We have finally cleared out the backlog of great music and present some new episodes.
Episode 711 features music from The Jesus and Mary Chain, Zola Jesus, Duster, Sangre Nueva, Dialect, The Bug, Cleared, Mount Eerie, Mulatu Astatke & Hoodna Orchestra, Hayden Pedigo, Bistro Boy, and Ibukun Sunday.
Episode 712 has tunes by Mazza Vision, Waveskania, Black Pus, Sam Gendel, Benny Bock, and Hans Kjorstad, Katharina Grosse, Carina Khorkhordina, Tintin Patrone, Billy Roisz, and Stefan Schneider, His Name Is Alive, artificial memory trace, mclusky, Justin Walter, mastroKristo, Başak Günak, and William Basinski.
Episode 713 brings you sounds from Mouse On Mars, Leavs, Lawrence English, Mo Dotti, Wendy Eisenberg, Envy, Ben Lukas Boysen, Cindytalk, Mercury Rev, White Poppy, Anadol & Marie Klock, and Galaxie 500.
Skolavordustigur Street in Reykjavík photo by Jon (your Podcast DJ).
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Flesh soon yields, but stone is greater; the works of man survive the maker,
Yet, given time, new flesh brings breath; and fastens song to stone’s unrest.
Stone ruins prick the Devon map like starlight in the night sky. Each one reaches us as a distorted image of a bygone age: a past-pulse, rippling out through time to meet us in the present, beaten and ragged from a long journey.
Devon Folklore Tapes marks its seventh iteration with sound-investigations into two such time-travellers: Frithelstock Priory and Okehampton Castle. The former was once the home of an Augustinian fraternity, but since its dissolution in 1536 has continued to shelter monks of the spectral kind in its slow decay. The latter is a Norman motte and bailey castle, situated in a leafy valley on the edge of Dartmoor, where a revenant spirit wanders the byways in her carriage of bones.
The movements featured on this cassette tune in to these tales and others, informed by fieldwork and automatic improvisations conducted on location in 2017. The cassette comes housed in a hand-stamped and numbered presentation box including an inlay booklet detailing the folklore of each site.
The works were executed by R.D. Kirdiv and S.V. Skirling – two longstanding members of the Folklore Tapes ensemble who, with this release, are finally stepping out from the shadows and into the ferric.
While I doubt I would ever use the term "peaceful" to describe Jim Haynes' prolific solo output, this newest record makes his previous work seem just that. Electrical Injuries may not be far removed from his body of work sonically, but there is a different edge, a malignance to it, and one that is not so subtly referenced in the album’s title. With literal and metaphorical references to the unpleasant nature of electricity, this is perhaps his most harsh work to date, but one that clearly bears his signature brand of audio decay.
Haynes’ work has always fit into the nebulous area of sound art:not quite music, but not pure noise either.This one leans a bit more into the latter, however.The instantaneous squealing electronics that open "Falling Through Ice" makes this tactic abundantly clear.Over an undulating, churning loop of electronics he casts out big, massive crashes of harsh distortion, as brutal or aggressive as anything from a Merzbow record.However, what sets it apart is that sense of complexity, his use of textural rotting sounds that are almost tactile in their depth.The dissonance relents a bit, revealing his trademark processed crunch and ghostly electronics rising from within.
For as forceful and chaotic as Electrical Injuries can be at times, it never comes across as anything less than carefully composed and deliberately structured.Crunching loops make up the framework of "Choked on Brine," with some scraping and an almost guitar-like squall emanating from below.The structure and looped repetition gives the piece an obtusely musical quality: as the sounds rise and fall he carefully changes and adapts what is there, making for a diverse and multifaceted sounding composition.The painful buzz that aggressively opens "Operator" is befitting the record's title, as shortwave radio static is brought in, melded together into some sort of pseudo burbling electronic rhythm. The piece never becomes overly abrasive, but the sustained electrical hum that stays active is disquieting to say the least.The unpleasant electricity continues into "Acerbic, Convulsive", as strange tones drift in and out.Howling, shrill electronic moans are added in, increasing discomfort but also the wide variation of sound within the piece.
The lengthy conclusion to the album, "Autosuggestion", is perhaps its most calming moment, and that is speaking only in relative terms.Haynes again maintainssustained buzz, pulsating between loud and soft, but as a whole there is a slower, more pensive flow to the piece.Additionally, his employment of less distorted synth-like electronic noises is a more pleasant addition compared to the rest of the record.The sound builds to a nice crunch, with some additionally shrill noises added, before ending the album on a sputtering engine.
