30 January 2016

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Albums and Singles

Tim Hecker has revealed details of his latest album, and first record for 4AD.  The Canadian composer will release Love Streams, on 8th April 2016.

Love Streams takes its cues from the avant-classical orchestration and extreme electronic processing of his previous full-length, 2013’s Virgins, but shaped into more melancholic, ultraviolet hues.  Inspired by notions of 15th century choral scores (particularly those by Josquin des Prez), transposed to an artificial intelligence-era language of digital resonance and bright synths, the album was assembled gradually, with layers of studio-tracked keyboards, choir and woodwinds being woven into the mix, then molded and disfigured through complex programming.  Like hearing some ancient strain of sacred music corrupted by encryption, Hecker admits to thinking about ideas like "liturgical aesthestics after Yeezus" and the "transcendental voice in the age of auto-tune," during its creation.

The Love Streams sessions took place throughout 2014 and 2015 at Greenhouse Studios in Reykjavik, Iceland – where parts of both Virgins and Ravedeath, 1972 were tracked – with Hecker reuniting with the same crew of collaborators from Virgins (Kara-Lis Coverdale, Grímur Helgason) and bolstered by the Icelandic Choir Ensemble, whose vocal arrangements were scored by Icelandic composer Johann Johannsson.

The title of Hecker's new work can be interpreted any number of ways – erotic, technological, spiritual – although his own conception is appropriately vast, calling it "a riff on the ubiquity and nihilism of streaming of all forms of life."  Now we stream more than we love.  Nowadays music too frequently resembles a product, or white noise.  With a career spanning fifteen years, Tim Hecker belongs to a select camp actively resisting this undertow, this reduction in significance.

30 January 2016

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Albums and Singles

This is the seventh Surgeon album.

"While exploring new production techniques using old and unlikely hardware, the results were so unusual that I really had the sense that these pieces of equipment didn't actually create these sounds, rather they were in fact some kind of elaborate reception device that allowed me to tune into transmissions from distant galaxies. The music I could hear was actually the received transmissions of Pop Hits from those Distant Galaxies that were being played on their radio stations. I quickly recorded all that I could before losing the transmission. I consulted with Dr. Andrew Read, the astrophysicist with whom I recorded Guitar Treatments in 1999. He has worked on the discovery of the most distant galaxies and astronomical objects in the Universe. Together we came up with a possible list of where these musical transmissions may have come from."

-via Forced Exposure

30 January 2016

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Albums and Singles

"The legendary JK Broderick reprises his lushly romantic Final alias for Downwards with an expanded reissue of 2010's My Body is a Dying Machine offered to those who missed it first time around.

Now featuring eight tracks instead of the original five, Black Dollars hits a rich vein of ambient dream-pop that has always been an integral, if quieter part of Broderick's oeuvre since even before Godflesh was born.

Foggy highlights of the original EP such as the looping, blooming noise ecstasy of Gravity and the mind-sweeping guitar strokes of A Slight Return are now supplemented with the blown-out glory of The Eternal Dreamer and the majestic MBV-style swell of Flow River Flow and the vaulted electro-acoustics of The World is Not Waiting For You to make up an epic trip for the road or bedroom."

-via Boomkat

30 January 2016

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Albums and Singles

"Roly Porter zooms out to super macro levels of sidereal physics in Third Law, his debut for Tri Angle and most impressive solo album to date in the wake of Life Cycle of a Massive Star and his formative work with Vex’d.

Eight tracks describes a cataclysmic chain of cosmic events with fathomless attention to detail and a dizzying sense of meter appropriate to the breadth of his compositional and conceptual scope.

Leaving the dancefloor/earth as a speck of dust floating in his rear-view, he evacuates mind/body into a noumenal dimension of near-symphonic energy transfers between interrelated elements of rhythm, bass, and sound design shaped according to his own laws of physics.

In effect it recalls the flaring cinematic scope of Vangelis as much as Iancu Dumitrescu’s pursuit of a spectral music, and likewise the shuddering electro-acoustic masses of his Subtext label-mates, Emptyset and Paul Jebanasam, whilst also paralleling the dark matter investigations of The Haxan Cloak and Fis’s polymetric, psycho-acoustic ecosystems for Tri Angle."

