There are very few people around making better compilations than Analog Africa’s Samy Ben Redjeb.  For this latest treasure trove of newly unearthed obscurities, Samy teamed up with Teranga Beat's Adamantios Kafetzis, who tracked down Senegalese sound engineer Moussa Diallo back in 2009 and digitized his large archive of tape reels.  Remarkably, only five songs from that big score made it onto the album, so the duo must have made some very hard decisions in narrowing down Senegal 70 to its lean and consistently excellent 13-song song incarnation.  Happily, one of the songs that made the cut is a previously unreleased piece by the incomparable and woefully underdocumented Amara Touré.  Also present is the long-running and internationally successful Orchestra Baobab, but many of the lesser known artists shine just as brightly (if not more so), making this one of Analog Africa's stronger compilations to date.
In his liner notes for The New Attractive, Yu Wakao writes, "In a sense, there is no need for individuality in noise music—ultimately, noise can only be hindered by the individual." Taste, he concludes, is far more important. It’s what separates this noise from that noise, the sound of traffic outside your car window from whatever is on the stereo. It’s a provocative claim because Takuji Naka and Tim Olive’s music on The New Attractive both affirms and refutes it, and because the distinction between taste and individuality is ambiguous. How are we to separate the two? Which one determines the instrument that the artist brings to their art? Which influences their preference for color, duration, and texture? What about volume? Naka and Olive certainly seem present in their work—the use of magnetic pickups and mechanical turbulence is familiar enough, as are the congealed puffs of electronic haze. The brevity of these five untitled tracks, their loose atmospheric structures, and the quiet, almost casual quality of the duo’s interactions all sound deliberate, the product of individuals with distinct tastes. Those qualities rise up and disperse across a wider plateau, however, propelling the music and musicians toward a nebulous border where specifics fall apart.
Clodagh Simonds has had a lengthy and storied career, working with the likes of Mike Oldfield and her own 1970s band Mellow Candle, and her return after a lengthy break with Fovea Hex beginning in 2005. With the rest of the band, including such recognizable artists Michael Begg, Colin Potter, Laura Sheeran. Cora Venus Lunny, and Kate Ellis, and special guests Justin Grounds and Brian Eno, this EP is a captivating, achingly stunning suite of music that defies any sort of classification.
Like her last record (2013's Character) and much of her solo material, Asperities is Kent, her cello, and a tasteful amount of processing and effects. While her list of collaborators are a veritable who’s-who of modern experimental music, her solo work is just as strong, but stripped down and intimate enough to place all the emphasis on her and her instrument. These restrained arrangements, however, serve to bring out the finest and most nuanced details in her playing and strong sense of composition.
The titular MB on this record is not the Italian noise pioneer, but GOG's Michael Bjella with Robert Skrzyński (of Micromelancolié) in collaboration. Black Box Recordings may not resemble Bianchi in any obvious way, but the duo have a similar raison d'être of utilizing purely dissonant electronics, roughly recorded found sounds, and the occasional interjection of conventional melody and instrumentation. Like its title would indicate, it is a bleak and disturbing collection of sounds that could easily be the final recordings of a cataclysmic event.
The way I see it, there are only three possible reactions to the statement "Matmos just made an entire album from recordings of their washing machine."  The first, which was my reaction, is "Yes!"  The other two, of course,  are "Ugh-of course they did." and "Who?"  What I am getting at here is that Ultimate Care II sounds exactly like everyone will expect it to sound, which is (naturally) exactly like a Matmos album: part conceptual art, part bizarro dance party, part abstract experimentation, and part willfully ridiculous (they let the actual rinse cycle play out unmolested for several minutes at one point).  The only real surprise for me was that Ultimate Care II is just a single extended piece that loosely mirrors the stages of a single wash cycle.  That one piece covers a lot of strange and varied stylistic ground, however, veering wildly from pummeling junkyard percussion to Looney Tunes to musique concrète to Love's Secret Domain-era Coil within a single 38-minute span.  Predictably, it is a wild ride indeed and precisely the type of album that no one but Matmos could (or would) ever make.
This trio featuring ubiquitous pianist Nils Frahm is one of the more pleasant surprises that have come across my path in recent memory, as I expected some sort of bloodless avant-jazz/post-rock hybrid, but was instead treated to quite an innovative and unique album (albeit quite an understated one as well).  I suspect a lot of that success is due to the band's exceedingly unconventional recording process, as they spent 8 years recording, re-recording, editing, recombining, and endlessly tweaking these pieces before finally concluding that The Gamble was finished.  Consequently, whatever these songs sounded like when they were originally played is probably a hell of a lot different from what ultimately wound up here.  To my credit, I was right about this album being a sort of avant-jazz/post-rock hybrid, but all of the instrumentation is so blurred together that The Gamble transcends either genre entirely and instead sounds like a strain of dub techno that is just as influenced by Latin percussion as it is by Jamaican dub. Except when it sounds like the greatest album that Tortoise never recorded.  Or when it sounds like something else entirely.