Although some of the song titles on Electrical Injuries would not be out of place on a grindcore album, Jim Haynes conjures the violent and the disturbing not via trite imagery or provocative, but from his sounds alone.The album is consistent with his fascination with decay (visually and audibly), but the greater sense of maliciousness pervades the record gives it a distinctly different feel than his other works.This stems largely from the brash, noise-laden edge to most of these six compositions, but also a general sense of the sinister that pervades it from beginning to end.The end product makes for a fascinating record that is quite often discomforting, but in the most enjoyable of ways.
New Zealander Clinton Williams has been operating as Omit since the late 1980s, but his hermetic approach to electronic music has kept him largely on the periphery of any related musical scene. His early works were handmade tapes and, once the technology became available, CD-Rs created on his own label, with his own artwork, and produced by none other but himself. His insular approach to his art meant work was only known to a handful (I myself had heard the name, but none of the music prior to this review) until this new box set joint released by Lasse Marhaug's Pica Disk and NZ based End of the Alphabet Records. Not intended to be a career overview, it instead is a compilation of five self-released CD-Rs from 2011 through 2016, packaged with a lavish booklet that only sees the surface of Williams’ unique brilliance.
It only takes a cursory overview of the box and the discs to get the feel that Omit is clearly Williams' own personal obsession.Besides the insightful, in-depth essay by the Dead C's Bruce Russell, much of the original artwork from these releases is presented:intricately detailed pseudo-schematics of sound systems and speaker arrays, along with almost obsessively documented tracking sheets of the equipment used on various compositions within this set.
This documentation is illuminating, because a quick listen would insinuate that Williams' work is either the product of a NASA control room array of modular synthesizer equipment or genius level Max/MSP processing.Instead, it is revealed that most of the sound is from standard keyboard gear:the Pro-One and DX7 especially figure heavily into the documentation, as does a wide variety of effects units.However, the expanses of pure, electronic sounds and idiosyncratic rhythms seem unlikely to come from such mundane equipment.
That, however, is clearly indicative of Clinton Williams’ skill and deftness as a composer and performer.Right from set opener "Turner" from Transistor Rhythms this is clear:a lush, but minimal expanse of synth is cast out and, over the span of the next 20 minutes he blends in the perfect minimal electronic beat, with a great deal of variation, and dynamic, growing layers of sound added and subtracted.Bits of voice seem to penetrate through here and there, but the emphasis is obviously on the synthetic."Construction (Front-End System Loader)" from Proportions of the Skull is similar, with the addition of oddly processed hand clap like rhythms and a warbling bass line that congeals into a bizarre take on electro.
The use of rhythms (I am hesitant to say drum programming) is one of the most enthralling parts of Omit's work.In some cases they are almost conventional:the tiny, fragile clicks of "Mind Borrow" from Proportions are reminiscent of the short-lived glitch scene, and the almost-techno feel is enhanced by the addition of some 303-like passages later on.Echo Dot's "Echo Dot FrameWork:One (Repeat Frame)" is a brilliant juxtaposition of a minuscule rhythmic sound joined with a massive, chaotic industrial din behind, all treated with carefully measured dubby echo and feedback.
Williams' use of field recordings and found sounds is another extremely impressive and idiosyncratically wonderful facet of these recordings."Skull Lander (Enter the Compound)" is mostly a minimalist click and vocoder fest, but also with an added beep of the grocery checkout line to set the unlikely stage."Diffuser" opens with what can only be the sounds of an empty plastic bottle, later mixed with scraping metal and analog beats.Finally, Endclosure's "Enclosures Four" is a combination of heavy beats and skittering rhythms, with eventually a few layers of the mix devoted to the rustling a potato chip bag (which is confirmed by the tracking guide in the booklet).
The term outsider artist is usually a backhanded complement at best, and pejorative at worst, but I think it is fitting for Clinton Williams' Omit in the most positive of ways.Outsider in the sense that the music contained on these discs sounds like no attempt to fit into a scene or genre, or to adhere to any norms or expectations.Nor does it seem clearly influenced by any other artist or style in particular.Instead, it is clearly the manifestation of one man's obsession, something that may be odd or occasionally strange to us listening from the outside, but makes perfect sense to Williams.Whatever intrinsic motivations he is working from to create this music may be a mystery to anyone but him, but there are many of us in the world who can love and appreciate this work.The clarity and purity of sound and the almost tangible depth of the sounds and processing makes this an essential collection from this unique and sadly under recognized genius.
