This enigmatic Illinois collective has never been particularly keen on revealing much about themselves, but they do have something of an origin story in which the project was birthed when they fatefully discovered a section of a film trailer in an abandoned drive-in theater back in 1983. While I do not believe they ever specified which film they found, all signs point to a George Romero or Lucio Fulci film, as "sounds from films about fake corpses constitute some of the earliest material used by Fossil Aerosol Mining Project." In fact, the project nearly always sounds like a hallucinatory collage of badly distressed VHS tapes of Dawn of the Dead, but the project has also released several explicitly zombie-indebted releases over the course of their long and macabre career, some of which were eventually compiled on 2014's digital-only Zombi Traditions. As befits the subject material, those already remixed, remastered, and revised pieces have been cannibalized once more for this definitive edition. As the previous incarnations of these songs have been purged from existence, I cannot say how well these latest versions stack up against the earlier ones, but I can say that this is easily one of the best Fossil Aerosol Mining Project albums that I have heard. To my ears, this album is the embodiment of everything I love about this project, as it perfectly captures the imagined ambiance of a late '70s/early '80s mall where the only remaining signs of life are strains of kitschy muzak and cheery announcements of incredible bargains eerily reverberating around the ransacked, rubble-strewn, and desolate halls until the electricity eventually fails.

Self-Released

Given this project’s mystery-shrouded nature, I cannot say for certain what their working methods were back in 1983 or if they have evolved at all over the ensuing four decades, but it definitely seems like the collective has an extremely purist approach to how they use their material. It seems fair to say that one of the project’s self-imposed constraints is that all of the sounds they use must be scavenged, so the difference between a middling album and great one lies in how well the fundamentally non-musical material lends itself to musicality (and how ingenious the collective can be when the material does not). In practical terms, that means that the essence of Zombi Tradition's aesthetic is murky ambiance conjured from hiss, garbled samples, and industrial hum, but that foundation is often enhanced with enigmatic vocal fragments, snatches of ads, and bits of repurposed muzak.

When they hit the mark, the results can be wonderfully creepy, immersive, and hallucinatory in a very unique and distinctive way. In the case of this album, those moments mostly tend to be the longest pieces. For example, the seething slow burn of "Damaged Years Ago" steadily swells to a haunted crescendo of inhuman-sounding backwards voices and a promise of "all the most popular brands." Elsewhere, "Italian Resurrection" evokes the swaying industrial ambiance of a massive engine slowly churning in an enigmatic miasma of footsteps, tape hiss, and eerie vocal fragments ("help me") that bubble up from the depths. Later, "The Shopping Mall Has Long Since Flooded" sounds like a broken radio playing flickering, unintelligible, and creepily reverberant emergency dispatches to a long-abandoned and partially submerged food court. A couple of the shorter pieces are excellent too though. I especially love the hiss-ravaged muzak phantasmagoria of "1983," which has the creepy, sad, and playful feel of some recent Aaron Dilloway albums. That said, the whole album casts a wonderfully unbroken spell and the execution is unusually strong for FAMP (presumably because the material has been reworked so many times). Given the grisly and oft-schlocky source material being repurposed, I was pleasantly surprised by the bleak beauty and subtly morbid humor of these pieces, as they never err into oppressive darkness or easy kitsch (even when a cheery voice is encouraging me to "visit often"). To my ears, this is one of the true jewels of the Fossil Aerosol Mining Project discography (if not the project’s culminating achievement).

Samples can be found here.

This latest release from Aleksandra Zakharenko is a "selection of soundscapes created by throughout various stages of last year" described as "subliminal moments, suspended fragments, caught between time zones." While that description could admittedly fit quite a lot of Perila's music, 7‚Äã.‚Äã37‚Äã/‚Äã2‚Äã.‚Äã11 has a far more intimate and informal feel than this year's previous release on Smalltown Supersound (How Much Time It Is Between You And Me?). That uncluttered, sketch-like approach suits Zakharenko quite well, as it brings out a bit more distinctive character than her more layered and produced work. Given that Perila is one of the more consistently intriguing artists in the ambient-adjacent abstract electronic milieu, there is plenty to like (or love) about that more produced side too, but I found this more stark and simple side easier to connect with on a deeper level, as these six songs distill Zakharenko's vision to its most pure form without sacrificing any of the beauty.

