After two weekends away, the backlog has become immense, so we present a whopping FOUR new episodes for the spooky season!
Episode 717 features Medicine, Fennesz, Papa M, Earthen Sea, Nero, memotone, Karate, ØKSE, Otis Gayle, more eaze, Jon Mueller, and Lauren Auder + Wendy & Lisa.
Episode 718 has The Legendary Pink Dots, Throbbing Gristle, Von Spar / Eiko Ishibashi / Joe Talia / Tatsuhisa Yamamoto, Ladytron, Cate Brooks, Bill Callahan, Jill Fraser, Angelo Harmsworth, Laibach, and Mike Cooper.
Episode 719 music by Angel Bat Dawid, Philip Jeck, A.M. Blue, KMRU, Songs: Ohia, Craven Faults, tashi dorji, Black Rain, The Ghostwriters, Windy & Carl.
Episode 720 brings you tunes from Lewis Spybey, Jules Reidy, Mogwai, Surya Botofasina, Patrick Cowley, Anthony Moore, Innocence Mission, Matt Elliott, Rodan, and Sorrow.
Photo of a Halloween scene in Ogunquit by DJ Jon.
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The plain, unmarked white shell and clinical titling of break_fold's debut certainly adds a mysterious quality to this project. There is no hint as to what to expect musically, and that alone always makes me curious. That ambiguity carries onto the tape itself, in the form of complex and diverse beat heavy electronics that excels as much in mood and texture as it does in pleasant melodies and memorable rhythms.
These six pieces—all simply titled for the date they were recorded (I assume)—are refreshingly varied and dynamic.Right in the opening moments of "24_08_15," there is a great snappy drum machine, tastefully filtered, to click away as beautiful synthesizers glide effortlessly over the top, immediately followed by the ghostly melody and stuttering, idiosyncratic beat of "07_07_15".In both of these cases, however, there ends up being much more.On the former, the electronics slowly become more dense and dissonant, and by the closing moments they engulf the remainder of the mix.In the latter case, the balance of raw and polish is upset in the ending, as the entire piece disintegrates brilliantly.
This dichotomy continues throughout the tape.While "11_09_15" begins with a dense, heavy beat that eventually transitions from darkness to light, the remainder of the piece does the opposite.The beat may become less oppressive, but the overall arrangement begins in a far more chill zone than the intensity in which it closes.For "05_01_16" break_fold leads off with gentle, fluttering electronics and an overall slower pace, and despite the big, resonating handclaps the mood stays light.However, the beat is shifted around and the focus instead shifts to the big, dramatic synths that stand out strongly.The latter parts of the piece may drift into noisy territory, but the melody never fully disappears.
On the final third of the tape the differences are a bit more pronounced, however.On one hand, break_fold drifts more into conventional song structures on "21_02_16,"compared to the more techno-oriented sounds that preceded it.There is a wonderfully dense synthesizer progression, but as a whole there seems to be more melody and varying structures to be find.On the other hand, "13_04_16" may be a direct continuation of the previous, but the tempo is slowed.Instead the beginning minutes are slower and in general the mix is more stripped down, cutting the electronics back somewhat.It picks up towards its end, but the inclusion of vocal fragments makes the piece more unique overall.
07_07_15-13_04_16 may not be the most experimental or challenging sounding tape, but the familiar ground that break_fold covers is done with such panache that it is an engaging tape completely as it is.The complex production ensures that the beats never become stale, and the wonderful melodies make for a tape that is rife with heavy beats, but without numbing repetition.The presentation may be intentionally obscure and a bit obtuse, but the content itself is excellent.
I had a very unfortunate false start with Gnod, as the first time I heard them, I mistakenly concluded that they were basically the UK version of White Hills rather than a deeply radical and experimental entity of Swans-like intensity.  With the benefit of hindsight, I have since embraced them as one of the single most exciting forces to emerge from the underground in recent years.  Thankfully, no one at all will be likely to repeat my mistake after hearing Just Say No, though it admittedly tones down the band’s more arty and indulgent tendencies quite a bit in service of visceral brute force (the album title provides a very unambiguous clue as to the band's current mindset). Of course, as much as I enjoy raw power, punk energy, and hardcore fury on their own, the beauty of this album lies in how brilliantly Gnod manage to blend heavy music with their longstanding Krautrock and psych fascinations, enhancing the expected monster riffs with bulldozing no-frills repetition, seismic percussion grooves, Gang of Four-style minimalism, and a wonderful textural chaos of electronics and radio broadcasts.