Earlier this year, Staalplaat took a break from their plunge into Bryn Jones' seemingly endless archive of unreleased/hyper-limited material to put out a double-LP vinyl reissue of this beloved landmark album from 1998. While the vinyl format is an odd choice for this particular release (I have the digital version), I am delighted by this new reissue campaign: the sprawling Muslimgauze discography is a hopelessly intimidating and overwhelming labyrinth for all but the most die-hard fans, so the world definitely needs a knowledgeable curator to call attention to the most timeless and essential releases in the Muslimgauze canon. This is one of those. Normally, my own favorite Muslimgauze albums tend to be the more ethno-percussion-driven ones, but Mullah Said's heady drone/dub-inspired collage aesthetic is a striking exception, as it stands as one of Jones' most immersive, evocative, and fully formed works.
One thread that runs endlessly through the Muslimgauze discography is Bryn Jones' obsessive recycling and self-cannibalization, as the same motifs appear again and again and many of his better ideas resulted in multiple variations of the same song.That curious approach arguably reached its apotheosis with this album, as two of its lengthiest songs ("Every Grain of Palestinian Sand" and "Muslims Die India") appear twice, accounting for roughly 18 minutes of a 65-minute album…and those two pieces can only be differentiated by their subtly different bass patterns and shifts in pace.And the opening "Mullah Said" does not sound much different either.It is unusual sequencing, to be sure, but it does not feel redundant, lazy, or one-dimensional.Rather, Mullah Said feels like a single, massive, trance-inducing epic with relatively irrelevant differentiations between its various movements.As such, the vinyl format fundamentally disrupts Mullah Said's raison d’etre: the mesmerizing cumulative power of the album's enveloping, hallucinatory repetition.I imagine it is quite hard to remain beguiled by Mullah Said's exotic and unworldly spell when you have to flip a record three times to get to the end, though I suppose roughly the same effect could be achieved by just playing the same side of the album four times in a row.That is not a negative statement about the music itself, mind you–just an observation that Mullah does not have a dramatic arc that gradually unfolds: it is more like a swirling and mysterious aural hallucination to live inside.Concepts like "beginning" and "end" do not hold much meaning here.That said, people love vinyl, so I cannot fault Staalplaat for their choice: a deluxe vinyl reissue is an event that generates excitement–a reissued CD is not.
In essence, Mullah Said is built upon an understated (yet perfect) infinite groove of brooding bass tones and shifting electronic drum patterns.Aside from the tensely relentless kick drum pulse in the first "Every Grain of Palestinian Sand," Jones tends to maintain a languorously lurching dub-like pulse, which provides an optimally spacious canvas for all of the other dub-like flourishes (drifting voices, echoing percussion, etc.).There are occasional loops of sitar/tambura melodies and some wonderfully menacing swells of buzzing string drones that serve as recurring motifs to give the album a sense of structure, yet the true beauty of Mullah Said lies in everything on the periphery: this album is a vibrant, multilayered, and complex tour de force of clattering hand percussion, evocative field recordings, and enigmatic snatches of dialogue.In the past, I have critiqued Muslimgauze for Jones' exasperating tendency to endlessly move on to the next project without lingering around to fully flesh out his best ideas and Mullah Said is an unexpectedly dramatic swing in the opposite direction: it is basically just a simple bassline and sinister-sounding sitar buzz painstakingly expanded into an incredibly rich and detailed fantasia.It feels like I was dropped inside a nightmare set in an unknown Middle Eastern city and all I know is that something extremely significant just happened, but trying to piece together exactly what proves to be incredibly elusive.I am completely enveloped in an unnerving chaos of gunshots, lamentations, prayers, radio transmissions, shouting men, speeding trucks, conspiratorial-sounding conversations, and a host of unrecognizable and unfamiliar other sounds.Sometimes it feels like I am just wandering through a marketplace and other times it feels like I just stumbled into the aftermath of a massacre, which is a very neat trick indeed: Mullah is built on constantly shifting sands and its unstoppable forward motion makes it impossible to ever fully get my bearings.Despite that seemingly amorphous structure, however, Jones maintains a deliciously constant balancing act of tension and release, as these pieces regularly blossom into small-scale crescendos of intensity or oases of comparative calm (or at least simmering unease rather than boiling unease).