-via Boomkat

30 January 2016

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Albums and Singles

Josephine Foster's No More Lamps In the Morning is a new folk route, a stripped down starsailor vector connecting heller to highwater. Foster, on nylon string guitar, and husband Victor Herrero, accompanying on Portuguese guitar, together weave intimate readings of songs spanning Foster's songwriting career including selections from recent albums This Coming Gladness (2008) and I'm a Dreamer (2013) and back to Born Heller (2004).

Foster's new route is a free, chromatic music, a tuneful montana of mind--an expansive harmonic space dominated by Rif mountain on the horizon. As highwater as the music is, as broad the stylistic palette of the musicians, the music really exists in service of the lyrics. Two of the songs on No More Lamps are poems by Rudyard Kipling and James Joyce given musical settings by Foster. The rest arguably are musical settings of her own poems strengthened in a fiery crucible of guitars (and on 2 tracks Gyða Valtýsdóttir's cello) in which dissonant notes bend and quaver as wirefork embers, dying without affecting the glowing tonal fire which unites contrary forces in a Moroccan speakeasy.

She and Herrero have performed, for an audience of burros, concerts of Federico Garcia Lorca poems set to music. A music of wandering and a music of roots. An impermanent tradition passed down for generations. Let your loved ones know. ~ Written by Chris Davis

More information can be found here.

24 January 2016

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Albums and Singles

This classic minimal music album is now available again on vinyl for the first time since the '70s.

La Monte Young, widely acknowledged as the father of musical minimalism, is one of the most influential contemporary composers. Yet he has strictly monitored his own discography and his music is rarely heard. Born in a log cabin in rural Idaho in 1935, Young became a key figure in the New York underground art scene of the early 1960s. He made vital contributions to the Fluxus movement and initiated the use of lofts as performance venues. Most important of all, his exploration of sustained tones, unorthodox tuning, high volume and long duration changed the course of twentieth-century music and ushered in new ways of listening.

This LP, initially issued on the French Shandar label in 1973, is a crucial document, preserving two manifestations of Young’s pioneering creative imagination. Each side stretches out to the standard length of an entire long-playing record. Listening to the sounds captured in each groove you are lifted out of routine temporality into a prolonged and personal here and now, an intimate kind of time that no clocks can measure.

On the first side is a performance by the Theatre of Eternal Music, the group which Young formed specifically to realise his radical musical conception. The name was coined in February 1965 to indicate that this ecstatic droning music had neither beginning nor end, that it came from and returned to a state of silence, where it lingers in its full potential until some musicians play its component tones once again. The group’s line-up, which changed over the years but always featured Young and his partner Marian Zazeela, boasted such luminaries of new music as Tony Conrad, Terry Riley and John Cale. Cale carried lessons learnt from Young into his work with the Velvet Underground, and through that seminal group to new generations of indie rockers and noise experimentalists.

On this recording the voices of Young and Zazeela are combined with the trombone of Garrett List and the trumpet of Jon Hassell, now more widely known through his work with Brian Eno. Although the immediate impression created by the music is that it changes little, close listening reveals intricate activity in the high harmonics where unexpected patterns and phantom melodies skitter across the surface of the music’s enveloping drone. Young and Zazeela developed their vocal technique through intensive study with North Indian singing master Pandit Pran Nath, and traces of that influence can be heard in their subtle ornamentation of the sustained tones.

Sine waves provide the basic threads that hold together The Tortoise, His Dreams And Journeys. Sine waves unadorned form the Drift Study on the second side of the LP. Such pieces were conceived as continuous sound environments. Since 1962 Young has nurtured the notion of a Dream House, in which such work might be installed, playing continuously and taking on a life of its own. To a seated listener this Drift Study appears a very pure form of minimalist musical drone, but move around the space in which the piece is playing and you will hear dramatic variation in the loudness of different frequencies, while your movement will itself alter the structure of air molecules in the room, affecting the way the piece is heard. It’s a fascinating probe into the nature of sound, hearing and spatial awareness.

The Shandar label, under the musical direction of French musicologist Daniel Caux, produced a small but select  catalogue. It includes recordings by Albert Ayler, Terry Riley, Sun Ra, Philip Glass, Cecil Taylor, Steve Reich and Charlemagne Palestine. During the early 1970s this was the cutting edge of new music, and today these recordings are still challenging, uplifting and revelatory. This reissue preserves the original artwork, an integral part of that special Shandar magic but also a fine example of the design sense and calligraphic grace that Marian Zazeela has brought to the presentation of La Monte Young’s singular music.

