Brainwashed Radio: The Podcast Edition

Rescued bird by Stef

Three new episodes are ready for your listening pleasure, thanks to a a busy two weekends combined with an overflow of excellent music. 

The first episode features Dead Pioneers, Casa Ukrania, loscil // lawrence english, Jim White & Marisa Anderson, Kevin Drumm, KMRU, Moonshake, DJ Anderson do Paraíso feat. MC Magrella, Sandwell District, The Bevis Frond, serpentwithfeet, and Dean McPhee.

The second one has goodies from Jan Jelinek, Jessica Pratt, Myriam Gendron, Creation Rebel, Dabrye, Scanner, Wand, Shane Parish, øjeRum, Lise Barkas & Lisa Käuffert, Miranda Sex Garden, and Carlos Niño / Surya Botofasina / Adam Rudolph.

And last but certainly not least, we bring you Four Tet, Mary Lattimore and Walt McClements, Doc Sleep, SPC ECO, Sparkle Division, Derek Monypeny, Devon Welsh, Sheherazaad, Alvidrez, Michael Vincent Waller, Bardo Pond, and Songs: Ohia.

Thanks to Stef who provided this image of a bird rescued from the jaws of the family cat.

Get involved: subscribe, review, rate, share with your friends, send images!

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Julian Sartorius, "Hidden Tracks: Domodossola – Weissmies"

Hidden Tracks: Domodossola – WeissmiesThis Swiss percussionist has been quietly carving out a very cool and unique niche for himself over the last decade, as he continually finds unusual conceptual scenarios to combine with his virtuosic playing. I greatly enjoyed 2021's aptly titled Locked Grooves, but had not yet delved too deeply into his earlier work, so I had missed the first installment of Hidden Tracks: 2017's Basel – Gen​è​ve. For that album, Sartorius brought his drumsticks along for a 10-day, 270km hike along Switzerland's Jura Ridgeway Trail and recorded improvised beats on whatever intriguing sound sources he encountered (trees, empty silos, corn stalks, etc.). On this latest installment, his journey is now vertical, as Sartorius kept a similar beat diary as he climbed from the Italian village of Domodossola "to the peak of Weissmies (4017m above sea level) in the Swiss Valais." In theory, that upped the game considerably constraint-wise, as Sartorius gradually leaves behind both humanity and trees in his ascent, but that comparative dearth of available sound sources was no match for his resourceful inventiveness.

Everest Records

The album is presented as a series of eight pieces that mirror Sartorius's ascent in 500 meter intervals, so the first piece (272m_↗_500m) is built from sounds recorded in Domodossola and the last piece is assembled entirely from sounds collected near the mountain summit. Notably, Sartorius was joined by videographer Stephan Hermann and his footage makes for a wonderfully illustrative guide to the shifting terrain that the duo encountered. It also helpfully illuminates how Sartorius was able to make these recordings, which is something that initially baffled me, as some of these pieces seemed impossibly complex to perform in real-time and Julian made a point of stating that "no electronic effects or sound processing were used." That claim is indeed factual, but there was some post-recording assembly involved: Sartorius recorded multiple tracks (usually played one-handed while the other hand wielded a microphone), then assembled layered beatscapes from the sounds collected at each elevation. That essentially means that a kick drum pattern might have been recorded with one pile of rocks, but the rest of the beat may have been recorded using a completely different pile of rocks. That said, that finished recordings make for a very impressive audio illusion, as it often sounds like Julian's drumming is taking place in real-time and intuitively interacting with non-percussive field recordings of cars, birds, planes, radios, cows, and sprinklers.

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Robert Poss, "Drones, Songs and Fairy Dust"

Drones, Songs and Fairy DustAcross the 16 songs that make up this album, the title makes perfect sense: a myriad of abstract, expansive pieces, full-fledged songs, and odd little miniatures. All of them are linked together with Robert Poss's infinite love for the electric guitar, however, and as a whole, it encapsulates much of the sound he has cultivated throughout his entire career.

Trace Elements

Poss is best known for his tenure as guitarist/co-vocalist of Band of Susans, a band that often seems relegated to a footnote in discussions of noisy, unconventional guitar-based rock music, or for a number of years just cited as Page Hamilton's pre-Helmet band. Which is, of course, a disservice given how they expertly bridged the late 1980s "college rock" sound and the avant garde together. This style that he pioneered with bassist/vocalist Susan Stenger is never far on this new album, either.

