05 November 2016

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Faitiche welcomes back an old friend: Andrew Pekler was the musical director of the 2011 Ursula Bogner album, Sonne = Blackbox (faitiche05 lp/cd/book).

Known for his albums on Senufo Editions, Entr’acte, Dekorder, Kranky and other labels, Pekler’s new work Tristes Tropiques is now released by Faitiche. Tristes Tropiques is an album of synthetic exotica, pseudo-ethnographic music and unreal field recordings.

02 November 2016

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Dais is excited to announce the third box set of ambient master works by ominous painter and musician Tor Lundvall. Musically influenced by his own haunting and unique paintings, Lundvall creates ethereal landscapes of dreamlike beauty, seamlessly weaving classic ambient composition, piano and other instruments with a modern yet nostalgic touch, accompanied by electronics, samples, and field recordings. Best described as “Ghost Ambient” music, Tor Lundvall creates records that are absolutely unique and unequalled: the soundtrack to dreams, solitude, nature, nightmares, and memories.

This 5xCD box set includes the following:

• The Park
• The Violet-Blue House
• Rain Studies
• Field Trip
• Insect Wings, Leaf Matter & Broken Twigs Vol 2

02 November 2016

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Albums and Singles

Frozen Geometry emerged from years of sketching new textures on guitar, which were layered and looped into immersive capsules of harmony and drift. Erik Kowalski's original intention was to use them as melodic foundations for future compositions, but then he "became aware of them existing on their own."

First full-length offering from legendary ambient act in over half a decade.

An intriguing opus of hypnotic beauty and peripheral consciousness.

More information can be found here.

31 October 2016

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Albums and Singles

For some reason, I never fully appreciated Emeralds when they were around, but I think I am belatedly redressing that wrong with my interest in Steve Hauschildt’s quietly impressive and steadily evolving solo career.  Prior to Strands, I was most taken with his more "Kraftwerk' moments on 2012's Sequitur, but this latest release often feels like a gorgeous culmination of Hauschildt's artistry, eschewing almost all traces of Vangelis-inspired retro-futurist pastiche to weave a lush and languorous reverie inspired by both creation/destruction myths and the famously burning river of his own hometown of Cleveland.

Kranky

The opening "Horizon of Appearances" does not waste any time setting the tone for album, as it basically oozes into audibility as a melancholy drift of swelling chords with some distantly hallucinatory drips and twinkles buried deep in the background.  While they are very much in the periphery, those "drips" are probably my favorite part of the otherwise unrelentingly somber piece, sounding like falling condensation in a deep cave that unexpectedly blossoms into ephemeral melody as the splash reverberates around its cavernous surroundings.  Aside from those subtly psychedelic nuances, "Horizon" is far from my favorite piece on the album, but it is only the monochromatic sadness of the central motif that relegates it to the status, as I very much love the unhurried, exhalation-like pace and attention to detail.  The following "Same River Twice" offers up a somewhat different template, however, keeping the melancholy, but enlivening its theme with an undercurrent of burbling momentum, a shuffling rhythm, and flourishes of vibrantly glittering arpeggios.  It is a fairly representative work rather than an exciting leap forward, but it does capture Hauschildt's longtime aesthetic at its best: simultaneously understated, vibrant, and richly layered.

The album starts to catch fire in earnest (like the Cuyahoga) around the fourth song, however, as "Ketracel" bolsters its melancholy faux-string melody with an energetic bed of pulsing arpeggios, off-kilter rhythms, and a host of delightful bleeps and squelches.  Then the piece gets uncharacteristically pulled apart and the sadness of the central theme gets almost completely consumed by the increasingly erratic underlying music and some intrusions of noisier textures.  It is quite a curveball by Hauschildt standards and the following album highlight "Time We Have" keeps that momentum going beautifully.  Like several other pieces on the album, it is quite slow-moving and elegiac, but manages to come across as warm and rapturous rather than somber.  Also, Hauschildt enhances his perfect melody with some nice textural crackle and increasingly rich harmonies.  It is simultaneously simple, gorgeous, and moving and is likely the crown jewel of Hauschildt’s career to date. The following title piece is also another quiet stunner, as its lovely subdued and burbling melody is allowed to spiral off into a number of compelling textural directions, leaving a trail of wonderfully hallucinatory afterimages that seem to have a life of their own.

