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Jim Haynes is a San Francisco-based musician who has made a name for himself through work in the duo Coelacanth and in his travels as a solo sound-artist. The rich SF scene has no doubt provided Haynes with many opportunities to expand his listener-ship, and recently he has ventured eastward with an installation called Magnetic North appearing in Nashville and San Jose. This disc, the first release from The Helen Scarsdale Agency and limited to 300 copies, contains the audio portion of the installation, culled from performances of the last two years. The most striking quality of the music herein can inadequately be described as its organic nature.
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On this single track album, Tommi Keränen, who is also one half of the infamous Norwegian noise duo Testicle Hazard, throws down a bit over a half hour of heavily dynamic electronic noise that destroys speakers with the best of them, but with a level of complexity and variation that many other noise artists seem to ignore.
With its hushed synthesis of traditional instrumentation and lightly processed field recordings, Monocoastal follows along recent trends of Seaworthy & Matt Rösner and Taylor Deupree's works on the 12k label. They're carving out a niche that is alien, but familiar, and is as complex as it is sparse, weaving the recognizable with the unknown.
Chicago's Locrian have actually been a bit less prolific this year, really only releasing two brilliantly cohesive albums, Territories from earlier this year (originally on LP, now available on CD), and the upcoming double disc The Crystal World. Other than those, they've been relatively quiet, even with the addition of full time percussionist Steven Hess. On this split with New York's Century Plants, they continue their emphasis on abstracting the concept of "metal", with each band taking different approaches, but achieving a common goal.
As enjoyable as Robert Haigh's albums have been, they never seemed to capture that same aching beauty of his classic albums from the '80s (both under his own name and as Sema). This latest album changes all that. The delicate touch and fragile melodies, which defined his best work, are both present. Sombre without being dour, reflective without being depressing, this represents Haigh's finest work in years.
San Francisco's Barn Owl have always been underground music chameleons, shifting skillfully between ominous drone, distorted amplifier worship, and all the various places in between, but their first album for Thrill Jockey extends that schizophrenia a bit too far for my taste. Fortunately, while Ancestral Star may not be a completely coherent whole, it at least sounds quite good while it is missing the mark.
I loved Fire on Fire's The Orchard, so I was pretty disappointed to learn from a recent Michael Gira interview that they had dissolved. My despair turned out to be extremely short-lived though, as I've since discovered that Colleen Kinsella and Caleb Mulkerin have been self-releasing a steady stream of slightly more feral and weird cassettes on their dontrusttheruin imprint ever since. Big Blood sometimes seems a little more sketchlike and rough than Fire on Fire, but the duo's backwoods brilliance remains intact and is generally enhanced by its underproduced and artfully artless nature.
What began apparently as an unplanned collaboration between Leslie Winer's text and spoken word with CM von Hausswolff's electronics in 2011 eventually evolved into this full fledged LP release, also Winer's first all original release in 25 years. The result, (1), is a release that heavily strikes a balance between the two predominant elements, without one ever overshadowing the other. Winer’s idiosyncratic voice and artistically obtuse writing and von Hausswolff's understated use of electronics blend together wonderfully for this record.
Now thankfully available digitally (lavish packaging means lavish overseas postage rates), Memorious Earth is the film soundtrack from Richard Skelton and Autumn Richardson’s ambitious recent retrospective that involved a gallery show, a book of writings and photography, and (of course) a film.  While I have not seen the film (it was only included in the extremely limited "archive box"), the album works just fine without its intended visual component, doubling down on the long-form aesthetic of predecessor Diagrams for the Summoning of Wolves for a single 44-minute epic with considerably more success.  In fact, this is exactly the Richard Skelton album that the world needed: there are already plenty of wonderful distillations of his prickly, undulating brilliance around, but now there is a mesmerizing and slow-burning expansion as well.
This is an expanded reissue of a 2012 album that documented two 2009 live performances in which Nurse With Wound, Julia Kent, and Italy’s Blind Cave Salamander teamed up for an improbable variation/reinterpretation of NWW’s classic Soliloquy for Lilith album (an album that was largely the product of an unexpected and unrepeatable electromagnetic phenomenon).  The expansion in question is a third performance in an identical vein to the previous two.  Notably, however, that vein is not all that much like Soliloquy, which makes Cabbalism something separate and singular rather than just a mere live album.  In fact, it does not even sound much like NWW at all, which I suppose makes this a very successful collaboration.  While the third piece is not nearly divergent enough to warrant repurchasing the album for anyone who pounced on Cabbalism this first time around, the reissue is a very enticing package for those of us who unwisely slept on it.
While Jenks Miller has his hand in a multitude of Chapel Hill bands, his Tony Iommi meets Tony Conrad metal project Horseback has received the most notoriety as of late. However, on this collaboration with the relatively new drone composer Nicholas Szczpanik, there isn't a riff to be found. Instead the two weave together seamlessly expansive ranges of tonal and textural sound into an album that travels through the darkness and into the light multiple times.