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Moonshake, "Eva Luna" Deluxe Edition

Eva LunaI believe I stumbled upon Moonshake's singular 1992 debut full-length by blind luck at a used record store, but I cannot remember if I picked it up because I was already vaguely aware that Margaret Fiedler was cool or if it was still pre-Laika. In any case, I always thought of Moonshake primarily as Fieldler's alternately frustrating and brilliant first band. In hindsight, however, I failed to appreciate how truly radical this foursome were during their brief flourish and dearly wish that I had dug a bit deeper back then, as Eva Luna could have (and should have) been my gateway into an amazing world of killer underground music that I was not yet aware of (krautrock, post-punk, free jazz, Jamaican dub, and even the C86 scene). Listening to this expanded reissue now with considerably more adventurous ears, I still find this album oft-frustrating, but I am newly struck by how almost every song features at least one moment where Moonshake sounded like the best band on the goddamn planet. That white-hot inspiration did not always sustain itself for an entire song, but this reissue beautifully strengthens the original album with some welcome gems from the band's early EPs.

Beggars Arkive/Matador/Too Pure

The idea for Moonshake first took shape after the 1990 demise of guitarist/singer Dave Callahan's previous band The Wolfhounds. He was weary of playing rock music and wanted to try something more eclectic and sample-driven, but he was less than thrilled with the sound of his own voice, so he placed an ad in Melody Maker for a female guitarist and Margaret Fielder was the only person who responded. Callahan's original plan was allegedly to combine Byrds-inspired vocal harmonies with samples and Metal Box-inspired dubwise post-punk, but both of those influences fell by the wayside once Fiedler's own creative input started to shape their sound. The new band's first release was 1991's First EP on Creation Records, which is something of a gem in its own right, but sounds completely different from Moonshake of Eva Luna: the shoegaze-y melodicism of First is very much in line with other Creation bands of the time like Swervedriver and My Bloody Valentine. That achievement did not suit Callahan at all, so the band set out to completely reinvent themselves for their next major statement (spoiler alert: the PIL influence came back in a big way, but was joined by some fresh influences from hip-hop, free jazz, noise, and elsewhere).

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Lise Barkas & Lisa Käuffert, "Lo Becat"

Lo BecatThis album is definitely one of the more unlikely underground hits to cross my path in recent memory, as this strikingly unique bagpipe performance first quietly surfaced as an extremely limited CDr back in 2017 on Strasbourg's Soleils Bleus label. Last year, however, it got a well-deserved vinyl resurrection on Belgium's forward-thinking Morc Records and it sold out almost immediately (as did last month's repress, unsurprisingly). Notably, the bagpipe has historically not been my favorite instrument, but I've said the same thing in the past about harps and harpsichords only to have my mind blown by Joanna Newsom, Mary Lattimore, and Catherine Christer Hennix, so this is merely the latest revelation that any instrument can sound amazing in the right hands. I also never expected the French traditional music scene to be the source of so many stellar contemporary albums, yet Lise and Lisa have just joined my personal pantheon of Gallic folkies (France, Tanz Mein Herz, etc.) who have dropped killer left-field psych gems in recent years. That is an especially impressive feat for Kaüffert, given that she is a German bagpiper.

Soleils Bleus/Morc

As far as I can tell, Lo Becat was originally recorded back in 2016 for a radio broadcast, but Lise and Lisa have been playing together as a duo since 2014. While Kaüffert's own origin story remains a mystery to me, Barkas' journey to traditional music amusingly began via Coil, as she was entranced by Cliff Stapleton's hurdy-gurdy playing. That eventually led her to the music of France's Yann Gourdon and her involvement in more traditional fare, but that was mostly because there is a lot more demand for bagpipe and hurdy-gurdy players in the traditional/folk music scenes than in the experimental one (Coil is no longer hiring, I'm afraid). In the years since, however, Barkas and her like-minded friends have carved out a unique niche through the band L'Écluse (Kaüffert is also a member) and collectives like Kreis. Unsurprisingly, Lo Becat is the appropriately unusual fruit of a union between two avant-garde-minded bagpipers with one foot in traditional music circles, as it is essentially a loose fantasia upon an old ballad entitled "la belle va au jardin des amours" (Beauty Goes To The Garden of Love) that segues into a folk dance. Neither of the two pieces incorporated into Lo Becat are familiar to me as an American, of course, but I doubt a dueling bagpipe version of either would be recognizable to many French people either. That said, a timeless and beloved melody is always a solid foundation for adventurous experimentation or improv.

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Rafael Toral, "Spectral Evolution"

Spectral EvolutionBefore I heard this album, I mistakenly believed that I had a reasonable familiarity with Rafael Toral's oeuvre, as I had heard and enjoyed a handful of his classic guitar-era albums such as 2001's Violence of Discovery and Calm of Acceptance. That said, it had been a while since I had kept tabs on his work, so I was quite curious to hear what made this "quintessential album of guitar music" exciting enough to reawaken Jim O'Rourke's decades-dormant Moikai label. As it turns out, absolutely everything about Spectral Evolution feels like a goddamn revelation to me and I am now kicking myself for sleeping on Toral's post-guitar Space Program-era of experimentation with self-built instruments. The psychotropic omnipresence of those self-built instruments makes it amusingly misleading to call Spectral Evolution Toral's return to guitar music, but if the presence of some recognizable guitar sounds lures more listeners towards this one-of-a-kind work of genius, I believe that claim has served a worthy purpose. Listening to this album was like hearing classic Merzbow or My Cat Is An Alien for the first time, as Toral plays entirely by his own set of rules and succeeds spectacularly.

