22 January 2017

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Albums and Singles

Rashad Becker’s 2013 debut album was a singular and radical work of art, resembling nothing less than field recordings from a sinister extra-dimensional jungle.  For this follow-up, however, he apparently opted not to try to blow my mind a second time and instead just deepened and expanded upon what he had already done previously.  Naturally, the second volume is every bit as deranged and wrong-sounding as the first, so my favorite hallucinatory and Lovecraftian aural nightmare essentially just became twice as long.  I am quite fine with that state of affairs.

PAN

Much like its predecessor, the pieces that comprise Traditional Music of Notional Species Vol. II are divided into two categories: themes and dances.  While the line between them can be a bit blurry, the "dance" pieces tend to have a little bit more in the way of structure, such as the menacing and mechanized-sounding throb that relentlessly moves forward beneath the cacophonous skwonks and buzzes of "Dances VI."  Curiously, however, "Themes VII" boasts a weirdly staggering rhythm that feels more danceable than any of the designated dances.  Such odd inconsistencies are inconsequential with an aesthetic as alien and abstract as this one though.  (Un)naturally, the actual sounds are every bit as wrong-sounding and unnervingly organic as those of the first volume and similarly difficult to comprehend.  For the most part, however, it sounds like this album is primarily the fruit of an inventively misused modular synthesizer, though Becker largely avoids anything that resembles a patch, pattern, melody, or chord.  Instead, the surreal chorus of blurts and jabberings feels like a field recording that has been digitized and rendered quite sickly and weird.  Granted, plenty of musicians have tried to conjure up the craziest and ugliest sounds imaginable, but Becker is truly on another level altogether, going far beyond the pale with his ambition, imagination, unwavering thematic commitment, and the visceral and crystalline clarity of his engineering.  This is a vibrant and fully formed sound world like nothing else.

It is hard to choose a favorite piece, as the primary appeal of this album is that Becker basically dropped me in the middle of a seething, gibbering, and absolutely otherworldly miasma.  Consequently, it feels somewhat silly to champion one vignette of squelching, belching, and squirming weirdness over another.  Few albums are as audaciously and willfully inaccessible as this one, yet it is so boldly imaginative, richly textured, and disquietingly evocative that it is an endlessly fascinating rabbit hole to get lost in.  Still, some of these bizarre fever dreams are admittedly more striking than others, such as the opening "Themes V" which slowly transforms a plinking and metallic percussive motif into an increasingly dense and gnarled eruption of elephantine swoops and growls.  The aforementioned "Themes VII" is also quite memorable, resembling a mutant tango mingled with a chorus of gibbering wildlife and ugly, wobbly synth moans in the vein of Throbbing Gristle’s "Hamburger Lady."

While this exactly the kind of album that I spend every year waiting for, it is certainly not going to be for everybody and I can accept that there are some perceivable flaws.  I will not accept "deeply inaccessible and weird" as one of them, of course, but these eight pieces definitely feel like a kaleidoscopic and lysergic hall of mirrors that does not ever evolve in any sort of conventional compositional way.  To my ears, however, any conspicuous traces of human intervention would completely ruin the vibrant and unnerving illusion that Becker so painstakingly crafted.  As far as I am concerned, his judgment was entirely unerring: he set out to make something completely unique, deranged, and alien-sounding and he succeeded beautifully.  And then he had the good sense not to fuck it up by over-egging the pudding.  If Chris Watson could make a field recording of squelching, gurgling, and slithering cosmic horror, it would probably sound an awful lot like this.  Since he presumably cannot and will not do that anytime soon, Rashad Becker's work is probably the closest thing we currently have to a disturbing glimpse through a rupture in the fabric of reality.  Cherish it appropriately.

• Themes V
• Themes VII
• Dances VI

 

22 January 2017

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Albums and Singles

Few current artists are as consistent and reliably absorbing as William Basinski, as he has carved a wonderful career out of conjuring work of hypnotic beauty from simple, well-chosen snippets from his backlog of decaying tapes.  It is not nearly as simple a formula as it sounds, but Basinski always manages to make it look effortless anyway.  Recently, however, he seems to have become a bit restless with that aesthetic, as he transformed the more traditionally Basinski-esque The Cascade into The Deluge with the aid of some feedback loops of varying lengths.  A Shadow in Time is an even more radical leap forward, as the title piece feels like a pile-up of blurred tape loops woven into a vibrantly shifting composition.  The other piece, Basinski's gorgeous tribute to David Bowie, is admittedly a bit less adventurous in structure, but is not devoid of unexpected twists either.

