28 February 2016

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Albums and Singles

The way I see it, there are only three possible reactions to the statement "Matmos just made an entire album from recordings of their washing machine."  The first, which was my reaction, is "Yes!"  The other two, of course,  are "Ugh-of course they did." and "Who?"  What I am getting at here is that Ultimate Care II sounds exactly like everyone will expect it to sound, which is (naturally) exactly like a Matmos album: part conceptual art, part bizarro dance party, part abstract experimentation, and part willfully ridiculous (they let the actual rinse cycle play out unmolested for several minutes at one point).  The only real surprise for me was that Ultimate Care II is just a single extended piece that loosely mirrors the stages of a single wash cycle.  That one piece covers a lot of strange and varied stylistic ground, however, veering wildly from pummeling junkyard percussion to Looney Tunes to musique concrète to Love's Secret Domain-era Coil within a single 38-minute span.  Predictably, it is a wild ride indeed and precisely the type of album that no one but Matmos could (or would) ever make.

Thrill Jockey

While Ultimate Care II is unquestionably a quintessential "Matmos" album, Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt did not make it alone, enlisting the aid of several guests from around the Baltimore area including Dan Deacon and members of Horse Lords, Needle Gun, and Half Japanese.  To their credit, some of the guests even earned some serious washing machine cred beforehand by periodically doing their laundry at the Matmos house.  Aside from generally being a fun project, the involvement of so many people in this quixotic endeavor served a practical purpose as well: every sound on Ultimate Care comes from the washing machine itself, so recruiting talented collaborators was a useful way of coming up with enough interesting ideas to fill an album.  Unsurprisingly, quite a few of the sounds on Ultimate Care sound recognizably like a washing machine, while many others exploit the machine’s rich percussive potential.  Then, of course, there are many others that veer so far off the tracks that it is hard to believe their origin.

The magic, of course, lies in how those myriad sounds are combined and how all the various motifs evolve into one another.  Many of the best parts sound positively raucous, as the duo prove particularly adept at combining stomping and plinking rhythms into a fun quasi-industrial dance party.  Also, the crazier and wonkier the grooves get, the better.  Most of Ultimate Care’s best moments occur when Schmidt and Daniel settle into a weirdly funky and stumbling groove filled with kooky bleeps and buzzes.  Infectious rhythms aside, the other highlights tend to be the gutsier and/or more surprising moments.  For example, there is an admittedly non-gutsy, yet completely unexpected interlude where the piece coheres into an absolutely beautiful passage that resembles a haunting glass harmonica performance.  More frequently, however, Ultimate Care reaches its greatest heights when it just gets go-for-broke bonkers.  Like, for example, when it sounds like jungle-themed exotica made by a mental patient.  That thankfully happens more than once and it is absolutely glorious every time.

Of course, not every idea that found its way onto Ultimate Care was entirely brilliant.  Some of the more straightforwardly pummeling percussion passages definitely left me a bit cold, as they are a bit too bombastic for such a fundamentally absurd venture.  Admittedly, they can be quite visceral, but I do not like Matmos because they can sound like Test Dept. if they want to–I like them because they are imaginative and unique.  I was also not wild about a blurting passage that sounded like a computer throwing up, as it was only interesting because it was made from a washing machine.  Conversely, however, I actually did enjoying the few sections that basically sounded like untreated washing machine recordings.  In my defense, if washing machines did not sound cool, Matmos probably would not have made this album.  I am not ruling out the possibility that I am becoming an easily amused simpleton, however.  In any case, the good parts far outweigh the bad and none of the weaker moments stick around for long.  Also, I would be crazy to expect a flawless, seamless longform composition made from a goddamn washing machine: Daniel and Schmidt are primarily experimenters and Ultimate Care is essentially a series of wild set pieces that flow together surprisingly well.  I am sure there will be plenty of better compositions this year than Ultimate Care, but I doubt many of them will rack up quite as many memorable highlights along the way.

• Excerpt One
• Excerpt Two
• Excerpt Three

 

28 February 2016

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Albums and Singles

Blackest Ever Black presents a new vinyl edition of Af Ursin’s 2005 masterpiece Aura Legato, and its first outings on CD and digital formats.