"My own feeling is that if people aren’t carried away to heaven I’m failing," -La Monte Young in 1966

More information can be found here.

24 January 2016

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Albums and Singles

One of downsides to living in the United States is that it is hard to keep up with all of the great limited-release or self-released albums that are continually emerging from the fringes of the UK’s experimental music underground.  While it is not terribly difficult to keep tabs on more established artists like Cyclobe, Nurse With Wound, Richard Skelton, or Current 93, it is very easy for an artist like, say, Áine O'Dwyer to remain under my radar for far longer than I would have liked.  Yet another fine example is this deeply inspired and beautiful homage to Jhonn Balance from early last year recorded by Phil Legard (Ashtray Navigations, Xenis Emputae Travelling Band) and his wife Layla.  While it predictably has some Coil-esque attributes (subtly hallucinatory electronics, a healthy interest in paganism), the Legards admirably transcend those nods by mingling them with their own passions for traditional/early music, yielding a unique strain of ritualistic-sounding rural psychedelia (and one of 2015's most slept-on great albums).

Xenis Emputae Travelling Band

The initial idea (and namesake) for this apparent one-off project originates in Ian Johnstone’s Jhonn Balance memorial, located near a hawthorn tree by Bassenthwaite Lake in Cumbria (the place where Jhonn’s ashes were spread).  Appropriately, work on the album began during the Summer Solstice back in 2014, a decision that Coil certainly would have approved of.  Balance and Peter Christopherson probably would have also appreciated the Legards' penchant for twilit ambiance and eerie, hallucinatory electronic textures, as well as the Legard's use of some deeply unconventional instrumentation (like a fox skull and a spiricom).  In nearly all other respects, however, Hawthonn diverge quite dramatically from Coil’s influence, which is (of course) what makes this album so compelling.  For the most part, these six pieces are built from little more than simple accordion or harmonium chords and Layla's beautifully somnambulant-sounding "ancient Druid priestess" vocals.  The overall feeling is a uniquely languorous, sensual, timeless, and ceremonial one that seems like half-dream, half-distant field recording of a pre-Christian ritual in some Stonehenge-like clearing on a hillside.

While pieces such as "Aura" unquestionably boast lovely half-ghostly/half-angelic melodies, Hawthonn's primary appeal lies in their ability to cast and maintain such a haunting and otherworldly spell.  They also do an absolutely superb job of blurring the lines between structure and abstraction, real versus unreal, and natural versus unnatural.  The opening "Foxglove," for example, opens with untreated field recordings of bird songs before transforming into a simple, lovely vocal melody…that floats above a bed of loud insectoid clacking and chittering.  Also, while Layla's melody remains relatively constant, the surrounding music restlessly shifts between being virtually absent altogether and cohering into ominous swells of dark chords.  Additionally, the vocals themselves eventually dissolve into distant soft-focus dreaminess before ultimately resurfacing in their natural state. There is no real terra firma that can be reliably expected to stick around.  Later on the album, "Ghost" seems to revisit a similar  vocal melody, but it is initially only heard in vaporous fragments amidst a bleary haze of rippling accordion chords, electronic hums, and deep exhalations, though it eventually coheres into something resembling an actual song (albeit one buffeted by spacey electronics).  Throughout the album, Layla acts as kind of a benevolent Siren, guiding me through a fog of buzzing drones, sputtering electronics, and an endlessly shifting landscape of collapsing, dissolving, stretching, and coalescing structures.

As far as faults are concerned, I am hard-pressed to think of anywhere where Phil and Layla made anything resembling a misstep, though there are plenty of unusual sequencing and structural choices that could be viewed that way by listeners with different perspectives than my own.  For example, Hawthonn have a definite tendency towards burying their strongest material in extremely lengthy songs, as both "Foxglove" and "Thanatopsis" clock in at over 16 minutes.  I tend to view that as a wise tendency to ensure that the longer, more ambitious pieces have enough of a melodic hook to keep them compelling for their entire duration though.  It is great that the Legards have such a knack for writing timeless neo-folk melodies, but they are definitely not the endgame or Hawthonn’s real raison d’être.  Rather, they are merely the most immediately graspable facet of a much larger, stranger, and more iconoclastic vision.  Another possible critique is that the album is somewhat amorphous and that all the songs sort of blur together without any real stand-out or real culmination.  Again, however, that is completely by design.  In fact, the album is intended to he heard as one constantly shifting, ebbing, and flowing whole rather than a series of discrete works.  In order to work as well as it does, this album absolutely required a light touch and an unwavering willingness to eschew the sharp edges of reality in favor of a beautifully drifting and flickering reverie.  Layla and Phil succeeded admirably in those regards.  As a result, Hawthonn have achieved the rarest of rarities: a homage that reaches heights similar to its inspiration.

