We have finally cleared out the backlog of great music and present some new episodes.
Episode 711 features music from The Jesus and Mary Chain, Zola Jesus, Duster, Sangre Nueva, Dialect, The Bug, Cleared, Mount Eerie, Mulatu Astatke & Hoodna Orchestra, Hayden Pedigo, Bistro Boy, and Ibukun Sunday.
Episode 712 has tunes by Mazza Vision, Waveskania, Black Pus, Sam Gendel, Benny Bock, and Hans Kjorstad, Katharina Grosse, Carina Khorkhordina, Tintin Patrone, Billy Roisz, and Stefan Schneider, His Name Is Alive, artificial memory trace, mclusky, Justin Walter, mastroKristo, Başak Günak, and William Basinski.
Episode 713 brings you sounds from Mouse On Mars, Leavs, Lawrence English, Mo Dotti, Wendy Eisenberg, Envy, Ben Lukas Boysen, Cindytalk, Mercury Rev, White Poppy, Anadol & Marie Klock, and Galaxie 500.
Skolavordustigur Street in Reykjavík photo by Jon (your Podcast DJ).
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Dawnbringer is Chris Black, a contemporary metal musician who writes and produces all of his own material and performs most of it on record. His fourth full-length album is superb, finding inspiration in traditional heavy metal forms and injecting them with Black's own character and creativity.
Dawnbringer's previous albums skew toward black metal, and Nucleus is a departure. The majority of its songs are littered with classic thrash metal and NWOBHM signifiers (think prime-era Iron Maiden, Metallica and Slayer): a welcome influence and starting point. While traditional heavy metal is the album's backbone, there are several songs that take clear-cut inspiration from black metal, including album highlight "The Devil," and there are acoustic, folk-based interludes and breaks scattered throughout the record. Nucleus doesn't sound tied to a particular era—at times it sounds like it could have been released 25 years ago, and at others it sounds undeniably modern.
The enjoyment I find in Nucleus is the way it digests familiar influences—classic thrash and British heavy metal, along with modern black metal—and subsequently turns out nine songs that are well-written, catchy and distinctive. The musicianship is top-notch throughout the album. In particular, the guitar attack stands out: not a minute goes by without a riff, hook or searing solo that captures my attention and enthralls me. The rhythm section provides a solid foundation for the guitars, taut and forceful, but doesn't overpower them. The production sounds crisp, three-dimensional, and unreliant on studio effects, such that Nucleus might as well have been recorded live.
If Nucleus has an Achilles' heel, however slight, I think it's the vocals. Chris Black is an everyman—he holds his ground and is not off-putting, yet doesn't lay down a distinctive performance the way metal's best vocalists can. Granted, this may be to his credit—I get the sense he would prefer the music take center stage. Black's lyrics suit the music well: never written lazily, but sticking with topics familiar to metal, often regarding spiritual beings (devils, ghosts, wizards) or huge, immovable forces (death, dreams, earthquakes, night, the sea).
Most of these songs run together seamlessly on disc, forming suites of tracks that play well in sequence. Fast, intense songs are sequenced alongside others content to rise and fall slowly: for example, the first three tracks play as a single suite, culminating in "The Devil," which then segues into the acoustic-flourished "Cataract" and groovy, slow-burning "Like an Earthquake." This lends Nucleus a strong sense of cohesiveness.
Nucleus sounds like a great rock album should—memorable and hooky at times, intense at others, well-sequenced, and with great songwriting and musicianship throughout. As a fan of classic heavy metal, I've enjoyed hearing Dawnbringer mold influences into a powerful, thrilling album of its own.
Psychedelic folk stalwart Ben Chasny's newest album speaks volumes through its packaging. Small observations hint at the nature of the music within: tranquil cover art picturing three hand-painted, mystic animal figures; a dedication to the late Dr. Ragtime in the liner notes; and the album's vivid title, Asleep on the Floodplain, referencing a peaceful state of rest and rejuvenation amidst a greater chaos.