If I had to succinctly summarize Gnod’s aesthetic with Just Say No, Entertainment!-era Gang of Four would be the clearest reference point, but with the caveat that all their equipment was stolen right before an important gig and that they had to perform using gear that was already set-up and soundchecked for Ministry or Neurosis.  There are plenty of tight grooves and "angular" guitars, but they are often atop an incredibly dense, earthquake-level low end.  The opening "Bodies For Money," ostensibly the album's lead single, is a bit of aberration from that template though.  In fact, Gnod are roughly in White Hills territory again, barreling along at a double-time pace with a simple power chord riff and even erupting into a noisy guitar solo at one point.  There are some key differences though, as Jon Perry's drums are jacked-up to rumbling, elemental force and vocalist Paddy Shine's ragged, world-weary vocals are more of a sincere, snarling, and rueful denunciation of the state of the world than a melodic hook.  Put more glibly, it is Motorhead music with a Crass intellect.  That is an admittedly gratifying and bracing aesthetic, but it is not nearly as compelling as the more distinctive fare that Gnod conjures up elsewhere.  For example, the following "People" is every bit as bludgeoning, but slowed and pared down to little more than pummeling, fill-heavy drums; densely buzzing bass; and a flanging sample that sounds like a processed muezzin's call.  Eventually, an ascending strummed guitar motif appears, but the foundation of the piece is essentially just a sample and some stomping, improvisatory drumming and it all works beautifully.  In fact, it seems like Gnod work best when they are working with the fewest materials.
The following "Paper Error" unexpectedly brings shades of Steady Diet of Nothing-era Fugazi, as Gnod lock into an obsessively repeating two-chord riff while Shine howls elliptical and scathing thoughts about errors and bodies.  While it is not exactly my favorite piece on the album, "Paper Error" makes one of the stronger cases for Gnod's brilliance: it is built upon an incredibly simple riff and a lyric sheet that probably only has like three lines scrawled on it ("Error! Error! Error! Error!"), yet it feels like being run over by a goddamn tank.  It is the perfect distillation of the album's description of "a harsh and repetitive riff-driven rancour refracted through a psychotropic haze of dubbed-out abstraction," as the riff is an unstoppable juggernaut, Shine's raw-throated intensity is magnetic, and the underlying music is a dense and roiling onslaught of furious crash cymbals and buried snarls of ugly guitar noise.  Even better still is "Real Man," the album’s muscular and hyper-minimal centerpiece.  At its core, it is essentially a cutting denunciation of macho culture delivered over a heavy and perversely funky drumbeat.  There are some embellishments, like a blown-out one-note bass line and stabs of discordant guitar, but all of that is secondary to the perfectly swaggering menace of a song mocking swaggering menace.  Eventually "Real Man" erupts into a crescendo of noisy guitars and jabbering loops, but the lasting impression is that Shine and his drummer are about to curb-stomp a bunch of football hooligans.
The album finally winds to a close with the epic "Stick in the Wheel," which initially reprises the band’s winning formula of heavy drums, Shine's bitter and blackly funny rants about society, and well-placed splashes of noisy guitars.  Bizarrely, it suffers a bit from having too many ideas, as Gnod seem to reach their peak when they focus all of their energy on just one simple thing with face-melting intensity. I suppose I cannot blame them for including it though, as its extended length (just over 12 minutes) gives the band a chance to shift gears into a lengthy dub-damaged interlude of simmering psychedelia, reminding me that the rest of Just Say No is not necessarily the true Gnod.  Of course, the true Gnod is a very fluid concept that varies greatly from album to album.  The band have certainly made some stellar albums exploring their more hallucinatory and abstract side, but Just Say No works best when the band sticks to no-frills thuggish brutality, so the arty coda mostly feels like it accidentally wandered in from a different album.  Aside from that, my only real critique is that the band has a tendency to drag their songs on a bit longer than necessary here, as riding a groove for ten minutes works a lot better with psychedelia than it does with eruptions of violence.  With music like this, the best approach is to get in, tear my goddamn head off, then get out.  There is no need to linger.  I have absolutely zero problem with the vision and the execution here though, as Just Say No is otherwise an absolutely crushing and timely tour de force of controlled fury.  This album will deservedly be all over "Best of 2017" lists in December.