• Foxglove
• Aura
• Ghosts

 

 

24 January 2016

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Albums and Singles

This collaborative EP with violinist Anne Bakker is a unique entry in Rutger Zuyderveldt’s vast discography, as it is a 26-minute tour de force of nerve-jangling tension and sliding dissonance.  Deining (translating as "heave" or "commotion") definitely falls quite unambiguously and unapologetically into the "this is art, not entertainment" category.  That probably will make it a hard sell for most people (Rutger himself understatedly observed that the piece is "a tad bitter"), but it is nevertheless quite a fascinating piece for those of us with an appreciation (and high tolerance) for shifting, uncomfortably close harmonies (there are a lot of those here).  Also, it is very hard not to admire the beautiful symmetry and simplicity of this uncompromising experiment.

Machinefabriek Bandcamp

When I first heard Deining, I had not yet read anything about it and was somewhat mystified by the seemingly minimal role played by Machinefabriek.  Aside from the subtle pulse of a sine wave, the piece seems to be entirely about Bakker and her violin.  Which it definitely is, in one way.  In a much more significant way, however, this is very much Rutger Zuyderveldt's experiment, as his concept and behind-the-scenes machinations are why Deining is such a singular entity rather than any kind of expected or "normal" collaboration.  The project is rooted in a very simple idea: Zuyderveldt asked Bakker to slowly slide from the lowest note to the highest note for five minutes on each string of her violin.  She gamely obliged and also threw in some corresponding downward slides as a bonus.  Structurally, Deining is little more than five minutes of Bakker slowly sliding up the lowest string of her violin, a brief resolution into a pleasant drone, Bakker slowly sliding up the second lowest string of her violin, another brief resolution, and so on.  There is not any larger compositional arc other than a series of four increasingly high-pitched, uncomfortable, and painfully slow slides up the neck of a violin interspersed with a few welcome oases of calm.

While such a nakedly segmented, time-based, and purposely restricted composition does not yield much in the way of a cumulative reward, there is quite a lot of pleasure to be found in the details (if "pleasure" is the right word).  Zuyderveldt did quite an expert and impressively nuanced job of layering multiple tracks together to evoke a constantly escalating intensity and pitch even while other tracks are sliding downwards.  Also, the two opposing sliding pitches, coupled with the underlying sine wave tone, yield a vibrant and constantly shifting world of complex harmonies and oscillations.  As an experiment in sustaining simmering, squirm-inducing tension for an uncomfortable period of time, Deining is quite an unqualified success.  Also, the structure of escalating, sharpening plateaus of unease is a clever and effective way of presenting such an (almost) unrelentingly dissonant theme.

There are also few other tricks and enhancements happening in the background of Deining, like the fact that Rutger’s sine waves manually follow the pitch of the violin, then freeze into a drone when they reach the same pitch (always at the midpoint of a section).  The piece is not nearly as aggressively minimal as it initially seems.  I also enjoyed the transitional moments when the warmly beautiful passages of interstitial calm suddenly blossom into a fresh surge of quavering upward glissando.  The real show, however, remains the rich and wonderfully textural plunge into almost half an hour of shifting dissonance and close harmonies.  All of the conceptual and structural underpinnings are neat, but they are primarily intellectual pleasures that pale beside the far more visceral and immediate power of the piece itself.  There is certainly no shortage of harsh music in the world, but it truly rare for anyone to achieve that end through harmony alone and to do it so immersively and so effectively (especially outside the realm of modern classical music).  Obviously, a release like Deining is fundamentally destined to appeal to a very limited audience, but it is hard to imagine any way in which Rutger could have achieved his objective any more perfectly than he did here.  Deining fills a niche that almost never gets explored and does it masterfully.