Af Ursin is the alter ego of Finnish autodidact composer/improviser Timo van Luijk. He began his musical activities in the mid-1980s, co-founding the Noise-Maker’s Fifes collective with Geert Feytons in ’89. During the ’90s he developed his solo work under the name Af Ursin, before establishing his private press, La Scie Dorée, in 2001. It continues to act as the main platform for his own music, including regular collaborations with Christoph Heeman (as In Camera) and Andrew Chalk (as Elodie), while his other label, Metaphon (run with Marc Wroblewski and Greg Jacobs), is focused on archival presentations from the likes of Michael Ranta, Joris de Laet, and IPEM.

Van Luijk’s work is rooted in the use of acoustic instruments (wind, percussion, strings), but his special sensitivity to the timbral qualities of each instrument, and his deft blurring of them, results in a sound-world that is mysterious, amorphous and hallucinatory, full of suggestive shadows, creaks and whispers. Informed by years of intensive listening to various types of free music, exploratory drug use and especially the “irregular organic forms” of the Belgian countryside where he resides, van Luijk’s process begins always with pure improvisation: music played in an intuitive, sensual way, without the employment of conscious technique. He performs and overdubs each instrumental component himself, and out of this process micro-structures and loose arrangements emerge: the piece becomes an improvised composition. Over time he has evolved his own richly poetic musical language, full of allusions to drone, acid folk, classical, Musique concrète and jazz, but beholden to none.

Originally released on La Scie Dorée in 2005, in an edition of 350 copies, Aura Legato is one of van Luijk’s darker and more acutely psychedelic offerings. It’s a work of profound interiority, but one that also conjures images of old Europe and fin-de-siècle decadence – dabblings in Thelema, the fog of the opium-den – and has earned telling, if inadequate, comparisons to Third Ear Band, Nurse With Wound, Mirror and HNAS. Fully remastered by Noel Summerville, the album has never sounded better, and our vinyl edition replicates the original’s ornate presentation: sleeve die-cut in the style of a 78rpm record, with gold detailing and individually hand-glued labels. Due to be released in May 2016, we urge you to acquaint yourself with what is, unmistakably, a modern classic.

More information can be found here.

28 February 2016

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Albums and Singles

A new long-form offering of poignant, isolationist machine music from Secret Boyfriend. Eschewing the cryptic and compact song-sketches that characterised his 2013 Blackest Ever Black LP, This Is Always Where You’ve Lived, Ryan Martin instead guides us through vast interior topographies and nerve-damaged ambiences that comfort and deceive like memory itself.

Beginning with "The Singing Bile" – minimal synth submerged and subjected to an almost oceanic pressure – the tracks are mostly crude, extended live improvisations, recorded straight to tape. Martin’s loose intention was to subtract himself from proceedings and “let the music play itself”, but the erasure is not quite complete: on the contrary, each piece feels distinctly authored, and charged with personal significance. The atrophying loops of "Memorize Them Well"broach the elegiac grandeur of Gas and William Basinski, while "Paean Delle Palme" summons E.A.R., Af Ursin, and the clammy, opioid exoticism of :zoviet*france:*’s Just An Illusion. The album is largely instrumental, but there are two weighty exceptions: the sprawling, drumbox-driven space blues of "Little Jammy Centre" and the guileless yearning of "Stripping At The Nail." This is electronic pop undressed, unravelled and mapped onto the infinite wave.

Expansive and enveloping, Memory Care Unit's offer of comfort and refuge is difficult to resist. But this amniotic idyll is frayed and haunted at its edges, and ultimately treacherous. The return to innocence it promises may be possible, but the price is separation, alienation and loss.

More information can be found here.

28 February 2016

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Albums and Singles

Saturday Night Fever takes the concept of the movie of the same name and stretches the night a bit later, the fever a bit higher to the point where the party ends up blending into something much more sinister and wild. What starts out as a disco drumbeat with funky guitar swagger and melodic horns, may slowly deteriorate into some sort of corroded ambient loop that eventually morphs into melodic horn samples.. Basically every track is subverting it's own gestures, carving out a narrative of interruption and stretching the disco template in directions simultaneously embracing and mocking the form.. In a way, this album is a sequel to "A Republic of Sadness", embracing the criticisms people had of that album and expanding on those flaws. The resulting album sounds like Morley's pulling out some heaping doses of the hermit boogie and Otago funk and stretching it into some sort of Basinskian disintegration loop gone Bernard Bonnier zonked mutant scene.. There are so many moves within each of the four extended tracks, that it feels like that illuminated dance floor is always slipping beneath your feet. I promise it'll be worth the effort, twinkletoes...