Vaagner

The opening "long dizzying air through a balcony door" sounds exactly like I would expect Perila to sound when filtered through the beautifully murky melancholia of Vaagner's house aesthetic (or at least curated with that aesthetic in mind). It is one of the more minimal pieces on the album as well, as it is essentially a spoken-word piece over a little more than a ghostly hum that rises and falls like a slow exhalation. The words are compellingly poetic and vaguely confessional, as it Zakharenko seems to be haltingly recounting fragmented and enigmatic memories from a past spring burned deep into her psyche. It strikes quite a mesmerizing balance of eerie and sensuous and is easily as strong as anything I have previously heard from Perila. In fact, I would have been thrilled if it was followed by five more pieces in the exact same vein, but only a fool would expect that, as Zakharenko's music has long featured a strong element of unpredictability. In keeping with that theme, the following "amorphous absorption" sounds like deconstructed dub techno sourced from dripping stalactites and chopped, hallucinatory voices, while the blearily melodic reverie "haven't left home 4 4 days" evokes the melancholy of a rain-soaked and cloud-darkened afternoon. A similarly drizzly atmosphere returns for the two pieces that close the album, but "this story doesn't make any sense" detours into a gently seething and bubbling experiment in disjointed, deconstructed, and unconventional percussion that feels like it is fading in and out of focus. It is an enjoyable piece, but the two pieces that follow even more impressive. I especially enjoyed “Crash Sedative,” which feels like a stoned and stumbling twist on classic Bill Evans-style jazz piano. "1 room" delves into a similarly noir-ish jazz vein, but feels too haunted and texture-focused to exist outside an especially creepy David Lynch film.

Nearly everything on the album is both good and distinctively "Perila," however, which makes this modest release an unexpectedly satisfying and absorbing album. On a related note, Vaagnar has also issued a considerably shorter sister EP (Memories of Log) that compiles strays from one of Zakharenko's stronger collaborators with Ulla. I expect anyone who likes 7‚Äã.‚Äã37‚Äã/‚Äã2‚Äã.‚Äã11 will enjoy that one too, as I certainly did (particularly Ulla's sublime closer "falling water lullaby").

Samples can be found here.

While still a fairly new label, London’s The Tapeworm has quickly established itself as one of the most prominent and unique exponents of the underground’s current cassette renaissance.  Obviously, much of the credit for this is due to the surprisingly well-known artists (Stephen O’Malley, Phillip Jeck, Geir Jenssen, etc.) that they’ve enlisted, but a significant part is also due to their bold attempt to bridge the oft-disparate worlds of high art and the DIY ethos.  This latest batch of tapes documents the collision of these two worlds with varying degrees of success.

Newly reissued with different artwork, Porter Ricks' second album is a fitfully compelling and somewhat perplexing mixed bag that I somehow managed to never hear until now. My befuddlement is largely due to the fact that the first Porter Ricks album (Biokinetics) is an all-time dub techno classic, so I would have expected Andy Mellwig and Thomas Köner to expand further upon the formula that they had perfected to great acclaim. Instead, the duo took a more stylistically fluid approach, occasionally returning to Biokinetics-style dub, but also dabbling in dark ambient and some unexpectedly funky strains of house music. That said, it is probably wrong to view Biokinetics and this album as intentional statements or clearly delineated phases of a linear artistic evolution, as both releases are compilations of singles and EPs and Biokinetics got all the great Chain Reaction ones from 1996. This one collects all the Force Inc. EPs from the following year, so these pieces could be anything from Chain Reaction-era outtakes to stylistic experiments to a stab at greater accessibility (though that is hard to imagine, given the cold bleakness of Köner's solo work). In any case, there are still enough strong pieces to make this an enjoyable album, but anyone hoping for the focus and distinctive vision of Biokinetics will probably want to moderate their expectations a bit before diving into this one.

Mille Plateaux/Force Inc.