Temporary Residence

The opening "A Shadow in Time" does not waste any time at all in establishing that Basinski has some new ideas to share, as the murkily pulsing synth drones are quickly embellished with a series of very composed-sounding swells of ghostly sounding feedback or harmonics.  Also, the underlying drones gradually accumulate additional layers, additional density, and some subtly dissonant and grinding metallic textures, so it is almost instantly impossible to tell how many loops are involved, how long they are, and how much of the piece is not culled from loops at all.  If Basinski played anything in real-time (and it seems he did), he certainly did an admirable job in making it sound every bit as gauzy and distressed as his old tapes.  Also of note: the piece feels quite a bit more amorphous than a lot of Basinski’s work, as there is no immediately graspable melody or satisfying chord progression amidst the swirling ocean of drones and tape hiss.  Normally, a conspicuous lack of structure or hooks would be a bad thing, but "Shadow" actually represents a bold step forward compositionally, as the harsher, grinding textures give the piece an ominous sense of menace to hold my attention while a dark and shifting undercurrent sneakily takes form.  As such, it is definitely not one of Basinski's more immediately gratifying pieces, but it gradually revealed itself to be quite subtle, heavy, and ingenious once I listened to it enough for everything to fully sink in.  While the comparatively placid fade-out perhaps overstays its welcome a bit, the best parts of "Shadow" feel like a sinister black cloud billowing up through a deceptively calm sea.

"For David Robert Jones" on the other hand, initially feels like business as usual, as a warm and dreamlike loop endlessly repeats with minimal embellishment.  In fact, it is not unlike the gorgeous melancholy of Basinski's classic 92982 album, resembling a blurred and gently hallucinatory choral mass.  That is probably the side of Basinski's artistry that I love the best, but "For David Robert Jones" unexpectedly develops into something a bit more than a heavenly, "locked groove" elegy, as something that sounds like a tape-distressed saxophone hook erupts from the bliss-fog about a third of the way through the piece.  The delayed introduction of a bold new motif is not a common Basinski trope at all, so it makes for a comparatively vibrant splash of color and nicely deepens the emotional richness of the piece.  While that turns out to be the final significant surprise that Basinski has up his sleeve for the album, he makes the interesting choice of juxtaposing the beginning of that hook with a repeating wrong-sounding note.  Weirdly, that one sour note is what elevates the piece into something truly special for me, as a slightly curdled version of lush melancholia is considerably more intriguing and mysterious than pure sonic heaven with no sharp edges to watch out for.

As an album, A Shadow in Time has a lot going for it and certainly claims a place among Basinski's stronger releases.  First and foremost, "For David Robert Jones" is easily one of the most beautiful pieces that he has ever recorded. The title piece is not quite on the same level, but it is no less significant.  While my deep appreciation for William Basinski's work is well-documented, it is not an unconditional love–he can only explore variations of familiar themes so many times before they start to yield diminishing returns for me (and presumably for him as well), so it is encouraging to see a promising step in a different direction.  I have no idea if "A Shadow in Time" represents the way forward for Basinski, but I am definitely eager to see where it leads.  In the meantime, it is refreshing to hear something outside the norm and an unexpected treat to see Basinski in more overt "composer" mode.  Given that his treasure trove of damaged tapes turned out to be such career-defining, once-in-a-lifetime lightning bolt of inspiration, it is far too easy to forget that Basinski is more than someone with limitless patience and a golden ear: he was a gifted musician and composer long before The Disintegration Loops changed everything for him and that person has not gone anywhere.