As swirling, lysergic, and ambiguously malevolent as it is, however, Mullah Said is curiously bookended by glimpses of simple beauty: it opens on a somewhat meditative tone with a call to prayer and closes in extremely bizarre and disarming fashion with "The End."The crux of "The End" is just a woman quietly singing a pretty song to herself, seemingly surrounded by a gibbering chorus of birds.Left unmolested, it would be a perfectly lovely and hopeful coda for Mullah Said's darkly heavy and hallucinatory journey, but Jones repeatedly disrupts it with a strange percussion loop that sounds weirdly arbitrary.Or perhaps the disruptive loop deliberately serves to show that bliss and tranquility are but a flickering mirage.Whether it was meant as a powerful final commentary or just a somewhat half-baked collision of studio scraps that perversely felt right, I will never know.Bryn Jones was a complicated man and I would probably go insane if I ever tried to nail down his intentions.In any case, despite Jones never having been to the Middle East, Mullah Said paints an extremely vivid picture of the region as it existed in his head, distilling all of its rage, turmoil, and beauty into a deeply compelling and haunting aural postcard from an imaginary city.Mullah Said is not just one of Muslimgauze's finest albums–it is one of the most radical and inventive "outsider" albums to ever emerge from the dub tradition.
The work of Andrew Chalk and Daisuke Suzuki seems as if it has been intertwined forever, so I was somewhat startled to discover that this is their first new collaborative release in almost a decade. As befits the re-convergence of these two masters of understated tranquility, Yama to Nashi feels like a relaxed and unhurried reunion of old friends rather than a bold new vision. As such, it is a somewhat minor (if lovely) addition to the Siren/Faraway Press oeuvre that mostly lingers in familiar territory, but there are a couple of divergent gems lurking amidst these new pieces that longtime fans will not want to miss.
For the most part, the languorous and glistening opening piece ("Threads From The Milky Way") sets the tone for the entire album, establishing the overarching aesthetic of sketchlike vignettes of dreamlike, liquescent bliss.It is difficult to tell exactly how Chalk and Suzuki are getting their blurred and slippery tones, but I believe there is a processed electric piano at the heart of these recordings.As the album unfolds, however, Chalk and Suzuki start to drift further and further away from their lazily glimmering and rippling sound pools and both the mood and the palette start to deepen (and darken).The first real shadows start to fall across Yama on the third piece, "Suzume," which casts a mournful spell by weaving discordant harmonies from glacially swelling strings and drifting smears of synth tones.Curiously, that veil of sadness dispels almost as suddenly and unexpectedly as it appeared, as the wonderful "Shelf on Wall" shakes off its initial moody reverie to blossom into a surreal field recording of a Japanese parade.From there, the piece continues to be a pleasantly inventive and evocative surprise, as the parade seems to partially fade away, but leaves a lovely and lyrical flute melody in its wake that dreamily drifts through a woozy fog of gentle arpeggios, crashing waves, and a few lingering tendrils of the raucous festivities (marching men, clattering percussion, children's voices).To my ears, it is the album's true centerpiece (conveniently located in the center of the album, no less), but it is not without strong competition from the album's final stretch.
Although it is considerably shorter, I am also quite fond of "A Sentry on The Roof," which augments its blearily impressionistic cascades of watery electric piano tones with the loud and fitful buzzing of a large bee.That bee makes a surprising amount of difference, which highlights an unusual trend the runs throughout Yama to Nashi: the purely instrumental pieces feel like the soundtrack to a gorgeous sunrise or seaside vista that I am not seeing, while the pieces that prominently feature field recording are considerably more effective at drawing me into the scene.I am a bit curious about why Chalk and Suzuki did not pursue that elegant blurring together of swooning, hazy ambiance and crisp, vibrant textures from the natural world more, as it definitely feels like that synthesis elevates this collaboration into something more transcendent and unique when it happens.If I had to guess, however, I suspect that the reason is that most of Yama to Nashi consists of Chalk and Suzuki's stronger improvisations that occurred on the road to composing the album's epic closing title piece.On one hand, "Yama To Nashi" is not radically different from the rest of the album, as it is built from gently tumbling arpeggios and warmly radiant washes of synthesizer (though there are some buried bird noises hiding in the mix).There is, however, an unexpectedly strong motif resembling a shuddering, digitalized bird call that periodically tears through the placid idyll.That certainly livens thing up, though it is not quite as dramatic as it sounds.The real difference is mostly just time: Chalk and Suzuki allow "Yama to Nashi" to languorously stretch out for over 20 minutes and that suits it beautifully.Duration makes a world of difference with music in this vein: a glimpse of heaven is nice, but getting a chance to linger in it is by far a superior experience.
As is true of most Andrew Chalk albums (both with and without Suzuki) there is very little to grumble about with this album: Chalk and Suzuki have a long history of making lovely and lush music together and Yama to Nashi ends a long hiatus to bring the world more of it.That pleases me.I am, however, the hapless victim of my own high expectations, as I hoped this welcome reunion would result in an enduring classic.Yama is not an enduring classic, though "Shelf on Wall" seems like a strong step towards a more ambitious and immersive future opus.Hopefully it will not take another decade for that to happen, but I am sure I can find some way to keep busy while I wait if it does.In the meantime, Yama to Nashi is a solid to return to form that adds one more quietly beautiful longform work to the Chalk/Suzuki canon.
