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The first volume of Gengras's Collected Works was unexpectedly one of my absolute favorite albums of 2013, so I was looking forward to this follow-up with a great deal of anticipation.  As it turns out, my expectations were way off the mark, as New Process Music is nowhere near as great as its illustrious predecessor.  However, it is equally worth noting that it is not trying to be: this album is a different beast altogether.  While The Moog Years captured Gengras at his haunting, long-form compositional peak, New Process Music instead documents a series of brief experiments in harnessing the squiggling, burbling chaos of a small Eurorack modular synth.  The results are certainly interesting, but anyone seeking something beautiful or sublime should definitely look elsewhere.
Unlike The Moog Years, which collected pieces from a number of Gengras's cassette releases, the 8 pieces that comprise New Process Music are all essentially previously unreleased (though Gengras did make them available digitally at one point).  Also, the majority of these pieces were recorded during live shows spanning 2011 through 2012, though they do not sound live.  Essentially, these pieces were all patches that he devised for live performances (enhanced by tape echo), but the raw recordings were all later tweaked and further processed in his studio.  The post-production enhancements generally seem to be peripheral or textural in nature, though "Ricochet" unexpectedly features a distant-sounding interlude of Arvo Pärt’s "Für Alina."  Consequently, the meat of New Process Music is literally just variations on some endlessly repeating patterns: these are Gengras's first "pure" modular synth compositions.
Admittedly, Gengras conjures up some fairly cool patches, particularly with the longer pieces.  The 8-minute "Slider," for example, augments its relentless early Tangerine Dream-style pulse with some squirming and trilling higher notes and a low roar that sounds like it features some buried field recordings.  The twinkling and throbbing "The Last Time We Were Here" again reminds me of early Tangerine Dream, but seems more like the crescendo (and then coda) of one of their heavier pieces.  Another piece that works quite well is the closing "Pure (Reprise)," as it seems much more composed, relaxed, and melodic than anything else on the album.  It is essentially built upon a bittersweet series of swelling notes, but Gengras does a fine job of enhancing them with well-placed sizzles and echoing afterimages.  For someone like me who is not at all a modular synth enthusiast, "Pure (Reprise)" is by far the best piece on the album, as it is the one that feels most like a complete, thoughtfully constructed composition.  I am probably not the target demographic here though, as it seems like New Process Music’s true raison d’être is to delight synth fans with the way that Geddes wrestles with (and willfully causes) entropy.
Ultimately, New Process Music is less a disappointment than it is an album that is just not for me.  While The Moog Years admirably transcended the limitations of the synth revival genre, this album whole-heartedly embraces and embodies them.  It certainly suffers from its severe constraints, but those constraints are all completely by design, so I can hardly gripe about the outcome.  My sole meaningful critique is that most of these pieces lack the momentum and length needed to maximize the power of Gengras's many swooping and blurting variations.  These songs are mostly roiling and untamed right out of the gate, so there is never any real drama or feeling that anything is at stake, whereas Geddes's somewhat similar (but beat-driven) Personable project at times feels like a speeding train about to derail.  These pieces just kind of start and then eventually stop without any rewarding arc, just a bunch of cool technical feats and twists.  That said, New Process Music is still a vibrant and adventurous experiment, so modular synth enthusiasts will probably find a lot to love here, which makes perfect sense: this album is very much just for them.
 
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England / Ohio's Mat Sweet presents his latest album under the Boduf Songs moniker via The Flenser!
Stench of Exist is at once his most accessible and most esoteric work to date; from the opium flow of the tracks, running headily into one another like tributaries to river, to the muted-industrial-electronic-effected drums underscoring the spiraling melodies and fluttering drones, to the clean and rich guitar, abstracted cycles and feedback walls, its whispered doom metal masquerades as a lullaby.
Stench of Exist unfolds languorously, laced with mysterious electronic filigree. Gorgeously intimate, it transforms the minimal into maximal with layers of electro-detritus wreathed in lush guitar strums, street-side field recordings, reverberating pianos and softly crooned vocals. It is a record of rain and cities and nighttime. The collision of arabesque tonalities with electronic sound and ambience brings to mind the promise of Blade Runner—half-asleep at 4:00 A.M. and slightly medicated, with pyramids and flame-spewing cityscapes in downpour glowing against the fluttering eyelids in the almost-dreaming consciousness. A record for saturnine commuters, on headphones, after sunset.