Lamentably, that wonderful streak of near-perfect songs could not last forever, as Hauschildt becomes overly somber again with "Transience of Earthly Joys," which almost sounds like a funeral mass.  It is not necessary a misfire, but it definitely could benefit from a lighter touch.  The closing "Die in Fascination" feels like belated coda to the earlier "Time We Have," as it reprises its formula of simplicity and a quietly beautiful flow of swelling chords.  Unlike "Time We Have," however, it just gradually fades away rather than blossoming into anything more.  Within the context of the album, that was an excellent sequencing choice, but it is a bit too basic to stand as one of the album's high points.  Much like every Hauschildt album, Strands is ultimately a bit of a mixed bag, as Steve is prone to occasional heavy-handedness or dubious stylistic choices.  However, he is also one of the most gifted and exacting composers currently working with synthesizers, so I do not mind listening to a handful of near-misses to get to the inevitable bulls-eye or two.  Also, even his near-misses tend to offer a few compelling facets, as the sheer craft of Hauschildt's work is always impressive even when the songs themselves fall a bit short.  In any case, Strands certainly seems like Hauschildt's finest album to date, boasting both an impressively sustained three-song burst of greatness and the feeling of a thematically satisfying and artfully sequenced whole.

Samples:

• Ketracel
• Time We Have
• Strands

 

30 October 2016

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Albums and Singles

Adam Bryanbaum Wiltzie, the creative force behind A Winged Victory For The Sullen and Stars Of The Lid, is to officially release his score for the non-fiction film Salero on November 11th.

Having channelled some of the most iconic drift music of our time through A Winged Victory For The Sullen and Stars of the Lid, 2016 has already seen Erased Tapes luminary Adam Bryanbaum Wiltzie provide original scores for a number of feature films including Jalil Lespert's Iris and The Yellow Birds by Alexandre Moors.

It’s on Salero, however, that we see Wiltzie weave some of his finest work and deliver an expertly distilled accompaniment to director Mike Plunkett's sprawling, uncompromising visuals. Set in Bolivia's Salar de Uyuni, the world’s largest salt flat, the narrative follows the region's "Saleros" – those who have for generations gathered salt and earned enough to somehow carve out an existence in such a barren landscape. It’s with the discovery of huge Lithium reserves – a mineral used frequently throughout the tech industry – under the scorched earth that acts as a catalyst for exploitation of the environment and its people; holding a microscope to the drastic effect industrialisation has on local culture and tradition.

"I have always said that composing music is infinitely easier when you have beautiful images to be inspired by. It was a pleasure to write a score over this captivating place of endless, glimmering salt before its impending demise. I was fascinated by this mythical space and its ability to define the identities of the people who live in its vicinity, where this vast salt flat itself would be a central character" – Adam Bryanbaum Wiltzie

More information can be found here.

30 October 2016

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Albums and Singles

Unlike most Benoît Pioulard enthusiasts, I connect most strongly with Thomas Meluch’s recent instrumental side, so I was a little bit heartbroken when he decided to end his recent hot streak in that regard with a return to more song-based work.  Personal preferences aside, however, Meluch's latest release is an intriguing and unusual one, as he seems to be simultaneously growing more ambitious with his arrangements and more abstract with his structures.  He also seems to be making a conscious effort to be a bit more upbeat and effervescent, albeit in his own muted way.  The overall result admittedly has a "transitional album" feel at times, but The Benoît Pioulard Listening Matter definitely takes Meluch's "ambient pop" in a subtly more sun-dappled, blearily vaporous, and fragmented direction.

