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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While many artists use the sonic medium as a canvas to paint imaginary journeys conceptually through sound and instrumentation, this Australian duo takes the concept to a more literal point by utilizing recordings of actual events and elements referenced in the track titles in addition to traditional instrumentation. The result is a wonderfully dark, post-rock tinged trip that shows the 12k label is at the cusp of more than just laptop programming and art installation sounds.
The opening "Ablation" uses the actual sounds of ice and wind to create a murky atmosphere that sounds like rattling engines and running water, never clearly identifiable at first, but familiar and organic. Later in the track some untreated cello and piano arise, starkly contrasting the "known" instruments with the "unknown" ambience. "Hydraulic Fluctuations" (based on fluid fluctuations recorded inside a large pump) has some more overt filtered water noises, but also a clattering percussive part that sounds like rocks rattling together, along with some deep, rich stringed instrument tones. The mix is thick and dense, and far from the minimalism one might expect.
"Canal Rocks" features a field recording of wind through a small rocky alcove in Australia, which is contrasted with a gentle, hovering melody. As the track goes on, the lighter moments are supplanted by the deeper, dense textures. "Beyond This Window" opens with shimmering feedback like tones and understated strings that focus more on the musical rather than environmental end of the sound spectrum, though the calming rush of a rainstorm keeps things rooted in nature.
The low end rumbles and echoed reverberations "In The Light Storming" uses obviously resemble a violent storm, the sound creeping into textures that have a vaguely early industrial vibe to them. However, the sound is never oppressively dark or violent, and instead the sun shines through at the end to reveal bits of pure, untouched ambience. "Look For Me Here" (also available as a CD single with remixes by Ryuichi Sakamoto and Giuseppe Ielasi) is the closest thing to being overt "post-rock" with its distant pings and pulses, rattling fuzz and swells of orchestral like tones. Glistening chimes and hammered guitar notes sit above of filtered noise that nicely compliments the more traditionally beautiful moments.
The final two tracks of this journey are much more dark and sinister than the rest. "Loom" is an appropriate title for a piece of humming ominous strings and dark, growling like textures. Cello, guitar and other strings provide a more familiar reference point to the otherwise murky mire, but even they alternate between a melancholy drone and a violent, panicked pace. The long closer, "Woods Flesh Bone," is another literally titled track. Consisting of field recordings that can only be described as "wet," the sound is amplified by flies buzzing all around (based on field recordings of a chicken carcass), and an eerie calm, punctuated by birds far away. The sound of dark isolation grows worse as the synthetic elements become more pronounced as the track winds down, leading to a dark, bleak foreboding sound that is one of the best examples of how to aurally represent decay. Rather than the journey ending happily, it instead finishes on a bleak, sinister note.
Each piece functions on its own as a microcosm of organic sound although all are thematically linked, expertly mixing untouched field recordings, treated sounds, and traditional instrumentation into a work that sounds decidedly natural, yet completely mysterious. It is the kind of album that begs to be replayed not just because of its inherent strength, but also because of its variation and complexity.
With these two being recorded in 2008, it is not surprising that these two LPs from this solo project have a similar sound and vibe to them, though both do go in somewhat different directions, with Psychosis focusing on the droning slow space rock material, while Night Flights opens the sonic pallet up to include more than just guitar and bass, but primitive analog electronics as well. They both definitely take minimalist droning guitar into a more astral plane than usual, however.
Psychosis is actually two side-long tracks, "Sleeping Corpse" and "Widow Planet," that are each broken into three shorter pieces. The former suite is somewhat lighter and ambient while the latter crosses the line into darker drone territory. "Into Body," the first part of "Sleeping Corpse," begins with deep undulating bass drones and echo chamber guitar scrapes. The low end gets pushed into noise territory while the guitar scrapes eventually morph into more prog-rock like soloing. The overt guitar playing reappears in "Cold Forecasting," where it begins as simple two chord rhythms but shifts into pure soloing that is a bit reminiscent of Earth’s recent blues/country infused sound, though here it is in addition to a noise driven backing.