This latest opus from the Opalio brothers continues their restlessly experimental hot streak, taking inspiration from a characteristically bizarre event: two years ago, Roberto discovered that a bunch of his records were corroded by an "inexplicable oxidation process." After some time, he decided to listen to one of them anyway and found himself fascinated by the way the listening experience was transformed by the surface noise. Naturally, the instantaneous composition that resulted from that revelation is considerably more bizarre and idiosyncratic than a mere celebration of crackle and hiss, but the added layer of noise beautifully adds an evocative textural layer to The Sky With Broken Arms' sublime and eerily otherworldly reverie.
Every now and then, I come across an album that has uncannily perfect cover art that not only conveys exactly the tone of the album, but seems to exist as an absolutely crucial part of the whole.The Sky With Broken Arms is one such album, as Roberto Opalio's blurred and mysterious photograph of a tree and a streetlight is a window into the similarly blurred and mysterious world that this blearily languorous longform piece inhabits.I should note that "longform" in this case means a mere 36 minutes, so this is actually a comparatively concise and distilled dose of the Opalio's lysergic sorcery, given their recent run of double-, triple-, and sextuple-album epics.Aside from that brevity and the omnipresent crackle and hiss of Roberto's ravaged vinyl, however, this release shares a lot of stylistic common ground with some of the Opalio's more sustained plunges into deep-drone psychedelia.All of the expected elements (the alientronics; the eerily floating, wordless vocals; the surreal loops) are in place as always, yet The Sky With Broken Arms has its own very distinct character, as it paints an extremely vivid picture of a very specific scene (for me, at least).
If this album were a movie, it would be a grainy home video of a sleepy rural town at night: the streets are empty, the one stoplight gently sways in the wind, and the church bell in the center of town hollowly resonates, announcing the time.Something is not quite right, however, as the bell continues to calmly ring again and again long after it has passed any possible earthy hour: time seems to have either frozen, slowed, or gotten stuck in an endlessly looping moment.Also, the bell is not the only sound, as the very air itself seems to have come alive with a crackle that resembles the sparking of a downed power line.And it sounds like a nearby radio has suddenly come to life as well and is now picking up mysterious, swooping transmissions from unknown sources.In fact, it seems like the entire town has been completely enveloped in some kind of unexplained electromagnetic disturbance and I seem to be the only one awake to witness it.Characteristically, things only get stranger from that point, as Broken Arms is essentially just one long, slow descent into escalating weirdness.First, Maurizio’s queasily rippling guitars make it feel like reality is dissolving into a dizzying fever dream.Then, Roberto’s unnervingly spectral vocals start to creep over the piece like a dense, lysergic fog.Or like a sickly green light emanating from a UFO hovering right above the town.Needless to say, there is nothing else on earth quite like this album (or like My Cat is an Alien).Ostensibly, this is music, but that feels like a hopelessly reductive term for the transcendent, reality-disrupting spell that the Opalios cast.This album is roughly as disorienting as unexpectedly waking up in another dimension.Or at the bottom of the sea.
I suppose there are other My Cat is an Alien albums that I like more than this one, but that kind of earthbound thinking truly misses the point of the Opalios' artistry.A new MCIAA album is never just a fresh batch of songs–it is both a legitimate event and an invitation to share the Opalios' hermetic, otherworldly headspace for a brief time.Notably, that headspace is never the same twice, as the Opalios' music is an evolving ritual.It is quite remarkable how the brothers are able endlessly combine and rearrange their unconventional and minimal sound palette into new experiences with their own distinct personalities.Some albums are like a deep trance, some are like an extradimensional nightmare, some are like a plunge into the subconscious, and some make me feel like I am losing my goddamn grip on sanity.This one is a bit different, as it feels like living inside an especially haunting and surreal episode of The Twilight Zone.On one level, it is a bit less "alien" than some of the duo’s more expansive releases, but the few recognizable touches from our physical world arguably make it one of the Opalios' more unnerving and striking releases to date, as the border separating reality from the Opalios' darkly lysergic vision now feels ominously porous.
Kyle Bobby Dunn's first physical release since 2014's And the Infinite Sadness is a warm, albeit compressed, sequel to that universally acclaimed 3xLP. In "The Searchers", the Canadian composer's sidelong composition is still set adrift in a sea of infinite nostalgia and reflections of past selves but with an ascending lightness that gleams at the contours of Dunn's most personal and affecting work. "The Searchers," named after the John Ford film, meditates on the way in which the imposing expansiveness of the American West worked upon the minds of its inhabitants who fought, lost and did terrible things to each other in their attempt to claim it. The West, like the slipstream of the course of events in a life, offers no resolution and shakes off any narrative that attempts to define it.