- Pete Swanson

More information can be found here.

28 February 2016

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Albums and Singles

This trio featuring ubiquitous pianist Nils Frahm is one of the more pleasant surprises that have come across my path in recent memory, as I expected some sort of bloodless avant-jazz/post-rock hybrid, but was instead treated to quite an innovative and unique album (albeit quite an understated one as well).  I suspect a lot of that success is due to the band's exceedingly unconventional recording process, as they spent 8 years recording, re-recording, editing, recombining, and endlessly tweaking these pieces before finally concluding that The Gamble was finished.  Consequently, whatever these songs sounded like when they were originally played is probably a hell of a lot different from what ultimately wound up here.  To my credit, I was right about this album being a sort of avant-jazz/post-rock hybrid, but all of the instrumentation is so blurred together that The Gamble transcends either genre entirely and instead sounds like a strain of dub techno that is just as influenced by Latin percussion as it is by Jamaican dub. Except when it sounds like the greatest album that Tortoise never recorded.  Or when it sounds like something else entirely.

R & S

If their colorful biography (featuring a major fairground ride tragedy) is to be believed, this trio of Nils Frahm, bassist Sepp Singwald, and drummer Frederic Gmeiner have been playing together since childhood.  Even more suspicious than the carousel tragedy, however, is the fact that their biography makes absolutely no mention of Übertonmensch, a previous band featuring the exact same line-up.  Instead, Nonkeen is framed as the culmination of a lifelong journey.  I suppose it probably is in some ways, but these guys are still quite an inscrutable bunch.  Their backstory and previous output go a long way towards explaining their current sound though, as the trio have flirted with both jazz and electronic music, but were originally brought together by their shared love of tape machines and their possibilities.  Consequently, it makes perfect sense that they would eventually shake free from more straightforward genre fare and embrace the studio as their true muse.

They also embraced current Miasmah artist Andrea Belfi, who contributes guest drums and percussion on five songs.  That certainly adds further to The Gamble's blurring effect, as it is impossible to say where Belfi's contributions end and where Gmeiner's begin, especially since no instrument credits are provided except for Belfi.  In fact, it is entirely possible that Belfi steals the show, as two of his five songs are among the best on the album ("Animal Farm" and "Chasing God Through Palmyra").  Naturally, everyone's contributions swirl together at all times, but Nonkeen are at their absolute best when their hazy almost-jazz is driven by a strong pulse.  "Animal Farm," for example, boasts a very cool organ-like chord progression and a nice slowed-down tape loop of a male voice, but it is the sexy Latin groove that makes it seem like a bombshell compared to the earlier songs on the album (especially when the beat takes on an ominous, industrial texture).  The album's lead single, "Chasing God Through Palmyra," is equally Latin-tinged, tape loop-enhanced, and quasi-industrial, but even more propulsive.  In fact, I believe both pieces were culled from many of the same parts, but "God" is a bit more sped up and consequently feels quite different.  Elsewhere, the tensely clattering and improvisatory-sounding "Ceramic People" is another high point, benefiting from some fairly wild live drumming.  The Belfi-less closer ("Re: Turn!") might actually be my favorite piece of all though, sounding like a dreamy treatment of a simple, repeating piano motif that calls to mind a hallucinatory reimagining of Steve Reich’s "Music for 18 Musicians."

My sole grievance with The Gamble is just that it has much more filler than I would expect on a 9-song album that took 8 years to make: not much happens at all in either "Capstan" (sounds like someone noodling on a vibraphone while someone else practices drum rolls) or "Pink Flirt" (a few melancholy chords, some tape hiss, and a prematurely aborted good idea).  Otherwise, however, Nonkeen seem to have had plenty of fine ideas in a number of different directions, yet made them seamlessly fit together with an unwavering commitment to space, mood, and understatement.  I was especially struck by how ego-less this album is, as few things are rarer than getting three musicians with reasonably solid jazz chops together in a room and having them all try to smear together unrecognizably in service of a smoky, dub-wise aesthetic.  Even when Nonkeen sound like an actual jazz trio, as they do on the excellent "Beautiful Mess" and "The Saddest Continent on Earth," it sounds like a noir-ish afterhours jam designed not to wake any neighbors.  Equally significant is the fact that I never would have ever guessed on my own that The Gamble featured a pianist of Frahm's caliber: not because the playing is unexceptional, but because Nonkeen somehow manage to make everything feel so seemingly effortless, simple, and natural.