Moikai

After being properly gobsmacked by one of the album's early "singles" ("Fifths Twice"), I was not sure that I was even listening to the right album when I finally played Spectral Evolution for the first time. That feeling quickly dissipated after the first minute, but the album deceptively begins with Toral casually improvising around a few jazzy chords.on a relatively clean and effects-free electric guitar. It does not take long at all before that pleasant motif is absorbed by an otherworldly cacophony of whining harmonics and squirming electronics, however, and the wild ride that ensues leaves those jazz chords so far in the rearview mirror that they feel like a memory from a previous life. If someone held a gun to my head and demanded that I coherently explain what was happening in the album's opening minutes, I would probably resign myself to my imminent death, but "I think an alien jungle just crash landed onto an organ mass in Mindfuck City" is probably a reasonably accurate summation…temporarily, at least. If I waited another minute or so, however, I would probably lean more towards "a group of psychotic puppets just formed a jarringly discordant marching band and kicked this Mardi Gras party into overdrive!" Consequently, it is hopeless to make any generalizations about Toral's vision for this album at all unless that generalization is something vague like "an unpredictable series of dissolving lysergic mirages dreamed up by a madman."

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Maria W. Horn, "Panoptikon"

PanoptikonI tend to enjoy damn near everything that Sweden's XKatedral label releases, but this half-disturbing/half-transcendent tour de force by co-founder Maria W. Horn still managed to completely blindside me. Panoptikon's four-part suite was originally composed for a macabre installation at the "disbanded Vita Duvan (White Dove) panopticon prison in Luleå, Sweden." Being a panopticon, Vita Duvan had an unusual circular design "to create a sense of omniscient surveillance," but that is just the tip of a very grim iceberg, as it was also known for its brutal isolation tactics as well as rampant torture and execution. While the prison mercifully ceased operations in 1979, I suspect I would've needed months of therapy to recover from Horn's installation alone, as it pulsed in synchronization with the prison's lights and the cells contained speakers broadcasting the imagined voices of the doomed prisoners. Thankfully, the decontextualized album is considerably less harrowing than its origin suggests, as its dark choral opening quickly expands into an immersive swirl of heady drones, spacy synths, and timelessly beautiful vocal motifs.

Xkatedral

The heart of the album is the opening "Omnia citra mortem," which borrows its name from a legal term that translates as "everything until death." In the context of Vita Duvan, that meant that no one could be sentenced to death for a crime they did not confess to, but they could certainly be tortured until a confession was made. Needless to say, few were inclined to stick around very long, as being beheaded with an axe was vastly preferable to the alternative. According to Horn's research, the crimes that could land one in Vita Duvan could be as minor as "drunkenness" or "vagrancy," but several dozen unfortunate women met their end there because miscarriage and abortion were considered "child murder" at the time.

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Dean McPhee, "Astral Gold"

Astral GoldThis fifth full-length from Yorkshire-based guitar visionary Dean McPhee is actually a compilation of sorts, bringing together the pieces from his out-of-print Cosmos / Ether lathe cut 7" (2022) with a couple of gems from Folklore Tapes compilation appearances. Happily, however, Astral Gold is also rounded out with a pair of new pieces and one of them ("The Sediment of Creation") easily ranks among McPhee's finest work. Given that I was already a huge fan of one of the Folklore Tapes pieces included here, that is more than enough to make this a solid release, but it is also an unexpectedly focused and thematically compelling one given the varied origins and inspirations of these songs. It is quite an aptly named release as well, as the languorously meditative and cosmic mood of these pieces seem like they would be an ideal soundtrack for any astral traveling that one might have on the horizon.

Bass Ritual

The album opens with the two pieces from the Cosmos/Ether single on Reverb Worship, which was originally something of a divergent release for McPhee, as both songs feel more like the extremely understated work of a cosmic-minded '70s psych band than McPhee's usual fare (Manuel Göttsching being the obvious reference point). That said, the two pieces still sound a hell of a lot like Dean McPhee--they just happen to have unusually prominent bass lines. Of the two, I prefer "Ether," as it plays more to McPhee's strengths of hazy, reverbent melodies and looping chord patterns. While I love both the gently pulsing chord progress and the lingering vapor trails that hang in the wake of the lead guitar melody, McPhee's larger achievement lies in how he seems to slow and blur the passage of time: the way his notes seem to burn off or ripple away into silence is often more significant than the notes themselves. The uncluttered clarity of his playing is similarly striking and out-of-step with the current musical landscape, as he consciously avoids any excess notes or layers that would dilute the direct/real-time beauty of his themes.