Coming February 2015.
More information can be found here.
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Recorded Nov/Dec 2014.
Title lifted from the Joan Didion book The Year of Magical Thinking. Thanks Joan.
Samples and more information are available here.
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"...And Wait For Something to Happen"
A dark, dark journey of spirits and alchemy conjured in the supernaturally hot, still spring of 2014 in Burlington, North Carolina, that haunted black X on the map buried deep in the Alamance foothills. These are the wailings of phantoms trapped beneath the floorboards and between the walls of our murky and crumbling 1910 home, buried on sleeping side-streets within a moment's reach of swarming, grasping woods. These are the sheets of rain swept in the doorway, the static churning of a possessed shortwave radio, the spitting demons of electricity and malfunction and broken, obsolete machines slowly giving way to organic sounds, light, an upward journey out of the very hands of night's oblivion and into more luminous, radiant decay. Here lies collapse, entropy, and rebirth.
More information can be found here and here.
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The latest sonic throw-down between Jim O'Rourke and Christoph Heemann; a state where it's almost impossible to determine who is responsible for what. The plastic people have melted together, that's why!
(Slightly) more information can be found here.
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After intense one-on-one dialogue with Heather Leigh on the label's renewed remit to present beautiful records that showcase all styles of "guitar" in all their extremities, Golden Lab is delighted to deliver to you what is, no question, an absolutely blinding example of just such a record.
A recording that captures Heather Leigh direct to cassette – one of those performances where the pedal steel was raging so hard that the vocals never had the opportunity to even make an appearance. Recorded in glorious mono and mastered to really bring out the harshness of those insane tones, the capturing of this performance to cassette gives the pedal steel an almost tape-like quality itself and its transfer to vinyl only warms it up further into a new zone of somehow cosy metallicism. This is an absolute joy – a real tear-yr-face-off record that sort of acts as a companion piece to HL's recent work w/ Stefan Jaworzyn in Annihilating Light. This won't stick around long.
More information can be found here.
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Jasmine Guffond is an original creator of conceptual sound. This first output under her own name is its own study, and if you've heard her former projects Jasmina Maschina or Minit, you should not be surprised at the different driving force and fresh structure of sound behind this new venture. However, if you're anticipating veins of clean, melodious folk or purely experimental electronic, you should shift your expectations.
Yellow Bell presents a broad spectrum of musicality, floating within hazy electronics, lost vocals, and ambient dimensions. The balance of digital synthesizer, loops, processed voice, and guitar creates a meticulous soundscape that both intrigues and calms. With its delicacy and immediacy, Yellow Bell distorts the perception of time and creates an environment for engagement and understanding.
While creating its own memorable dynamic, Yellow Bell resonates with the delayed endlessness of Grouper or lovesliescrushing and touches on the early electronic sounds of Musique concrète.
More information can be found here.
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166 minutes with
Charlemagne Palestine: piano Bösendorfer, orgue Yamaha and voice
Rhys Chatham: trumpet, loop pedal, electric guitar.
This is the first recorded collaboration between Charlemagne Palestine and Rhys Chatham. And it's precious. After the musical meetings with Tony Conrad (SR204) and Z'ev (SR340), these new Sub Rosa sessions create a form of trilogy.
More information can be found here.
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Sometimes I wonder why the rest of the world does not seem to appreciate the singular genius of Colleen Kinsella and Caleb Mulkerin like I do.  Other times, an album like this comes along and reminds me how truly unhinged, prickly, and unsuited for mass consumption the duo can be and everything makes sense once more.  Given the diversity and volume of Big Blood's output to date, it is hard to say just how dramatic a divergence Unlikely Mothers actually is, but I normally associate the band with a uniquely raw, primal, and art-damaged strain of folk that defies easy categorization.  Unlikely Mothers also defies easy categorization, but calls to mind some sort of primitive, sludgy, and bass-driven strain of '70s hard rock.  Some of the grooves achieve an unexpectedly hypnotic momentum or bracing, wild-eyed power, but the shrillness and single-mindedness of some these pieces can definitely make for a rough ride.