• Ceramic People
• Animal Farm
• Chasing God Through Palmyra

 

22 February 2016

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Albums and Singles

Like her debut release, Valence (2012), Montreal's France Jobin’s work is from the traditional school of electronic minimalism, in which the sparsest of sounds and instrumentation are utilized to create complex, nuanced sculptures of tone and texture.  Inspired by quantum physics and actualized by a variety of processing and modular synthesis, this album is yet another strong entry in her growing discography.

Line

One aspect that sets Jobin's work apart in this often-crowded field is her judicious use of dissonance.Rather than relying on distorted processing effects or abrasive synthetic tones, her work is instead more restrained and nuanced.Gliding, almost bowed-string like tones cut through dramatically on "l," as she builds upon simple loops into a richer, almost conventionally melodic sound.The lengthy opening piece "n" features a swirling, almost organ like tone that fights with pure silence during the opening.The piece transitions to a shimmering, sharper quality not unlike Robert Hampson’s work as Main in its most stripped-down capacity before blending extreme, yet low volume frequencies in its conclusion.

That is not to say that France's work is all pure sounds and open spaces, however.Sustained low-end vibrations stretch throughout "m," which results in a piece with just the right amount of grit, but one that complements the rest of the piece well.Even with these darker rumbles and the occasional bit of what most closely resembles digital interference, her use of quiet, almost melodic passages contrast extremely well and give the piece a distinct feeling of beauty.

The 13 and a half minute concluding composition, "s," makes for the perfect culmination of Singulum and encapsulates her style as a whole.The opening passages are bleaker and less inviting, exemplified by icy sounds and a slowly pulsing, slightly menacing layer of noises.It never becomes overly powerful or commanding, but the sound has a distinctly sinister characteristic to it.However, she uses the piece's duration to evolve and develop the sound, rearranging the various layers to alleviate the tension she created beforehand.By the conclusion of the composition, the layers have been shifted to a more open, spacious arrangement that lets light shine through what previously was kept in the dark.

Singulum is one of those albums that requires focused and dedicated attention, as any sort of distraction significantly hinders the impact of the work.But through these hushed volumes and carefully treated electronic passages, France Jobin has constructed an album of quiet, yet lush arrangements.While it is difficult to exactly imagine how quantum physics can translate to sound, Singulum is undoubtedly a pretty close approximation.

samples:

• n
• l
• s

 

22 February 2016

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Albums and Singles

Federico Durand’s music has always had an extremely intimate, hushed quality to it; akin to being in a small room with him as he records, and his newest release is no different. A Través Del Espejo, which translates to "through the mirror" is an apt metaphor for the sound of this record, given its glassy clarity and deliberate, brilliant use of loops and repetition. His use of Spartan instrumentation is especially effective, making the absolute most out of even the smallest sounds culminating in a gorgeous, multifaceted record.

12k

Much of this album is constructed from the use of cassette tape loops, but the medium is usually secondary to the sound being played.A song such as "El Jarden Encanto" seems to be constructed from a plucked strings of some sort (Durand is fond of working with non-traditional instruments), and the whole piece ends up having an almost toy music box feeling to it.The brief "Mirador en la Montaña" (featuring Andrew Chalk on synthesizer) captures what could be gentle plucked strings and delicate chimes, with a distinct purity and clarity to the sound.

On "Teatro de Sombras," he once again constructs from sounds that most closely resemble chimes or pure, glassy tones, but by placing an emphasis on the lower end parts of the sonic spectrum, the resulting piece takes on a very different quality than some of the other, lighter moments on the record."Diorama" may be a bit lighter with the expansive tones and twinkling bits of noise that define it, but it is a cold, frosty beauty rather than a warm, embracing one."El Grillo de Nácar" is one of the album’s softest moments, with what could be a low fidelity nature recording blended with some light, airy plucked notes that is anything but cold.

Durand's use of analog tape as a source material does creep to the forefront at other moments, however."Linternas Junto a la Laguna" slightly sputtering analog noises and inconsistent tones feel much more in line with the unpredictability of cassettes, and also culminates in a piece that stands out due to its less pristine sound quality."Hora de Dormir"'s only obvious musical element seems to be a piano of some sort, but instead the focus is on the taped conversations, children in the distance, and so on.It has such a distinctly domestic feel to it that, while not specifically musical, fits in squarely with the more intimate moments of the album.The title song begins with wet noise akin to that of rewinding tape, with Durand including sustained, ghostly waves of reversed sounds.The early moments are more dissonant (at least in relative terms), but by its conclusion, the loops lock into a near groove, to end the album on an almost conventional passage of music.

