20 September 2015

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Albums and Singles

Fifth in a series of recordings made by Autumn Richardson & Richard Skelton for the Furness Fells of south-west Cumbria, UK:

"Sympathetic resonance: a vast stringed instrument made in honour of J.F. Glidden, tuned to esoteric frequencies. Fine thread-like fibres. A holy triad: Raven’s Crag. Fox Haw. Brock Barrow. Memorious Earth. Land-music. A poultice to remove proud flesh."

More information is available here.

20 September 2015

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Albums and Singles

Calluna is the second collaborative release from Andrew Chalk & Tom James Scott, and was completed following the duo's first live performance in summer 2014. Recorded over a longer time period than Wild Flowers (2013), Calluna sees the haze of their debut lifted to reveal a clearer, more expansive sound world. Scott's sparse unadorned piano notes occasionally cluster into more elaborate, decorative phrases, delicately underpinned and enhanced by Chalk's slow, carefully placed additions.

Edited from an extensive collection of material by the two, Calluna is presented here as a 12" mini-album cut at 45rpm by Noel Summerville, and packaged in a full colour offset printed sleeve featuring artwork by Tom James Scott. Edition of 500 copies.

More information can be found here.

20 September 2015

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Albums and Singles

Drew McDowall’s back story reads like a primer of psychedelic fiction woven into statements of the unbelievable, superhuman and outright insane.  Somewhere in the chaotic madness, comes an artist such as McDowall with total control and absolute calm within his songs and artistic method.

Growing up in the gangs of 1970’s Scotland, Drew McDowall started to shy away from the daily violence once punk took hold of the counterculture youth.  Drew McDowall quickly scrambled to form his own punk band in 1978 with his then wife, Rose McDowall, called The Poems.  Shortly lived, the Poems released a single and various tracks but more importantly, the band allowed McDowall to network with other local musicians in Glasgow, such as Orange Juice, and allowed him to travel down to London thus forming friendships with Genesis P-Orridge, David Tibet and countless others, bringing Drew into the fold of the experimental revolution happening in the UK brought upon by Throbbing Gristle and executed by bands such as Psychic TV and Current 93.

During the 1980’s, McDowall found himself in the ranks of P-Orridge’s Psychic TV and collaborating with the mysterious duo comprised of former Throbbing Gristle creator Peter ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson and the enigmatic John Balance who had been creating esoteric and progressive electronic music under the title of Coil.  It was during his formative collaborations with Coil that McDowall saw himself shift from occasional contributor to austere full-time member of the arcane outfit.  McDowall’s impact on the band’s sound was apparent as the releases transformed from their previous avant pop signature to a more complex and methodic electronic imprint accompanied by even more abstruse subject matter than previous years. McDowall would continue honing his compositional skills with Coil until the release of the band’s two most broad-minded albums, Astral Disaster and Musick to Play in the Dark.

Dais Records approached Drew to solidify his standing as a leading electronic musician with the recording of new material neatly wrapped up in his debut album entitled Collapse.  Recorded in 2015 in Brooklyn, NY, McDowall’s synonymous modular synthesizer compositions are augmented by obtuse sampling cut-ups and contributions from Nicky Mao (Hiro Kone / Effi Briest) rounding out the lumbering sequential knot work that has become synonymous with McDowall and craft.

More information can be found here.

20 September 2015

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Albums and Singles

Nearly a year in the making, and including a cast of thirty musicians, J.R. Robinson delivers his towering third album as Wrekmeister Harmonies titled Night Of Your Ascension, set for release on November 13.

The cast of all-star players on Night of Your Ascension includes heavyweights Chip and Lee Buford from The Body, Alexander Hacke from Einstürzende Neubauten, members of Indian, Bloodiest, Anatomy of Habit, Twilight, and more, along with members of the indie and classical community such as Cooper Crain (Cave, Bitchin Bajas), Chris Brokaw (Come, Pullman), singer Marissa Nadler, harpist Mary Lattimore, composer Olivia Block, and cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm.

Robinson has long been pre-occupied with society’s unwanted, observing the horror of their acts while trying to identify with their conflict. Night of Your Ascension is a commentary on our own fascination with bloodlust and our seemingly insatiable appetite for lurid depictions of depravity. The music on Night of Your Ascension is as hauntingly beautiful as it is brutal.

More information will soon be found here.

20 September 2015

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Albums and Singles

Steve Hauschildt's new album is his first since the late 2012 release of Sequitur. Although Where All Is Fled sonically harkens back to his earlier albums such as Rapt for Liquid Minister and Tragedy & Geometry, it slowly becomes apparent that it is also a divergence from those recordings.