Love is the Capital is the debut LP by Hiro Kone, the recording alias of Nicky Mao. The album is a follow-up to the incredibly well-received Fallen Angels cassette, bringing with it some of Mao's most emotionally and politically driven work yet. It is Hiro Kone's long-coming opus, examining a number of all-too-relevant themes: capital, the state, egoism, anxiety, and steadfast optimism.
The eight songs on Love is the Capital highlight Mao's austere, politicized techno battling for the greater good. Songs are visceral meditations of rhythm, noise, and melody in the vein of Pan Sonic, Chris & Cosey, Muslimgauze, and Kangding Ray.
The sounds were often recorded in scenes of isolation, whether physically or emotionally. "Infinite Regress" was during a trek with Roxy Farman (Wetware) up to the sleepy, upstate NY town of Palenville. There, frozen in a cabin with the most DIY of recording booths, Mao recorded Roxy's vocals and what would be the track that would put into motion the entire album. "Less Than Two Seconds" was written in a single afternoon in late December 2015 when it was revealed that the grand jury had declined to indict the police officer who shot to death 12-year old Tamir Rice.
The taut techno, industrial minimalism, and aural upheaval is embedded in tracks "Rukhsana" (featuring Drew McDowall, formerly of Coil & Psychic TV, on modular synthesizer), "The Place Where Spirits Get Eaten," and "Less Than Two Seconds,"an emotionally wrought blitz of serrated Monomachine tones flanked by timeless recordings of essayist, poet, and social writer James Baldwin. Mao ventures deep into heady, prismatic runs of hypnotic techno, on "Don’t Drink the Water" and "The Declared Enemy." On opener "Being Earnest" and "Love is the Capital," foreboding motifs brood their way back into the narrative.
Still, the album maintains a sense transformation, burdened with an alien tension– the awareness of an impending and necessary collapse. And what may come next.
There is a playfully cryptic euphoria embedded in Luke Younger's work as Helm. An expansive constellation of references from across electronic music converge in his output, driving its narrative in and out of the heights of exploratory sound practices, covertly repurposing pop's prosthetic limbs on the side. His latest record, World In Action, broaches the ever-present—and ever agitated—political thread that has been pulled through the project's most opaque regions with a reinvigorated immediacy and purpose.
Recorded across East London, South-East Kent and Snaresbrook Crown Court at the height of the UK media's attempt at divining integrity from the orchestrated turbulence of Brexit, World In Action presents four pieces that juggle the documentation of this particular moment with the desire to discern motivation from despair.
Frenetic woodwind instrumentation is guided through cyclonic synth pads in slow motion, while Valentina Magaletti's percussion scatters the surface, scrambling the after-image of each piece as it propels us to the next. With a nod to industrial rock's breakbeat excursions, field recordings drenched in longer than long ago gather these elements into a worn path through unimaginable terrain.
The track titles recollect a time of just accountability and presence in the UK's mass media. This is a direct manoeuvre on Younger's part, setting World In Action up as a sceptical, yet hopeful work, unafraid of the deep political anguish that underpins its intent.
Félicia Atkinson's new full-length album, Hand In Hand, is an expanded development of her musical compositions started with the highly-acclaimed A Readymade Ceremony released on Shelter Press in 2015, and follows her collaborative effort with Jefre Cantu-Ledesma Comme Un Seul Narcisse (Shelter Press, 2016).
Composed over the year of 2016 at EMS during a snow storm and at home in Brittany, Hand in Hand could be considered as the most ambitious body of work recorded by the French musician and artist.
Doubt and Optimism are the two sides of a same coin. Hand in Hand is arid and warm in its whole synchrony and opposition. Days are burning and nights are made of ice. Coyotes are exchanging sounds with rattles snakes while bunnies are hiding. Strident modular sounds are tearing apart minimal beats and drones. The stories told by A Voice to the auditor are no longer fictions and become slowly reality.