Asleep on the Floodplain unfolds at a relaxed pace, never hurried. The album finds Chasny rekindling his fondness for the simple beauty of acoustic guitar—or perhaps deepening his love for it. Of ten songs, the majority center on Chasny's deft guitar playing: two were recorded on solo acoustic guitar with no overdubs; two feature acoustic guitar with harmonium overdubs; and five others utilize more varied instrumentation, but feature Chasny's guitar work at their core. Only half of the tracks feature vocals, some of which, such as Elisa Ambrogio's appearance on "River of My Youth," are wordless. The album was home-recorded over the course of three years, lending it an up-close-and-personal feel less emphasized on recent Six Organs efforts.
In short, the album is excellent—and it's a grower, understated at first blush, but revealing the depth of its charms with multiple listens. Whether it ranks with Chasny's best work is a difficult call because I'm hard pressed to find a weak leak in his discography–a favorite Six Organs album isn't a case of Chasny's having an obvious career highlight, but a personal preference for one of his many strong, varied records.
Asleep on the Floodplain is a departure from the scorched-earth doom of Shelter from the Ash, the deep psychedelic explorations of Luminous Night, and the sprawling free-psych of Rangda, Chasny's excellent collaboration with Sir Richard Bishop and Chris Corsano. Its overall mood is pastoral, meditative: Chasny sounds at peace with his muse, in harmony with (or perhaps disconnected from) the world around him. Of his past works, the primarily acoustic For Octavio Paz strikes me as similar, as well as his recent soundtrack work for Joseph Mattson's novel, Empty the Sun. Both of those are gorgeous records, and Asleep on the Floodplain plays similarly, spinning its mellow, Eastern-tinged improvisations and gentle psych-folk into a cohesive listen that is never lacking in inspiration.
My favorite moment—one which the subtle, restrained mood of the first seven tracks sets up masterfully—is "S/word and Leviathan," which breaks tone with the rest of the album, yet serves as its centerpiece and clear highlight. "S/word" begins with a simple, repetitive figure finger-picked on saz, which never lets up over 12 minutes and hundreds of quick repetitions, a buzzing drone rising in the background like a swarm of bees. As the saz playing is layered over itself and snowballs in its momentum, Chasny loops his spectral vocals and, eventually, a blistering psych-guitar burst into the mix. Taken in whole, "S/word and Leviathan" is stunning—the first piece of music I have heard this year that leaves me noticeably short of breath as it unfolds, raising my heart rate, transporting me to a different headspace at its peak. This is Chasny's best long-form composition since "River of Transfiguration," the LP side-length closer to 2005's underrated The Sun Awakens.
Asleep on the Floodplain finds Chasny confident in his playing and in fine form throughout. It is an enveloping listen, my favorite album of 2011 to date and a worthy addition to the Six Organs of Admittance catalog.
The best description of Ashley Paul's music that I can think of is that it sounds like she heard a Jandek album one day and thought "Yes!  This is exactly what I want to do!  But better, obviously."  I mean that in the best possible sense though, even if it is bizarre to hear a presumably well-adjusted, conservatory-trained Brooklyn composer make something that resembles very creepy, sociopathic, and unsettling outsider art.  Heat Source is a wonderfully broken-sounding, discordant, and challenging effort.
I have absolutely no idea if Ashley has ever had any interest in Jandek's career at all, but it would be very difficult to argue that she has not taken a sophisticated route to wind up in a place very similar to his early primitivism.  This is one unapologetically stark and haunted-sounding album.  The difference between the two artists lies primarily in the rigorousness and vision of Paul's execution, as Heat Source's 10 pieces create the illusion of out-of-tune pointillistic randomness while Ashley remains in complete control (she has a solid background in both jazz and microtonal music).  That multi-layered depth and structure makes a big difference, making Heat Source feel far more like hallucinatory, nightmarish, and fractured adult nursery rhyme than a series of lonely audio suicide notes.  Also, Ashley conveys a much wider range of moods than Sterling Smith, even if they are all quite troubling.
At its core, Heat Source is built upon Paul's guitar work, which alternates between dissonant slow-motion arpeggios of non-chords and skeletal, unadorned single notes (as in "Rain, Away").  Ashley embellishes her fragile plucking with a host of delightfully unsettling other touches though, filling the spaces with odd creaks and scrapes, strangled-sounding saxophone whines, and forlorn clarinet melodies.  Then, of course, there are Ashley's hushed, disquieting vocals, which sound like she is recounting her darkest, innermost thoughts in a sing-song, somnambulant lilt.  The overall effect is quite unnerving, ranging from uncomfortably vulnerable to uncomfortably grotesque ("I want your skin on my ears").  The latter is quite a neat trick, as the lyrics of "Feet on Legs" would be sensual/sexual in almost any other context, but Ashley's delivery is such that they sound far more like the prelude to an especially grisly murder.