This uneven and eclectic collection of songs makes a lot more sense if one considers how they were originally released, as the album is essentially four stand-alone singles and their flipsides. And in classic dub fashion, the B-sides tend to be variations of the raw material from the A-side, so there are basically four separate thematically unified clusters of songs here. There is one notable exception, however, and it is the album's longest and strongest piece: "Scuba Lounge." I do not believe it ever surfaced on a single before appearing on this full length (the Trident EP featured a different "Scuba" piece), but it definitely sounds like it should have been on Biokinetics. It opens in deceptively formless fashion, elegantly blurring together burbling scuba sounds and ominous industrial ambiance, but soon coheres into a killer menacing groove of gurgling bass and seething, slow-motion crunch. The other pieces closest to the Biokinetics vein are "Redundance" series from the Vol 1 and Vol 2 EPs. My favorite of the lot is "Redundance 3," which combines the relentless forward motion of its shuffling beat with an impressively gelatinous and gnarled sounding synth motif. The remaining four "Redundance" pieces are a surprisingly varied lot, taking roughly the same themes in very different directions, as Köner and Mellwig alternately veer into hissing, coldly futuristic ambient ("Redundance (Version)"), a sensually kitschy vintage burlesque show groove ("Redundance 5"), and—weirdest of all—a Bo Diddly beat ("Redundance 6"). Similarly wrongfooting are the pieces from Explore/Exposed and Spoil/Spoiled. For example, "Explore" sounds like a New Jack Swing groove augmented with a very insistent wah-wah guitar theme, which the flip resembles guitars from The Church mashed together with a hypercaffeinated, percussion-heavy, and out-of-control strain of synth pop. That said, "Spoil" is inarguably the biggest shock of the album, as an unrelenting house thump barrels along with a very in-your-face funk bass line and some jangly guitars. It sounds far more like a purposely ham-fisted house remix of an A Certain Ratio single than anything I would expect from Porter Ricks. The smeared, hallucinatory, and submerged-sounding flipside ("Spoiled") is right up my alley though, approximating a building-shaking rave as heard from a neighboring alley. While I wish I loved more than a handful of songs here, I am delighted that this reissue called my attention to a few old classics that were new to me, as Porter Ricks has a tragically lean discography for an influential project that has now spanned a quarter century.

Samples can be found here.

In my review of Cantus Figures Laurus last month, I half-jokingly noted that Sarah Davachi's creative arc seems unavoidably headed towards composing a full-on Mellotron-driven prog rock opus. While she has not quite reached that dubious culminating achievement yet, Antiphonals is arguably another significant step in that direction, as it is very Mellotron-centric and the vinyl release features a sticker comparing it to a prog album with everything removed except the keyboard parts. For the most part, however, the change in instrumentation did not inspire any particularly dramatic stylistic transformations, as Antiphonals mostly picks up right where Cantus, Descant left off, which is somewhere best described as "like a blurred, stretched, and deconstructed organ mass." In keeping with that theme, both an electric organ and a pipe organ are featured (along with plenty of other instruments), yet the resemblance to an organ mass is more spiritual than overt this time around. In more concrete terms, that means that Davachi's sound palette has broadened a bit from Cantus, but she is still very much focused on somberly meditative moods, glacial melodies, bleary drones, and subtle harmonic transformations.

Late Music

As was previously the case with Cantus, Descant, Antiphonals' title plainly states the compositional theme of the album. The term is usually applied to liturgical or traditional choral music and roughly means that two choirs are singing different themes that interact with each other. While there are not any choirs here, the album’s overarching aesthetic seems to be sketchlike compositions in which Davachi brings together two simple motifs to rub up against one another in interesting ways. I say "sketchlike" because she does not seem particularly interested in crafting strong melodies or complete compositional arcs for most of these pieces, opting to instead zoom in closely on harmonies and textures that tend to come to an abrupt end when a piece has run its course. That said, the album does feature one (somewhat) fully formed and melodic centerpiece ("Gradual of Image") that combines minor key acoustic arpeggios, a quietly gorgeous organ melody, and fluttering, dreamy layers of Mellotron. That is Davachi's most "prog" moment and it executed beautifully. For me, however, the album’s zenith is the ghostly drone of "Magdalena," which sounds like a spectral brass ensemble conjuring slow motion waves of aching melancholy. It is a masterful slow burn, gradually revealing shifting patterns and warm harmonies. In fact, it may be one of the most perfect pieces that Davachi has composed to date, so the album's primary allure is "one killer drone piece and a very promising prog detour," but a couple of the remaining pieces are compelling as well. For example, "Border of Mind" initially sounds like a murky tape of a small string ensemble trying their damnedest to acoustically replicate Sunn O)))'s gnarled and blown-out drones, but it quickly dissolves into a hallucinatory coda of smeared flutes and uneasily dissonant harmonies. Elsewhere, "Rushes Recede" takes the opposite route, as bleary flute-like Mellotron drones gradually blossom into something resembling a sublime organ mass. For me, "Rushes Recede" feels like the third and final highlight of the album, yet fans who are more enamored with Davachi's recent indulgently minimal "ancient cathedral" direction will likely find Antiphonals to be a worthy successor to Cantus, Descant. While this is admittedly not my favorite side of her work, I can still very much appreciate the way she is slowing down and burrowing deeper, as though she is tenaciously peeling away layer after layer of craft to get to the pure essence of her vision.