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Organum Electronics, "Quietude", "Darcknes"

QuietudeAs the first two installments of a seven-part subscription series on Die Stadt, David Jackman (as Organum Electronics) has fashioned two new long-form pieces that are seemingly sparse in their formation, but like the entirety of his lengthy discography, result in something with so much more depth. Material utilized in other recent works from him are building blocks in these two discs, but compared to the quiet and understated recent material, these align much more closely with his earlier, noisier material, and continues to demonstrate his compositions are as fascinating as ever.

Die Stadt

Quietude is the noisier and overall more forceful of the two albums. It beings with an immediate blast of dense buzzing noise that approximates a jet engine very well, but multilayered and treated to give an amazing sense of depth and nuance. At times it almost seems as if it is a basic sound being utilized, such as the hum of a florescent lightbulb, blown out to massive proportions. The sound is sprawling, with intersecting passages shifting focus throughout. Shimmering engine sounds cascade over a continual buzz, with occasionally bassy churning sounds bubbling to the surface. Layers eventually relent alongside what sounds like rattling, scraping chains, leading to a jarring ending.

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"Flux Gourmet Original Motion Picture Soundtrack"

Flux GourmetI acknowledge it is only February right now, but I believe I can confidently state that this soundtrack will be the weirdest and most mystifying new album that I will encounter this year. The film itself was released back in 2022 and follows the trials and tribulations of an imaginary performance art group during a surreal and contentious month-long artist residency. It is an absolutely brilliant and wickedly funny film (possibly director Peter Strickland's finest work) and joins similarly deranged fare like Holy Mountain in the pantheon of cinema so audaciously batshit crazy that it is hard to fathom how it was ever financed, cast, or released. As befits such a bananas endeavor, the soundtrack features a murderers' row of compelling artists from the experimental/psych fringes, drawing participants from Broadcast, Nurse With Wound, Stereolab, Neutral Milk Hotel, Swans, and elsewhere. Obviously, that seems like a solid recipe for a unique album, but it is a unique album with a twist, as the heart of it all is Strickland's own Sonic Catering Band, a shifting collective devoted to transforming the preparation of vegetarian meals into ritualistic noise performances.

Ba Da Bing

The Sonic Catering Band allegedly formed as an anonymous ensemble in 1996 after finding unexpected inspiration in a bout of food poisoning. The band's mission statement is quite simple (if comically niche): "to employ a similar approach to electronic music as to (vegetarian) food; taking the raw sounds recorded from the cooking and preparing of a meal and treating them through processing, cutting, mixing and layering. No source sounds other than those coming from the cooking of the dish are used and as a commitment to artistic integrity, every dish is consumed by all members of the Band." The project spawned a record label (Peripheral Conserve) as well, releasing work by many of the folks who appear on the soundtrack as well as some other hard-to-categorize art provocateurs like The Bohman Brothers and Faust's Jean-Hervé Péron. Unsurprisingly, the project also resulted in some truly memorable-sounding performances ("on the wall by the table hung a lifesize 5ft gingerbread man with headphones on, listening to the sound of himself being cooked.").

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Dead Bandit, "Memory Thirteen"

Memory ThirteenThis is the second album from the instrumental duo of Ellis Swan and James Schimpl and the first Dead Bandit album to follow Swan's killer 2022 solo album 3am. Happily, Memory Thirteen returns to the hypnagogic "witching hour" vibes of 3am, but it also marks a very compelling creative leap forward into fresh stylistic terrain. To my ears, that blearily dreamlike terrain is best described as "what if Boduf Songs scored a gig as the house band at a strip club in the Donnie Darko universe?" Needless to say, that is a very tricky and hyper-specific niche to fill, yet Dead Bandit consistently find new ways to combine hushed and haunted late-night melancholy with neon-soaked sensuousness, deadpan cool, and dreampop shimmer.

Quindi

The opening "Two Clocks" introduces most of the elements central to the duo's current vision: understated guitar melodies, well-timed flickers of human warmth, submerged and distressed-sounding textures, and slow-motion, head-nodding beats. It is a fine way to start an album, but it feels more like a setting of the stage than a legitimate album highlight (even if it undergoes a gorgeously dreamlike transformation around the halfway point). The first unambiguous highlight follows soon after, however, as "Blackbird" feels like a window into a narcotic and carnivalesque cabaret of eerie melody, throbbing bass, lysergically smeared textures, and simmering, seething intensity.

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