half of Vanishing Twin’s rhythm section (bassist Susumu Mukai) joined the fold. In keeping with that theme, the addition of yet another talented collaborator (Sam Shackleton) has triggered yet another sizable creative leap forward, as The Tumbling Psychic Joy of Now is legitimately impressive enough to back up the wildly bold promise of its title (an Ornette Coleman-level feat if I ever saw one).