Like his previous album El Estanque Esmerelda, Federico Durand blends the sparsest of instrumentation and the lightest of processing to make for an album that resonates with the most delicate of sensibilities.His unique approach to instrumentation and deliberately luddite-like approach to recording ties together as an inviting, extremely personal sounding record that renders the simplest string pluck into a dramatic, beautiful orchestral passage.

samples:

• Teatro De Sombras
• El Grillo de N√°car
• A Traves Del Espejo

 

21 February 2016

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Albums and Singles

According to the website, Suppedaneum’s mission is, in part, to probe the relationship between music and composition. All the more reason to pay special attention to the score that accompanies The Letter, Joseph Clayton Mills's 22-minute cassette EP that comes close to not being an EP at all. With the exception of the first, each of the 100 cassettes that Mills assembled for this project is a hand-duplicated copy of an earlier copy. Thanks to the technological shortcomings of the medium, successive renderings of The Letter past the first contain imperfections not present in previous versions, meaning each tape is a uniquely worn-down object. As the liner notes put it, "The Letter is a piece of music designed to approach disappearance." Strangely, the music is not a performance of the aforementioned score, a piece titled Abscission that comprises the images of two trees and three pairs of musical staves. The tape’s sine tones, Throbbing Gristle-like noises, and warped piano phrases were inspired by those images, but the disconnect between them predominates. It’s one of the ways in which Joseph distills the disjunction and cohesion between sound and writing.

Suppedaneum

A phrase like "the letter" possesses clout. It means "the letter I received from my parents" or "the letter he wrote to me." Significance is implied. That’s true even if what is meant is something like "the letter S" or "the letter of the law." Mills could have intended any of those things and in different ways The Letter touches on each one. The piece begins with someone (or something?) reciting the English alphabet and ending on the letter "zed"—not "zee"—which might say something about the speaker’s origin or the recording’s original use. It then introduces a piano melody (letters A through G) and concludes with a story that sounds familial, a recollection of how someone came to be who they are and where they are. Law is in there too, in the confusion of compositional fidelity and performance.

But the familial tint is strongest. It stands out against the field recordings, buzzing plastic, and metallic howls. It’s the thing the ears strain to hear as the sound of a busy market blows through the speakers and it’s the element that draws the drama of the surrounding noise to it, as if by gravity—the voice of someone explaining what it was like to be poor at the end of the Great Depression, to pick strawberries for two cents a quart during the summer, and to deal with the hardships of a massive flood afterward.

Even if the narrator and Mills aren’t related, the details resonate empathetically. How else to interpret the black-and-white photograph of "Violet Cowie and her siblings" included in the set, apparently taken in Scotland, or Joseph’s decision to assemble in one place sounds recorded between 1989 and 2015? That span of time suggests someone thinking about the past. It’s a recollection that parallels the anonymous narrator’s. The music is another layer in that nexus, residing somewhere between the certainty of the details and the ambiguity of the score, which might remind some of a family tree and others of the cycle of the seasons.

Abscission is what trees and plants do when they drop their leaves, needles, or fruit, usually to protect themselves, as in winter, or to reproduce. In the case of The Letter, it’s the process by which music, time, and memory are cut away. And as with the trees, something persists after the foliage falls. It takes root in innuendos and multiplicities and subsists through silences and interruptions even as it disappears into the past.

samples:

• Four samples are available on the Suppedaneum Soundcloud page

 

21 February 2016

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Albums and Singles

Back before the days of MP3s and file sharing, it was not uncommon for me to slowly lose my goddamn mind because there was some album that I desperately wanted to hear, yet could not find anywhere.  Naturally Coil, Current 93, and Nurse With Wound were all regular members of that exclusive club, but the reigning king of maddening elusiveness was always La Monte Young–more specifically, The Well-Tuned Piano, though Dream House (now finally reissued) would have been a lovely consolation prize (both albums have regularly turned up on Discogs' "most expensive items sold" list).  The reason for my obsession is quite simple: Young was the ur-visionary at the root of many of the more compelling strains of underground culture that have blossomed over the last 18 years, heavily and directly influencing the aesthetics of Brian Eno, Andy Warhol, The Velvet Underground, and Terry Riley (in fact, John Cale, Angus MacLise, and Riley were all members of Young's Theatre of Eternal Music ensemble).