Both the artwork and the music on this new work were heavily inspired by surrealist landscape paintings, early alchemical emblems, and recurring visions.

The result is a pristine series of cascading melodies, fantastical terrains of layered lattices, and overlapping patterns of synthesizers superimposed with orchestral instrumentation. Hidden in the crevices of the album are processed crowd sounds, re-sampled text-to-speech synthesis, piano, and animal noises which reveal themselves after repeated listens and blur together notions of artificial and natural sound. While slowly unfurling, each sound is given its own place and space, never hurried, never cluttered.

The album is a modern kosmische milepost, and the most accomplished statement of Steve Hauschildt's vision yet.

More information will eventually be available here.

20 September 2015

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Albums and Singles

For synthesizers, sine tones, amplified violin/viola/cello, field recording and custom software.

Written/recorded/reconfigured/mixed July-October 2014, New Orleans.

Dedicated to Pitre's family: past, present and future.

Bayou Electric is the final installment in an unplanned trilogy, with Feel Free and Bridges making up the first and second installments in the series, respectfully. All three works share similar characteristics, compositional processes, alternate tuning schemes, instrumentation and a certain ethos that the composer views as cohesive whole. There is a progression toward refinement over the course of this trilogy, in the overall "sound" of the albums and in their dependence on other musicians to realize them (each less dependent than its predecessor). Bayou Electric, which contains a single, calming and cathartic composition (of the same title), brings this cycle to a gentle and unhurried finale.

The field recording utilized in Bayou Electric was captured on a late night in August, 2010 at the edge of Four Mile Bayou; Louisiana land that has been in Pitre's family since January 14, 1922. Upon listening to what he'd captured, Pitre become enthralled by the fabric of sound that the wildlife on this waterway had created. It evoked many feelings--such as how past generations of his relatives lived amongst these same sounds and walked the same land--creating a powerful connection and a sense of timelessness.

Pitre was set on finding a way to use this field recording in his music, but wanted to do so without simply adding it to a composition as just another layer of sound or by molding it (via 'processing') into something easier to work with. Instead, Pitre decided to start with the unaltered field recording and build the instrumentation around it, in a highly sympathetic manner, with the musical portion becoming accompaniment to the sounds of this remote land. This was the catalyst of Bayou Electric and of primary importance to him, as a way to connect to his Cajun heritage in his own artistic way.

More information can be found here.

20 September 2015

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Albums and Singles

I Abused Animal is Heather Leigh’s first proper solo studio album after solo releases on labels Golden Lab, Not Not Fun, Fag Tapes, Wish Image and Volcanic Tongue. Renowned as a fearless free improviser, I Abused Animal is a breakthrough work showcasing Heather Leigh’s songwriting prowess, foregrounding her stunning voice and her innovations for the pedal steel guitar. Warmly recorded in a secret location in the English countryside, the album transmutes the power of her captivating live performances to a studio setting, capturing her tactile playing in full clarity while making devastating use of volume and space. Heather Leigh explores themes of abuse, sexual instinct, vulnerability, memory, shadow, fantasy, cruelty and projection. I Abused Animal is a personal, idiosyncratic and deeply psychedelic work, ranging from almost Kousokuya-scale black blues through the kind of ethereal electro-ritual of Solstice-era Coil. At times the intimacy of the recordings makes you feel like she’s singing directly into your ear, playing just for you.

The daughter of a coal miner, weaving a trail from West Virginia to Texas and now residing in Scotland, Heather Leigh furthers the vast unexplored reaches of pedal steel guitar. She’s performed and released music since the 1990s as a solo artist and with a wide range of uncompromising collaborators from Peter Brötzmann to Jandek and has toured extensively throughout the US, Europe, Australia and New Zealand. Her playing is as physical as it is phantom, combining spontaneous compositions with a feel for the full interaction of flesh with hallucinatory power sources. With a rare combination of sensitivity and strength, Leigh’s steel mainlines sanctified slide guitar and deforms it using hypnotic tone-implosions, juggling walls of bleeding amp tone with choral vocal constructs and wrenching single note ascensions.

She’s played/performed/released music with Ash Castles On The Ghost Coast, Charalambides, Scorces (a duo with Christina Carter), the Dream/Aktion Unit (a group with Thurston Moore, Paul Flaherty, Chris Corsano and Matt Heyner), Taurpis Tula, Jailbreak (a duo with Chris Corsano) and Jandek, as well as collaborated with Peter Brötzmann, Lynda (as Termas), Stefan Jaworyzn (as Annihilating Light), Richard Youngs, Blood Stereo, MV & EE, Robbie Yeats of The Dead C, John Olson of Wolf Eyes, Smegma, Jutta Koether, Kommissar Hjuler & Mama Baer and many others.