Samples:

• A Shadow in Time
• For David Robert Jones (excerpt one)
• For David Robert Jones (excerpt two)

 

 

22 January 2017

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Albums and Singles

This is a long-awaited CD reissue of a largely unheard 45 RPM art edition LP from 2014. Although the idea of getting a small Steven Stapleton painting with an album was certainly appealing at the time, I was understandably a bit apprehensive about buying an expensive album that could easily turn out to just be a bunch of regurgitated studio scraps or live recordings.  I passed.  As it turns out, however, The Great Ecstasy was (and is) actually a surprisingly excellent and cohesive album.  More importantly, this reissue appends another great rarity to the original release in the form of Silver Bromide's "Circles of Confusion," which is one of my favorite NWW pieces in years.  Given that copies of Silver Bromide are currently going for $1500, this humble CD holds an awful lot of appeal.

United Dirter

In classically cryptic Stapleton fashion, The Great Ecstasy of the Basic Corrupt offers no real information other than the track titles, but the line-up is rumored to be just Stapleton and Andrew Liles.  I am happy to accept that, as the pieces themselves do not offer much in the way of any further clues: each of these three 20-minute pieces sounds like it could stylistically be the work of a completely different band, though there is an admirable consistency in both mood and pacing that unites them.

The opening "No Meat for the Dogma" is a nice bit of menacing Eastern drone built upon a sinister-sounding two-chord bed of buzzing tambura or sitar.  It seems like Liles had an especially prominent role, as the foreground is devoted to a fitfully unfolding and surprisingly musical harpsichord solo that sounds like something an especially sensitive and melancholy vampire might play alone in his castle in one of his darker moods.  Since I cannot picture Steven Stapleton ever playing a harpsichord, he presumably focused upon the nightmarish and hallucinatory drone-blossoms that bleed together and undulate in the periphery.  It is quite a wonderful piece that would lend itself well to a La Monte Young-style marathon performance (or one of NWW’s own sleep concerts), as it feels like it could endlessly ebb and flow forever without getting boring.  The other piece from the original album, "Feed the Loathing," is a bit more minimal and understated at first, but nicely continues the theme of psychotropic droning–in fact, Coil’s Time Machines initially springs to mind as an apt reference point. The piece quickly evolves beyond its foundation of slow, hypnotic pulsing though, adding in some haunted-sounding atmospherics in the form of mysterious creaks, metallic washes and clatters, discordant chimes, and tense swells of "horror movie" synths.  Much like "Dogma," it is not exactly a structured and evolving composition so much as it is a rich, shifting, and evocative tapestry of ominous ambiance, albeit one a bit more intent on conveying an escalating sense of dread.  More than anything, "Feed the Loathing" feels like the soundtrack to a paranoid and sleepless night in a remote cabin.

Silver Bromide's "Circles of Confusion" is a different animal altogether, though it is similarly restrained and slow-burning.  The big difference is that "Circles" sounds like the work of a brilliant psych-rock band with seemingly limitless patience.  It opens with a loop of a beautifully lilting snarl of feedback that repeats several times before a simple two-note bass line chimes in to mirror it.  As with "No Meat for the Dogma," it is the kind of perfect and elegantly minimal motif that could be hypnotically repeated forever, but even more so.  Tempting as it may have been, however, Liles and Stapleton did not just leave the piece on autopilot.  Rather, they imaginatively embellish their glacially unfolding groove with a bevy of guitar-like noises worthy of Sonic Youth: clattering de-tuned strings, warbling and oscillating overtones, and some unexpectedly poignant swells of feedback.  Another big difference is the mood, as "Circles" completely eschews any sense of menace for a sustained reverie of bittersweet and dreamlike beauty. Gradually, it blossoms into a somewhat straightforward and sustain-heavy guitar solo, losing a bit of its brilliantly deconstructionist otherness, but it is still quite an all-around stellar piece.

Obviously, long-time NWW fans are going to pounce on this album regardless of what any reviews say, as both Great Ecstasy and Silver Bromide (along with Xerography) are among the most maddeningly elusive releases in NWW's entire discography.  The good news is that they will definitely not be disappointed at all when they finally hear these pieces for the first time.  I know I certainly was not.  There are admittedly some other NWW eras that I prefer to this one, but I do very much enjoy what Stapleton and his collaborators have been up to in recent years and this feels like an atypically strong and painstakingly crafted batch of songs.  I did not expect that at all for releases that were issued in such small editions.  In particular, the wonderful "Circles of Confusion" is a revelation, as it does not sound like anything else that I have yet heard from either NWW or Liles.  In fact, if it had been recorded by someone like My Bloody Valentine (not an absolutely insane stretch) as an experimental b-side tucked away on some single, it would probably be widely revered as a left-field noise-guitar masterpiece.  Thankfully, songs do not have feelings, so it is perfectly fine that "Circles" will instead lead a quiet life as an unexpected gem on an obscure but extremely satisfying NWW reissue.