Wayne Robert Thomas is an Indianapolis based musician who composes drones like sculpting in wet cement, each movement turning slowly upwards while simultaneously being locked into time and space. His first appearance on vinyl, Wayne Robert Thomas's deeply felt composition "Voyevoda" utilizes processed electric guitar to fill all available space with lofty and spacious tones that lose nothing of their clarity as the float up to the rafters before settling back down to the nave. A stirring counterpoint Dunn's composition, "Voyevoda" keenly examines one's fidelity to unconquerable nostalgia.
Memories — places, vacancies, allusions — are fundamental characters in Mary Lattimore's evocative craft. Inside her music, wordless narratives, indefinite travelogues, and braided events skew into something enchantingly new. The Los Angeles-based harpist recorded her breakout 2016 album, At The Dam, during stops along a road trip across America, letting the serene landscapes of Joshua Tree and Marfa, Texas color her compositions. In 2017, she presented Collected Pieces, a tape compiling sounds from her past life in Philadelphia: odes to the east coast, burning motels, and beach town convenience stores. In 2018, from a restorative station — a redwood barn, nestled in the hills above San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge — emanates Hundreds of Days, her second full-length LP with Ghostly International. The record sojourns between silences and speech, between microcosmic daily scenes and macrocosmic universal understandings, between being alien in promising new places and feeling torn from old native havens. It's an expansive new chapter in Lattimore's story, and an expression of mystified gratitude. A study in how ordinary components helix together to create an extraordinary world.
I was a bit surprised to belatedly discover that Irisarri’s latest release was conceived as an imaginary soundtrack to the Doomsday Clock, as Midnight Colours is often an atypically warm and beautiful release, shedding much of the pervasive melancholy that runs throughout his previous work. Perhaps, however, it would be more accurate to say that Irisarri has merely become a bit better at effectively wielding that melancholy, as the shadows that shroud the lush heaven of Midnight Colours tend to add depth and gravitas without crossing the line into brooding reverie. That may sound like a subtle evolution, yet it is quite an important one from my standpoint, as Irisarri's eternal somberness was always a bit of an obstacle for me. I am not normally one to praise accessibility, but I am delighted by it in this instance, as his grainy, hissing, and gorgeously enveloping drones have rarely been more listenable than they are here.
Over the course of his last few albums, I have increasingly found Rafael Anton Irisarri to be quite a fascinating and underappreciated artist, as he is kind of a negative image doppelganger for Tim Hecker.Both artists are incredibly talented and have a similar aesthetic at their core, yet Hecker has lately been reaching towards the heavens with increasingly ambitious, timeless, and thematically powerful compositions while Irisarri continues to burrow further and further inward, deeply feeling all the anxiety and sorrow of our current age and trying to channel that into something meaningful.Put more prosaically, Irisarri remains extremely committed to drone, pouring his soul into his elegantly blurred and swirling sound worlds in hopes of occasionally achieving something transcendent and poetic.With the first few songs on Midnight Colours, he succeeds beautifully in that regard, especially with the opening "The Clock."While it is built on a simple and bittersweetly gorgeous chord progression, the lion's share of Irisarri's artistic vision is devoted to harnessing the cumulative power of small details and layered textures.Regarding the latter, there are very few other artists who are on Irisarri's level, as "The Clock" is a sumptuous feast of woozily ravaged tapes and buried field recordings that hint at deeper mystery and meaning.When he is at his best, Irisarri's work feels like a hallucinatory plunge into the swirling mists of his subconscious, resembling a warm and lovely dream populated with ephemeral fragments of more concrete memories.The sweeping and lush "The Falling Curtain" that follows is similarly revelatory, as a simple two-note pattern acts as a lilting sonar ping that guides me through a rapturous fog of blearily swelling chords, blurred drones, and tape noise.