Electric waves transmitted by living creatures and machines seem to deliver special sounds and frequencies that only non-human can hear. They grow and vibrate despite of the walls and interdictions. Therefore, the human who is listening to this record might find in it a particular kind of emotion a way to take space in silence, and frame a certain vision of thinking while losing a certain notion of time, acknowledging step by step its universal environment. Plants, galaxies, animals, machines, Hand in Hand.
This record is meant to be a moment of common thinking and listening in its diversity and abstraction. In the same way a sci-fi novel by Philip K. Dick or a sculpture by Guy Mees can be percieved: trivial, sensitive and mysterious at the same time.
On the Echoing Green is an elegant work of lush, shimmering sound, rendered with a singular touch by eternal electric romantic Jefre Cantu-Ledesma.
In contrast to the haze and hermetic process of previous albums, Green was conceived as a deliberate experiment in clarity and collaboration: "I was interested in trying to bring out more overt pop elements, to let them come to the front and be present. I also have more trust now in letting things happen – trusting other people’s musicianship, and being open to people’s ideas. Eventually, things emerge."
What emerged from this bond are eight rapturous and richly melodic slow dives of swirling guitar, bass, synthesizer, piano, and drum machines, dramatically accented in places by heavenly arcs of voice courtesy of Argentinian singer-songwriter Sobrenadar. Cantu-Ledesma encouraged chemistry and intuition in the studio by beginning the album without any demos for reference; he and his collaborators pursued patterns and hypnotic textures across long-form improvisations until gradually songs began to take shape.
This is music of growth and grandeur, of ascent and exploration, played with purpose and passion by a craftsman in tune with the beauty of sound and the harmony of light. In his words: "[This album] feels like spring – things coming alive, blooming, emerging from winter."
More information can be found here. Out in June 2017.
After the long overdue release of Drew McDowall’s debut solo album Collapse in 2015, the experimental music underground saw McDowall as an arrival of an artist that was always here, hiding in plain sight. He was quietly in the background, pulling the levers on some of the most influential recordings in electronic music and with shifting his focus from the role as band member of such legendary acts as Coil & Psychic TV along with his recent collaborative efforts alongside Tres Warren (of Psychic Ills) in Compound Eye, McDowall came to finally identity as a singular artist and figurehead to a movement that has vitally required his presence.
His second full length endeavor for Dais Records is aptly titled Unnatural Channel, allowing McDowall to allocate offerings to the ghosts of his past using methods not fully understood. Moving forward from the impact left with his first album, Unnatural Channel moves McDowall into more uncharted territory. From the opening mark, Drew’s distinct fingerprint is evident on the track "Tell Me the Name," his signature ambient ebb and flow to pulsing electronics painted over reverberated percussions that have been pulled apart and spun around the spectrum.
Once the introduction has been made, the album moves forward into more rhythmic territory using classic industrial structures found on his previous work but fused with tumbling aural friction complimented by more techno-based cadence. Views into McDowall’s unconscious are ever-present in "This Is What It's Like," a reflective decent into madness brought on by the anxiety of sleep deprivation. Looping the title mantra, the listener gets caught into the author's own delusion and lost within the auditory hallucination.
The two part suite of "Unnatural Channel" subjects us to a torrent of fluttering and panic-stricken electronics, subtle in its dispatch but powerful in its impact. Field recordings of the most personal, hypnogogic dream-state, lost within itself until McDowall unveils his unbalanced, sequential patterns of fibrous, metallic waveforms and subsonic bass kicks that hit the air with such strength and coercive force that it is impossible not to be converted.
Ending with the statement of "Unshielded," the album ties off with the primal voice talents of artist Roxy Farman of the Brooklyn avant-techno duo Wetware. Roxy’s confused phrasing seemingly crashes head-on with McDowall’s cathartic finale, using every method of sonic hypnosis at his disposal to finish with a bold yet disconcerting assurance.
Natalie Chami's project TALsounds documents solo sessions of improvised synthesis and live-looped vocal performances, presented to the listener as discrete takes without overdubs. The decisions she makes in her atmospheric sketches - the onset of a quivering vocal melody, the echoing turn of a delay knob - flash across her stereo spreads as seismic ripples within a network of standing sounds. Frozen into recursive afterimages of fingers on keys, her intricate synth arrangements juxtapose textures from her rig of analog electronic instruments and compound into narrative arcs at once alien in tone and direct in human-to-human address. Love Sick, TALsounds's first LP release, follows a series of full-length tapes on labels like Hausu Mountain (run by Chami's bandmates in free music trio Good Willsmith), Patient Sounds, and Moog's own physical imprint. While these releases showcased Chami's ideas in the context of looser improvisations, drifting off into extended states of narcosis and looping architectures, Love Sick distills her tactics of spontaneous composition into her most concise song cycle to date.