"Left to Die," the opening movement of "Widow Planet," has a more traditional organic guitar ambient sound with a hint of dubby bass that puts it in league with Main circa Motion Pool: it has a looped sound that is depressive and dark. The style continues into "Stark Bleakness Rising," which pulls away the bass and instead showcases slow, repeated guitar riffs with some more guitar soloing on top. The closing "Haunting the Terrain" goes even farther into sonic space, having a more traditional dark ambient/industrial influenced sound that still shows exceptional analog warmth while keeping the conventional guitar sound at bay.
Night Flights, on the other hand, is four distinct tracks that expand the instrumental repertoire. "Transcending Energy from Light" has a distinct Moog pulse with the occasional perceptible guitar note and high frequency vacuum cleaner shriek. The sound ends up in a swirly psychedelic vortex with only the occasional noisy synth stab or clear guitar note escaping. "Alpestrine Fog" keeps the low end synth pulse but with warmer guitar tones that are a bit more inviting and less space-y than the previous one.
"Cognac Smoke" is probably the most dynamic track of both LPs, which actually has some rhythmic movement due to the old school Suicide-esque analog drum machine that propels the pitch bent guitar noises and bird-call like shrieks along. The closing “Seismic Nuances” recalls the looped guitar chaos, with proggy guitar solos to distinguish it.
With the guitar based drone sound staying popular, more and more artists need to carve out their own niche to simply not get lost among the detuned chords and sustain pedals. Expo ’70 does so by adding that liberal dash of '60s psych and '90s dark ambience to the fray. While there are the occasional bits of sameness within each album, as a whole they are a good mix of the familiar and new.
For its maiden release, the new Staalplaat sublabel Le Petit Mignon has issued this clear little 7" in gaudy, bright packaging with each of the artists tackling a side. Between Chessex (Monno) abusing his saxophone and Riviere (Textile Orchestra) destroying an electrophone, the results is a precious few minutes of pure sonic destruction.
Chessex’s “Power, Stupidity & Ignorance” is a rapid-fire blast of harsh noise, with a dynamic flow that puts it in league with the old school cats like Masonna and Government Alpha. However, considering that the tenor sax that makes up the core sound here occasionally swells to the surface, it resembles more of a clusterfuck free jazz take on harsh noise than anything a horn could normally do.
On the flip side, Arnaud Riviere’s “Queen Queen Banda Drive” is a lo-fi piece of sonic detritus that is obviously very intentionally recorded in the worst way possible. It’s a parade of metallic crashes that occasionally locks into a semblance of rhythm, but more often than not sounds like a microphone in a metal oil drum being rolled down a hill and run through a few pedals.
The fact that this is a short release is what makes it successful. Either track would seem to drone on for a bit too long and lose some of the visceral impact that is allotted by limiting each artist to a few minutes. It’s a nice, jagged listening experience.
Given that this is a collaboration between a noise duo, a toy collector, and guy known for sometimes playing an electrified rake, it is not entirely surprising that this recording session is a bizarre Dadaist mess. Nevertheless, I remain deeply confounded by it all and cannot begin to guess what exactly the participants were attempting to achieve or to what degree they may have succeeded.
Glöggerne are a chaotic Danish experimental electronic duo made up of Mikkel Ring and Christian Skjødt. In 2003, they permanently teamed up with like-minded Czech artist/toy enthusiast Martin Klapper, but the trio did not release their debut (With Sound) until 2007. In the past, they have worked with experimental luminaries like Derek Bailey and Evan Parker, so a pairing with Chadbourne is not completely unexpected. Eugene, of course, is a pretty established figure in the American underground: he has been lurking in the fringes and playing his unique mutant roots music for over 30 years now (he also wrote for Maximum Rocknroll and hosted a somewhat legendary radio show, for good measure). While he has generally associated with free-form instrumentalists like John Zorn, Sun City Girls, and Fred Frith, abstract electronic music is not entirely new territory for him, as he has also worked with Kevin Blechdom.
