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Ashley Paul, "Heat Source"
The best description of Ashley Paul's music that I can think of is that it sounds like she heard a Jandek album one day and thought "Yes!  This is exactly what I want to do!  But better, obviously."  I mean that in the best possible sense though, even if it is bizarre to hear a presumably well-adjusted, conservatory-trained Brooklyn composer make something that resembles very creepy, sociopathic, and unsettling outsider art.  Heat Source is a wonderfully broken-sounding, discordant, and challenging effort.
I have absolutely no idea if Ashley has ever had any interest in Jandek's career at all, but it would be very difficult to argue that she has not taken a sophisticated route to wind up in a place very similar to his early primitivism.  This is one unapologetically stark and haunted-sounding album.  The difference between the two artists lies primarily in the rigorousness and vision of Paul's execution, as Heat Source's 10 pieces create the illusion of out-of-tune pointillistic randomness while Ashley remains in complete control (she has a solid background in both jazz and microtonal music).  That multi-layered depth and structure makes a big difference, making Heat Source feel far more like hallucinatory, nightmarish, and fractured adult nursery rhyme than a series of lonely audio suicide notes.  Also, Ashley conveys a much wider range of moods than Sterling Smith, even if they are all quite troubling.
At its core, Heat Source is built upon Paul's guitar work, which alternates between dissonant slow-motion arpeggios of non-chords and skeletal, unadorned single notes (as in "Rain, Away").  Ashley embellishes her fragile plucking with a host of delightfully unsettling other touches though, filling the spaces with odd creaks and scrapes, strangled-sounding saxophone whines, and forlorn clarinet melodies.  Then, of course, there are Ashley's hushed, disquieting vocals, which sound like she is recounting her darkest, innermost thoughts in a sing-song, somnambulant lilt.  The overall effect is quite unnerving, ranging from uncomfortably vulnerable to uncomfortably grotesque ("I want your skin on my ears").  The latter is quite a neat trick, as the lyrics of "Feet on Legs" would be sensual/sexual in almost any other context, but Ashley's delivery is such that they sound far more like the prelude to an especially grisly murder.
If Heat Source has a flaw, it is that it feels like ten variations of the same theme, which I suppose is also a charge that could be leveled against last year's somewhat less dissonant Line the Clouds.  It is admittedly a great theme though, even if it is engineered for maximum discomfort.  Also, I suppose that this is kind of a difficult album to love, given how prickly and alienating it is by design, but that is because it is great art rather than great entertainment.  That distinction is important.  Ashley has done something rather brilliant here, striking the perfect balance between compositional artifice and fearless, deeply personal catharsis.  Heat Source is easily one of the year’s most memorable and unique albums.
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