Samples:

• No Meat for the Dogma
• Feed the Loathing
• Circles of Confusion

 

15 January 2017

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Albums and Singles

Japanese legend Keiji Haino meets two of Belgium's most active and valued musicians: Jozef Dumoulin- keyboards (Lilly Joel) and Teun Verbruggen - drums (Othin Spake).

The Miracles Of Only One Thing is a deep and intense testimony of this meeting. Keiji Haino - without any doubt one of the most important musicians from the Japanese underground scene, is at his best.

Teun Verbruggen (drums & electronics) and Jozef Dumoulin (keyboards & electronics) did a 3-week tour in Japan in Sept 2015 playing concerts in duo, but also solo and with local musicians. One of those musicians was hero Keiji Haino, whose work has included rock, free improvisation, noise, percussion, psychedelic music, minimalism and drones. Besides his legendary bands Fushitsusha and Lost Aaraaff, he has worked with artists and bands like Boris, The Melvins, Jim O'Rourke, Oren Ambarchi, Peter Brötzmann and Steve Noble.

As for Dumoulin and Verbruggen, they are both known for their always refreshing and groundbreaking work that breaks up the barriers between free improvisation, electro, jazz and more. Jozef Dumoulin is part of the duo Lilly Joel appearing recently on Sub Rosa (SR416).

The three teamed up for a studio recording and a recorded live-show. Out of all the material, they distilled an album that reflects both the excitement of the new bond as well as the deep and vast sonic landscapes that their joined forces laid bare.

More information can be found here.

15 January 2017

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Albums and Singles

Timely outing from two grand masters of exploratory electronics. Kassel Jaeger is the moniker of French musician François Bonnet who works at the GRM and has released a number of books including the highly regarded The Order of Sounds, A Sonorous Archipelago published by Urbanomic in 2016. Jim O’Rourke is known to most through his explorations of the song and shapes, the high and low, the east and south.

Wakes on Cerulean is a joint adventure where process folds upon process and the operation of procedure remains unknown. Amongst a mysterious cloud of excited high frequencies tiny whistling howls. Frog leaps in technique lay out a thrilling and uplifting journey that runs from the soothing to ecstatic and back to the buoyant again.

Wakes on Cerulean is a staggering feast of the joys found in electronic process. A malleable bubble of hovering excitement, melody and joyous refrain.

More information can be found here.

15 January 2017

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Albums and Singles

Staalplaat's tireless trawl through Bryn Jones's endless archive yielded yet another fine pair of releases to close out 2016.  Jerusalaam, the stronger and more traditionally Muslimgauze-esque of the two,  is not so much a new find as it is a straight-up reissue of the fourth album from 1998's Tandoori Dog boxed set.  However, that absorbing and varied release is expanded with a couple of lengthy unused pieces recorded for the Return of Black September album.  The much stranger Mohammad Ali Jinnah album has an even more perplexing and convoluted provenance, as it is basically an alternate version of 2002's Sarin Israel Nes Ziona, with significant variations in sequence and song lengths.  Staalplaat rightly describes it as "a release unlike anything else in Jones' discography," as classic Muslimgauze fare rubs elbows with some rather spirited forays into frayed breakbeats, experiments in obsessive repetition, and four-on-the-floor house thump.