If Heat Source has a flaw, it is that it feels like ten variations of the same theme, which I suppose is also a charge that could be leveled against last year's somewhat less dissonant Line the Clouds.  It is admittedly a great theme though, even if it is engineered for maximum discomfort.  Also, I suppose that this is kind of a difficult album to love, given how prickly and alienating it is by design, but that is because it is great art rather than great entertainment.  That distinction is important.  Ashley has done something rather brilliant here, striking the perfect balance between compositional artifice and fearless, deeply personal catharsis.  Heat Source is easily one of the year’s most memorable and unique albums.
Disparition is the solo project of Brooklyn composer Jon Bernstein, who is best known as the man behind the music for Welcome to Night Vale.  Most of his previous non-Night Vale work has been in the ambient/ambient-techno veins, but this latest release is a wildly ambitious departure, enlisting a large cast of disparate collaborators for a stylistically eclectic This Mortal Coil-style tour de force.  Clocking in at almost 2 hours, Granicha can be a bit of an overwhelming and disorienting listen, but it somehow still manages to err on the side of far too many good ideas rather than too few.
Granicha is a very difficult effort to wrap my head around for a whole host of reasons, which I suppose means that Bernstein is doing something very right: this album certainly does not suffer from lack of ambition, an unwillingness to take chances, or a rigid adherence to convention.  Sometimes conventions are in place for fairly good reasons, however, which is where Granicha occasionally enters some head-scratching territory.  For example, the lead-off "Hexe" is a very hooky, propulsive piece that is roughly in the Massive Attack vein, boasting wonderfully soulful, sensuous vocals by Valerie Evering and some very cool dub-influenced percussion.  All of the necessary components for a great single are in place and they are executed beautifully.  Bernstein had other ideas, however, as the piece dissolves midway into a clattering percussion interlude, then a brief unaccompanied violin motif, then returns to full power in darker, more psychedelic form before ultimately winding down around the 9-minute mark.  The transitions themselves are seamless and enjoyably unanticipated, but it is a little bewildering (and little cool) to see someone so intent on sabotaging their own perfectly crafted pop song.
That conflict between Jon's talent for hooks and tight songcraft and his love of epic, byzantine, proggy multi-part song structures is a curious running theme throughout Granicha.  Usually, however, it works in the reverse direction:  they are plenty of non-hooky, seemingly indulgent pieces strewn throughout the album that are unexpectedly saved by a beautiful transition into a strong melody or groove.  On a related note, I truly cannot stress how stylistically varied Granicha is, sometimes even within the same song.  The high-water water for that eclecticism is the unquestionably the 13-minute "Doggerland," which somehow manages to encompass heavy Tangerine Dream-style space music, operatic Siren-esque vocals from Marnie Breckenridge, a very cool percussion interlude, a quasi-gospel crescendo, and some kind of Flamenco/Middle Eastern guitar coda all within the same song.
Most of the fun of Granicha (for me, anyway) lies in witnessing Jon's compositional gymnastics, as it seems like he is always in danger of digging himself into a hole or hopelessly flogging an unpromising motif, only to imaginatively twist the piece into something that I genuinely like.  The downside to that, of course, is that there are quite of few stretches of Granicha that drag a bit for me (it is a nearly two hour album) even if nearly every individual piece boasts at least one passage of remarkable inspiration.  Also, I would be remiss if I did not mention the craftsmanship.  Specifically, I loved Tim Monaghan's many shifting percussion flourishes throughout the album, but in a more general sense Granicha is a production tour de force: this album is a massive, complexly structured, genre-hopping, multi-layered monster featuring everything from rappers to operatic sopranos, yet somehow it all holds together and sounds consistently assured, crisp, and vibrant.  I cannot begin to fathom how many hours this album took to assemble once the recording was complete.