Kranky

The listening matter in question teasingly opens with a brief and gorgeously lush drone piece ("Initials B.P.") before the understated and elegantly orchestrated pop extravaganza begins in earnest with the following "Narcologue."  Tellingly, the very first lines that Meluch sings are about how he finally found the song he wanted, but it disappeared.  For better or worse, that statement is probably the overarching theme of the album, as The Benoît Pioulard Listening Matter is chock full of great hooks and melodies that feel effortlessly tossed off or aborted prematurely.  This is very much an album of wonderfully glittering moments of maddeningly ephemeral pop genius.  The best example of this tendency is probably the wonderfully driving and uncharacteristically rapturous "Like There’s Nothing Under You," which exasperatingly bows out after just over a minute.

Despite Meluch's casual disregard for fully exploiting his perfectly crafted hooks, he clearly put an enormous amount of work into meticulously layering and texturing all of these fleeting vignettes, peppering them with odd percussion and subtly hallucinatory field recordings.  Meluch has stated in interviews that those recordings often tend to have personal significance for him and trigger memories when he hears them again, which is an admirably sneaky backdoor way to infuse his somewhat mannered, deadpan pop with hidden depth and mystery.  I certainly appreciate that aspect of the album myself, as the evocative and subtle sublayers make for rewarding repeat listening.  That said, it is the actual songwriting makes me want to listen repeatedly in the first place, so the songs with the strongest hooks tend to be my favorites (provided they stick around long enough to grab me).  Aside from the lush and delirious first single "Anchor as the Muse," Meluch saves most of his best pieces for the second half of the album, particularly "A Mantel for Charon," which I would describe as stomping and soaring…by Benoît Pioulard standards, at least (it still manages to remain characteristically dream-like and soft-focus).  The jangling and clap-filled "The Sun is Going to Explode But Whatever Its OK" is yet another stand-out, as its joyous music is amusingly undercut by Meluch's deadpan delivery and dark sense of humor.

In a perverse way, the problems with The Benoît Pioulard Listening Matter are part of what makes it such an unusual and intriguing album.  Meluch seems to have been pulled in a number of seemingly disparate directions here, as Listening Matter sounds like he started out to make a glorious bedroom-pop Pet Sounds-style opus, but could not fully commit to it because being so nakedly poppy did not sit well with his muted, sleepy, and "underachiever" aesthetic: he avoids being gauche or heavy-handed to an almost self-sabotaging degree.  It also seems like Meluch is still (rightly) somewhat in the thrall of his recent instrumental bender, as a good number of these "songs" are brief, wordless interludes that would have been album highlights if they had stuck around long to leave an impression.  Aside from a handful of 3-minute pieces, this album rushes by like a goddamn whirlwind.  On the bright side, Meluch certainly did not lack inspiration or great ideas and he undeniably threw himself into presenting them all beautifully.  Consequently, The Benoît Pioulard Listening Matter is quite a likable album–I just cannot shake the feeling that there is an even better one lurking in this material that may have come out if Meluch had not condensed so many ideas into so short a span.

• Like There's Nothing Under You
• A Mantle for Charon
• Ruth

 

30 October 2016

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Albums and Singles

I had absolutely no idea what to expect from Jim Thirlwell’s latest opus, as I am still a bit shell-shocked from the overwhelming maximalism of 2013’s Soak and all bets are off with soundtrack work.  Also, Tony Oursler's Imponderable is quite a bizarre film by any standards.  Appropriately, the soundtrack is quite bizarre as well, though it is considerably more understated, melodic, and tender than I had anticipated: Thirlwell's eerie, dark, and eclectic vision beautifully mirrors the film’s own noirish pulp-meets-hallucinatory experimentation aesthetic.  Both Oursler and Thirlwell definitely share a puckish appreciation for the nexus where garish "low" art collides with higher, more cerebral fare.  That said, Imponderable is still a soundtrack rather than an original new stand-alone Thirlwell album, so its appeal is very "niche."  Devout Thirlwell fans will definitely not want to miss it though, as it is quite a unique release that takes his aesthetic in some unusual and surprising directions.