Aguirre

Originally released in 1973, Dream House is one of the inaugural releases in Aguirre’s series of reissues from the amazing and forward-thinking French label Shandar.  Before its basement office was largely destroyed by a flood in 1979, the label run by Daniel Caux and Chantal Darcy released an unprecedented string of crucial avant-garde albums featuring everyone from Charlemagne Palestine to Sun Ra to Pandit Pran Nath.  Even among that milieu of iconoclasts, however, Dream House stands out as exceptionally outré.  Comprised of two side-long pieces, Dream House explores Young’s obsession with idea of eternal music without beginning or end.  Few (if any) Western musicians were as invested in the idea of hypnotic, trance-like repetition as La Monte Young was in the 1970s.  Significantly, it was not so much a musical choice so much as it was a lifelong obsession, as the idea of a "dream house" was later expanded into a series of installations (of varying degrees of permanence) built around Young’s sine waves and Zazeela’s accompanying light sculptures.

The first and far more distinctive piece, "13 I 73 5:35-6:14:03 PM NYC," features a stripped-down version of the Theatre of Eternal Music ensemble, in this case just future avant-garde luminaries Jon Hassell and Garrett List.  The general idea is quite simple, as it is basically just a drone piece built from Young’s sine waves, Zazeela’s voice, and the ensemble’s sustained brass tones.  Over that, however, are Young’s otherworldly, nasal, ritualistic, and chant-like vocals.  On one level, Pandit Pran Nath’s influence is abundantly clear, but there is a buzzing, quasi-insectoid quality to Young's voice as well.  As such, the piece still sounds quite alien today, so I cannot begin to imagine what unsuspecting American listeners in the early ‘70s made of such a bizarre, time-stretched blending of Indian classical music and the hum of high voltage power lines.  Nor can I imagine what listeners would have made of the hyper-minimal second piece, "Drift Study 14 VII 73 9:27:27-10:06:41 PM NYC," a gently oscillating 39-minute sine-wave solo.  Neither piece offers anything in the way of conspicuous evolution or strong melody, as the emphasis is quite squarely on the hypnotic properties of endless repetition and on small-scale shifts in harmony and oscillation.  Dream House was far more than an unusual synthesis of Eastern music, minimalism, and the more experimental strains of jazz and classical music–it was a radical experiment in transforming how we hear and experience music.

There is no question at all that Dream House is a radical and significant work by a woefully underdocumented and hugely influential figure.  However, the inevitable downside to being a groundbreaking visionary is that when one of your seminal masterpieces is finally reissued 40 years after it was recorded, the rest of the experimental music world has already long caught and surpassed it.  Granted, the first half of the album still sounds quite unusual by 2016 standards, but its capacity to blow anyone's mind has long expired.  In the case of most composers, there would be some sadness to that, but La Monte Young’s career almost seemed completely independent of his albums.  Dream House is merely a snapshot of an ephemeral instant in an endless evolution, as any clips that I have heard from Dream House installations are considerably more immersive and harmonically complex than what is documented here.  Also, "13 I 73 5:35-6:14:03 PM NYC" is allegedly just a mere section of a larger piece called "Map Of 49's Dream The Two Systems Of Eleven Sets Of Galactic Intervals Ornamental Lightyears Tracery."  And, of course, that piece is itself allegedly just a section of Young’s even larger and never-ending opus "The Tortoise, His Dreams And Journeys."  Odds are quite high that most of Young’s greatest work probably existed only live or in concept alone, so we are probably lucky to get to hear any of it at all.  There is not much available, so every single bit is cause for excitement.  I am absolutely thrilled that this has finally been reissued.

Samples:

• 13 I 73 535-61403 PM NYC
• 13 I 73 535-61403 PM NYC
• Drift Study 14 VII 73 92727-100641 PM NYC

 

21 February 2016

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Albums and Singles

Newly resurrected by Oren Ambarchi’s Black Truffle imprint, this would-be landmark 1987 recording was originally slated to be released on Glenn Branca’s short-lived Neutral Records.  After sadly sitting on the shelf for roughly a decade, it was finally issued by Dutch label Barooni in 1998 and thankfully reached enough people to warrant yet another resurfacing almost 20 years later.  It is hard to understand how this album wound up so cursed while the very similar Strumming Music became so revered, but the world is not a fair place, I guess.  In any case, Godbear is a suite of three solo piano pieces recorded in a church and it is wonderful.  While perhaps not quite as essential as Palestine's more ambitious and unusual recent work (2015’s Ssingggg arguably eclipsed absolutely everything that came before it), Godbear’s rumbling storms of overtones are quite visceral and inventive by solo piano performance standards.