Love Sick shifts through a program of contrasting moods and tonal palettes, from close-mic confessional meditations to funereal deep space ritualism. Queasy and clipped percussion samples pop into view over live-layered sheets of sawtooth drone. Liturgical organ chords intersect with the fine-grain whirr of monophonic noise formants. With each live sketch laid out over a length closer to the traditional pop format, far-flung sonic elements arrive as momentary upheavals to animate the space Chami allots them before falling back into the murk. Within webs of texture, TALsounds's vocal performances sound out in her most frank mode of address yet captured. Fragments of discernible lyrics smear into melismatic melody lines and loop back around, intertwining into complex harmonies with her wordless vocalizations. Her vocal style, informed as much by her classical voice and opera training as by a lifetime of immersion in Björk, Portishead, Aaliyah, and Sade, blends a hands-on process of technical self-accompaniment with moments of diaristic intimacy. A more direct recording strategy, with individual feeds of her live performances mixed in isolation, renders every sigh, whisper, and wail at a level of detail far from the realm of cavernous reverb ambience. When Chami's lyrics emerge on the spot in flashes of legibility, they draw out a fascination, or maybe a preoccupation, with the control that raw emotions have over mind and body. The love sickness she offers sidesteps any cutesy, wistful implications, and skirts closer to a state of physical illness whose cause and solution can't be identified. TALsounds captures the stewing within these feelings, the confidence to keep them close and use them for fuel for another fire, without letting confusion or fear of imperfection overtake her.
Love Sick reveals TALsounds as a remarkable anomaly in an era of bedroom producers and laptop-abetted pop projects - capable of sculpting dense fields of sound in live takes and channeling improvised vocal performances into emotional frameworks that betray no defects for their process of instant conception. Quite simply, this way of making music has become second nature for Chami. Distinctions between genres and performance style give way to the clear limitlessness of her musical practice, the experiments of her workaday recording regimen. Her art floats with a body and character not quite identical to her own, pressed into fluid and squeezed of symbolism. TALsounds paints Love Sick from moment to moment with clouds of abstraction and ambiguity, while understanding with some cosmic certainty that this music is the only appropriate form through which to communicate her own depths.
Mono No Aware (もののあわれ) is the first compilation to be released on PAN, collating unreleased ambient tracks from both new and existing PAN artists.
Featuring Jeff Witscher, Helm, TCF, Yves Tumor, M.E.S.H., Pan Daijing, HVAD, Kareem Lotfy, ADR, Mya Gomez, Sky H1, James K, Oli XL, Bill Kouligas, Flora Yin-Wong, Malibu, and AYYA, the compilation moves through more traditional notions of what is called "ambient," to incorporating wider variations that fall under the term.
"Mono no aware," "the pathos of things," also translates as "an empathy toward things," or "a sensitivity to ephemera." A term for the awareness of impermanence, or the transience of things. A meditation on mortality and life's transience, ephemerality heightens the appreciation of beauty and sensitivity to their passing. In investigating the passing of time, the boundaries between memory and hallucination become blurred; between fiction and reality. The movement of time transforms into an eternal present.
After nearly a decade-long recording hiatus, iconic force of nature Diamanda Galás has resurfaced with pair of themed albums of characteristically dark covers and interpretations.  Linked by two different versions of the traditional "O Death," the partially studio-recorded All The Way revisits the familiar territory of classic blues and country while the St. Thomas the Apostle live performance delves into the even more familiar subject of death.  Both albums have their moments of brilliance, but the St. Thomas performance is arguably more accessible, if only because Galás's demonic operatic flourishes  feel a bit more at home in her own arrangements of poems and texts than they do when all that firepower is directed at, say, a Johnny Paycheck song.  Also, it is quite a bit looser and more varied.  Accessibility is quite relative with an artist as simultaneously beloved and polarizing as Galás though, as even the sultriest, sexiest jazz standards can erupt into primal, window-rattling intensity with absolutely no warning.