While it is probably fair to say that Midnight Colours is front-loaded with its two finest moments, it is a thoughtfully sequenced and immersive album from start to finish–it just happens to dissolve more and more into hallucinatory abstraction as it unfolds (for a while, anyway).For example, the sustained, quavering, and engulfing roar of "Oh Paris, We Are Fucked" is not a piece that would have struck me if it were decontextualized from its surroundings, but it is quite a pleasant place to linger for several minutes after "The Falling Curtain" fades away.While the next couple of pieces continue that descent into increasingly diffuse and drifting terrain, there are subtle and cunning machinations at work, as the album gradually darkens and takes firmer form again, though the radiantly burbling "Two and Half Minutes" is a bit of perplexing and tonally anachronistic detour.Aside from that curious aberration, the overall trajectory of Midnight Colours is like slowly descending into a blissful sleep only to be haunted by a sense of vague menace in my dreams…then ruefully awakening into a reality that seethes with simmering dread and regret (as well as quite a bit of stark beauty, thankfully).That dark awakening seems to begin in earnest with "Drifting," which unfolds as an empty-sounding murky thrum beneath a languorous melody that feels distant and corroded.In many ways, it is a corroded inversion of the album's earlier pieces, as the textures are gnarled and scorched and their distorted wake creates a snarl of uncomfortable harmonies. The brief and understated final piece, "A Ruptured Tranquility," is not nearly as overtly blackened, yet is perhaps even more unnerving, as it feels like I am among the innards of a massive clock, surrounded by straining, weary gears that are slowly shuddering to a halt.To quote TS Eliot's The Hollow Men: "This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper."
Midnight Colours is mostly devoid of flaws, aside from possibly some curious choices in pacing (Irisarri occasionally makes his weaker pieces too long and his stronger pieces too short).My only significant caveat with this album is that Irisarri's brilliance lies primarily in his production talents: he is always a master craftsman, yet his triumphs as a composer are a bit less consistent.When he is at the peak of his powers in both regards, as he is on Midnight Colours' first two pieces, the results are glorious.The remainder of the album is still quite an absorbing and lushly immersive whole though: I have been listening to it for weeks and I am still finding plenty to like in Irisarri's beautifully roiling and frayed dronescapes.While I have not heard enough of Irisarri’s early work to know whether or not Midnight Colours is his strongest album, I can say without reservation that it is definitely a serious contender for that honor (as well as a significant leap forward artistically).
A month ago, I had absolutely no idea who Patrick Flegel was, but the buzz surrounding Superior Viaduct's Cindy Lee reissue series piqued my interest and Flegel quickly became one of my new favorite people. In a past life, Flegel was the frontman of Canadian indie-rock band Women, who famously imploded in a Halloween-costumed, guitar-smashing onstage meltdown in 2010. Soon afterwards, Flegel began dressing in drag and his "diva alter-ego" Cindy Lee was born. Sometimes a full band, sometimes a solo act, Cindy Lee has a strikingly guileless, idiosyncratic, and oft-disturbing aesthetic that almost feels like outsider art. On Act of Tenderness, Flegel's vision focuses primarily on intimately and eerily channeling '60s girl-group pop through a hissing and hallucinatory fog of melancholy. Some songs certainly work better than others, but when Cindy hits the mark, it feels like a memory-haunted chanteuse has stepped directly out of David Lynch's imagination and become actual flesh and blood.
I was lured into Act of Tenderness by the tender and hauntingly lovely would-be single "Power and Possession" (as well as the deliciously weird cover art), but I was truly and wonderfully unprepared for the depth and intensity of Flegel's commitment to his alternate persona.While there are a couple of other gorgeously eerie pop confections hidden amidst these twelve songs, the album as a whole resembles a fractured and lysergic series of glimpses into a complex, lonely, and darkness-shrouded life.As such, it is much more than an album.Flegel has essentially created an entire life and it is quite a complex and compelling one: Act of Tenderness feels like the disjointed audio diary of a tormented pop genius in a fog of pain-killers slowly losing her mind in a series of depressing motel rooms.Not every day is bad though, even if it seems like Cindy has been extremely unlucky in love.In her better moods, Cindy conjures up songs like the aforementioned "Power and Possession," which is an understated and swooningly beautiful swirl of heartbreaking melodies, ghostly swathes of backing vocals, and a few simple chords.Also: plenty of hiss and reverb.Normally, I have a bit of a hostile attitude towards vocalists who always blur their vocals into oblivion with effects, but Flegel is a striking exception, as the hazy lo-fi aesthetic is pitch-perfect for this project: it feels like Lee is always singing her heavenly, heartfelt songs into a crappy tape deck alone in her room and all the veil of hiss and murk makes it all feel like a bleary half-dream.That unsettling feeling of being inside a flickering and precarious dream is further heightened by some of the album's distinctly non-pop moments, like "New Romance" and "Quit Doing Me Wrong," both of which sound troublingly broken and wrong."New Romance" in particular is especially unnerving, as it sounds like Cindy is blissfully and obliviously recording a sweet and sincere vocal track over blown-out, gnarled chaos and squalls of feedback, far too fucked-up to ever notice that all the levels are completely wrong and that the "song" is a flaming wreck.