Samples can be found here.

One of the many surprises of the last few years has been the current pipe organ renaissance unfolding in the experimental music world (your days are numbered, modular synths!). Thankfully, we still seem to be in the honeymoon phase of that phenomenon, as the vanguard of Kali Malone, Sarah Davachi, and Lawrence English are all fairly consistent in exclusively releasing strong and/or interesting albums. This latest release is English's second (after last year's Lassitude) to focus entirely upon pieces composed on an 19th century organ housed in Brisbane's The Old Museum. This is a very different album than its predecessor, however, as Lassitude was comprised of homages to Éliane Radigue and Phill Niblock. On Observation of Breath, English instead derives conceptual inspiration from Charlemagne Palestine's "maximal minimalism" as well as the mechanics of breathing (quite relevant when pipe organs are involved). There is one more favorable similarity to Lassitude, however, as this album also features one stone-cold masterpiece that spans an entire side of vinyl.

Hallow Ground

As English amusingly notes in his album description, Observation of Breath was composed and recording during a soft lockdown in which he "spent many days playing to an empty concert hall." He also states that he considers these four pieces a collaboration between himself and the pipe organ, which is not intended a mere nicety, as he viewed their interaction similarly to the mind/body dialogue of breathing (hence the album's title). In essence, English was consciously "breathing" for the pipe organ, as he strove to achieve a compelling balance of power (exhalations stacked in unison) and "elegant uncertainty" (the moments when breath becomes unsteady and fading). Knowing all of that failed to fully prepare me for the harrowing "The Torso" though, as English unleashes deep bass drones augmented with plenty of hiss, industrial ambiance, and nightmarish whine (I especially enjoyed the parts that sounded like a seasick air raid siren). The following "A Binding" is considerably less radical, lying somewhere between "textbook drone done well" and "multiple drones with differing oscillation patterns ingeniously intertwined." To my ears, it is the least strong piece on the album, but I still like it. And I love “And A Twist,” as it feels like a hallucinatory organ mass that keeps tying itself into murky knots of dissonance. Sadly, it clocks in under three minutes, but is easy to imagine an extended version rivaling Catherine Christer Hennix’s The Electric Harpsichord for the crown of "best album that sounds like a vampire on hallucinogens blasting out a sinister solo in his lonely mountaintop castle."

Fortunately, the closing title piece makes a great consolation prize for that missed opportunity. "Observation Of Breath" initially sounds like a viscous fog of dread oozing across a deep sustained drone, but English gradually enhances that with more harmonic color as the piece glacially unfolds. The truly inspired part comes when English begins to "explore the sonic qualities of different frequency spectra," however, as the piece blossoms into an all-enveloping and seismic drone juggernaut that feels like it is tuned to the resonant frequency of the earth (or at least of my apartment walls). As such, the primary appeal of this release for me is that it contains one of the greatest drone pieces ever recorded, but it is a damn strong album as a whole too. English is in peak form here.

Samples may be found here.

This ten-band concert DVD celebrates the weird, sweaty entropy of LA’s unique all-ages DIY club.  There are some fairly well known bands included here, such as High Places and the reliably excellent No Age, but the most memorable performances are generally delivered by those that lurk in the most aggressively uncommercial shadows of the lunatic fringe (like Captain Ahab and Foot Village).