All the Way kicks off with the studio-recorded title piece, a song that I best remember via Frank Sinatra.  All similarities to Sinatra are strictly limited to the lyrics though, as the sometimes dissonant and erratic avant-jazz piano and Diamanda's alternately hissing and snarling vocals makes the song feel like a bitter and threatening warning from a wronged woman who is probably on her way to go repeatedly stab a happy couple.  Curiously, it gradually becomes somewhat less threatening and a bit more conventionally melodic as it progresses, which is almost more disturbing, as it could mean that menace is slowly becoming mingled with better memories or just that the narrator is prone to unpredictably shifting moods.  In either case, it is quite an unsettling piece and a prime example of the sort of disturbing twists on the torch song genre Galás excels at here, as she subverts the expected kittenish seduction into something that feels a lot more like being mesmerized by a succubus...then being ferociously ripped apart.  Much like the rest of the album, "All the Way" is essentially just Galás alone at a piano (raw and undiluted), though it does offer some rare and subtle studio embellishment in the form of well-placed echoing after-images.
The hot streak that began with "All the Way" continues uninterrupted for the entire first side of the album, as the smoldering "You Don’t Know What Love Is" is especially electrifying.  Galás also returns to the Chet Baker chestnut she so harrowingly interpreted on Malediction and Prayer ("The Thrill is Gone"), but plays it fairly straight this time around, taking a tender and mournful tone rather than a feral one…initially, at least–it takes a hard turn towards the cathartic, maniacal, and obsessive near the end.  I suppose that unpredictable trajectory, aside from her prodigious vocal range and power, is what makes Diamanda's interpretations of these standards so unique: I never know when a Pandora's box of howling anguish is about to be unleashed.  The following foray into Thelonious Monk's "Round Midnight," however, is an unexpected aberration to that trend, as Diamanda gives her throat a brief rest to showcase her mercurial piano virtuosity.  "Round Midnight" proves to be the calm before the storm though, as Galás plunges into the album’s bizarre and eccentric centerpiece, "O Death."  It is a piece that she seems singularly fixated upon, as it appears in live form on both of her new releases in addition to its previous appearance on 2008's Guilty Guilty Guilty.  I suspect it is exactly the kind of piece that separates the serious Diamanda fans from the more faint-hearted dabblers like myself, as its simple piano blues erupts something that sounds like an entire musical theater production or one-woman show condensed into a disorienting 10-minute tour de force of howling, shrieking, and ululating.  I truly do not know what to make of it, as the high points are absolutely face-melting, but it makes for a thoroughly unsettling and challenging listening experience as a whole (Galás even seems to be speaking in tongues at one point).  It feels embarrassingly lazy to observe that Diamanda sounds "possessed," but that is exactly how she sounds during the more unhinged and explosive moments of "O Death."
In theory, that demented freeform hurricane should be an impossible act to follow, but the coda of Johnny Paycheck’s "Pardon Me, I’ve Got Someone to Kill" feels weirdly appropriate.  Naturally, it does not sound at all like the original, as Galás inventively transforms it from vaguely "outlaw country" territory into something resembling a rapturous gospel piece.  It also has an almost conversational tone in places, as if she is cheerfully explaining the liberating pleasures of murdering one's former lover  to a roomful of rapt (yet understandably somewhat confused) children.  After the harrowing eruption of "O Death," nothing could be more perversely welcome.
Galás has made no secret of her love of Maria Callas, so it is fitting that her St. Thomas the Apostle performance opens with a dose of relatively pure opera in the form of her own adaptation of a text by Cesare Pavese.Although it roughly translates as "Death Will Come and Will Have Your Eyes," it is not nearly as terrifying as some of Galás's jazz standards, opting instead for a kind of ghostly beauty.  Much like All the Way, the Pavese piece and the seven other songs that follow all feature Galás alone at her piano, which suits the material just fine.  This album feels a bit more loose, improvised, tender, and informal though, as if I am listening in on Diamanda playing late at night in her living room after a couple glasses of wine (rather than listening to her channel an intense parade of murderous seductresses and spurned lovers).  That casual charm extends to the eclectic nature of the selections as well–though death is the unwavering theme, Galás effortlessly shifts languages and moods from song to song.  For example, "Anoixe Petra" sounds like a rousing Greek wake, while her cover of Albert Ayler's "Angels" sounds like a meandering gospel piece that intermittently erupts into atypically joyful upper-register vocal pyrotechnics.  It is nice to hear some major chords every once in a while, as darkness needs contrast to make its full impact.
Despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that I was actually at one of the two Harlem shows, I did not have particularly high expectations for At Saint Thomas The Apostle, as I generally find live albums extraneous and indulgent.  More importantly, watching Diamanda perform live is a singularly mesmerizing and profound experience–one that I knew could not possibly be approximated by a mere recording.  This album offers quite an appealing and surprisingly intimate consolation prize though, as Galás feels less like An Important Artist Creating Important Art and more like a charismatic creative supernova unselfconsciously and joyously burning through all of her favorite songs for a church full of devoted fans.  Naturally, Galás's more terrifying, intense, and iconic work will continue to be her legacy, but Saint Thomas the Apostle is probably the best entry point to her singularly uncompromising oeuvre that anyone could ever hope for…aside from, of course, attending one of her actual performances: anyone who can walk away from one of those unmoved is categorically dead inside.
I have an unfortunate tendency to take Sarah Lipstate's work for granted, as if it is somehow not enough that she is one of the most distinctive and inventive solo guitarists currently active.  Part of that is her own fault, as she periodically produces work so beautiful and sublime that she transcends her role as guitarist and instead seems like one of the most compelling artists around.  Those are the moments that I am always chasing and I have not experienced one since the title piece on 2013's No Dreams.  Happily, Pink Sunset manages to floor me once more with "Deep Shelter."  There are a few other memorable moments on this solid and likeable album as well, but not quite enough to disabuse me of my belief that Lipstate is gradually accumulating the material for an absolutely stunning greatest hits album at a rate of one fresh masterpiece every few years.
Pink Sunset boldly opens with the aforementioned "Deep Shelter," which is an absolutely lush and gorgeous swirl of dreampop heaven.  Lipstate does absolutely everything right, chiseling a perfect gem of languorous shimmer, cool harmonized guitars, and delirious eruptions of striking melodies.  While it admittedly sets the bar impossibly high for the rest of the album, it also sets a compellingly eclectic template that yields intermittently wonderful results.  For one, Pink Sunset seems to be a compositional leap forward from the transitional-seeming Fantastic Planet, as Lipstate has now fully left the more abstract drone/soundscape aesthetic of her past behind in favor of more tightly structured "songs" with hooks.  As "Deep Shelter" shows, she undeniably has an impressive talent in that regard, but there is also something deeper and stranger going on in these songs than mere skilled songcraft: Lipstate seems to be a preternaturally gifted sonic magpie, casually appropriating tropes from eclectic and more difficult genres and seamlessly working them into her own Romantic pop concoctions.  Pink Sunset is littered with moments that sound like an alternate reality Cocteau Twins where Robin Guthrie was a massive prog, classical, and Iron Maiden fan.  Similarly, Lipstate deftly avoids the navel-gazing, indulgence, and melancholy that dog so much material in this vein, replacing mopery with cool confidence, clarity, and focus.  From a compositional standpoint, I love the tight structure, brisk pace, and complete lack of clutter, though a bit more snarl and grit would have been quite welcome.
"Deep Shelter" aside, Pink Sunset mostly feels like a gauzy, 4AD-damaged hall of mirrors, unfolding as a series of dreamy, delicate interludes that occasionally blossom into something with a bit more heft.  While it is easy to forget that Lipstate is primarily a solo guitarist with an experimental bent when she is at her best and most transcendent, Sunset is still unsurprisingly populated with a number of guitar-centric vignettes.  The title piece is one of the more striking works in that vein, as its gentle and pretty foundation of limpid arpeggios unexpectedly explodes into thick, distorted chords and a muted haze of dissonant and hallucinatory pedal-abuse.  I personally prefer some of the more adventurous later pieces on the album, however–particularly "Trails and Trials," which sounds a lot like Emeralds covering the baroque pop of Kate Bush.  Lipstate does an especially fine job with orchestration and balancing dynamics and textures that piece, embellishing her dense, distorted central melody with a vibrant backdrop of ringing arpeggios, complementary melodic motifs, and well-timed stabs of strings.  The brief and ghostly "Corridors" is yet another minor classic, as a subtly muted and minor key motif unfolds beneath a spectral haze of harmonics or feedback.  It has a very neo-classical feel, but intriguingly subverts that with a strong chorus and some wonderfully ragged-sounding string-bends.  The best part is definitely the spectral haze though, as "Corridors" is a master class in nuanced coloration and shifting mood.  The elegantly warped closer "Emergence" is yet another stand-out, weaving a woozy reverie from a disparate battery of alternately fat, artificial-sounding tones and rippling layers of fragility.