Ectopic Ents

It goes without saying that Jim Thirlwell is an interesting guy who chooses interesting projects, but teaming up with Tony Oursler seems like an especially perfect marriage.  By coincidence, I found myself in NYC over the weekend, so I was able to catch a bit of Imponderable at MoMA, its current home.  I am curious to see if takes up residence anywhere else, as it has some interesting technical demands that prohibit it from playing in a regular theater. More specifically, it is "presented in a "5-D" cinematic environment utilizing a contemporary form of Pepper’s ghost—a 19th-century phantasmagoric device—and a range of sensory effects (scents, vibrations, etc.)."  I personally did not find the occasional red houselights or wafts of perfume to be especially crucial to the experience, but it is easy to see how the artist might feel differently.  Vibrating floors and scent infusions aside, Imponderable is a one-of-a-kind film just from its subject matter alone, as it is a complexly layered fantasia on director Tony Oursler's family history mingled with his longtime fascination with "stage magic, spirit photography, pseudoscience, telekinesis, and other manifestations of the paranormal."  The overall effect is unpredictable and disorienting in the extreme, as it feels like watching weirdly stage-y and stilted reenactments of multiple unfamiliar films while deeply in the throes of an acid trip.

Appropriately, Thirlwell’s soundtrack is similarly kaleidoscopic and phantasmagoric, flitting seamlessly from squelching and goopy vintage synth kitsch ("Symphony VII, Part II") to jaunty accordion romps ("Giggle Water") to gorgeous, exotic reveries ("Chinese Ghost").  The album’s centerpiece, however, is the comparatively lengthy "Spark of Life," an oasis of lush and darkly Romantic balladry amidst a wilderness of eclectic instrumentals.  Though it admittedly boasts a few over-the-top goth/theatrical tropes (church bells, a raspy throat gurgle) and very film-specific lyrics ("automaton will rise again"), Thirlwell’s tenderly incantatory vocals elevate it into something quite haunting and compelling.  Hearing an actual, naked human voice intrude into an album that otherwise sounds like a bizarre B-movie fever dream is quite striking.  I actually like all of the longer pieces quite a bit though, as Thirlwell seems to be at his most outré and inspired when he has a few minutes to stretch out.  In "Night Nurse," for example, he manages to find room for an interlude of strangled strings, a drone segment featuring eerily quivering feedback, and a darkly hallucinatory music box coda.  Elsewhere, he embarks upon a beautifully lush and melancholy reverie in "Faerie Bust" and deftly condenses all of the album’s disparate themes into a single piece with "The History of Magic."  I also quite liked the brief "Demonologia," as its gnarled, industrial-damaged collage aesthetic is much closer to my personal sensibility than the rest of the album.

Generally, my problem with soundtracks is that I just do not understand why they exist or why anyone would want to listen to music that is disembodied from its intended context.  I recognize that that is a harsh stance, but the whole point of a soundtrack is to provide color and mood for a more complex and layered whole without being intrusive or stealing the focus.  As such, soundtracks are fundamentally not meant to stand alone.  That said, I am not a crazy person, so I acknowledge that some soundtracks transcend their original intent.  The Imponderable score arguably does just that: while it is too closely thematically tied to what is on the screen to exist as a completely independent entity, it is also far too vivid and rich for its only life to be as a mere backdrop.  As I was watching Imponderable, I appreciated how beautifully the underlying music enhanced the scenes, but realized that it is probably very easy to watch the entire film without ever noticing the sheer depth, breadth, and imagination of Thirlwell’s score, which is definitely its own singular work of art.  That seems criminal, so I am delighted that this window into Thirlwell’s skewed genius remains open for me to explore at my leisure.