• Excerpt One
• Excerpt Two
• Excerpt Three

 

24 January 2016

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Albums and Singles

Perpetual frontrunners Natural Snow Buildings and My Cat is an Alien aside, the single most unique and transcendental album of 2015 was this full-length debut from Würzburg-based experimental folk duo Brannten Schnüre.  While previous releases were primarily focused upon crackling, ritualistic-sounding, and eerily beautiful abstract collages, Sommer im Pfirsichhain (Summer in Peach Grove) takes Christian Schoppik's "German hauntology" aesthetic to a whole new plane, sounding like nothing less than the ghost of a lovesick Weimar Republic busker who happened upon an accordion, an out-of-tune violin, and a battered four-track in the spirit world and somehow managed to mail the resultant album to the Aguirre office in Belgium.  As if that were not enough, Sommer improves upon that already appealing description by balancing its more macabre and experimental tendencies with an unexpected warmth, sweetness, and innocence.

Aguirre

Christian Schoppik's Brannten Schnüre project first surfaced with a now impossible to find split release in 2011 on Germany’s SicSic cassette label.  The excellent Aprilnacht tape then appeared on the same label in 2014 and earned Schoppik a bit more well-deserved attention, as his surreal loop collages of weathered traditional folk and classical music samples, melancholy accordion, enigmatic dialogue, and lilting, half-sung German vocals were both beautifully constructed, wonderfully otherworldly, and completely unstuck in time.  It seemed like a perfect and fully formed aesthetic, so his decision to expand into a duo with vocalist Katie Rich and transition from loop-based soundscapes into actual songs for this latest album was quite an unexpected and bold one.  It seems to have worked brilliantly, however, as everything that made Aprilnacht so singular is still more or less intact, but Schoppik has found a way to transform that vision into something a bit more melodic, tender, and memorable.

The transformation was not a complete one, however, as Rich's haunting ballads are still interspersed with a number of more drone-based pieces that would not have been at all out of place on Aprilnacht.  Schoppik excels equally at the two veins and they balance each other nicely, even if the vocal pieces tend to be the ones that stick in my head a bit longer.  Among the instrumental pieces, the opening "Vom Baum im Hof" probably stands out the most, as a languorous melody unfolds over a sensuous bed of churning and bleary strings as floating synth tones flutter and bleed together in the periphery.  It is followed by one of Rich's lovely and melancholy accordion ballads ("Schweiβ"), which is ingeniously made surreal and ghostly with the addition of quivering string stabs and deep, bleary, and ominous horns.  "Feldweg," on the other hand, is such a perfectly eerie song that it does not need much more than a simple guitar arpeggio and Rich's vocals to cast a sublimely, mesmerizing spell (though it does benefit from some nice additional touches, like a bittersweet accordion melody, washes of guitar shimmer, and high-pitched backing vocals that sound like a chorus of ghost puppets).  Later in the album, "Brüderchen und Schwesterchen" manages to hit the wonderful place where the two strains of Schoppik's vision intersect, as corroded loops of undulating accordion arpeggios steadily grow in power while Rich seems to be distractedly half-singing by herself in another reality altogether.  The rattling and undulating beauty of "Nachmittagsschwüle" is likely the album's zenith, however, sounding like an epic tour de force of heartache, mourning, and occult nocturnal ritual condensed into just three perfect minutes.

There is an enormous amount to like about Sommer, so it is difficult to think of any real flaws other than the inclusion of a few instrumentals that are not quite as strong as the material surrounding them ("Lichter am Weiher" and "Mithra im Jardin Botanique").  That minor quibble ("why isn’t the album absolutely perfect?!?") is naturally eclipsed by the many ways in which Sommer is truly wonderful and utterly mesmerizing.  Great melodies and excellent songwriting aside, Brannten Schüre excel the most at the more intangible and fundamental things, such as lightness of touch, use of space, dynamics, sequencing, and texture.  In particular, I was most struck by how effectively Rich and Schoppik maintained a spell of bittersweet, mysterious beauty without ever erring into oppressive sadness.  Schoppik's talent for texture deserves a special mention as well, as Sommer's half-dream/half-nightmare spell would not be nearly as effective if the various instruments were not all frayed, rusted, submerged, or shrouded in audio fog. Sommer im Pfirsichhein so effectively creates its own little dream world that it feels like gazing into an extremely lovely and elaborate version of whatever the summer equivalent of a snowglobe would be, then noticing all kinds of disconcerting little details amidst all the beautiful seaside houses and picturesque tree-lined streets, like menacing shadows; a haunted-looking, hollow-eyed child; a body hanging from a tree; or a large rotting animal carcass on a perfectly manicured lawn.  In short, exactly the sort of thing that I love.  This album is absolutely stellar.