Essentially, this album is built around Chadbourne's hammy mangling of several old country and folk classics in a disjointed medley while accompanying himself on banjo and guitar. He certainly has good taste, tackling Merle Haggard’s “I’m a Lonesome Fugitive” and Ernest Tubb’s “Good Year For the Wine” (among others), but his interpretations seem much more like half-assedly messing around than anything deliberately avant-garde or deconstructionist. The rest of the guys back him with a spirited yet seemingly random splattering of unspecified electronics, toys, and sundry amplified objects. However, Glöggerne and Klapper are usually pushed to the background whenever Chadbourne is singing (the session was recorded live onto one track), but a surreal flurry of squelches, hums, squawks, and odd sci-fi noises continuously burbles and simmers and occasionally bursts into the foreground.
While this is an undeniably strange album, it rarely becomes anything more than pleasantly diverting and can get quite annoying in places (particularly during Chadbourne’s shouting and frenzied noodling in “North Carolina”). Also, it often sounds like the surreal sound collage stuff is completely independent of what Chadbourne is playing. Glöggerne and Klapper are certainly capable of making compelling work (as evidenced by their previous album and this album’s few Chadbourne-less interludes), but With Dr. Chadbourne just feels like an off-the-cuff jam session. While it was probably fun to make, the end product is ultimately far less than the sum of its parts.
In this, the third installment of the Songs trilogy, Matt Elliott continues to celebrate the values and world-views of working class peoples. If Drinking Songs was dedicated to the worlds favorite pastime, and Failing Songs was about the impossibility of hope when faced with the magnitude of the worlds ills, then Howling Songs is the cathartic venting of bottled up pain. Here Matt Elliott is found screaming into an unrelenting wind, and sounding better than ever before.
Over the course of the trilogy a steady improvement in the overall quality of the songs can be discerned. Elliott’s acerbic lyrics and his droll black humor are still evident but the bleakness of the subject matter (the death of loved ones, sinking ships, stockbrokers) is tempered by a musicality even more touching than what was found on Drinking Songs or Failing Songs. Howling Songs is the masterful culmination of the efforts he began with those discs.
The album begins with the elegiac flamenco of “The Kubler-Ross Model.” Elliott sings in his characteristic slurred, downtrodden style. His multi-tracked vocals hover gently over trembling mandolins. The song is an exploration of grief, and a gentle one, until a little more than halfway through, it explodes into a rage of distortion. Anger, depression, and denial, all stages in the grieving process modeled by Elisabelth Kubler-Ross, are ably expressed. The screeching guitars and wall of feedback gradually give way to slow plucking and soft cooing. The sadness remains, but the process of acceptance has begun. He continues on an otherworldly theme with the spectral “Something About Ghosts,” a story of dead man forced to watch his still living lover have sex with someone else.
Elliott doesn’t allow his anger to be buried, a trait I find refreshing. His sulfurous vitriol finds a ready target in the bankers and bureaucrats who have orchestrated the resource wars that have plagued this decade. On the song “How Much in Blood?” he asks, “how much in gold? / what volume of tears will suffice? / what is the index price of life? / and did it fall or rise today?” It is a question to which no satisfactory answer is given. Gleefully, however, he is able to assert “prices will fall / the markets will stall / …we’ll laugh at your name / and dance on your grave.” Gently he serenades the objects of his hate, mocking them in the process.
The album reaches its musical apogee with “I Name This Ship The Tragedy. Bless Her & All Who Sail With Her.” Elliott sings easily here, with clear enunciations, the words falling cleanly from his lips. The guitars, slow whining of bowed strings, and rippling pianos swirl around each other in perfect harmony. Short bursts from some type of brass horn punctuate the tune, giving it added character. These types of little details that often make a song stand out are lovingly applied throughout the album, as with the gravelly time stretched voices at the end of “A Broken Flamenco” and the low-pitched woodwinds appearing on the albums closer, “Bomb the Stock Exchange.”