• Spark of Life
• Faerie Bust
• The History of Magic

 

23 October 2016

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Albums and Singles

From Steve Hauschildt:

"Strands is a song cycle that is about cosmogony and creation/destruction myths. The title alludes to the structural constitution of ropes as I wanted to approach the compositions so that they consisted of strands and fibers which form a unified whole. This was so the songs could have the appearance of being either taut or slack without being fundamentally locked to a grid. So the sounds/tones have a certain malleability to them and sound like they're bending through time. It's also grittier and more distorted than my previous albums. I wanted to try and capture that moment in nature and society where life slowly reemerges through desolation, so it has a layer of optimism looming underneath. The music represents this by seemingly decaying at times but then reforms and morphs in a fluid way back to its original state. I was also inspired by the movement of rivers, particularly their transformative aspect and how they're in a state of flux and change, in particular the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland where I live, which notoriously caught on fire thirteen times because of industrial pollution in the 1960s and before. I was very interested in the dichotomy of oil and water and the resulting, unnatural symptoms of human industry. It's a very personal record for me as it is a reflection of my hometown where I grew up and where it was mostly recorded."

Out October 28, 2016 on Kranky.

23 October 2016

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Albums and Singles

Monument Builders is the new album from loscil, the ambient/electronic project of prolific composer Scott Morgan. It was primarily created on sample-based instruments in Morgan's century-old Vancouver home. Like that aged space, this music is also rough-hewn, with rickety samples of boiling kettles and resonant moving air. Recordings from a vintage micro-cassette recorder contribute distortion, rattles and textures that serve as both percussion and abstract aural color.

According to Morgan, the genesis for the album may have begun as he viewed an old VHS copy of the American experimental film Koyaanisqatsi. "Something about the time-tarnished visuals and the pitch warble on Philip Glass's epic score added a new layer of intrigue for me," says Morgan. "Glass has always been an influence but lo-fi Glass felt like a minor revelation, as if the decay was actually enhancing the impact of the film's message."

The investigations on Monument Builders also took inspiration from the anti-humanist writings of influential philosopher John Gray, as well as photographer Edward Burtynsky’s iconic aerial photographs of pollution and environmental destruction. "Gray’s writing, particularly his book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals, reinforced a bleak notion I had that we humans don’t have much say in how it all turns out," says Morgan. "With Burtynsky, I was struck by the fact that something so strikingly beautiful could be the result of large-scale waste and exploitation."

Monument Builders was composed during a period in which the life-and-death battles of close friends and family forced Morgan to examine his own feelings on mortality. In the course of that introspection, Morgan found himself buoyed by a feeling of celebration and a stubborn sense of survival – an acknowledgement of what it means to be able to breathe and create amidst the clash of love and chaos. Ultimately, Morgan hopes the music here can offer listeners solace while leaving room for exploration and surprise.

Out November 11, 2016 on Kranky.

23 October 2016

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Brian Lustmord's latest opus, allegedly first begun 15 years ago, attempts to evoke the immense void and mystery of space using a host of cosmological recordings from NASA and others as his source material.  There are a number of serious hurdles standing in the way of that ambitious and quixotic objective, sadly, but Dark Matter boasts enough flashes of inspiration to make it an interesting and valiant struggle.  Though serious Lustmord fans will probably be delighted to hear Brian revisiting similar territory to his classic The Place Where the Black Stars Hang album, his epic vision is hobbled a bit by the limitations of the format.

