On their third album, Trembling Bells explore traditional folk themes such as boozing, loneliness, landscape, mystical creatures and regret, with more modern and eclectic sounds. Their joyous approach to playing and singing is hypnotic and passionate with enough humor and raw edges to steer well clear of being over-sentimental.

On last year's excellent Fountain, Grody divided his time between nods to droning contemporary ambient and more traditional acoustic guitar fare.  This time around, the focus is much heavier on his more rustic, Takoma-influenced leanings, which yields mixed results.  On one hand, these songs are more distinctive and anachronistic, but their languid pace and comparative lack of hooks blunts their impact a bit. In Search of Light still boasts some wonderful songs though–they're just a bit more sparingly distributed than they were on its predecessor.

This stripped-down 20-minute EP captures Blackshaw back near the top of his game, finding the perfect synergy between his talents as a steel-string virtuoso and his ambitions as a more varied composer.  While the overall feeling of these two pieces is languorous, melancholy, and impressionistic, the crisp sound and complex and inventive arrangements imbue them with a surprising amount of dazzle and immediacy.  James makes a virtue of brevity, as Holly is a complete, undiluted, and consistently strong effort.

Compared to the sprawling songs on their previous album 13 Blues for Thirteen Moons, Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra have streamlined their songs as well as their name and their line up for this album (the band are now a far more manageable five piece compared to the larger ensembles of previous albums). Granted there are still a couple of monster-sized pieces here but there are a number of shorter, punchier songs to break them up. Kollaps Tradixionales shows this pared down Silver Mt. Zion in ferocious form, the stark beauty of their music reinforced with a renewed fire in their bellies. As usual, I am completely blown away by their music.

The anchoring of western music to equal temperament has on one hand lead to many musical developments but on the other hand, there is a whole world of musical textures and approaches to composition lost to instruments that are stuck playing in chromatic scales. On this excellent compilation, several artists explore intonation from a number of different approachesm utilizing a range of instruments. Ranging from almost ambient soundworks to difficult conceptual pieces, The Harmonic Series is an expansive anthology of unusual and beautiful music.

In the canon of Whitehouse, this is an odd release.  It lacks the unabashed brutality of the early releases, the monotone sex-crazed sounds of the mid period, and is far more restrained than anything that has been released since.  I think for that reason this has become, at least for me, their lost classic.  Not lacking the caustic, angry vocals and genuinely disturbing moments of their discography, the other component is a very nuanced study of electronic textures, and an oh-so-subtle sense of humor and irony that really holds it all together.

Consisting of two distinct conceptual pieces spread across a total of four tracks, La Casa creates sound based upon the disparate concepts of both nature and urban sprawl, utilizing field recordings in each case both in their untouched and heavily treated states.  The complex result is simultaneously warm and inviting, yet cold and detached, exactly as the source material would lead one to expect.

The title of this album alludes to a deeply macabre and scatological Indonesian myth about young girl who possessed the dubious magical ability to defecate surprising items ranging from earrings to knives to...well...gongs.  When she distributed these items to men at a village dance, the villagers collectively decided that her power was an infernal and unseemly one and that they needed to bury her alive.  Fortunately, the story has a happy (albeit grisly) ending, as her friend later dug up her corpse, dismembered it, and reburied its parts all over the village, which caused delicious tuberous plants to grow.  

Aranos’s new long-form opus may be a bit lacking in his characteristic eccentricity, but it maintains his usual high standards of adventurousness, difficulty, and oblique conceptuality.  While ostensibly a drone piece, the tone is much less meditative than I expected.  Instead, Crow Eye Hint is a nakedly experimental and exploratory work for much of its duration, focusing on both negative space and the acoustic properties of misused pianos and clashing tones.  Also, it gets pretty scary.

Recorded throughout the '90s and released in 1998 by Robot Records, the first proper album from The Aeolian String Ensemble is something of a mystery. Though it is attributed primarily to the work of David Kenny, the liner notes for Lassithi/Elysium also mention names like David Tibet and Steven Stapleton. Both songs bear out comparisons to music by either one, but the Ensemble's especially light touch and new age flourishes are entirely unique to them.

After years of work with other bands, and consistent but low profile solo-work, Prism Of Eternal Now will certainly be Adam Forkner's most visible release yet. White Rainbow might not be his most recognizable moniker, but those acquainted with his past work will find something familiar.