With Howling Songs Matt Elliott has clearly set a new standard for himself. The intricate arrangements, crisp production, and piercing lyrics make for a jewel of a record.
Friendly Pants finds Sakata, now 65 years young, as agile and observant as ever. Joined by the equally virtuosic duo of Darin Gray on double bass and Chris Corsano on drums—here known by the collective name of Chikamorachi—Sakata's heartfelt blasts of alto saxophone find a rhythm section more than competent to bring seduction to post-bop jazz.
In a classic episode of Seinfeld, the battle of the sexes reaches a tipping point when Jerry lets it be known to an associate of Elaine's boyfriend that he believes her relationship with the saxophonist to be "hot and heavy," which in turns leads to the jazz virtuoso to unveil a new song titled "Hot and Heavy" and doing the unspeakable act he has once refused to do. Yet even a sitcom can display the powerful emotions of jazz, especially with the emotive tenors of the saxophone. Whether Akira Sakata is involved in a hot and heavy relationship is only known to those closest to him but there is no denying that those pangs are ever-present on Friendly Pants, Sakata's first U.S. release in 20 years.
Any listener with a modicum of jazz knowledge will instantly recognize the influences that flow through Sakata's spit valve. Friendly Pants is a journey through late '60s and early '70s bop with a zeal rarely found in modern jazz, which tends to focus on experimentation, electronics, and jamming. The key to Sakata's frantic but organized eruptions are Gray and Corsano, who keep the urges to explode with Sakata in check. There are moments when the ecstasy is too great to combat, such as the energetic "In Case, Let's Go to Galaxy," but the orgy of fractured saxophone, machine gun snare rolls, and cymbal splashes are countered by Gray's poise.
For the few moments of unrestrained bombasity, there are far more focused movements to discover. "That Day of Rain" is a bebop delight, keeping the pace quick but the melody mellow. It's James Dean or Steve McQueen—always unflappable while the shitstorm rains down around them. "Un" is 12 minutes of cigarette smoke and cheap bourbon in a 1950s Greenwich. Sakata pays tribute to Kind of Blue with drawn out notes and a slow roll. The trio work as one, capturing the elegant strokes of jazz's heyday without completely abandoning new world charm.
It's a tender balancing act; one Sakata, Corsano, and Gray have mastered well through numerous collaborations and releases, but it all comes to glorious fruition within Friendly Pants. The idea that is has taken 20 years for Sakata's music to reach American shores once more is a sad thought but we can be glad that Friendly Pants will serve as a constant reminder that the best the jazz world has to offer will always find its way back home.
Brain Foote, along with Honey Owens, Paul Dickow, and a few new faces, have produced one of the most varied and unique records I've heard all year. The progress won on their Infinity Padlock EP has been further refined into a near seamless blend of miscellaneous musical styles and sleek, spaced-out atmospheres. With As Good As Gone Nudge has entered a world all their own; nobody else sounds quite like they do.
Initially, it isn't clear what Foote and company are up to on their latest record. The opening song, "Harmo," is a wheezing stretch of noise that never quite gels or finds a groove. It is held together in only the most abstract way: there are no strong rhythms, identifiable lyrics, or particularly notable sonic events, nor is there a particularly strong melody to which one might latch. Honey Owens' voice merely slides in and out of intelligibility behind an orchestra of harmonica, vocal harmonies, guitar, bubbling bass, and other various electronic refuse. It develops a tangible tension, but release never comes. After listening to the album once, however, "Harmo's" place is clear: it is the sound of Nudge warming up and preparing to blow minds. Over the next 35 minutes and six songs the band fuses together dub, rocksteady, drum 'n' bass, psychedelic rock, jazz, and various forms of electronic pop and dance music. The result is a dark, almost brooding album packed full of strong songs, memorable melodies, and an enormous (somewhat sexy) low end. Through it all Nudge sound cool and relaxed, as if these peculiar blends all came to them quite naturally. I imagine the opposite is true, however. As Good As Gone shows some improvisational color, but the album's deliberate pace and sober tenor suggest that Nudge worked very hard to make this recipe sound as good as it does.