1. Sybille Baier, "Tonight"
2. Karen Dalton, "Katie Cruel"
3. Anne Briggs, "Polly Vaughan"
4. Kristin Hersh, "A Loon"
5. Lisa Germano, "Trouble"
6. Diane Cluck, "Easy To Be Around"
7. Vashti Bunyan, "Swallow Song"
8. Kath Bloom, "I Wanna Love"
9. Lucinda Williams, "Sharp Cutting Wings"
10. Susanna & The Magical Orchestra, "Jolene"
11. Shirley Collins, "False True Love"
12. Linda Perhacs, "Hey, Who Really Cares?"
13. Joanna Newsom, "Peach, Plumb, Pear"
14. Gillian Welch, "I Dream A Highway"

Anthony D'Amico,
Chatham, NY

Anthony D'Amico lives a quiet life in New York's Hudson Valley.  He lives vicariously through books, music, and film.  He used to subsist primarily on Indian and Thai food, but he has recently decided that ice cream is also enjoyable.  He enjoys making photo and video collages.  He has been writing for Brainwashed since 2008, but was a reader of the site long before that, as he has been a huge Nurse With Wound and Current 93 fan since his teens.    

He has recently changed his "dear god, please do not send me any more fucking promos" stance to "feel free to send or recommend any albums that he might like."  He loves that there is a thriving and supportive community of underground music fans, artists, and labels all over the world and decided it would be a good idea to be more accessible and open to unsolicited emails, even if it comes at great cost to his fragile sanity.  There are some caveats, however:

1.) He gets A LOT of email and is terrible at responding to people.  I do not believe that he is particularly unique in this regard.  Nevertheless, you may rest assured that he feels low-level guilt at all times.  He DOES read it all though and will listen to anything that seems particularly interesting or original.

2.) There is always a mountain of stuff that he personally wants to cover.  In a perfect world, he would exclusively cover albums that he believes are amazing (regardless of when they were released or what label they are on).  However, he also tries to cover as many "major" albums as he can within the Brainwashed milieu.  It's a delicate balance and a lot of great albums fall through the cracks.  Heartbreaking, yet unavoidable.

3.) He tries to be as open minded as possible, but he unavoidably has some deeply held subjective preferences.  It is generally ill-advised to send him anything bombastic, intensely angry, toothlessly New Age-y, or jammy and meandering.  He also can't stand improvised/abstract music that could be reasonably described as "a bunch of honking and clattering," unless someone is extremely good at it. 

4.) Conversely, he generally loves the weirder fringes of psychedelia (Natural Snow Buildings, Ak'chamel, My Cat is an Alien) and the more melodic side of tape music (Tape Loop Orchestra, William Basinski).  He also has favorable feelings about mangled guitars, drone, dub, and classic Jamaican, Thai, and African music.

He can be reached here:

email: misplaced_sandwich at hotmail.com

Cultural Delights That Greatly Brightened An Otherwise Dreary 2021

• Kier-La Janisse's Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched
• Aaron Dilloway/Lucrecia Dalt, "Lucy & Aaron" (Hanson)
• Fluxion, "Parallel Moves" (Vibrant)
• Ryusuke Hamaguchi's Drive My Car
• Chris Corsano & Bill Orcutt, "Made Out of Sound" (Palilalia)
• Chuck Johnson, "The Cinder Grove" (VDSQ)
• claire rousay, "a softer focus" (American Dreams)
• Dean McPhee, "Witch's Ladder" (Hood Faire)
• Lawrence English, "Observation Of Breath" (Hallow Ground)
• Bendik Giske, "Cracks" (Smalltown Supersound) and his cover of Caterina Barbieri's "Fantas"
• Die Welttraumforscher, "A Young Person's Guide To The Early Welttraumforscher" (A Colourful Storm) & "Die Rückkehr der echten Menschheit (1981 - 1990)" (Bureau B)
• James Ginzburg, "crystallise, a frozen eye" (Subtext)
• Myriam Gendron, "Ma Délire - Songs of Love Lost & Found" (Feeding Tube)
• Jeff Burch, "Samum Suite" (Important)
• Kleistwahr, "Winter" (Helen Scarsdale Agency)
• Laura Cannell & Kate Ellis's amazing run of monthly EPs
• Leven Signs, "Hemp Is Here" (Futura Resistenza)
• Meitei / ??, "Kof? II / ?? II" (Kitchen Label)
• My Cat is an Alien & Joëlle Vinciarelli, "Eternal Beyond III" (Opax/Up Against the Wall, Motherfuckers!)
• Nonconnah, "Songs For And About Ghosts" (Ernest Jenning)
• Noveller, ""Aphantasia" & "Red Room" (self-released)
• People Like Us, "Welcome Abroad" (Discrepant)
• Steph Kretowicz, "I Hate it Here" (Curl)
• Tasos Stamou, "Monoliths" (Moving Furniture)
• Martyna Basta, "Making Eye Contact With Solitude" (Warm Winters Ltd)
• Stereolab, "Electrically Possessed [Switched On Volume 4]" (Duophonic)
• The Humble Bee, "A Miscellany For The Quiet Hours" reissue (Astral Industries)
• The Volume Settings Folder, "Pastorage Sights" (self-released)
• Thomas Ankersmit, "Perceptual Geography" (Shelter Press)
• Vanishing Twin, "Ookii Gekkou" (Fire)
• Tomaga, "Intimate Immensity" (Hands in the Dark)
• HTRK, "Rhinestones" (Heavy Machinery)
• Various Artists, "La Ola Interior (Spanish Ambient & Acid Exoticism 1983-1990)" (Bongo Joe)
• Grouper, "Shade" (Kranky)
• Sublime Frequencies' entire 2021 output
• Rachika Nayar, "fragments" (RVNG Intl.) & "Our Hands Against The Dusk" (NNA Tapes)
• Bombay Lunatic Asylum, "Mad Song" (Oaken Palace)
• Anders Brørby, "Constant Shallowness Leads to Body Horror" (Fort Evil Fruit)
• CZN, "Commutator" (Offen/Lovers & Lollipops)
• NTS Live
• Todd Haynes' The Velvet Underground
• Obscure film blogs (MyDuckIsDead/Cinema of the World/Rarelust) & Ubuweb
• Dream Weapons mixtape blog (and revisiting classic ?øly ?ayabl?? mixtapes)
• Reading Megan Boyle (Live Blog), Scott McClanahan (Crapalachia & Collected Works, Vol. I), and Brad Phillips (Essays & Fictions)
• All things Everything is Terrible!-related
• Belatedly discovering the plunderphonic genius of The Found Sound Orchestra & Cassetteboy
• Almodovar's Parallel Mothers
• JD Twitch's mixtapes for Optimo
• The White Lotus
• Succession
• I Think You Should Leave

Things That Provided Some Much-Needed Joy & Amusement For Me in 2020

• William Basinski, "Lamentations" (Temporary Residence)
• Mary Lattimore, "Silver Ladders" (Ghostly International)
• KMRU, "Peel" (Editions Mego)
• Meitei, "Kofu" (Kitchen)
• Ian William Craig, "Red Sun Through Smoke" (130701)
• Clarice Jensen, "The experience of repetition as death" (130701)
• Félicia Atkinson, "Everything evaporate" (Shelter Press)
• Midwife, "Forever" (The Flenser)
• Klara Lewis, "Ingrid" (Editions Mego)
• Celer, "Future Predictions" (Two Acorns)
• Everything Marc Richter released this year.
• Ashley Paul, "Ray" (Slip)
• Ike Yard reissues
• Helm, "Saturnalia" and "Oregon Crisis" (Alter)
• Carl Stone, "Ganci & Figli" (Unseen Worlds)
• Everything Big Blood released or re-released this year.
• Teleplasmiste, "To Kiss Earth Goodbye" (House of Mythology)
• Don Herzfeldt's World of Tomorrow Episode Three: The Absent Destinations of David Prime
• Various Slim K & Chopstars mixtapes
• Andrew Chalk finally having a Bandcamp page
• Bandcamp Fridays
• Several NTS Radio shows (Bianca Lexis, Sarah Davachi, Carla dal Forno, Maria Somerville, ONY, Andrew Weatherall, Lucifer Over LA)
• Watching many, many films by Jonas Mekas, Bela Tarr, Andrei Tarkovsky, and James Benning (beginning of pandemic)
• Obsessively watching trashy '70s Euro-Crime films, YouTube collections of vintage grindhouse trailers, and old episodes of Dance Fever and Soul Train (several months later)
• Finally watching Twin Peaks: The Return & rewatching the rest of Twin Peaks
  
• Mexican Coke
• Cooking increasingly ridiculous & experimental variations of pizza and chicken tikka masala.
  

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