Staalplaat

My interest in Staalplaat's Muslimgauze archive has alternately waxed and waned quite a bit since its inception, but I have definitely found myself appreciating the curatorial decisions quite a bit more than usual lately.  As I get deeper and deeper in Bryn Jones's oeuvre, it has become clear that there were definitely brief periods of white-hot inspiration mingled with work that does not feel particularly visionary or crucial by 2017 standards.  To their credit, Staalplaat have been doing a stellar job digging into and expanding upon the body of work that still feels fresh and contemporary today.  Also, my exasperation over the sheer volume and repetition of the Muslimgauze discography has unexpectedly dissipated quite a bit as well.  Case in point: the Mohammad Ali Jinnah album is essentially the Sarin Israel Nes Ziona album obsessively tweaked and reworked by Jones as he restlessly awaited Sarin's release.  Naturally, there is a lot of duplication and redundancy between the albums, but given how insanely sprawling the Muslmgauze discography is, it is probably safe to say that plenty of fans that have never heard Sarin and now they probably do not need to, unless they are floored by Mohammad Ali Jinnah and desperately crave more of the same.  It is certainly confusing, but there is no harm in supplanting previous releases if the newer incarnations are good.  This one is good.

Understandably, most of Mohammad Ali Jinnah's best pieces were already present on Sarin, though many reappear in altered form.  For example, the manically kinetic and digitally burbling "Imam Fainted" has been wisely stretched from just over a minute to over three minutes.  The obsessive and sputtering locked groove brilliance of "Yousif Water Pipe Habit" is similarly expanded for good reason.  The album's most classic piece ("Rafia, In Her Voluminous Black Tent") stays roughly the same though.  Notably, "Rafia" is not radically different in structure from any of the other pieces, as just about all of Mohammad is devoted to simple percussive vamps with a minimal melodic hook and some peripheral snatches of field recordings.  Sometimes there are also sputtering and sizzling dub-wise production disruptions as well.  The key difference is primarily just that "Rafia" has the coolest and most sensuous groove on the album.  The crackling, head-bobbing rhythm of "Zahir Din, Cab Driver of Zind" and the blown-out clattering of "Kurds Eye View" are also stand-outs, but they mostly adhere to the expected template.  It is easy to see how Jones was able to churn this stuff out on an industrial scale given the "Ok, this loop goes with this beat-done!" approach clearly employed here, but the clarity and simplicity of the process does not make the end results any less effective.

While "Rafia" is probably the only legitimately essential piece on the album, the real appeal for me lies in the sheer exuberance and the unexpected pop influences present in some of the other material: roughly half of Mohammad feels like business as usual, but the rest feels like a very strange and fun party.  In particular, the relentlessly insistent beat of "Abu Kaff, Your Guide Around A West Bank Bedouin Shack" is an especially entertaining treat, even if the actual music feels kind of like an afterthought.  I think Bryn basically just came up with the perfect beat and hit "play." "Because He Had A Mustache And Beard, They Thought He Was An Arab" is a similarly successful attempt at a floor-filling club banger, though it is fleshed out a bit more with a cool backwards string melody and some echoing and unexpected stops.  Elsewhere, "Abdullah Kosher Halal" feels like Jones attempted to apply his dub techniques to hip-hop with interesting and fitfully successful results.  Those pieces are what make Mohammad such a genuinely fun and worthwhile release, as there are already plenty of great Muslimgauze songs and albums out there in the world, but not many that capture Bryn Jones in full-on party mode.

Samples:

• Rafia, In Her Voluminous Black Tent
• Yousif Water Pipe Habit
• Abu Kaff, Your Guide Around a West Bank Bedouin Shack

By contrast, Jerusalaam feels like an album where Jones had a very clear vision and poured considerable time and care into realizing it.  That makes sense, as the Tandoori Dog vinyl boxed set is one of the more ambitious and significant releases in the Muslimgauze canon, even if I have not exactly loved all of the previous reissues from it.  I guess Staalplaat saved the best for last, as Jerusalaam is the final of the four original LPs to finally be reissued as a stand-alone album.

Stylistically, it is not a far cry from the bulk of Mohammad Ali Jinnah, albeit with all of the contemporary dance elements excised.  Instead, there is plenty of traditional hand-percussion, thick and distorted bass, drifting field recordings, and exotic snatches of melody.  In short, all the elements of a classic Muslimgauze album are in place and in sharply realized and vibrantly percussive form.  Also, there is a minimum of filler and atmospheric meandering to boot.  This is a strong collection of fully formed and thematically coherent songs that feel like they belong together.  That is certainly not something that I can say about every Muslimgauze album, even the ones that were not compiled posthumously.  The crown jewel from the original album is probably the woozily dissonant and off-kilter groove of "Under the Burka," which somehow manages to sound simultaneously sinister and clunkily infectious.  Also, its deep and fuzzed out sub-bass sounds like it could have been recorded today.  Another great piece (after a bizarre and unrelated-sounding intro) is the sexy and understatedly beautiful "Sufiq Gulf Breeze 1-2."

