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 ostensibly only a mere remix album, this is actually something far more miraculous and novel: a second chance. The original All is Wild, All is Silent was a frustrating and somewhat clumsy album by a generally good band that seemed to have lost their way. Fortunately, eleven of Balmorhea’s talented pals have helpfully erased their mistakes and resurrected the material as a far more compelling and impressive work. Every band should get friends like these.
All is Wild, All Is Silent was Balmorhea’s first album with an expanded line-up and its heft and drama marked a jarring transition (for me, anyway) away from the elegant simplicity of their earlier work. Consequently, I was not particularly enthusiastic about hearing this remix album until I realized that Xela was involved: I could not even begin to imagine what Balmorhea’s cinematic Americana would sound like after being filtered through John Twells’ misanthropic, black metal-damaged aesthetic. My interest was piqued.
Once I put the album on, however, all thoughts of skipping right to Xela disappeared with the first song: Eluvium’s “Settler.” The 17+ minutes of angelic vocals, cymbal washes, backwards acoustic guitars, treated strings, creaking noises, and warm ambient haze are an absolutely stunning feat of sonic alchemy that caught me completely off-guard. Much to my great pleasure, Eluvium’s piece is not a fluke and instead sets the tone for everything to follow: the bulk of the reworkings here are almost unrecognizably transformed from the original songs and the spirit is much closer to the haunting fragility of the small-scale Balmorhea of old than the current, more lumbering post-rock incarnation.
Most of the best work on the album falls squarely into the ambient/drone category, such as Tiny Vipers, Bexar Bexar, or Rafael Anton Irisarri’s melancholic, glistening piano reinterpretation of “Harm and Boon.” The true highlight here, however, is inarguably Machinefabriek’s quavering, crackling, and absolutely mesmerizing “Remembrance.” While the piece wisely retains some of the organic instrumentation from the original material, such as banjos and stand-up bass, it artfully drowns them in a shifting, oscillating cloud of droning tones and a steadily intensifying loop of disquieting, warped classical vocals. It is a stunning and absolutely flawless work and I'm amazed that it is relegated to a remix album for another band- Rutger Zuydervelt must like the Balmorhea guys a lot.
Of course, there is some stylistic diversity on display too. In particular, Peter Broderick’s spoken-word open letter/choral re-envisioning of “November 1, 1832” is endearingly strange and stirring. Also, Helios turns in a pleasant and delicate IDM-influenced work, while the aforementioned Xela simply opts to envelop the source material in an escalating avalanche of oscillating noise. Jacascek’s bleak but perversely bouncy “Night In the Draw” is also quite noteworthy and occupies a bizarre no-man’s land between IDM, experimentalism, and classical music.
Obviously, some of the remixes included are less inspired than others, but this is generally a surprising and very strong album that completely eclipses its source material. I’ve been listening to it off and on for about a month now and have not grown tired of it yet, which is rather rare for me. Hopefully, Balmorhea have closely examined the Eluvium and Machinefabriek pieces and are tweaking their blueprint accordingly for future releases.
Issued earlier this year as an LP, the latest Final album is rereleased digitally with almost an entire second album’s worth of alternate mixes that combine the strongest moments of Justin Broadrick’s long-standing side project into a single work. It meshes the dark, moody ambience of his discography with the more recently resurrected love of dirty noise into 80 minutes of melancholy melody and speaker shredding squall.
Final started as a noise band by a teenage Justin Broadrick, and was then revived in the mid 1990s as a dark ambient/isolationist project, and is responsible for some of the short-lived genre's best works. Now, in its third phase, Broadrick has combined elements of both previous forms into a newer, evolved sound.
"Right Signal" begins with dirty crunchy bass noise that sounds pulled off of any possible noise record, but paired with melodic ambient synth that ranges from dramatic prog-rock flourishes to dark, horror movie dirges. Synthetic horn fanfares are presented alongside distorted electronic passages with a slow building tension throughout. "Wrong Signal" is initially pure power electronics swell with guitar feedback and noise winding through. Through its 15 minute duration, mournful synths eventually come into focus, calling to mind some of the melancholy moments of 2 but in a far less minimal context.
"Stop at Red" keeps up the darkness by focusing on sparse, treated guitar over a stripped down bed of electronics, eventually being dominated by squealing feedback and raw noise, though the deep, gliding bass sounds never go away. The track ends with the multi-tracked voice of Broadrick (I am assuming) that could be a lost Jesu vocal track. The original material ends with "Green," mixing mostly plaintive guitar playing from Broadrick with more ambient sounds. The guitar has the dreary post-punk sound that a lot of the more recent Jesu work has incorporated, so it is perhaps the closest sounding thing to that project here.