Touch

Dark Matter opens with its strongest and lengthiest piece, the 27-minute "Subspace," which is centered around a wonderfully eerie, distant, and forlorn-sounding two-note melody.  While that "hook" is the most important part of the piece for me, such touches are quite peripheral to Lustmord’s central vision here: Dark Matter is primarily an album of deep throbbing drones, cavernous rumbles, ominous whooshes, volcanic bubbling, and distant crackling.  Therein lies the root of my issues with the album, as Lustmord is first and foremost a brilliant and exacting technician fixated on mood and texture, while his interest in being a composer is clearly of secondary concern.  To his credit, a lack of attention to melody and harmony makes perfect sense thematically, as space is ostensibly a soundless void.  Veracity and thematic purity do not always make for a great listening experience though.  On this particular piece, however, Brian strikes an excellent balance between composition and sound design: "Subspace" gradually becomes subsumed by drifting emptiness and mysterious crackles before a second strong theme emerges from the lonely void in the form of something that sounds like a whale song.  It is a genuinely satisfying arc.  That balance is the exception rather than the rule, however: if the entire album stuck with that precarious and unpredictable ebb and flow between form and formlessness, I would probably like it a lot more than I do.

Aside from "Subspace," Dark Matter often sounds like it is on dark ambient autopilot.  Each piece ultimately boasts a showstopping set piece, but there are a lot of lengthy, frustrating lulls between flashes of actual greatness.  For example, "Astronomicon" has a wonderfully haunting final motif, but it takes about 15 minutes to get there.  Of course, Brian was not actually on autopilot for this album and that is where things get thorny.  Part of the problem is that Lustmord (much to his chagrin) was one of the primary architects of the dark ambient genre, influencing a host of other artists in the '90s.  The resulting glut of lesser, yet very similar, music necessarily made Lustmord feel a lot less special.  As a long career in film and videogame and sound design can attest, Brian is head and shoulders above most of his peers in the actual mechanics of his craft–unfortunately, however, an amorphous flow of subterranean rumbles, deep throbs, crackles, buried howls, and whooshes in the hands of a dilettante sounds a hell of a lot like the same thing done by a master on most stereos.  Without anything resembling melody or rhythm, the only obvious differences between similar artists in that milieu are largely technical and conceptual.

Naturally, Brian is well aware of his predicament and has noted in the past that his rare live performances are partly done just so people can hear how Lustmord is actually supposed to sound.  Consequently, Dark Matter is fundamentally a bit an indulgent and insular release, existing almost as a site-specific work designed solely to be experienced on Brian’s own amazing home stereo system, as he has observed that very few people will be able to properly experience its visceral and seismic low frequencies.  Another problem is that sonically trying to evoke the bleak immensity of space is inherently futile (space's sounds are generally at wavelengths that we cannot hear) and conveying infinity in an absorbing way is also no picnic.  Trying to hold my attention for 70 minutes with hollow whooshes, clanging metal, cavernous gurgling, and muted roars is a similarly unpromising endeavor, so it takes a lot of patience, attention, and volume to fully appreciate Dark Matter's secrets.  Having to wait a quarter of an hour for both "Astronomicon" and "Black Static" to fully evolve into something remarkable is far from optimal, but both are great once they finally catch fire.

The more I listen to Dark Matter, the more I find myself conflicted about it.  The only things that I am certain of are 1.) an enormous amount of work went into it, and 2.) an album is hopelessly inadequate for conveying the full majesty of Lustmord's vision.  I wanted to love Dark Matter and I lamentably do not, but the reasons for my vague sense of unfulfillment were initially hard to nail down.  At first, I thought this was a significant regression from the crazily ambitious and divergent The Word as Power and that Brian’s day job has begun to bleed a bit too much into his art (at normal volume, Dark Matter would provide a perfect atmosphere for a dark sci-fi game or film). Those assessments are not entirely off the mark compositionally, as Dark Matter definitely retreats to Lustmord's longtime comfort zone, but it is equally true that this album may very well be Brian’s magnum opus, albeit with some asterisks.  I am not going to say that Brian was too ambitious, but I do believe that his intent here far outstretched the capabilities of the medium: Dark Matter is an album that begs to be experienced on a grand scale (like an earthquake) rather than just heard.  As such, it is a bit underwhelming and easy to ignore for long stretches in its current form, but it is not hard to imagine these three pieces feeling like the voice of God if they were experienced at apocalyptic volume in the right context.

• Subspace
• Astronomicon
• Black Static