After "Harmo" shakes and buzzes away, "Two Hands" begins with a sudden rubbery bass line and a ruffled rhythm section that lends the song an uneven or unsure quality, at least at first. Strands of guitar hum to life and, shortly, Honey Owens sings a lilting tune that matches the music's lazy gait perfectly. It also generates some forward motion. Once she begins singing the song takes off in a multitude of ways. Paul Dickow's unmistakable rhythmic signature pops up almost simultaneously and is matched by both Owen's screeching guitar work and a never-ending cascade of effects, synthesizers, and instrumental variations. To top it all off, Foote inserts some muted, highly processed trumpet into the mix, tacking a distinctly jazzy tone onto the end of an already complex and luxuriant song. That hint of jazz haunts the rest of the record, sometimes showing up obviously and sometimes only vaguely. This is partly due to Nudge emphasizing continuity and development over repetition and partly due to the album's ambiguous use of otherwise familiar styles.
Aside from the repeating bass lines that anchor nearly every track on the album, loops seem to have disappeared from the band's vocabulary altogether. The drums, guitars, and synthesizers featured throughout the record grow and shrink in unexpected ways instead of simply repeating. Nevertheless, strong grooves play a big role throughout As Good As Gone, whether they are subtle or distinctly felt. On "Tito," rocksteady rhythms and unusual synthetic worms of melody produce a weightless or directionless effect, distorting time instead of keeping it. This makes the whole thing sound like a happy and drunken stroll outside a dance hall. As it turns out, the upbeat keyboard skanking, along with the pitch bending and shuffled effects, marks the brightest and happiest point on As Good As Gone. Nudge's staggered beats and confused melodies are at their most playful here. Once it ends everything goes very, very dark, like the album's artwork.
The howling dog on the cover reminds me of the slow and mournful atmosphere found on "Burns Blue" and "Dawn Comes Light." The former is a churning song with a somber bass melody and slithering vocal effects. The airy keyboards and rumbling, cymbal-heavy rhythm generate an isolated mood and further develop the jazz themes only hinted at in the previous songs. The latter is a dreamy, somewhat barren piece populated by bouts of silence and splashes of guitar strumming. It brings to mind the closing song on Infinity Padlock, but this time around the band's dynamic shift isn't nearly as surprising. The quiet guitars and near-whispered vocals eventually give way to a wave of distortion and surging, pseudo-melodious strings, which contrast the previous five songs in a relieving and natural fashion.
The ideas first tested on Infinity Padlock have matured fully by the end of this album. Nudge no longer sound as though they are forcing developments or seeking their voice. Everything has its place, even if that place is chaotic and disheveled. On As Good As Gone, the band sounds completely in control with each member performing at the height of their abilities.
This is the first release from these long time friends and collaborators. Having been cohorts for 40 forty years, playing in groups together as far back as 1974, this album captures a day's recording back in 1992. My preconceptions of this collection of vintage home recordings being like the musique concrète stylings of early Dead Voice On Air were shattered within seconds of the album's opening track. I will confess to stopping the LP and taking out the disc to check it was the right album.
"Watch" opens the album with dirge feedback-guitar, heavy crunching drums sounding like a lost, Psychocandy-era, Jesus And Mary Chain single. As the distorted guitars and buried vocals gather momentum, however, they suddenly stop a minute in, and unabashedly the track changes to a warped electronic soundscape. From here "Watch" quickly turns again, this time to a heavy No Wave sound of rapid drums and Sanderson’s free-jazz saxophone. The track ends by serging into a sparse drone with looped Vocal snippets, similar to Spybey’s later, more minimal output.
The five tracks on the album are almost meaningless guides, as the album stops and starts and changes pace and style so frequently it should either be indexed 20-30 times or released as a single 45-minute entity. There’s frenzied garage rock, bass heavy drones, cut-up samples, screeching jazz, and each movement provides no idea where the record will go next. It is strength of the album, however, as it is accomplished with great results making the listening experience akin to the mania of playing The Faust Tapes.