Elsewhere, I was quite fond of the reckless and disjointed "Lime Green Turban Gang," which is based upon an obsessively repeated and dramatic string loop, but is jarringly disrupted by unexpected volume shifts and blown-out, in-the-red textures.  Also, it sounds like most of the song is pushed so far into the background that it seems like another song altogether playing in a separate room–it is a very strange piece indeed.  If Jerusalaam had not been an actual album that Jones created in his lifetime, I would swear that "Gang" was just an unfinished sketch in the very early stages of songhood.  Bryn definitely made a lot of bizarre and adventurous decisions with this album, but that is probably why it works: Jerusalaam is not necessarily packed full of Muslimgauze’s greatest motifs, but there is a hell of a lot happening here and almost all of it is interesting.  I could listen to Bryn Jones mangle and twist his grooves all day long.

That said, I am still quite grateful that this version of Jerusalaam also includes one of Muslimgauze’s greatest extended motifs in the form of an orphan from the Return of Black September album.  Clocking in at about 15 minutes, the first of the two identically named pieces more or less steals the entire show, unfolding as a shifting, slow-burning, and hallucinatory ride cymbal groove.  Snatches of dialogue fade in and fade out and echo away into oblivion while the beat unpredictably dissolves and re-coheres again and again.  In fact, for the longest time, it just feels like Bryn just spontaneously erupted into a simmering drum solo alone in his room, but a subtly haunting two-chord progression kicks in around the half-way point to give a hint of structure and darken the mood.  Unlike most Muslimgauze pieces, however, the structure never fully locks in, so the piece evolves like an organically unfolding, richly vibrant, and half-menacing/half-beautiful dream.  Curiously, the second "Unused Return Of Black September" is a very different, lesser, and perversely placid piece, though several of the components seem to be the same.

Much like with Mohammad Ali Jinnah, Jerusalaam probably only has one truly essential piece to make it stand-out ("Black September," of course), but there are a handful of other legitimately great pieces here as well.  While there are probably other Muslimgauze songs out there that sound a hell of a lot like some of them, the cumulative effect is still quite impressive.  More significantly, I find the sheer depth, dynamic variety, and passion for experimentation here even more compelling than the unusually high volume of strong "singles."  While I do not think Jerusalaam is quite a stone-cold classic, it is quite a remarkably good album and it strikes a perfect balance between immediately gratifying hooks and absorbingly complex experimentation.  Some Muslimgauze albums are easy to wrap my head around in just one or two listens, but this one is a bit more mysterious than most. I appreciate that.

Samples:

• Sufiq Gulf Breeze 1-2
• Lime Green Turban Gang
• Unused Return of Black September

 

10 January 2017

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Albums and Singles

This Is The Wind That Blows It Out Pre-order:
http://thrilljockey.com/products/this-is-the-wind-that-blows-it-out

08 January 2017

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Albums and Singles

I think at some point in the near future Richard Chartier will be releasing new material under his own name again, but as of late his focus has been on his Pinkcourtesyphone project. There are similarities between the two monikers, but PCP tends to eschew the conceptual academics of his other work for the sake of tongue-in-cheek kitchiness, but still is an unabashed showcase for his subtle touch when it comes to performance and composition. Additionally, this new record shows him honing his craft even more, making for his most fully realized album to date.

Editions Mego

While I assume the title of the record is meant to be somewhat facetious, Taking Into Account Only a Portion of Your Emotions is actually the record I have felt that conveys emotions the most compared to others in the PCP catalog.Of course this is is entirely relative to the nature of the project, and the aforementioned emotions seem tapered by Xanax and red wine, leaving the emotions conveyed defined in the loosest of senses.

