Podcast Episodes 721 & 722 are live!
Mid-November midweek special
Two new episodes are now available.
Episode 721 features Throwing Muses, Eros, claire rousay, Moin, Zachary Paul, Voice Actor and Squu, Leya, Venediktos Tempelboom, Cybotron, Robin Rimbaud and Michael Wells, Man or Astro-Man?, and Aisha Vaughan.
Episode 722 has James Blackshaw, FACS, Laibach, La Securite, Good Sad Happy Bad, Eramus Hall, Nonconnah, The Rollies, Jabu, Freckle, Evan Chapman, diane barbe, Tuxedomoon, and Mark McGuire.
Wine in Paris photo by Mathieu.
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Jason Molina seems to be getting all the wrong kind of attention. Pegged as a follower and adherent of any number of past songwriters, Molina's distinct voice and his band's broad musical range often goes ignored in favor of unnecessary name dropping and undeserved, negative comparisons.
Followers of Michael Gira's storied career might have anticipated his latest work with The Angels of Light as a natural reduction of his emotional approach to songwriting to its most basic form.
After the great digital reissues of Judee Sill's legendary pair of 1970s albums on Rhino Handmade last year, and the superb vinyl facsimile editions on 4 Men With Beards, the Water label puts the icing on the cake with this outstanding double-disc set containing, among other things, Judee's never-before-released third album Dreams Come True.
This is the second collaboration between these two iconoclasts, the first being last year's too-short Tinnitus Vu: the duo's hiss-laden meditation on hearing loss and the dynamics of sound after sound stops.Tocsin works within a similar sound palette, becoming a longer group of compositions that are also more minimal. Tinnitusfeatured conceptually efficient sonic pile-ups: alienating meshes ofcrisp percussive noodling and phantom piano, reorganized digitally byZ'ev to the level of sonic negation, the music itself slipping behind aveneer of white noise emptiness. Tocsin again finds Jackmanbehind the piano and Z'ev operating some resonant steel instrument, butthe playing, even after the individual artist mixes (Z'ev for the firstseven tracks, "-6" through "0," and Jackman for the final "1" and "2"),feels like more of a trade-off: a see-saw between two more distinctvoices. An unhurried atmosphere prevails; the musicians content tomeander through what feels more like an impromptu jam session thananything else: Z'ev winding out steely, gong-like drones as Jackmanlets his chords fall in a determined and mournful slowness. Both thelength of these sessions and their haphazard result strike me as veryatypical of Organum, but it is admittedly pleasing to hear Jackman inan environment where not every second counts. The recording itself alsofeels immediately more intimate than the prior collaboration orJackman's work as a whole. It has been consciously edited with bits ofthe duo chatting amidst a prevailing amount of tape hiss that sounds atfirst like the by-product of poor equipment but which evolves intoprecise and manufactured intervals. Z'ev's tracks especially utilizethe tape sound to flesh out an ironic foreign quality in theinstrumental dialogue, freeing it from a real time perception. Hestretches Jackman's piano into echoed calls and distant moans,entwining along a cascade of scraped, rubbed drones and hollow chorusesof soothing feedback. This is the least abrasive music I've heard fromZ'ev, lacking any percussive punch or even the textural maneuverabilityof Tinnitus. Organum's two private mixes are much less complex,the first almost 15 minutes of barren piano sketches with perfectlydistant gong-like decays matching the piano's desperate march forward.Jackman's second and final track is almost identical, untreated pianoup-front with untreated metal washes this time in slow and gentlecrescendo until both drift into silence. If anything here comes closestto replicating the original performances it is Jackman's section,beautifully recorded and a real pleasure despite its one-dimensionalityand its relative inconsistency with the artist's successes to date.While not a benchmark in the history of either artist, Tocsinallows a view of both moving in slightly different currents than theyare accustomed, and the disc is important despite the lack of a moreconcise collaborative product. It's nice also to see that Die Stadt iscontinuing to press reasonably priced Organum CDs; hopefully this willcontinue. 
This concept mini-CD accurately represents its subject, massiveplane/boat hybrids known as ekranoplanes, in sound. Dmitri Della Faille(Szkieve)'s passion for his material is evident on this 22 minutehomage to, and study of, these anomalies of Russian scientifictechnology. The opening "Le Songe de R.E.A." evokes an ominous mood,conjuring up images of the metal beast preparing for take off. Sharp,shrill electronic tones and analog synthesizer miasma cut through thesounds of slowly chiming bells. "Le S.M. 2P" focuses on whirring andchugging sounds that recall those made by an engine working to keep thelarge entity afloat or aflight. The cycling rhythmic patterns andsteady moaning tones of "Le K.M." mimic the steady flight of thevehicle soaring through the air as a plane. "L'Orlyonok" gathers thevarious strands presented in the shorter tracks into a piece that seemsto be a musical response to the other tracks. This is the only trackthat features beats and a melodic theme running through it. "Le Lun"perfectly captures the feeling of a plane that was once steadily flyingat a fixed altitude suddenly dropping as it prepares for landing. Forthe first three of its four and a half minutes the persistent sound ofthe vessel sailing through the sky is realized by the sound of oneloud, all-encompassing drone. As the sound fades out gradually duringthe last minute it reveals layers of engine hum and the pitter patterof various working parts. In creating such a vivid aural description ofhis subject, Della Faille presents a full experience in a short amountof time. Although this is a 3" CD, the tracks don't feel incomplete.Instead, Ekranoplanesis the musical equivalent of a short film, and is successful on severallevels. As a tribute, it forms enough of a picture to be directlyconnected to the subject, yet it allows the listener enough space toplace the story in any setting the imagination can invent.