I have wrestled with what to say about this particular album for months, which I find very amusing given that Unlikely Mothers was probably composed and recorded in significantly less time than that.  I do not mean that as a critique, as Big Blood's intention very clearly seems to have been to unleash something loose, spontaneous, and different (and Unlikely Mothers is certainly all of those things).  What troubled me instead was that a band I love made an album that I found very hard to embrace, yet they themselves thought enough of it to make it one of their more high-profile, widely distributed albums (plenty of perfectly fine Big Blood albums have historically gone into the world as self-released cassettes or CDRs).  Consequently, I figured that I was probably missing something significant and just needed to hear the album enough to unlock its secrets.  Now that I have listened to it quite a lot, I can safely say that Unlikely Mothers probably has no secret layers or great buried melodies to uncover, but that it is nonetheless an admirable and unique experiment.  It just is not one for me.
With just a couple of exceptions, these nine songs are basically all grooves built upon a single promising riff.  Most of the riffs are admittedly cool ones, particularly the bass lines in "Steppin’ Time, Pt. II" and "Watery Down, Pt. II," but those riffs rarely make the leap from "great groove" to "great song," a problem compounded by some rather indulgent song lengths.  It takes quite an exceptional vamp to hold my attention for ten solid minutes and Big Blood are unlikely to dethrone Fela Kuti in that regard any time soon, though the 15-minute closer (the aforementioned "Watery Down, Pt. II") admittedly works quite well.  Still, if a bunch of simple, fuzzed-out bass riffs was all Unlikely Mothers had to offer, it would be fairly easy to dismiss.  It is not easy to dismiss at all, however.  Some of that success is certainly due to some neat details (the primal, clattering drums in "Thumbnail Moon," the lazy psychedelic guitar meandering in "Watery Down, Pt. II," etc.) and some occasional strong melodies and songcraft ("Watery Down" yet again).  Most of the album's success, however, is due to the duo's decidedly unique aesthetic.
Quite simply, Unlikely Mothers sounds like the work of some kind of isolated, backwoods cult that has largely spent the last few decades consuming massive amounts of peyote, reading arcane books, and listening to Sabbath and Dead Moon.  In fact, I suspect this album sounds far more like a weird backwoods cult than an actual weird backwoods cult would sound.  Caleb and Colleen have always sounded delightfully ragged, but Mothers takes that tendency and amplifies it to a raucous, stomping, religious fervor.  While there are a few oases of genuine beauty to be found in these songs, the emphasis is much more on trancelike repetition and frayed abandon (Kinsella often sounds more like a banshee than a Siren this time around).
The tragedy here is that I am perfectly fine with absolutely all of that: I am quite happy to follow Big Blood as far out on their weird, precarious limb as they want to go.  In fact, I think Unlikely Mothers is a legitimate stylistic triumph, as it all sounds genuinely fiery, gut-level, and half-crazed without a trace of irony, artifice, or artistic detachment to be found.  I love that.  I just wish that the duo's shriller, more unhinged tendencies had been better balanced with strong melodic hooks (Big Blood are historically very good at finding ways to present beautiful melodies with sharp edges).  The most perplexing thing of all is that at least some of these songs are reworkings of older pieces (both "Away" and "Leviathan Song" previously surfaced on Old Time Primitives, for example).  If cannibalizing pre-existing songs was fair game, it seems like Unlikely Mothers could have been forged from much stronger raw material than it was.  Perhaps these were all chosen for thematic reasons (the title refers to the fact that both Kinsella's mother and her aunt were nuns), but I was unable to find any kind of overarching narrative thread or theme in the songs as a listener.  Consequently, this album feel like an exasperating missed opportunity to me, albeit a wonderfully wild and divergent one.  A better album than this one can definitely be made in this vein.  That said, however, both halves of "Watery Down" rank comfortably among Big Blood's finest work, so apparently even a somewhat frustrating Big Blood album is still good for roughly 20 minutes of sublime greatness.