Like her debut release, Valence (2012), Montreal's France Jobin’s work is from the traditional school of electronic minimalism, in which the sparsest of sounds and instrumentation are utilized to create complex, nuanced sculptures of tone and texture.  Inspired by quantum physics and actualized by a variety of processing and modular synthesis, this album is yet another strong entry in her growing discography.
Federico Durand’s music has always had an extremely intimate, hushed quality to it; akin to being in a small room with him as he records, and his newest release is no different. A Través Del Espejo, which translates to "through the mirror" is an apt metaphor for the sound of this record, given its glassy clarity and deliberate, brilliant use of loops and repetition. His use of Spartan instrumentation is especially effective, making the absolute most out of even the smallest sounds culminating in a gorgeous, multifaceted record.
According to the website, Suppedaneum’s mission is, in part, to probe the relationship between music and composition. All the more reason to pay special attention to the score that accompanies The Letter, Joseph Clayton Mills's 22-minute cassette EP that comes close to not being an EP at all. With the exception of the first, each of the 100 cassettes that Mills assembled for this project is a hand-duplicated copy of an earlier copy. Thanks to the technological shortcomings of the medium, successive renderings of The Letter past the first contain imperfections not present in previous versions, meaning each tape is a uniquely worn-down object. As the liner notes put it, "The Letter is a piece of music designed to approach disappearance." Strangely, the music is not a performance of the aforementioned score, a piece titled Abscission that comprises the images of two trees and three pairs of musical staves. The tape’s sine tones, Throbbing Gristle-like noises, and warped piano phrases were inspired by those images, but the disconnect between them predominates. It’s one of the ways in which Joseph distills the disjunction and cohesion between sound and writing.
Back before the days of MP3s and file sharing, it was not uncommon for me to slowly lose my goddamn mind because there was some album that I desperately wanted to hear, yet could not find anywhere.  Naturally Coil, Current 93, and Nurse With Wound were all regular members of that exclusive club, but the reigning king of maddening elusiveness was always La Monte Young–more specifically, The Well-Tuned Piano, though Dream House (now finally reissued) would have been a lovely consolation prize (both albums have regularly turned up on Discogs' "most expensive items sold" list).  The reason for my obsession is quite simple: Young was the ur-visionary at the root of many of the more compelling strains of underground culture that have blossomed over the last 18 years, heavily and directly influencing the aesthetics of Brian Eno, Andy Warhol, The Velvet Underground, and Terry Riley (in fact, John Cale, Angus MacLise, and Riley were all members of Young's Theatre of Eternal Music ensemble).
Newly resurrected by Oren Ambarchi’s Black Truffle imprint, this would-be landmark 1987 recording was originally slated to be released on Glenn Branca’s short-lived Neutral Records.  After sadly sitting on the shelf for roughly a decade, it was finally issued by Dutch label Barooni in 1998 and thankfully reached enough people to warrant yet another resurfacing almost 20 years later.  It is hard to understand how this album wound up so cursed while the very similar Strumming Music became so revered, but the world is not a fair place, I guess.  In any case, Godbear is a suite of three solo piano pieces recorded in a church and it is wonderful.  While perhaps not quite as essential as Palestine's more ambitious and unusual recent work (2015’s Ssingggg arguably eclipsed absolutely everything that came before it), Godbear’s rumbling storms of overtones are quite visceral and inventive by solo piano performance standards.
On one hand, it is kind of astonishing that Andreas Brandal has not been covered on this site before, as the shape-shifting/multi-guised Norwegian experimentalist has been on the scene for more than two decades and has made plenty of excellent music covering an impressive amount of stylistic territory.  On the other hand, it makes absolutely perfect sense, as Brandal’s career is not unlike that of Machinefabriek: a seemingly constant and unrelenting stream of new projects, limited editions, and collaborations that no hapless fan (much less a casual listener) could possibly hope to keep up with.  I believe I personally have at least 8 Andreas Brandal albums at this point and I am certain that I do not have even the most tentatively grasp of the depth and scope of his discography: I have not just missed key album–I have missed entire genres.  I do know that I like him though and his newest release is an absolutely stellar one, occupying the unique nexus where heavy drone, languorous strings, and oversaturated Tim Hecker-esque textures wonderfully collide.