Finally, Granicha contains at least two songs that I would describe as legitimate, left-field successes that sound like nothing else I have heard: "A Fire in the Distant Hills" and "Book of Arrows," both of which feature obsessively repeating quasi-poetry from vocalist Oswald Starr over a constantly shifting groove.  "Book of Arrows" is especially impressive, as Bernstein ingeniously threads Starr's vocals together with those of Henny Hendrix and Deepthi Welaratna.  The cautiously curious would probably be best served by investigating those two pieces or "Hexe," but Granicha is ultimately a fascinating complete album in a crazy-quilt, overstuffed, anything-can-happen kind of way.  While part of me certainly wishes that Bernstein had pared things down a bit or focused on a single direction, I am probably still much happier with an unpredictable and sometimes unwieldy gamble that forcibly creates its own bizarre niche.
"The goal of this document is to suggest a vocabulary of actions," Mills writes. "It should in no way be seen as prescriptive or comprehensive, and the sequence of elements in this document should not be construed as implying a particular linear arrangement."
The 52-page score for The Patient bears only a passing resemblance to traditional musical scores. It contains a couple of references to particular notes in the Western 12-tone system, a few bar lines (one set displays both a treble and bass clef, but is otherwise blank), a few more very precise frequencies for sine wave generator, and even a reference to Wagner’s "Tristan chord," but the majority of it is filled with suggested actions of the sort written by George Brecht, La Monte Young, and Pauline Oliveros. They read, "play for longer than you think you should" and "image of water/droplets/dew" and "hushed breath/for unvoiced bellows/vocalist/friction on drumhead."
Together they are enough to constitute a composition, only the number of performers is unspecified and there are no instructions for how to string individual performances together. Participants have only Kafka’s quotes and Mills’s accompanying directions to guide them, along with a handful of photographs, drawings, medical diagrams, story excerpts, and historical summaries. None of it is prescriptive, but all of it sets a very particular tone, which is why, despite the score’s innate openness, this performance of The Patient sounds so compact, controlled, and potent. The instruments and sounds used to build it—piano, walkie-talkies, an accordion, bass clarinet, and even pages torn from a psalter—reflect Kafka’s illness brilliantly. They are harsh at times, and dry; distorted and lethargic; then atmospheric and feathered with granular noise. When they appear, words and phrases rise almost to intelligibility, then stop abruptly. They are threaded with interference, whispered breathlessly, and cut off as if by pain.
Still, every component is clearly expressed, even when it's truncated or mangled. Most passages are uncluttered and there are long spells of silence or near silence scattered throughout each of the piece’s seven mostly instrumental parts, but that only emphasizes the anguish in the sounds. It’s as if the audible distress of Kafka’s tuberculosis, latent in the notes he wrote, has been brought back to life. The wheezes, spasms, and sudden shocks of panic aren't just musical expressions, they're echoes of his condition that have traveled quietly through time for nearly 90 years.
But does it have to be so? Could The Patient ever be just an index for future performers, and so escape the gravity of Kafka’s life? What Mills put on the CD is a combination of improvised sounds inspired by his own text and a conscious arrangement of those sounds assembled after the fact. In this case, it’s almost impossible not to think of Kafka and A Hunger Artist or Before the Law because the text and the music is so filled with Kafka's voice, no matter how scattered and disembodied. Maybe we access Kafka’s private world by a secret musical door he never suspected, but that this world is put together from fragments and disconnected ideas constantly nags the mind. Whatever narrative can be spied in those scraps of paper, they’re a product of reflection, not the scraps themselves. The score sets a tone, but that tone could slip away like a breath if the performers wanted it to.
This particular performance pays homage to the score’s inspiration, but another might focus on the peonies, birds, or durations mentioned by Kafka in his notes. Yet another might obscure Kafka almost entirely and present a series of bodiless inflictions instead. That Kafka could disappear behind his own text is fitting. "Order and accidents seem equally impossible," he wrote. The Patient renders that paradox beautifully and asks its participants, whether listener or performer, to decide whether order or accident prevails.