• Schwei√ü
• Feldweg
• Br√ºderchen und Schwesterchen

 

17 January 2016

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Albums and Singles

Scale, repetition, and variation have a way of bringing Morton Feldman to mind whether or not Feldman has anything to do with the matter at hand. The matter in this case is Mike Majkowski’s Bright Astonishment of the Night, the second of two full-length albums he released in 2015. The other, Neighbouring Objects, focused on the sympathetic resonances between instruments like piano, chimes, and double bass. This one focuses exclusively on the double bass over two long tracks, one of which, titled "Sleep and Oblivion," runs for over 48 minutes. Majkowski spends much of that time cycling through a series of techniques that emphasize the weight and extent of his instrument: the way it travels through the room, the way it melds into the walls at low frequencies and cuts through the air at higher ones, and the way those extremes relate. Resonance is still the subject of his work, but in this case it’s cast against a play of repetition and variation that holds equal weight.

Bocian

Time was an important concept for Morton Feldman in the latter part of his career, from 1983 until his death in 1987. It was during those four years that he completed pieces like String Quartet No. 2, For Philip Guston, and For Christian Wolff, all of which challenge performers to concentrate on exceedingly tricky scores for anywhere between two and six hours, depending on the tempo the group chooses. Mike Majkowski doesn’t make that kind of demand on his audience or on himself, but like Feldman he utilizes long periods of time to get at ideas and sounds that other musical elements aren’t as well-equipped to produce. Chief among these are the shape of sound and the shape of time.

The bulk of "Sleep and Oblivion" is composed of double bass figures that either pop and resound or flash in straight, short lines, like beams of light. The contrasting high and low tones create a gaping space between, which is filled in as each passage slows down and drifts toward silence. Just as inertia seems poised to take over, the sudden pop and large low tone that started the last section springs back and the music resumes its slow crawl forward. Majkowski returns to figures like these throughout the piece. Sometimes they sound like near exact reproductions of sections that have come before, other times they are clearly variations with different melodies or rhythms. For the most part, however, the music cleaves to the same tonal center—minor, dark and maybe a little gloomy—so what melodic variation there is is a matter of small movements up and down. The durations and rhythms are much easier to pick out and much easier to remember as iteration after iteration falls into the past.

Buried between these repetitions are some surprising tangents: the combination of bowed and plucked strings at minute 23, a long low drone that never comes back at minute 32, a unique series of percussive tones struck with only three minutes left. Folded up inside the well-established patterns and seemingly constant cycles of "Sleep and Oblivion" are these unpredictable and otherwise unrelated intervals. Majkowski spends a lot of time lulling the ears into submission, conditioning them to expect another recognizable series or another recognizable technique. This is where time and its shape become a factor. Given enough space, time obscures, hides, or otherwise erases, makes identification and remembering a task, not because it must be that way, but because the content of the music, the way it is shaped, works to the same end. The shapes of time and sound are related just like the length of a sine wave and its tone are, except that, at large distances and over long periods, the effect is the dissolution of patterns and structures. There are many places, some of them dramatic, where Majkowski could have stopped his piece, but he chooses to continue with the process instead, thereby eliminating the feeling of completion associated with resolution, whether melodic, rhythmic, or otherwise.

In light of that disjunction, "Ultramarine" is a surprise. An 18-minute coda that sticks to quickly bowed drones, it neither completes nor resolves the tension of "Sleep and Oblivion" and, because of its shorter duration, ultimately disappears into the shadow of that piece. Similar ideas are at work—the same rapid bowing is used to produce a bright harmonic glow up and down the neck for the entire piece—but the subject is more melodic and more colorful, less preoccupied with structure. Duration still matters, but in this case it serves the contradiction between the short quick movements of Majkowski’s hands and the resonant luminescence of the strings, like watching an old film on a hand-cranked projector. In any case, "Ultramarine" is more of a departure than a continuation of "Sleep and Oblivion" and probably should have been given more space than is provided. That sequencing decision is the only hiccup on an otherwise deliberate and challenging record.

samples:

• Sleep and Oblivion (1)
• Sleep and Oblivion (2)
• Ultramarine