More information can be found here.

20 September 2015

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Albums and Singles

"Liberty" is one of those great terms that contains a trace of its inverse. It is usually taken to mean "freedom from" something, or immunity, as in the diplomatic kind everyone recognizes thanks to televised political dramas and George W. Bush. Consequent to that understanding, the less controlled or restrained a thing is, the more liberty it possesses. So the curtailment of action doesn’t usually figure into conventional senses of freedom, but think of all the liberties secured by the abridgment of desire, prejudice, and fear. License in one space often demands restriction, or constriction, or even conversion, in another. Something like that is at work on Severe Liberties, the benighted electroacoustic product of Kevin Parks and Vanessa Rossetto’s first collaboration. "Severe Liberties" are the kind of thing people take when they need to bend the truth, or when they simply don’t understand something. Here they are the kind of thing that transforms silverware and surface noise into music.

Erstwhile (ErstAEU)

"Seeing as Little as Possible" is a provocative opening statement for a song—and album—that contains so much sound. After an introductory spasm of indiscernible frictions and a very conspicuous length of silence, Parks and Rossetto pour on a cornucopia of domestic noises and electric signals. A contact mic makes love to bubble wrap, someone remarks that a UPS truck is in front of their home, and a lonely guitarist strums a few very Mazzacane-esque chords over the sibilance of mangled cellophane wrapping and the clatter of an undefined home improvement project.

That all breezes by in the song’s first nine minutes. The second half introduces birdsong, feedback, and jump cuts that transport the music from outside a New York City apartment to inside a clogged New York City drainpipe, complete with an auger and unwashed dishes in the background. Plenty happens during the album’s opening sally. What that something is exactly is impossible to know. Even if some of the sounds are recognizable, most are far too abstract to nail down, and their arrangement all but guarantees sensory confusion. If there is nothing to see here, no big picture or secure height from which to look down on the music’s patterns, it is because Kevin and Vanessa have strived to make it so.

Almost every noise on Severe Liberties has been detached from its source in a confounding way. Fragments of conversations, rhythms, melodies, and who knows what else have been strung together so as to be indecipherable or without narrative, and "severe liberties" are exactly the kind of thing someone would have to take in order to make sense of them. Fragmentation and falderal reign over these 18-odd minutes, which is why, in part, so much of the record feels nocturnal. Kevin and Vanessa’s compositions pull a shroud over meaning and eliminate most of the references that would make reconstructing it possible. Whatever liberties they took in sourcing their material, and whatever method they employed for arranging it, the consequence is this constantly shifting web of sensations, ungrounded and unfettered by an appreciable order other than its own disorder.

That is why "They Sit’s" pixelated imitations and on-a-dime turns are even harder to characterize than the events on "Seeing as Little as Possible," and it's why the album’s brief guitar passages fail to pull the songs together: they are as out of place as everything else. "The Details of the Anecdote" merely teases the idea of details in its title, it doesn’t actually illuminate much. Anecdotes are excerpts anyway, short narratives that tell short stories. If they aren’t minor details in a bigger picture, they are private details unearthed and treated separately from everything around them, as if they had a life of their own distinct from the rest of the world.

Parks and Rossetto run with that idea at the conclusion of their project. In its final minutes, a series of tones rise and fall in uneasy agreement, suggesting all the shifting perspectives and noises the album has chewed and spit out up to this point. The drone resolves into a dense rumble, a free falling sound that calls skydiving to mind, or the sound of riding at 100 miles per hour on the back of motorcycle without a helmet. It then slowly collapses into a wall of distortion and fizzles out, disappearing like a soap bubble. No resolution obtains, except for silence. Perhaps that’s because there is nothing there to resolve.

samples:

• Seeing as Little as Possible
• They Sit
• The Details of the Anecdote

 

20 September 2015

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Albums and Singles

I definitely didn't think I would enjoy an all vocal improvisation album this much, or on such a grand level. I simply love the acoustics of the room where Jason Kahn recorded in, where he is belting out such interesting and nondescript sounds where, "In the rooms of a former Swiss-com telephone relay station in Zürich. I decided to use the main room, which was entirely empty. Its linoleum floors, bare walls and many windows made for a very resonant space. Double glass windows sealed off the world outside but many sounds still emanated from somewhere deep in the bowels of the building." I wasn't terribly sure what a telephone relay station is, so I googled imaged it, and saw that it was what I thought it was after all. Lines of machines, with women (sometimes men too?) would sit in front of huge electronic boxes with wires and patches, crisscrossing each other, while the operator there would take people’s requests for phone calls and to be connected with others. To me, then, there is a sense of irony, or even a haunting simile that almost reminds me of an echo of conversations that might have taken place in the building in the distant past.