In interviews Spybey has frequently cited Can and Faust as inspirations but never has their influence been more explicit on a release than The Setland L.P. The heavy, repetitive drumming is dotted throughout the album; while the second track, "Power Cut," eventually veers into a heady, feedback dripping, cover of Faust’s "Sunshine Girl." No Wave and Free Jazz nods are found throughout and there are several lengthy menacing ambient pieces backed with radio samples, reminiscent of Throbbing Gristle’s "Ecoli."
The whole album has this warm feeling of being two friends’ condensed mixtape of a lengthy day’s jamming, experiments, and homages to the music they grew up listening to on cold, grey days in the North of England. The Steland L.P. is very raw, obviously recorded with minimal production in a home studio, but what is here transcends their recording limitations. At points the album can be frustrating, as a more catchy moment suddenly cuts out far too soon, but the vast amount of diverse and interesting sounds means there’s never a dull movement, and makes this an exciting and highly recommended listen.
The album is (unfortunately) only available as a digital download from Lens records, as either .mp3 or lossless .flac. Personally I would have liked a physical release, but ultimately it’s great this is available in any format. Let’s hope the follow up album Spybey has alluded to also sees the light of day.
This second collaboration between these two veterans of the 1980s UK noise/cassette underground is enigmatically rooted in the works of Lewis Carroll and schizophrenic outsider artist August Natterer. The result is an engaging, yet temporally dislocated, foray into ambient industrial music that sometimes favorably recalls some of Cabaret Voltaire's more abstract and loop-based moments (as well as a host of darker, and more sociopathic, tape-based experimentalists).
Zilverhill consists of Australia’s Schuster and Sheffield’s Present Day Buna, a rather inscrutable pair. I could not unearth much information about them except that Schuster was involved in the early stages of the infamously heavy and frightening Dieter Müh. The conceptual foundations of this album are equally mysterious and murky: while I can certainly see how its abstract and often nightmarish atmosphere and strange echoing field recordings and voices could be inspired by a schizophrenic artist, the album also features an inexplicable fixation with Richard Nixon recordings (“Nixon’s portentous voice & actions are intuitively fractured, reappraised, and manipulated to form the spine of the pieces”). It is hard to reconcile how it all coherently ties together thematically, but thankfully the philosophic underpinnings are largely irrelevant to the appreciation of the music.
The sonic content of Latent-Active-Descent is a surreal collage of shifting drones, hypnotically repetitive rhythms, blurred electronics, and disembodied voices. Sometimes it is relatively gentle, such as the sleepy marimba of “Sixteen Provinces,” but (more often than not) it can get quite harsh (as in “The Eternal Day Is Done,” which is reminiscent of some of Severed Heads' early tape loop experiments). However, the songs invariably writhe and seethe with all kinds of panning and surging sampled mindfuckery regardless of the basic material that each piece is built upon. The only time the duo fall flat is with the recurrent howls of agony throughout “Unceasing,” which is heavy-handed to an almost Lætherstrip-ian degree.
While its slow-burning and fever dreamlike nature requires a few listens to fully appreciate, Latent-Active-Descent is definitely an inspired and enjoyable effort. Though the material is very firmly rooted in the ‘80s industrial/noise underground aesthetic, it does not sound dated or regressive at all. Rather, it sounds like a great lost recording from that era (but with the clarity and density of more modern recording technology). This is some eerie, unusual, and otherworldly work.
On this first release in nearly 2 years, Finnish artist Sasu Ripatti allows a greater amount of his former life as a jazz drummer to enter the fray, offsetting the digital ambience and chaos of his work with a greater sense of the organic, bringing with him Lucio Capece on reeds and Craig Armstrong on piano. The result isn’t quite the jazz trio sound the lineup would suggest but certainly a more natural sound than other releases in the Delay discography.