Trying to assess how Pink Sunset fits into Lipstate's oeuvre is a bit tricky, however.  On the hand, it feels like a major creative breakthrough and "Deep Shelter" is easily one of the finest Noveller songs ever recorded (and probably one of the finest songs anyone at all will release in 2017).  On the other hand, most of the album is merely pleasant and misstep-free and Lipstate's increasing shift towards meticulously crafted crystalline perfection is pulling her away from my personal aesthetic and closer to wider accessibility.  That is great for Lipstate, as catering to my taste would ensure a life of poverty and obscurity, but I still prefer more abstract and immersive earlier albums such as Glacial Glow.  That said, I am delighted that Lipstate is taking risks and restlessly evolving rather than repeating herself, especially since she is doing it so distinctively and with such an intuitive grasp of songcraft.  As such, Pink Sunset is both essential for fans and an appealing gateway for the curious, as it is a Noveller album like no other.
The plain, unmarked white shell and clinical titling of break_fold's debut certainly adds a mysterious quality to this project. There is no hint as to what to expect musically, and that alone always makes me curious. That ambiguity carries onto the tape itself, in the form of complex and diverse beat heavy electronics that excels as much in mood and texture as it does in pleasant melodies and memorable rhythms.
I had a very unfortunate false start with Gnod, as the first time I heard them, I mistakenly concluded that they were basically the UK version of White Hills rather than a deeply radical and experimental entity of Swans-like intensity.  With the benefit of hindsight, I have since embraced them as one of the single most exciting forces to emerge from the underground in recent years.  Thankfully, no one at all will be likely to repeat my mistake after hearing Just Say No, though it admittedly tones down the band’s more arty and indulgent tendencies quite a bit in service of visceral brute force (the album title provides a very unambiguous clue as to the band's current mindset). Of course, as much as I enjoy raw power, punk energy, and hardcore fury on their own, the beauty of this album lies in how brilliantly Gnod manage to blend heavy music with their longstanding Krautrock and psych fascinations, enhancing the expected monster riffs with bulldozing no-frills repetition, seismic percussion grooves, Gang of Four-style minimalism, and a wonderful textural chaos of electronics and radio broadcasts.
After nearly a decade-long recording hiatus, iconic force of nature Diamanda Galás has resurfaced with pair of themed albums of characteristically dark covers and interpretations.  Linked by two different versions of the traditional "O Death," the partially studio-recorded All The Way revisits the familiar territory of classic blues and country while the St. Thomas the Apostle live performance delves into the even more familiar subject of death.  Both albums have their moments of brilliance, but the St. Thomas performance is arguably more accessible, if only because Galás's demonic operatic flourishes  feel a bit more at home in her own arrangements of poems and texts than they do when all that firepower is directed at, say, a Johnny Paycheck song.  Also, it is quite a bit looser and more varied.  Accessibility is quite relative with an artist as simultaneously beloved and polarizing as Galás though, as even the sultriest, sexiest jazz standards can erupt into primal, window-rattling intensity with absolutely no warning.
I have an unfortunate tendency to take Sarah Lipstate's work for granted, as if it is somehow not enough that she is one of the most distinctive and inventive solo guitarists currently active.  Part of that is her own fault, as she periodically produces work so beautiful and sublime that she transcends her role as guitarist and instead seems like one of the most compelling artists around.  Those are the moments that I am always chasing and I have not experienced one since the title piece on 2013's No Dreams.  Happily, Pink Sunset manages to floor me once more with "Deep Shelter."  There are a few other memorable moments on this solid and likeable album as well, but not quite enough to disabuse me of my belief that Lipstate is gradually accumulating the material for an absolutely stunning greatest hits album at a rate of one fresh masterpiece every few years.