The alternate mix of "Right Signal" pulls some of the harsh electronic elements away while simultaneously adding more film score elements to give it an even more dramatic sound than prior. The shortened alternate edit of "Wrong Signal" filters the noise down to a hushed static, allowing depressive synths to be the focal point.
"Stop at Red" reappears in a stripped down capacity that maintains the darkness of the original, but keeps the rougher elements more at bay. The remix of "Green" mostly treats and cuts up the original guitar, putting it behind the electronic stuff, and is one of the only cases on here where the alternate version is a bit more raw than the original one. The alternate mixes as a whole are pretty different takes on the material, to the point where one can hear the linkage between the two takes, but either would make a strong stand-alone album. Having them both together is just a great thing.
I have consistently considered Final’s 2 and the Urge/Fail 7" among the best dark electronic music I have ever heard some decade-plus since their first release, and that has not changed. Reading All The Right Signals Wrong, however, is one of the definite high moments in the Final discography that successfully incorporates the harsh, noisier stuff alongside the lush ambient moments that characterized the 1990s incarnation of the project. It takes the classically dark, morose power noise of early Maurizio Bianchi, but with a sense of brooding melody which that genre has never been focused on. It is also perhaps the most multifaceted work he has done under this name, and the alternate mixes exclusive to this CD are varied enough to make a more complete release.
While initially I thought that Luminous Night was a weak follow up to 2007’s Shelter from the Ash, it is obvious from repeated listening sessions that this album is a much more complicated and layered work than Ben Chasny’s previous album. The rich musical tapestry that his group has created here sounds timeless; that inimitable mix of rock, traditional and atmospheric music that sets Chasny and his companions apart from other bands.
Luminous Night feels like a soundtrack more than a traditional album; the scope of feelings and range of the music covered on the album mirror that of a particularly convoluted film. The instrumental “Actaeon’s Fall (Against the Hounds)” that opens the album has a bright, fantastic vibe and it could easily serve as a theme song to one of Jodorowsky’s movies; Ben Chasny’s music has that same sense of wonder and the same revelatory nature as a film like The Holy Mountain.
After the bright introduction, each song becomes progressively darker in mood and content. This gloom combined with the medical theme running through the album (“Anesthesia,” “Cover Your Wounds with the Sky,” etc.) may point to something serious in Chasny’s personal life but whatever that is, he has channelled it into something powerful. During “Ursa Minor” he sings: “This hospital’s no place to say goodbye;” these words combined with Ben’s beautiful acoustic guitar playing makes for a heavy, cathartic moment. The song then disintegrates into recordings of the full band bursting through the walls and the sound of life support machines, creating a deeply emotional and upsetting experience.
Yet, no matter how dark it gets there is always a glimmer of hope shining through. “River of Heaven” recalls Coil’s “Five Minutes After Death” but without the savageness of a murder lurking in the background. Eyvind Kang’s viola lifts this song into a truly spiritual place, riding on the rhythm like a hawk rides on the wind (or like a spirit escaping the body). The hope remains only a glimmer though as the album closes with “Enemies Before the Light,” finishing in a boiling mass of violence. I cannot help but feel that if this was a soundtrack, then this film most certainly does not have a happy ending.
A sad ending is not a bad ending by any means and Luminous Night again shows that Ben Chasny is still operating not just at full strength after over a decade of Six Organs of Admittance. When compared to the massive early years retrospective, RTZ, that came out earlier this year, it is clear hear how Chasny has developed Six Organs. His work over the last few years has come strongly together to make what I feel is one of the most interesting and exciting repertoires in rock music.
To commemorate its 12th year in existence, Hymen, the more "conventional" step-child of the Ant-Zen label, releases this massive two disc compilation of its roster, and it is packed with the electronic, IDM, and occasionally pop elements of the label that we’ve all grown to know and love.
When I say "packed", I mean it: both discs clock in a bit over 79 minutes each, and there are a total of 33 different artists present. Anyone familiar with the label’s roster will know what to expect from this. Artists such as The_Empath combine quiet electronic textures and flanged rhythms with the traditional IDM percussive skittering. However rather than just sticking with what’s expected, there is a late appearance by guitar that takes the track into an entirely different realm. Dryft’s "Vector Step (Elimination)" is similar, pushing lush electronic synths over hushed breakbeats that are more textural than rhythmic.