As disturbed-sounding as it is, however, "New Romance" still has the ghost of a pop song at its core.The shrieking, strangled, and visceral nightmare of "Bonsai Garden," on the other hand, sounds like a full-on psychotic meltdown that would feel confrontational even by Throbbing Gristle standards."Miracle of the Rose" is similarly bananas, resembling a very cool and ritualistic Eastern-influenced psych-rock jam…but with all of the guitars cranked up and layered into an oceanic roar of grinding horror.Those two incredibly striking pieces also illustrate something else quite fascinating about Act of Tenderness: Cindy seems quite fond of The East and also seems to occasionally dissociate from her persona entirely (Cindy the diva would not be particularly into menacingly noisy psychedelia, nor would she ever sing in such a low, male-sounding voice).Some of the other notable tears in Cindy's precarious, kimono-clad reality are considerably less hostile though, as "Operation" sounds like a hypnagogic New Wave hit, while the opening title piece songs like a ravaged 78 of an anachronistic torch song that could have been recorded in 1930s Singapore or Morocco.Even the poppiest moments can be quite bizarre, however, as "What I Need" sounds like girl-group pop played with gloopy analog synthesizers and somnambulantly sung through a malfunctioning microphone.One of Flegel's truly inspired twists on Act of Tenderness is that almost everything is disorientingly "off" in some way or steeped in some kind of vague dread, yet he continually finds new ways for that wrongness to creep into his work.His greatest moment is probably the deeply sensuous and sexy "The Last Train's Come and Gone," which takes a wonderfully languorous groove and a gorgeous guitar hook and marries them to a vaguely Asian melody and an increasingly haunted-sounding backdrop (it sounds a ghoulishly pitch-shifted, spectral, and distressed tape of a Phil Spector-style wall of sound).
Notably, if I had written about this album a few weeks ago, I probably would have probably written a very different review: my initial impression was that Flegel had written a handful of achingly lovely pop songs, then padded out the rest of the album with noisy, lo-fi filler.After essentially living inside this album for the last week, however, I now grasp that the uglier and harsher moments are an absolutely integral part of a rather brilliant artistic vision.The pop songs are certainly great, but a full album of them would be a cavalcade of pretty pastiches rather than what Act of Tenderness actually is: a wildly experimental and disturbing plunge into an absorbing and fully formed world that is half dream and half deeply phantasmagoric nightmare (Flegel's very own Mulholland Drive, if you will).I cannot think of anyone else who is so strikingly adept at both unleashing harrowing, noise-damaged weirdness and crafting sublime pop hooks.I think I want to write Patrick Flegel a gushing fan letter now.This was easily one of the best albums to come out in 2015 and now it is likely to be the single best reissue of 2018.I am properly floored.
Chapel Perilous exists whereby the supernatural converges with the everyday - whatever one's definition of reality, this psychological realm serves to prove it endlessly subjective and changeable. Robert Anton Wilson may have laid claim to the modern use of this phrase - as in his 1977 tome Cosmic Trigger - yet there can be few musical outfits in the here and now more worthy of carrying on its tradition than Gnod. In more than a decade on the planet, this singular Salford-birthed entity have married intrepid musical exploration with psychic fearlessness - not to mention a tendency to leave any tag or bracket one attempts to place on them utterly redundant.
In a sense, the latest adventure bearing this title evolved both from the lengthy European tour that the band embarked upon in the wake of their stripped-down and paint-stripping 2017 opus Just Say No The Psycho Right-Wing Capitalist Fascist Industrial Death Machine. Yet recording in Supernova studio in Eindhoven under the auspices of Bob De Wit, the band found themselves free not only to lay down two tumultuous tracks that they had been honing and hammering into shape on the road - the pulverizing fifteen-minute opener "Donovan’s Daughters" and the bracingly brutal "Uncle Frank Says Turn It Down" - but to sculpt more abstract material, utilizing dubbed-out repetition, furious riff-driven rancour, bleak soundscapes and off-the-map experimentation to create an intimidating and invigorating tableau of dystopian dread and unflinching intensity.
Always working purely on their own instincts and co-ordinates, Gnod's pathway into unchartered territory continues to move firmly on with nary a care for the sanity of anyone in their surroundings. Chapel Perilous is a still more indomitable chapter in a transcendental travelogue from an iconoclastic institution that only gathers momentum with the passing of time. Wherever Gnod go in 2018 and beyond, expect reality to be reinvented anew, whatever the consequences.
Out May 4, 2018. More information can be found here.