Althogh not yet quite as well-known as his peers, Paul Jebanasam is an integral part of Bristol's Subtext Recordings milieu, a loose cadre of erstwhile dance producers who have now moved onto far more conceptual and abstract art.  While it is not uncommon for Subtext releases (this one included) to sound cringe-inducingly pretentious and/or overly grandiose on their face, the reality is that artists like Emptyset, Roly Porter, and Jebanasam are currently making (or at least trying very damn hard to make) some of the most ambitious and forward-thinking art in the experimental music scene.  Admittedly, Continuum shares a lot of common ground with other artists like Tim Hecker, Johann Johannsson, and Ben Frost, but it does not feel derivative so much as it seems like Jebanasam heard the mangled organs of Ravedeath, 1972 and thought "Not a bad start, but it really should have gone much further."
This is a well-deserved and expanded vinyl reissue of the absolutely stellar My Body is A Dying Machine EP, which Justin Broadrick quietly released in digital-only format back in 2010. So quietly, in fact, that I completely missed it the first time around.  As with most expanded releases, the added material in this case is not exactly crucial, as most of the best songs were already on the original EP.  It is quite good though and the appeal of Black Dollars does not lie so much in its enhancements as it does in the fact that Downwards have resurrected some prime Broadrick material that snuck by most casual fans.  Stylistically, Black Dollars is very much in the "instrumental version of Jesu" vein, capturing Broadrick at his shoegaze-mode zenith.
In a lot of ways, this latest Roly Porter release sounds like a sister album to Paul Jebanasam’s Continuum, which is not all that surprising given that Jebanasam and Porter co-run Subtext Recordings (along with Emptyset’s James Ginsburg).  Like Continuum, Third Law is an ambitious, forward-thinking, and viscerally produced monster of an album.  Unlike Jebanasam, however, Porter completely leaves both Earth and conventional composition far behind in favor of complex, futuristic abstraction.  It is a unique aesthetic to say the least, veering unpredictably from warmly stuttering electronics to rib-cage rattling percussion flourishes to sci-fi choral music to absolute planet-smashing intensity with the all the restraint that one normally associates with mad geniuses.  While Porter's bold, speaker-shredding, and universe-spanning vision could be said to lack a healthy amount of restraint, no one will ever say that he lacks an incredibly rigorous attention to detail.  That combination yields quite an unusual result, as Third Law sounds like what I imagine you would get if you typed "create epoch-defining masterwork" into a supercomputer.
Staalplaat’s Muslimgauze Archive Series has been nothing if not totally perplexing and erratic in both quality and content, but this latest pair of releases easily stand among the series' most quixotic and self-cannibalizing entries yet.  On the one hand, there is Abyssinia Selasie, a truly excellent and (debatably) previously unreleased 7-song EP that has been inexplicably stretched into 15-song album by ambitiously ballsy and redundant repetition alone.  One the other hand, there is the previously released Libya Tour Guide, which originally surfaced as part of the limited edition Tandoori Dog (1998) box set.  Granted, not many people have that set (I certainly do not) and there is some new material added, but Libya is far too half-baked (even by Muslimgauze standards) to warrant any kind of reissue at all.  I love Bryn Jones's work as much as anyone, but no one needs to hear such an unpolished avalanche of sketches and rough ideas, as a few one- or two-minute flashes of brilliance are not nearly enough to sustain an album.
Like photographs, field recordings suggest unaltered reality. Suggests, not captures, because as in photography, there are artists who use field recordings for more than reproducing objective phenomena, if objectivity is even possible in the first place. Whether there’s an answer to that question, it at least points in the direction of impressionism and perspective, not just in visual productions, but in audible ones too. Whatever the medium, the artist brings more than a machine or a technique to the proceedings. Keeping with the comparison to photography, decisions about where to shoot and at what time, about exposure, and about dodging and burning all have parallels in field recording. They’re imprecise parallels, but they are clearly illustrated in the abstract shapes and bruised-blue colors of Michael Trommer’s Night Swimmer.
It occurred to me today that modular synthesizer albums are a lot like rodeos: it is immediately clear which cowboys are bad at riding broncos and which ones are good, but it is very rare for any of their individual personalities to come through while they are trying not to get bucked.  Despite only recently taking the plunge into modular synthesizer-centric composition with 2014’s Essays in Idleness, Bissonnette is one of the few artists able to transcend the limitations of that analogy.  While Pitch, Paper & Foil is not necessarily one of the best Christopher Bissonnette albums, it does boast a few of his best pieces and there is no question that this is a fruitful direction.  More importantly, Pitch still sounds unmistakably like Christopher Bissonnette, proving that the entropy of electronics is no match for Bissonnette's rigorous focus and control.
Quietly released between two major Mamiffer releases: last year's Crater with Daniel Menche and the upcoming The World Unseen, this limited cassette solo release from Faith Coloccia, under the name of M√°ra hopefully will not get lost in the shuffle. Surfacing is a sparse, intimate tape that showcases some of her contributions to the more dramatic Mamiffer sound and deserves just as many accolades as her better known "primary" project.