The sound veers towards dissonance at times, and in a fascinating way. Label stalwarts Somatic Responses gives "Takayama (Another Day)" a raw and grinding electro rhythmic edge upon which old school synth sequences show up, all of which leads to a beautiful extended ambient closing. Deru’s "Between You and Me" combines old school hip-hop beats with a decidedly minimalist synth setup, instantly bringing me back to the days of Front 242’s Endless Riddance material. Lowfish’s "Wreckage" takes a similarly old school electro direction, adding in deep synth pulses to the otherwise tightly sequenced sound.
Mid-period industrial influenced stuff is here too, notably in the layered mechanical beats of Millipede’s "Concevoir (remixed by Aphorism)" and the distorted rhythms of "Phoenix" by HPC, coming across like a stripped down take on early Skinny Puppy material. Defrag’s "The Old Growth" and Wisp’s "The Bard" go a more pop direction with the industrial, the former throwing in the requisite dialog samples, but giving it more of cut up vibe to it, and the latter sounds like it’s longing to be back on the dancefloor.
The more "out there" tracks are a mixed bag. "The End of the World (Intimate Mix)" by the better known Snog is the only vocal track, mostly untreated voice with backward synths and just a bit of distortion cropping up at the end. While very different, it is also a bit pedestrian and too blandly EBM. Bit Shifter brings the chiptune scene with "Easy Prey," being focused on old Nintendo sounds, but thankfully uses more conventional drum sounds rather than the shit white noise impulse that 8 bit consoles relied on. The most 'out there' contriobution is End’s "Jailbait Rock," which can only be described as rockabilly glitch metal. It's sort of like if Ministry from 1990 were playing with the Reverend Horton Heat while Autechre does the production…that’s about as accurate as I can get.
Over this near 2 hours and 40 minutes of electronic music, there are a lot of diverse genres represented. Some have distinctly fresh and cutting edge sounds to them; others feel like throwbacks to earlier days of the scene. While there are a few tracks that just don’t stand out on their own, it is a good survey of the label’s long history, and electronic and industrial fans will definitely enjoy most of what’s here, and probably like some of the tracks that may creep out of their "preferred" subgenres.
While both these artists are known for their work with the purely synthetic world of sound, here both add more traditional and organic instrumentation to their sound, and the result is a warm and melodic set of tracks that occasionally allow in a bit of dissonance.
Like much of Deupree’s work, there is an overwhelming amount of inviting sustained tones throughout Transcriptions.In fact, they make up the bulk of the opening "Nocturne," along with reverberated loops and guitar, which one of the decidedly organic elements to this album.The second track, "Largo," drops some of the processing for cleaner, glassy tones, but also brings in raw vinyl surface noise, either from 78rpm records or old wax cylinders that Mathieu brings to the table.The audio dirt from these old sources is a stark but welcome contrast to the otherwise pure and sterile nature of the sound.
Both "Solitude" and "Remain" amplify the more harsh elements of the duo’s sound, though it still is rather hushed by most standards.The former has soft, filtered white noise as a bed that reverberated music box tones from the farthest reaches of infinity soar over, and the latter uses gauzy static against soft melody, though sadly the static is not as prominent as it should be, in my opinion."Andante" boosts up the lower registered sounds and adds in some vaguely rhythmic loops to break up the pure tone.
"Genius" follows suit, but guitar is more of a prominent feature here, and so are the loops.In general, it has a more dynamic, varied feel to it compared to the other tracks’ more looming, frozen nature.The long "White Heaven" is aptly named:it is a mostly static track of soaring melodies and subtle variations in sound, but mixes the melody with subtle noise, which is stripped away towards the end to leave only the pure melody.
In total it is a pleasant tonal listening experience with some good textural elements to the sound, but it doesn’t stand out as anything especially innovative or new from either artist, and thus is more just another notch in the discography as opposed to a new revelation or career development.It’s good, but not great.
Culled from home demo recordings, this new artist flexes his muscles in that dark area where metal, drone, and noise mingle, and the result is a set of five very different tracks that capture the essence of the respective genres, but never feels like by the numbers simplicity.
The opening "Room 237" is based on what is listed as a "buzz cable" as the only instrument. My assumption (perhaps false) is that this is the traditional noise tactic of running a simple sound through a battery of effects and seeing what comes out. The sound of the track seems to support my thesis though, because it sounds like the intersection of sustained Japanese noise roar with traditionally American cut up power electronics grind. It’s very old school, thick and crunchy in its approach.