Liz Harris is becoming an increasingly complex and compelling artist, as her discography has started making unexpected leaps into the past that feel like leaps into the future.  Originally recorded in Portugal in 2011 with only a four-track and a piano, Ruins feels like a bold yet natural progression from last year's excellent The Man Who Died in His Boat (itself recorded from 2008 and 2010).  Consequently, it is completely unclear whether Liz is moving towards a simpler, more naked approach in general or if this is just a one-off experiment before she unleashes another salvo of reverb-soaked dreaminess à la Alien Observer/Dream Loss.  Regardless of its place in Grouper's continued evolution, however, Ruins is yet another fine album, boasting several of Harris's strongest compositions to date.
I thought I had a fairly solid understanding of Harris's aesthetic before last year, imagining her primarily as stylist who trafficked in a sensuous strain of reverb-swathed melancholy.  She could be a good songwriter too, but the songs were kind of beside the point, as Grouper was mostly about mood and murk.  Then the otherwise characteristically bleary and shadowy outtakes collection The Man Who Died in His Boat offered up a quietly devastating voice-and-acoustic guitar piece ("Living Room") that eschewed all of Liz's normal artifice to tower above the rest of the album.  Now Ruins goes one step further, delivering (almost) an entire album of reverb- and artifice-free piano ballads.  Rather than shrouding herself in soft-focus unreality, Liz goes for total naked realism this time around, even going so far as to leave in any outside sounds (frogs, a beeping microwave) that her microphone picked up.
There are some major threads linking Ruins to Grouper's other work, however, as Liz's pervading sense of melancholy and penchant for hushed understatement remain completely intact.  If anything, Ruins might be more melancholy than usual, as it sounds more tender and wounded than sensuous (it was recorded while "living in the remains of love," according to Liz).  I guess that makes this Grouper's "break-up album" mood-wise, but there is quite a lot of other stuff going on here as well.  Context-wise, Ruins was recorded at a residency near a beach, so it was also inspired by lots of hiking and comparative quiet in a place far away from her home in Portland, which comes through in its clarity, beauty, and simplicity.  When it works, Ruins is wonderfully raw and direct.  Sometimes it certainly errs on the side of being too dirge-y, but pieces like "Clearing," "Lighthouse," and especially "Holding" are hypnotic in their unhurried elegance (and they boast some very strong melodies as well).
The worst thing that can be said about Ruins is that it is a bit too one-dimensional and monochromatic to fully work as a complete album.  Harris breaks things up a bit at the end with a lengthy instrumental drone piece from 2004 that features a return to her characteristic haze ("Made of Air") and opens the album with a brief, gently throbbing soundscape, but Ruins is otherwise just six languorous, bittersweet piano ballads in a row.  That would probably test my patience from anyone.  Also, the instrumental bookends feel like mere padding rather than anything substantial.  Taken on a song-by-song basis, however, Ruins easily stands with Liz's best work, as arguably half of the six "real" songs are legitimate career highlights.  It is rare to experience such a direct, unfiltered, and fearless emotional connection from a mere recording, especially one from an artist who has previously been so well-cloaked in a fog of effects.
Drumm’s latest is quite an unusual and expectation-subverting one, given that his previous releases for the label have largely been genre-defining noise masterpieces. Trouble is definitely not that, nor does it bear much in common with any of Kevin's other major efforts.  Billed as "54-minute excursion into the netherworld of the audio spectrum," the piece is an extremely quiet and amorphous experiment in queasily dissonant harmonies that teeters dangerously close to being complete silence.
As a Kevin Drumm fan, I am deeply conflicted and exasperated by this album.  On the one hand, I am delighted that he has managed to avoid repeating himself and that he continues to push himself into new realms of experimentalism.  Whatever it is, Trouble is definitely not something that can be reasonably categorized as drone, ambient, or noise.  Nor could it be described as unambitious, as Kevin weaves a nuanced web of eerie, uneasily overlapping swells and hums for almost an hour.  Unfortunately, it all adds up to a bit of a frustrating listening experience for some very fundamental reasons.
For one, Trouble is an extremely quiet album that amounts to little more than faintly disquieting background noise unless it is played at a crazily high volume.  I realize that this was a deliberate artistic choice, but that does not make it less frustrating.  Secondly, Trouble does not feel like an actual composition.  Rather, it is just something that happens for an hour, then stops happening.  It could have just as easily gone on for ten minutes or six hours instead.  Without any kind of progression or arc, there is no real reward for attentive, prolonged listening–just a lot more of the same. It is like Kevin sonically snuck into my apartment to paint all of my white walls an extremely subtle shade of off-white that I would never notice unless I knew he had done it: plenty of effort for no discernible reason.