 

Kranky

Continuing the small trickle of releases since God's Money, this EP demonstrates the diversity of Gang Gang Dance's sound, even though most of the constituent songs aren't among the band's best.

 

The Social Registry

This is the first album from Wang Changcun, who is a member of the China Sound Unit, a group dedicated to investigating aural phenomena in various urban centers. Blurring the distinction between noise and the avant-garde, it also marks the first release of a Chinese composer by a Western label with international scope.

The composer Daniel Smutny has dropped his first name for his debut album. Despite his avant garde leanings, Telehors is accessible and devoid of any scholastic tendencies. It is a nice album made up of abstract sounds and haunting melodies. It can get dull at times but overall Telehors is a highly enjoyable experience.

Earth Covers Earth was the first Current 93 album I obsessed over. I acquired it not long after I found a copy of Emblems for $2.89 in a bargain bin at a record store where none of the clerks had ever heard of David Tibet or Current 93. It was a godsend. When I first heard Emblems it was like being drawn towards a black hole, and when I finally sealed my fate by listening to Earth Covers Earth I was pulled beyond the event horizon. One of the things I love about this album is the mixture of Tibet’s own lyrical songwriting, traditional tunes, and the obscure metaphysical poetry set to music. Pervaded by a vitriolic melancholy, I listen to it when I want to evoke the intermingled feelings of sadness, hope, futility, anger, joy and faith.

Like great film noir, everypiece of Murcof's puzzle is obviously manufactured and manipulated andcalculated and refined; it so completely captures a tone that I don'tmind that the sets are fake or the lighting is hyper-real.

Pup is another entry into the highly nuanced, subtle, and delicate world ofminimalism that at one time would have been called “ambient” but nowgoes by titles like “lowercase.”  There’s too much of this sortof thing for me to be able to stay abreast of, but Dan Abrams’ work asFenton is solid and enjoyable.

Threshold House
At first listen, COILANS seems like Exhibit A for the sort of experimental audio that functions as more of an intellectual or conceptual pleasure, rather than the sort of viscerally satisfying music I've come to expect from Coil. It clocks in at well over four hours of entirely unstructured, rhythm-less high-frequency sine-waves and subtly shifting AC hum. Tracks have no beginning or end, no point-counterpoint or resolution, and no tonal consistency. This new three-disc set also includes a DVD of synchronized digital animations for four of the tracks. It's a reissue and expansion of ANS, a limited edition, tour-only CD released last year, minimally packaged in an unmarked black plastic clamshell. This new boxed set comes in a beautiful foldout cardboard package (identical to the recent reissue of Nurse With Wound's Soliloquy for Lilith) decorated with pictures of the disused ANS machine itself, sitting neglected in a basement room of the Moscow State University, rarely used and in dire need of a radical overhaul. It was built in 1958 by Evgeny Murzin, who set out to create a synthesizer capable of producing the full range of audible frequency via a unique photoelectric process. The composer inscribes his visual "score" onto a glass plate covered with sticky black mastic, slides it through the machine, which reads the inscribed plate and converts the etchings into sound produced by a system of 800 oscillators. In the liner notes, which provide further technical information about the machine, Coil acknowledge that it takes a lot of practice and skill for the user to relate the marks on the plate to the resultant sounds. Soviet composer Alfred Schnittke (whose name is misspelled in the notes) spent an entire year of intensive work with the machine to produce his one and only piece of electronic music entitled "Flow." However, Coil spent only a few days with the ANS, so by their own admission, the sounds on these three discs cannot be described as "compositions" in any sense. Instead, the sounds represent an accidental interpretation of Coil's visual art into audible electricity. As such, it is pointless to assess the musical merit of any of these pieces. The soundpieces in the set are the work of various solo and group alignments of Jhonn Balance, Peter Christopherson, Ossian Brown, Thighpaulsandra and Ivan Pavlov of COH. The notes do not identify which track features which personnel, either because they can't remember or they think it doesn't matter. The CD wallets (and the prints included with the first edition of the set) feature some of the line drawings that were used to make these pieces, but once again, the listener is given no indication which drawings produced which sounds. The drawings operate as Spare-style magical talismans, where occult symbols and "alphabet of desire" glyphs representing words or phrases (such as the tautological "IT JUST IS" on the back of disc B) exist as arcane sigillizations. But the ANS is able to take these occult strategies a step beyond the usual, by transforming them into an entirely exotic lexicon of ghostly electric frequencies. This relation of visual image to sound had the effect of a strange form of synaesthesia on me as I waded through these four discs of unprocessed analog tones; I began to form novel mental connections between sound and vision, thoughts and symbols. Halfway through the third disc I had become like Nikola Tesla, obsessively listening to electronic signals trying to pick out messages he was certain were being transmitted by extraterrestrials. Is it possible for the mind to subconsciously decode this esoteric system of pulsations, throbs, clicks and whirrs? It's impossible to say with any certainty, but the mere suggestion that it might be so makes the sound entirely compelling. At first glance, the DVD animations seemed no more inventive than WinAmp visuals, but I soon noticed the subtle psychedelic abstractions present in each perfectly synchronized schema. By the end of my COILANS adventure, I was tuned into a heretofore unexplored magickal current, a current that sparks and buzzes with vibrations of the manifest spirit. Electricity has truly made angels of us all.