The disc opens with the slow elongated reverberations of “Melankolia,” which layers distant thumping rhythms and erratic scatter-shot digital beats with spacious electronic textures. The string pluck sounds and jazzy club piano music sit above the dissonant electronic stuff in a stark contrast. “Kuula (Kiitos)” buries the organic sounds amongst a significant amount of processing, collage type sounds are intertwined with isolated, sporadic rhythms and the occasional bit of overt, sparse ambience.
“Mustelmia” and “Toive” both stand out as being more percussion focused pieces. The former is based on rhythms that sound as if they were played deep under water along with some faux didgeridoo textures. The entire piece feels like a pseudo-ethnic track, even with the wet pitch-bent drums and spaced out passages. “Toive” has more of a marching cadence to the drums, recorded far off in the distance. The track as a whole has this feeling of distance, with muffled moaning sounds and instrumentation that seems just out of reach, with only clarinet and echoed keyboards to actually be the sounds in focus.
As the disc begins to draw to its inevitable conclusion, the sounds become even more abstract and experimental. “Tummaa” is a dramatic piece that focuses even more on the abstract textures that characterized the earlier Vadislav Delay releases, dynamically being much more loud and boisterous than the other more subtle tracks. A crystalline synth and arctic ambience balance out the loudness with a sense of delicate isolation. The closing “Tunnelivisio” is the most chaotic moment here, with harsher synth leads and garbled saxophone. The delayed, clattering percussion adds to the dissonance, which for all its chaos still has a warm, inviting quality to it.
The shift towards including more of Ripatti’s jazz background has been a smooth one here, as there doesn’t seem to be any unnecessary force needed to blend the organic with the digital. Tummaa is an album that sounds like no one else, and its dark, yet inviting introverted nature ensures that multiple listenings are required to get the full complex beauty of what is here.
The duo of Susanna Wallumrød and Morten Qvenild are finally back with a new album but with some disconcerting stylistic changes. While there are still a handful of excellent songs strewn about, the "magical" moments are now locked in a mortal struggle with "early Sarah McLachlan-esque" ones (made infinitely more confusing and improbable by the production involvement of Deathprod's Helge Sten). I fear for where this project is headed.
Susanna has written and performed some stunning music over the years, and the one thing that always made her so special was the unique vulnerability and intensity that she always brought to the material (original and otherwise). Consequently, it is difficult to understand why she takes such a cool and detached stance on 3. I suspect this new aesthetic might result in more mainstream appeal (particularly the first single, “Palpatine’s Dream”), but a lot of the tracks sound like a muted and subtly electronic approximation of Fumbling Towards Ecstasy (admittedly an objectively decent album) albeit lacking McLachlan’s warmth or skill at writing memorable hooks.
Notably, this album is made up almost entirely of original songs, as many of Susanna’s past highlights have been covers (Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” springs immediately to mind). That said, the two covers that are included hearken most strongly back to the more disturbing Susanna of old: a sparse, bleak, and unsettling piano performance of Roy Harper’s “Another Day” and a weirdly lurching, dystopian, and robotic take on Rush’s “Subdivisions.” Of course, she has written some memorably torchy/noirish originals in the past as well, but her new songs take a very conspicuous step away from that darkness. There are several songs that flirt with catching fire, such as “Guiding Star,” “Someday,” and “Game,” but unabashedly toothless, poppy choruses invariably sabotage them.
There is very little edge or bite to 3. For the most part, Morten Qvenild does an admirable job with the music (resembling Gary Numan on horse tranquilizers yet in a good way), but it is usually too understated to compensate for the cool shallowness of the vocals (they’ve certainly achieved elegance, but it was a Pyrrhic victory). With the exception of the rather charming electro pop of “Palpatine’s Dream,” the duo’s dabblings in slick pop music are a bit too unrewarding and uneven for me (although I have noticed that this album has inexplicably gotten some rave reviews from the British music press, so perhaps my ears are defective). Hopefully, this is merely a transitional album on the way to something better and not a new direction. I am disappointed, but not yet resigned.