For example, opener "New Domestic Landscape" brings a bit more of a dark side to the album, with its cavernous sonics and occasionally menacing electronic scrape.As a whole the piece is sparse in construction, but the occasional clattering passage and frequently shifting dynamics keep it active, which contrasts with my interpretation of the title as a commentary on the mundane life of the 1950s housewife. Heavy stabs of what could be choral samples pepper the otherwise lighter sounding "High End Smalls", but with the inclusion of slowly twinkling melodies and voices that appear at the end, the piece as a whole is more unsettling and disorienting than it would seem at first.

There is a more inviting mood that leads off "Reference Point Intermission 1", with its shimmering opening tones.The fragments of voice do give the piece a creepy edge, but as a whole it is a more comfortable piece, where sweeping passages of drama keep it fresh, but the hypnotic repetition that Chartier builds upon is still very captivating.The companion piece, "Reference Point Intermission 2" sits somewhere between the lighter and darker moments of the record, in a sustained humming drone suspended in gauzy passages of sound.It again sees Chartier going for a more repetitive structure, but the far off gurgling noise makes for a tasteful, diverse accent.

The album's high point, and one of the most powerful works Chartier has done ever,is the nearly 17 minute closer "Schlaflied (für PvK)".Composed as a memorial for one of his dearly loved cats, the sense of sadness pervades the entire work, more poignant and direct than before.Based upon a simple, sad melodic progression, he blends in a multitude of additional textures and tones carefully through the mix.A bit of crackle here, a heartbeat like passage there, it all comes together in a beautiful, yet very melancholy piece that is amongst the most fascinating he has ever done.

As a follow up to last year’s somewhat terse vinyl release Sentimental Something, Taking Into Account… is a more sprawling endeavor, with lengthier pieces that would not as easily have fit on a traditional vinyl record. But this is Richard Chartier, an artist who has never had a problem working with an extended canvas, and that is all the more explicitly clear here.There are definite highs and lows, frustration and sadness to be heard within the pink fog of this album, which just makes it all the more compelling to listen to.

samples:

• New Domestic Landscape
• High End Smalls
• Schlaflied (f√ºr PvK)

 

08 January 2017

Administrator

Albums and Singles

For Eric Hardiman’s Rambutan project, 2016 was an uncharacteristically quiet year. This new tape from the Upstate New York multi-instrumental experimentalist did not appear until November, and as best as I can tell it was the only release of the year. Perhaps that singular focus on this album was a good thing, because Universal Impulses is another fascinating release, up there with Remember Me Now and Inverted Summer as a complex, beautiful and mysterious work.

These Are Not Records

The instrumentation Hardiman utilizes throughout this tape are, as usual, rather ambiguous.The brief opening piece "Aside from What Matters" seems to be built from a slightly malignant sounding bit of scraped guitar playing.It stays as a repeating element to which more dissonant electronics are added, to the point that the piece eventually dissolves into a melodic mass of decay.Beyond that, however, the instrumentation is most definitely less apparent.

It is that juxtaposition between melody and noise that Hardiman does consistently through these seven compositions that gives Universal Impulses its greatest strengths.For "The Slow Pulse," he leads off with a bit of aggressive, dense noise that obscures a churning foundation that eventually takes the focus.With its subtle panning and processing and low, pulsing passage of what may be bass guitar, it overall feels reminiscent of Motion Pool era Main with its hint of traditional music scattered throughout the more fragmented moments.

A bit of crackling on "Backwards to Never" acts almost as a rhythmic backing track to which a subtle melody is added.The aforementioned melody eventually swells to a more distorted outburst and takes on a humming drone-like quality to shift things up very well before closing on a gentle, soothing fade out."Inside the Minute" has Hardiman pairing an almost marimba like base layer to which he adds scraping noises and bells, and enshrouds the entire thing in a wonderfully murky ambience that adds just the right amount of obtuseness.

The album culminates effectively in the nine and a half minute conclusion "Surface Elevation."At first a combination of filtered bell like tones and random noises, sputtering bits of radio static are slowly mixed in.He again keeps a repeating melodic layer the focus, suspended by a grimy accent of audio dirt.The pace is slow but piece opens and envelopes beautifully.The weird clipping effect that appears, sounding almost like a rat or insect, is a bit unsettling, but as a whole it is a wonderful, if occasionally bleak sounding piece to end an already powerful album on.