Editions

Zürich, makes me think of the Swiss Alps, and Swiss bank accounts, and as is with most if not all experimental/avant garde music to me, this album allows us, the listeners, to take the time off so to speak, from the corner of the room with headphones on and be simply enthralled by such sounds that never get much (if any) airplay, or are celebrated in any major media outlet, or even any indie ventures. Kahn’s vocals seem to take a meandering direction, so that it’s kind of like that snakes game, where you eat a dot and then gain a dot on your body until you hit a wall or something; then it’s game over and you start back again, as a smaller snake, until you eat more dots. Are these vocals sung out of a cathartic spirit? To me, it doesn't sound too much like that. It’s not an angry sound that Kahn makes, nor is it sad or a depressing sound.

In "Songline", Kahn’s voice takes the stage, and it is at times almost sarcastic and pitying. There’s a slight aching in his voice, and sometimes it makes him seem out of focus, or misplaced, but there is indeed something special/magical about the acoustics of the album, and his voice too. It’s as if you can hear it and perhaps yourself ravel distinctly from one end of the room to the next, or sometimes it remains isolated in what I can picture a photo booth, even though it’s just a telecom station, but still, images of old telephones and ways of telecommuting appear in my mind when listening to this album.

Maybe I shouldn’t go through my Facebook newsfeed while listening to Side D. Kahn’s improvisations makes my online life on the social media site completely asinine. Going on Facebook while listening to "Songline" is like putting on glasses, while scrolling through your News Feed, that will make you see things in a completely different light. People almost appear too distant, ones you thought who might have been your good friends etc.

Though I wonder why Kahn decided to do a double album of vocal improvisations. His musical output has mostly involved electronics of some sort, so it’s both refreshing and kind of surprising to see him make this record. It’s a perfect record for late at night, with headphones on, while listening to someone who has chosen to take a step in a direction that seems to be in a genre that is definitely often overlooked or over-analyzed. Like I mentioned, this is a good late night record, one that is not boring, or seemingly intrusive.

13 September 2015

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Albums and Singles

Basinski and Chartier have collaborated a number of times in the past, and their disparate, yet complementary approaches to music have always complimented each other perfectly. An uncharacteristic vinyl release for Chartier (a digital loyalist), these two sidelong pieces embrace both loops and melody, coming together beautifully as a sparse, yet forceful piece of music.

Important Records

Basinski is fond of using vintage, sometimes obsolete sound sources and a distinctively analog feel to the music he makes.Conversely, Chartier’s solo work may sometimes begin with field recordings or organic sources, but is most often subjected to a distinctively modern, digital toolkit to render the natural sound anything but how it began.

The first piece of Divertissement clearly carries Basinski’s penchant for loops, creating the foundation for a distant rattling noise and simple, yet diverse sound structures that build and dissolve.The duo carefully mix in a fleeting melody that gives a bit of beauty to the otherwise sparse soundscape.The piece may be sparse, but never is it simple or delicate:the understated nature of the piece carries an unexpected force and presence.Big open spaces and deep bass thumps eventually appear, before they end the composition on a spacy note.

While the first side was pretty consistent, the second sees the duo mixing in odd elements that may sound out of place on paper, but manages to work beautifully in their more than capable hands.The piece opens forcefully, with an almost choral tinged expanse of sound that begins powerful, and is then reigned in to a more nuanced, subtle passage.The feel is bleak overall, but Basinski and Chartier introduce shimmering melodies that come and go, sounding as if they come from another world.

The alien melodies remain, weaving in and out of what becomes a wall of squawking, dissonant electronics.A recording of what sounds like a helicopter is added, along with what resembles distortion laden radio communications, creating a noisy, and very Earthbound, compliment to the melody.The result is a piece of brilliant depth and diversity, with the conclusion slowly fading away into darkness.

The worlds of analog and digital sound art come together splendidly on Divertissement, with neither side becoming too much the focus.Instead it makes for a rich, complex recording that uses both beautiful and ugly elements into a work that expertly showcases both William Basinski and Richard Chartier’s proficiency in shaping sounds in consistently new and innovative ways.

samples:

• Divertissement 1
• Divertissement 2 (Excerpt 1)
• Divertissement 2 (Excerpt 2)