"Peep Show Arcade," created using only tape recordings, features mangled guitar shredding cut up and fuzzed out through tape tricks, though it comes out more like a mutant take on thrash metal solos. "Should We Move On Or Stay Safely Away" is based on guitar, and mostly of the harsh sustained variety. The tone is completely fuzzed out and near the middle portion of the sonic spectrum. It’s not very dynamic, but there is a decent enough amount of variation to the sound, and lots of good scraping and grinding textures. It focuses more on the feedback, and the title is a Joy Division reference, so it has to be pretty good.
"R-Grey" is a more rhythmic track, based around overdriven guitar textures and stuttering, almost drum-like percussive sounds. It is a more dynamic piece compared to the previous, and its organic sound contrasts dense noisy sections with more sparse and open ones. However, through it all there is a grimy and crusted over sound that never goes away, and it is the audio equivalent of nausea. I mean that as an utmost compliment, however, as any sort of sound that can be so viscerally satisfying is always a great thing.
The disc closes with the title track, which is also a guitar-based piece. Here the sonic dirt and grime is not as prevalent as it was previously, but some of the debris remains. While also highly textural, there is more of a mystery to the track. It has a very dramatic sound to it, and the textures are just as tactile as in "R-Grey," but less gory.
Apparently his debut release, Dumont is already showing skill at weaving sonic textures that rival some of the best. For those (like me) who like their noise so thick and varied that it can almost be felt, this is essential listening.
This album lives up to the band’s name, being a mechanized, but monochromatic, noisy death machine, hitting menacing metal tinged levels unheard since the end of Godflesh. It focuses on the aggression absent from Broadrick's newer work, and serves as the dark demonic yang to Jesu's pop-tinged yin. It is undeniably the work of Justin Broadrick, but feels more like a collaboration as opposed to a solo project, with the other members bringing their own elements to the table.
Although it does feel spearheaded by Broadrick, his longtime collaborators Diarmaud Dalton (Godflesh, Jesu) and Dave Cochrane (Head of David, God, Jesu) are present here, as is Hydra Head & Isis leader Aaron Turner. With the exception of its combination of heavy, sludgy elements with lighter, more melodic pastiches, it does bear little resemblance to Jesu. Much of the album is murky, intentionally so, with Broadrick’s drumming and detuned bass assaults from either Dalton or Cochrane dominating the mix, the occasional vocals, usually screamed, by Broadrick and Turner, are low enough to not be a distraction.
The best parallel to draw to this album is a more obscure Broadrick release, and that is the Ghosts album from Techno Animal, though here it is a bit more of an organic sound with less of the jazz trappings that were present on that disc. There are some similarities to the Curse of the Golden Vampire project with Alec Empire as well but this is far more "metal" and less electronic in nature.
Opener "Wolf at the Door" exemplifies this formula: crashing, loose bass thuds, simple but brutal drumming, and buried screams from either or both vocalists, but all lead by a melodic riff that could be leading a much more mellow and peaceful track. "Vultures Descend," which was released as a free download almost a year ago, even tosses out the melodic stuff, but keeps an electronic musical underpinning below the otherwise pure white noise and distorted drumming that make up the track.
There is more variation, and more of a Jesu feel, on both "When Attention Isn’t Enough" and "Wasted," the latter especially being a bit less noise focused and with its rudimentary drums and sludgy guitar and bass feels more like a modernized take on early Head of David, or something that wouldn’t have been too out of place on an earlier Godflesh record. "Just Breathing" also plods along with a traditional Broadrick guitar riff and even solo that could be off the Merciless EP from the mid 1990s.
The closing two tracks go the furthest into left field sonically. "Sweatshop" sounds like an intentionally lo-fi recording of the band rehearsing run through various digital filters, even tossing in a bit of chintzy drum machine before letting the track fall apart into noise akin to the early days of industrial. "Easy Pickings" is similar, but allowing more traditional guitar playing to rise up to the surface, directly contrasting some of the melodic Jesu stuff with pure electronic screech and noise. The Japanese Daymare pressing of this disc adds "We Are All Fucking Liars (Version)", which was the b-side to the limited 12” single of "Vultures Descend" and it takes a drastically different direction from the rest of the album. Filtering the original track occasionally down to just its purest melodic elements alternating with full on distortion and inhuman vocals, and then adding in slow, overdriven noise beats that sound like they’re from a late-period Techno Animal album. The track is not essential by any means and feels substantially different from the rest of the album, but it is interesting to hear such a different take on the material.
