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Bill Orcutt–his first solo electric studio LP—shocks with its space and sensitivity. On this eponymous record, Orcutt mines the expansiveness and sustain possible on the electric guitar, letting notes spin out and decay at the edge of feedback. His pachinko-parlor pacing, marked by unraveling clockspring accelerandos crashing into unexpectedly suspended tones, is still in evidence. But here, his developing melodicism maps a near-contemplative mental realm, orbiting St. Joan-era Loren Connors more than the cascading treble clatter of his duo LPs with Chris Corsano and others. From the first notes of Ornette Coleman’s "Lonely Woman," there's a lucidity and slow-burning lyricism that make Orcutt's plunges into barbed-wire fingerpicking all the more striking. While no one’s about to mistake Orcutt for Jim Hall, you could probably play this for your jazzbo friends (should you be unlucky enough to have them) without raising any eyebrows.
Orcutt's track selection mirrors his obsession with American popular song in its most banal manifestations, as radically reimagined via acoustic guitar on a variety of releases, including 2013's exhaustive Twenty Five Songs 7" box set, and the Mego LP A History of Every One. Many of the songs from those two releases are here–but stretched into new arrangements that explore the upper regions of the guitar neck (hitherto unexplorable on his shakily-intonated acoustic Kay), and lighting up new corners of each arrangement with a sensitivity born from years of reinterpretation. The result is a languid, freeform drift through Orcutt's internal cosmos into galaxies unknown to their original interpreters–and occasionally, Orcutt himself. Most striking is "White Christmas," its careening low-register melodies crashing into complex chords that transcend Orcutt's primitive four-string fretboard.
Orcutt's original compositions are equally striking. One of them—"The World Without Me"—is unique to this LP, and notable for its trebly flurry of Clapton-esque 12th-fret drizzle. "O Platitudes!" by contrast, spins ever-faster in the cadence of a hand-cranked music box, before grinding to a near halt, its higher-key electricity standing in for the moaning vocalizations on Orcutt's acoustic rendition as heard on his 2014 VDSQ LP.
With its deep-space beauty, harmonic complexity, and dark dissonance, Bill Orcutt is a stunning landmark in Orcutt’s form-destroying trajectory.
More information can be found here.
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There is a station where the train never arrives, where the Waiting Room is always occupied, where the conversation is inevitably awkward and where you’re never quite alone, but perpetually ALMOST alone.
Ladies & Gentlemen, welcome to Station Yellow Moon, the final bastion of humanity, the last stuttering blip on the life support system, the domain where Access Is Denied perpetually – but who the Hell would want to go there anyhow? Well, some pay handsomely for the Great Escape, despite the risks….
High On Station Yellow Moon is a new solo album by Edward Ka-Spel of The Legendary Pink Dots, and marks the beginning of his collaboration with long-time friend and fellow traveler Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls.
It doesn’t get more conceptual than this.
More information can be found here.
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Major new work from Kara-Lis Coverdale, her solo debut vinyl release following Aftertouches (2015). A blissfully introspective 22 minute piece for keys, samplers and EQs in three parts.
A sublime and quietly hypnotic work belied by steadfast conceptual rigour, Grafts is the most ambitious and involving work yet from Kara-Lis Coverdale, her first since 2015.
In three parts of cascading yet plaintive multi-instrumental gestures, Grafts expands on the processing and self-temperment techniques explored on 2014's A 480 into a more encompassing palette. Uncompromisingly distinct while redolent of modal minimalism, '70s, new age, and folk music, Grafts effectively blurs distinctions between traditional composition and more open, overlapping genres that hover in the half-light between acoustic and electronic refinement.
Rather than anything grandiose or explicitly seductive, the effect of Grafts is best compared with the subtle intoxication of micro-dosing on LSD or the clarity afforded by quiet meditation, in a sense dilating the listener’s focus to a heightened awareness of the piece’s intricate peripheral tones as much as its melodic centerground, with a beautifully understated, surreal resolution. The piece flickers with gentle optimism, never at random, illuminating unseen spaces that quickly gradient into nothingness.
In both concept and execution, Grafts firmly resonates with Kara-Lis Coverdale's deeply established roots as an improvisational virtuoso and accomplished pianist as much as her academically informed approach to electroacoustic composition that showcases a distinct omnivorous appetite for the digital. But it's an emotional generosity that proves to be its defining, most intangible characteristic. Never fully coming to a resolution. Lingering on like a slowly dispersing plume of smoke.
More information can be found here.
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Mike Cooper's output of the past half century has been described as "post-everything." It's a fitting phrase really when you consider he has been at the beating heart of so many critical musical moments. From the development of the blues touring circuit in the UK, through the growth of the folk scene and into the explosion of free improvisation that came to define a generation of UK musicians. Amidst it all, working at stitching these disparate forms into some kind of deterritorialised zone, was Mike Cooper.
It’s fitting then, that he explores the notion of journey on his latest full length edition. Even more fitting that he examines the vessels that carry us on journeys. With Raft, Cooper charts his interests in ambient exotica and collides it with his research into various South Pacific musical traditions. The record extends his palette considerably, stretching away from the hypnogogic flows of his master piece Rayon Hula, into a more oceanic setting. "Raft 21 Guayaquil To Tully," for example, sets out a lilting rise and fall of harmony which erupts with spluttering electronics.
Specifically inspired by Vital Alsar and William Wills, sailors who undertook some of the 20th centuries most impressive solo voyages, Raft reflects upon the determination of the solo traveller. In a musical sense, Mike Cooper's work of recent years has very much reflected a determined solo traveller work ethic. In his commitment to travel alone, he has developed a range of strategies that he works against as a means of surprising himself and uncovering unfamiliar sonic relations.
This approach has proved an incredibly fertile pursuit for Cooper, arguably producing some of his most affecting and engaging works, his Room40 albums Fratello Mare and White Shadows Of The South Seas amongst them. Raft is a vital record that sets its sights beyond the horizons of convention and in doing so reveals a perspective that is only available to lifelong voyagers such as Mike Cooper.
Out July 7, 2017 on Room40.
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Kate Carr melds the exquisite details of her field recordings with an ephemeral approach to the song. This Australian has relocated herself to London after many trips around the globe. With each orbiting journey, she has collected innumerable sounds from the urbane to the aqueous and from the frenetic to the sublime, contextualizing all of these into compositions rippling with primordial melodies through guitar, piano, voice, and electronics. The Story Surrounds Us follows her highly acclaimed albums I Had Myself A Nuclear Spring (first released on her own Flaming Pines imprint in 2015) and Carr's debut for Helen Scarsdale in 2016, It Was A Time Of Laboured Metaphors. Emblematic of her work is a gentle dislocation between the environmental sounds and her drone-dub ellipses of somnambulant melody. The clatter of a frozen dock or a vibrational shimmer from rustled objects or the unintelligible whispers displaces the sense of self amidst a sea of disparate symbols and coded thought. More a travelogue in and out of one's own body than to any particular place. Carr suggests "In a way, it is about restlessness, an uncomfortable tossing and turning in all these many different places, a struggle somehow to forge a connection between my own internal world and all these places and persons I have encountered. I think this holds a sense of unease and strain, with both beautiful and failed moments of intimacy and connection which are made either possible or impossible in the difficult and distorted context of being away. It is quite sad, really." Look to Carla dal Forno, Alan Lamb and those moments of clarity in the shapeshifting ethos from Jewelled Antler for neighboring sounds to Kate Carr's chimerical compositions.
more information can be found here.
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