Black Truffle

In a curious bit of temporal coincidence, Godbear is being reissued at roughly the same time as La Monte Young’s Dream House, making 2016 a banner year for former Pandit Pran Nath students who released seminal albums on Shandar.  Unlike Dream House, however, Palestine’s 1974 Shandar release Strumming Music got a major reissue in the '90s and kickstarted a career resurgence.  Remarkably, given how prolific he is today, Palestine did not release a single album between 1974 and 1997–a hiatus that the doomed Godbear would have ended.  Aside from being 1.) cursed, and 2.) quite good, Godbear is also significant for essentially being a reprise and improvement upon the 13-year-old Strumming Music.  In fact, Godbear’s second piece is even called "Strumming Music," though it condenses the previous album's epic 52-minute duration into a mere 11.  The other two pieces have different names, but the simple, underlying idea is very much the same for all: rapidly hammered notes at neutral intervals (octaves and fifths) that gradually become much more complicated and much less neutral.

The first side of the album is filled completely by the 20-minute "The Lower Depths," which is arguably the album’s highlight (though competition is fierce).  The title likely has its root in the fact that the piece gradually descends into the more rumbling, lower reaches of the piano's range, but its infernal connotations are warranted as well.  It does not take long at all for the ringing and rolling harmonies to descend into a darker mood, but Palestine does an excellent job rationing out the tension and dissonance, always returning to calmer, more consonant harmonies…until he finally stops circling around and decides to get dark in earnest.  Taken on its face, "The Lower Depths" is a dynamic and compelling piece of music, but its real power is somewhat sneaky and not instantly apparent with casual listening: there are the notes that Palestine is actually playing and then there are the complex clouds of dissonance that start to cohere with increased regularity due to the use of the sustain pedal.  Once I became fully aware of the latter, the piece took on a whole new unpredictable life for me.  The combination of the clattering, rumbling lower keys and the oscillating, spreading black mass of overtones is quite spectacular when it comes together just right.  Also, it is kind of a neat magic trick, as the piece often feels improvisatory and roving, but it is all in service of creating eventual rich and unexpected blossoms of looming, dissonant harmonies.

"Strumming Music" is considerably more radiant and rippling in nature, using the same tools to evoke a very different mood.  It also seems considerably more structured and indebted to earlier minimalist composers than the rest of the album, as it feels like a single strong motif that recurs and evolves, whereas "The Lower Depths" is significantly more freewheeling and messy (albeit in a good way).  That said, "Strumming Music" is still absolutely lovely, cohering into a wonderfully shimmering and undulating haze of bliss.  That respite is brief, however, as things get heavy again for the closing "Timbral Assault," which immediately delivers exactly what it promises.  In fact, it sounds a lot like an impressively prescient precursor to Tim Hecker’s "Virginal."  Unlike "The Lower Depths," however, "Timbral Assault" is instantly dissonant and ominously minor key in mood.  Also, it is the most rhythmically unusual and unpredictable piece on the album, as its forward motion is constantly disrupted by stuttering flurries of notes.  Despite those strengths, or perhaps because of them, "Assault" is the weakest of the three pieces, as it lacks the slow-burning build-up to a pay-off that makes "Depths" and "Strumming" so satisfying.  "Timbral Assault" certainly starts off wonderfully, but it does not leave itself many places to go when it does and consequently starts to fade and meander a bit as it unfolds.

Anticlimactic final act aside, Godbear boasts a solid half-hour of near-perfect music that is both distinctive and powerful, so it definitely deserves a place in the upper echelon of Palestine's oeuvre.  It makes complete sense that the later phase of his career spread out in such varied, experimental, and eccentric directions, as Godbear and Strumming Music both took Palestine’s solo piano vision as far as it could reasonably go.  Until they build a Bösendorfer Imperial Grand Piano with even more keys in the lower octaves or make some radical breakthroughs in sustain pedal technology, there is no need to ever return to this well again.  The definitive statements have been made–they are just waiting around to be heard.

• The Lower Depths
• Strumming Music
• Timbral Assault