Of course, it is possible (and desirable) to use volume-leveling software to make Trouble a far more engaging and audible experience, but that is not the album Kevin intended: he clearly wanted to make nearly imperceptible sonic wallpaper, something aggressively contrarian, or some kind of dark successor to Cage's "4'33"".  Whatever the purpose, it certainly seems like an extremely quixotic endeavor to me.  I am completely mystified as to why this ended up as a formal Editions Mego release rather than just a self-released Bandcamp or CDR experiment.  Trouble is strictly for serious Drumm fans only, as it is only interesting because it was made by Kevin Drumm.
Following quickly on from last year’s …Sun, Broken…, Mugstar have extended the formula that blew me away on that previous album and have made an impossibly shimmering, psychedelic and, most importantly, rocking album. Lime may not rewrite the history of rock music but it does act like the fruit it is named after, it cuts through the senses in a most pleasant fashion.
In a recent interview with Brainwashed, Jason Stoll revealed that a large portion of Lime came together at the last minute in the studio and that sense of immediacy and freshness comes through consistently throughout the album. If you told me this was a live recording of a band in their prime improvising while off their heads on the finest mind altering substances in some remarkable, esoteric location, I would believe you. The excitement, power and urgency of Mugstar’s playing shines through like a supernova; the music is that intangible, that ecstatic.
While the group play together with a tightness that would normally reflect too much polish on something best left with some grit and grain, Mugstar happily retain a looseness that tugs at the center of the balance of the pieces. On "Serra," a motorik rhythm pulses, sounding as solid as a castle (albeit one that seems to be charging along the autobahn). Yet throughout the length of the piece, the band chip away at the foundations and batter the walls with guitar and electric organ, causing the "Serra" to destabilize and teeter. This persistent threat of the whole thing coming down at any moment adds to the danger and thrill of Lime.
By the end of the album, I feel like I should have broken out a sweat as I am caught up in Mugstar’s sweeping music. Along with … Sun, Broken…, Lime represents some of the best pure rock music of the last ten years. As aforementioned, it is not revolutionary music in terms of innovation but the energy being blasted out by the band could easily spark a revolution of its own.
Heavy on percussion, the group have honed their rhythmic edge into a surgical knife. Stark, effective bass lines (sometimes just two notes) complete the rhythmic picture, adding a muscle to the rigid bones of the drumming. There is a vaguely ritualistic feeling to the music, for example on "Starts/Ends," where the percussion dances around itself to create a cathartic and engaging sound. Gavin Duffy’s immediate bass playing drags the music from this weirdly transcendent place back to the dance floor.
Without naming names, there are many artists who spend their time perfecting the ultimate post-punk album, drawing their inspiration from albums recorded 30 years ago and adding nothing more than a superficial glossiness to ideas that were once revolutionary but are now just a historical reference. So few artists try and break away from the past to create their own sound. While in the past I have heard the echoes of Sonic Youth, Throbbing Gristle and PIL in the music of Thread Pulls but on New Thoughts these influences have been pulverised and converted into Peter Maybury and Duffy’s own vision.
Duffy’s vocals are the other main ingredient to Thread Pulls unique sound. Sometimes adopting an odd but bewitching falsetto, not unlike a bleaker version of The Tiger Lillies’ Martyn Jacques, Duffy cannot be accused of being a boring vocalist. On "Sink and Swim," his voice rises up through the music sharply, demanding my attention. Elsewhere he delivers the mantric lyrics in a more controlled fashion such as on "Joujouka Reminder" where all the elements of Thread Pulls’ sound come together perfectly: the beat and word fusing into each other.
Throughout New Thoughts, Thread Pulls repeatedly up their game and make their previous releases pale in comparison. All the elements that I liked about their music (the rhythms and instrumentation in particular) have been streamlined and improved, the end result being a very lean and focused album. I have not seen them live in a while but I will be doing my best to catch them as soon as I can because they are obviously riding on the crest of a wave of inspiration.