Besides this balance between melody and noise, Eric Hardiman's Rambutan also excels on this tape with the sheer dynamics of his sound.The pieces are never disjointed or inconsistent, but never overstay their welcome either.He keeps elements constant long enough to be appreciated, but not so much that they start to feel dull or repetitive.Because of that, repeated playing results in a work that unravels more and more of its secrets each time, but always seems to maintain a sense of being a mystery that is never entirely solved.

samples:

• Aside From What Matters
• The Slow Pulse
• Surface Elevation

 

08 January 2017

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Richard Skelton was atypically quiet in 2016, as he and Autumn Richardson seemed to be focusing primarily upon their publishing ventures, poetry, visual art, and Skelton's esoteric and multifarious research projects.  Fortunately, however, the duo managed to release this EP in December to accompany a series of collages they completed during a month-long residency in the Orkneys.  While it only clocks in at a lean 20 minutes, Earth by Means of the Currents is one of the more focused and powerful releases in the duo’s collaborative oeuvre, featuring both a solid foray into their warmly beautiful drone comfort zone and a buzzing, gnarled plunge into its negative image.

Corbel Stone Press/Aeolian Editions

In classic Skelton fashion, the residency where this album was birthed was both hyper-specific and geological in nature, as this work is part of a commission for ØY, a "festival of island magnetism."  Since this EP is not a radical divergence from typical *AR fare, it is unclear how much that commission directly shaped the couple's musical decisions, though there are apparently field recordings from Papa Westray used throughout the album.  I suspect most of them are well-concealed and subtle textural touches, however, as I could only pick out the sound of waves washing up on a shore in the opening "The Primary Menstruum or Mother-Liquid."  Much more evident is the commission's impact on the song titles, as "primary menstruum" was Evan Hopkins' description of the ocean in his 1844 book On the Connexion of Geology with Terrestrial Magnetism.  That book was the subject of Skelton and Richardson’s collage series.

To the duo’s credit, "Primary Menstruum" certainly sounds appropriately oceanic, albeit far more like a calm and sun-dappled bay than a raging sea.  It is quite a simple and organically flowing piece structurally, built from warm and slow moving swells of strings embellished with a Siren-esque nimbus of Autumn’s hazy, wordless, and cooing vocals.  While it is a strong motif on its own, a lot of secondary appeal lies in the piece's nuances (such as sneakily massing harmonic overtones) and subtle dynamic shifts (the gently churning and throbbing undercurrent).  The undulating harmonic cloud that it leaves in its wake as it fades away is especially beautiful.  Beauty was presumably not the intention for the following "The Winding of a Galvanic Wire" though, which seems to be inspired by Hopkins' theories about the world being turned by a powerful current.  Naturally, the piece feels suitably like a deep and terrestrial electrical hum, as its core motif is a densely buzzing and oscillating bed of shifting drones from a tone generator.  There are a few ominous and cavernous sounds in the periphery and some twinkling, buried, and fried-sounding strings to give the piece a bit of an epic and massive feel, but the meat is primarily just the mass of thick, buzzing drones.  It is an enjoyable and effective piece as a counterbalance to "Primary Menstruum," but it would not stand with the pair's finest work on its own, as Skelton has previously channeled crushing elemental force far more viscerally on The Inward Circles' Nimrod is Lost in Orion and Osyris in the Doggestarre album.

Given that Earth by Means of the Currents was created to coincide with a series of visual works, it is probably not entirely fair to judge it as a stand-alone work.  However, that is presumably how most people are going to experience it, aside from those who snapped up the limited edition booklet. Happily, it holds up quite well to that unintended scrutiny: it is certainly a rather modest release, but quite a strong one too.  Both pieces flow nicely and feel like they have been painstakingly chiseled down to their clutter-free essence.  While "Galvanic Wire" is a bit of a departure, the stronger and more characteristic "Primary Menstruum" is the EP's true centerpiece.  As such, Earth by Means of the Currents unavoidably feels a bit like *AR treading water creatively and perfecting familiar themes between more substantial endeavors, but they certainly manage to do that beautifully: Skelton and Richardson's instincts, craftsmanship, and attention to detail remain in peak form.

Samples:

• The Primary Menstruum or Mother Liquid
• The Primary Menstruum or Mother Liquid (excerpt two)
• The Winding of a Galvanic Wire