samples:

• Disc A, Track One
• Disc B, Track Two
• Disc C, Track One

Intr_version
Here is another album from Intr_version that perfectly conforms to my expectations. I first heard The Beans on the label's excellent Saturday Morning Empires compilation, where their "May 6th Expires" served as the closing track, a gentle, rain-saturated drift-off that managed to sound both out-of-place among label's dominant electronic artists and also very apt, as a summary of the melancholic mood-building available throughout everything I've heard from the label yet. With this, their fifth proper release, the group has made a record whose spectral, narcotic beauty I feel instantly like I've heard many times before, but will never grow tired. The Beans are from Canada, and it's hard not to align their music, however slightly, with fellow countrymen Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Bassplayer is four long "rock" instrumentals driven by the same kind of simple, sad, two-chord meditations that Godspeed layers high with the swooning textures and the odd cryptic political snippets to create their signature effect. The Beans approach the same medium with fewer musicians, a looser stylistic palette, and much less bombast. Their slow, low-rising pieces seem—like Godspeed's—to touch on very familiar, almost basic melodic components, but without as much heart-stringing, making them better open to interpretation—if not quite subversive or challenging content-wise. Nothing is particularly new about the group's style or methods; however these songs speak for themselves, as "May 6th Expires" did as the finale of Intr_version's sampler. Included here as the first track in longer form, the song saturates from the first second, an almost note-less, reverb-expanded bassline brimming and coating each lazy, jazzy slide of the guitars, hooked into each other as if guarding against a very real threat of disintegration, a feeling notably lacking from the work of Godspeed and other post-rock groups where the studied, forced character of songs often ruins their potential for dramatic intensity. Bassplayer benefits from production that retains a live feel, emphasizing the endurance and conviction of the players while making the layered crescendos of the music all the more impressive. My first thought when hearing The Beans was actually a similarity to Australia improvisers The Necks, not so much in direct tonal relationship or even in the music's structural intent, but The Necks work within a similar slow-enfolding, immersive environment in which a song's parts reveal themselves as dependent without a sense of hierarchy. And though The Beans' discography does include three film scores, they refuse the visual dependencies of most things termed "cinematic." While much of this music captures a certain melancholic urgency that could serve the right film very well, it's hard to tell if this is not simply a part of the familiarity, the comfort I find in the music. Bassplayer is special in that it takes comfortable, almost predictable associations and offers the opportunity of living inside them for a short time, a kinetic edge usually denied music of such lateral calm and tender restraint.

samples:

• May 6th Expires
• Galuda
• Infused Dodecahedron

Virgin Prunes formed in Dublin in 1977, part of the fertile Lypton Village artpunk scene that also spawned U2. Instead of Bono and The Edge, Virgin Prunes had the equally absurdly named Gavin Friday, Guggi, Dave-id, Dik and Pod (later adding Haa Lacka Binttii and D'Nellon). From a very early point, it became clear that while U2 were aiming for global chart domination, Virgin Prunes were more interested in remaining aggressively idiosyncratic, developing their own unique brand of transgressive, avant-garde performance art and a wildly anarchic take on post-punk rock.