Few artists can boast debut albums as stunning as this one, making its reissue after nearly three decades of unavailability something of a major event.  Originally recorded in 1983, the Soul Possession sessions assembled a murderer's row of talented collaborators such as Crass and UK dub heavyweight Adrian Sherwood to back young Annie Anxiety's animated and unseemly tales from the dark side.  Rightfully considered an underground classic, this album captures a rare "super group" in which everyone involved was at the top of their game, giving birth to something truly disturbing and visionary.
Soul Possession has a somewhat improbable back-story, as the project was unknowingly set in motion when Annie decided to move from NYC to Germany following the dissolution of her band, Annie and the Asexuals (colorfully described in the liner notes as an "art-punk theater of pain").  Fate had other plans, and Annie wound up in London living with her new friends in Crass, an arrangement that resulted in the unexpectedly unpunk and tape-loop-informed Barbed Wire Halo 7", a collaboration with Penny Rimbaud that was issued on Crass Records in 1981.  Soon after, Annie met On-U Sound head Sherwood and the duo's shared love of dub resulted in this inventive and surprisingly dark collaboration.  Some mutual friends from the Crass collective were also pretty keen on dub at the time and gamely supplied much of the raw musical material.  In fact, Eve Libertine even takes lead vocals on one song, "Sad Shadows."
The most disorienting of those songs is the uncomfortably lurid "Turkey Girl," where she sounds like a cross between Tom Waits and a depraved sex offender, dropping squirm-inducing lines like "you're my turkey fuck girl" and "I want to cut my cock on your pop top" as Sherwood unleashes bleeping and blooping electronics over a slinky bass line and horror movie piano.  Equally disturbed is the hitchhiker murder fantasy "Third Gear Kills," in which Annie ominously repeats "you're gonna die in the lay-by…tonight" and creepily describes stuffing a body in a trunk.  Remarkably, Bandez finds yet further frontiers in discomfort to explore with the absolutely stunning "Viet Not Mine, El Salvador Yours," employing a barrage of crazed-sounding overlapping voices, disjointed ramblings, moans, whimpers, and gasps over a sinisterly throbbing groove.
This album could not possibly be much further in tone from Annie's more recent work, though her infectious charisma remains a constant.  Bandez was not content here to merely indulge her dark side lyrically: she delivers her lines with a frightening conviction at times, sounding like someone teetering on the verge of a breakdown.  Even if Sherwood had played it relatively safe, Annie's damaged and threatening vocals could have easily carried the album, but he more than holds his own with his appropriately tense and hallucinatory soundscapes.  Despite all the echoing, gurgling, shimmering, and industrial textures, however, he still manages to maintain some rather propulsive grooves and unlikely hooks– a rather perverse accomplishment, as Annie's content renders the music singularly un-pop.  It all works beautifully, as I imagine this album would've been unlistenably raw and uncomfortable without such touches.  With them, Soul Possession is a deeply aberrant and uneasy near-masterpiece during its best moments.  This is still a very scary and harrowing album, of course, but it is not an inaccessible one.
This digital-only EP released as an appetizer for the latest MBM full-length is a deliciously weird mixture of the sounds and ideas that make Meat Beat records so wonderful and unpredictable.
If Answers Come in Dreams is a tasty dish troubled only slightly by sameness, Totally Together is the perfect companion piece—a kind of sampler platter of the many directions that Meat Beat Manifesto can go at any moment.It represents an artist not tied down to any M.O. or tempo or method and that is, after all, one of the things that I've always found exciting about Meat Beat Manifesto records.
The EP's four tracks feature plenty of squelchy, acid-inspired bass and dub-infected effects called up from the familiar Jack Dangers menu, but each song distinguishes itself in a way that the tracks from Answers do not.Whether it's the vocal hook from "Totally Together," the maniacal Speak N Spell from "TRS2," or the traditional breakbeat in "Moving Body" that is nearly drowned in bass, each song has character.If you told me that "TRS2" was a MBM remix of Kraftwerk, I wouldn't be surprised and the fact that it plays right alongside the bubbling electro dub of "4OUR" is just a treat.
We need more digital download releases like this where artists are free to experiment while knocking out a couple of tracks that don't feed into a full album.The expectations of connectedness and weight put on albums sometimes leave good tracks like the ones here without a home.I'll take an EP of this quality without a physical disc any day.