 
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A reissue of a self-release from the enigmatic Grant Smith, the sound on this disc fits squarely in the world of guitar noise, but with a significant amount of development and variation within each of its six untitled segments. Sometimes harsh, sometimes pensive, and sometimes melodic, it results in a wonderful, mysterious album that is enjoyably unpredictable.
The only overarching theme that seems to be prevalent on Exploding Diseases is a progression from harsher material into more meditative and hypnotic passages.The first segment opens with a deep, subterranean grinding noise that is likely guitar, but has a raw and otherworldly quality to it.Eventually Smith brings in a more standard sounding guitar layer, but with surges of a harsh and unidentifiable noise that balances out the familiar sounds very well.
Moving into the second piece, the overall structure continues with a power electronics bass crunch that would not be out of place on a Brighter Death Now record.The rawness is still present, but dialed back a bit and mixed with a layer of echoing, wobbly guitar noise.It might not be aggressive, but there is a bleak malevolence behind it.The fuzzy bass throb of the third part only slightly serves to obscure Smith’s introduction of an otherworldly melody low in the mix, a hint of what is to come on the album.
The melody was just a teaser, because the following piece leads off with a sharper noise sound that is far more abrasive than what preceded it.The piece may not be musical at all on the surface, but he keeps a churning vibration going that gives it at least a sense of rhythm, even if that is just undone by its grimy and nasty conclusion.
The final two segments are where Smith allows the more peaceful and meditative sounds shine through.The fifth piece opens with an ambient expanse:slowly humming guitar feedback results in a softer sound, and even with the distorted bassy loops, the whole thing is hypnotically droning.In a way, it is like the best moments of Spacemen 3 but more dissonant.The final piece is culled from a similar template, with a little more emphasis on the bass and noise.Kept at bay below the distorted stuff is a melodic loop that again offsets the noisy moments with something more melodic and engaging.
This is an obscure album from an enigmatic artist:there are no credits on the sleeve, and I could not find much information about him or his previous work via a quick Google search.That obscurity though makes Exploding Diseases even more captivating, like a lost artifact of brilliance that seemingly appeared out of nowhere.The mystery is not necessary to fully appreciate the album though, as the music stands on its own strongly.
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Will Thomas Long has been less prolific as of late with material as Celer, his minimal ambient project. That longer space between releases has made each one all the more memorable, and that is no different with Sky Limits. Even though it is conceptually about the ephemeral nature of life and experiences, stopping to listen to these quiet pieces makes for a great metaphor of life on a grander scale.
The composed pieces are consistent with what Long has done as Celer for years.Long constructs "Circle Routes" entirely of gliding tones and expansive electronics.Layered and slow, the piece is gentle, but commands attention and never becomes dull."In Plum and Magenta" features Long working in similar methods, but scaled back to be somewhat sparser, still conveying the same pensive emotions however.
The sound becomes a bit more intense on the middle pieces of the album, however."Tangent Lines" has a sound that is more commanding and dense, a cinematic heaviness that conveys drama expertly.Long keeps the electronics heavy on the following "Equal to Moments of Completion," emphasizing the lower end and creating an even greater sense of bombast.
In a similarly cinematic manner, the final two pieces have the sound retreating to a more gentle, placid conclusion."Wishes to Prolong" floats more than looms, slowly whisping away its calm tones and melodies.The concluding "Attempts to Make Time Pass Differently" has Long working with a similar ghostly feel, but enhances it with a rich, slow driving expanse of tones.The closing minutes go to near silence, requiring focus and dedicated attention to fully appreciate.
With the whole of the album inspired by daily life in Japan, the six major pieces of music are interspersed with field recordings of mundane life:watching television while drinking tea, traveling on a train, or simply the sounds outside.Kept at a low volume level, it requires deliberate focus to be able to fully hear what is going on, a great metaphor for the rest of life.
Will Thomas Long's use of sparse and minimal electronics throughout Sky Limits should be of no surprise to anyone with even a passing familiarity with Celer's work.Weaved together with the bits of field recordings, the album almost becomes an anti-narrative.Unlike something of high concept and drama, the sounds are more about observing and appreciating the richness in the mundane, the every day experiences people ignore in the search for something bigger or more grandiose.
samples:
 
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