Disconnected is definitely a completely different project from Jesu, but it does have that undeniable Justin Broadrick sound to it. Fans from the Godflesh days won’t be shocked at all, but newcomers only familiar with the "lighter" Jesu material probably will not be interested in this. It is a murky, distorted set of songs that closer listening can reveal a greater depth to, even though it lacks the heavy, diverse beauty of Broadrick’s "main" project.
Rome's bold and prismatic vision is anchored by one of the strongest vocalists I've heard this year. Jerome Reuter's commanding and resonant voice is a significant part of this band's appeal, but it's the exotic and manifold musical styles used throughout the record that generate the most excitement and make Flowers From Exile a joy to hear.
Jerome Reuter's deep tenor recalls the deliveries of both Dave Gahan and Nick Cave. Coincidentally, the music he writes draws from the same deep well of drama, personal confession, damnation, and redemption implemented by both of those writers. On this record Reuter has more in common with the likes of Nick Cave or someone like Bob Dylan than he does with a pop star, but his music isn't a simple reflection of any one musical genre. Flowers From Exile is supposedly based upon the events of the Spanish Civil War, a conflict in which Retuer's family partook. The various samples used throughout the album, as well as its exotic arrangements, intimate an atmosphere of conflict and resignation, but specifics never quite materialize the way they would in folk music or songs of political protest. More plainly, Flowers tackles the familiar topics of isolation, desperation, and displacement whether it be political, familial, or religious in scope. Reuter's use of broad metaphor makes personal investment easy and ultimately lends the album a melodramatic tint, but the band's restraint and honesty takes the cheap catharsis of melodrama and converts it into a spectrum of various intrigues and ambiguities. In this way, the band's claim that they are influenced by chanteurs makes sense, especially if that influence were to include the likes of Jacques Brel or Serge Gainsbourg. As is the case with nearly every album conducted by a poet-musician, there are spots of lyrical extravagance that border on cloying, but Flowers' many merits make such excesses forgivable.
Many of those merits can be attributed to Rome's other half, Patrick Damiani. Responsible for producing Flowers and writing its arrangements, Damiani populates Reuter's world with the sounds of field recordings, foreign voices, martial rhythms, atmospheric howls, and a variety of musical styles from flamenco to pseudo-industrial collage. Despite that variety, the album stays focused and never degenerates into a formless mush. Comparisons to famous "neofolk" or "apocalyptic folk" groups makes sense to some small degree however the band's versatility is enough to distinguish them from groups like Death in June or Sol Invictus, not to mention their subtlety and restraint. Rome concentrates the majority of their energy on quality songwriting, a fact crystallized in both the memorable melodies and diverse forms employed throughout Flowers. The group rarely falls back on the verse-chorus-verse formula, they never rely on atmosphere or pomp to hold their music up, and the train of samples and instruments that pepper the record gel with the songs more often than they clash.
Patrick garnishes Jerome's songs with layers and layers of instrumentation, but uses the guitar to hold his ideas together. So, while welters of noise sizzle beneath some songs and operatic voices swell up beside others, Damiani's strumming moves forward and provides both a musical and narrative momentum. And the best songs have quite a bit of momentum to them. "The Secret Sons of Europe" and "To Die Among Strangers" are heavy and propulsive numbers with explosive qualities. One is a rhythmically intricate piece with sharp corners, sampled choruses, understated solos, and a gilded horn section. The other is an emotionally heavy performance accented by a quickly strummed guitar and an elegant violin part. They put the album's slowly developed tension to good use and, as a result, are two of the more memorable songs on the record. Rome's slower, more traditional songs do not inspire equally glowing reactions, however. Both "Odessa" and the titular closer feel somewhat empty or unfinished next to their richly decorated brethern. These songs are no less strong than any of the others, but they represent the places where Damiani's production does not rise the occasion. This is a minor annoyance, but it reveals that Reuter's voice is only as compelling as the music that surrounds it. Flowers From Exile is a gem of a record nonetheless, and its lackluster ending does little to compromise its many virtues.
This 10 CD boxed set is an epic trek through Ferrari’s electronic compositions for Le Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) from his early experiments in musique concrète in the 1950s up until his death (and beyond in one case). Along with detailed notes by Ferrari or those close to him, this is the definitive collection that covers all his most important works. This is essential listening of the highest order.
The majority of the first disc covers Ferrari’s earliest experiments with the GRM. The works included here like "Étude aux Accidents" and "Visage 5" are crude even when compared to Ferrari’s contemporaries at the time but they provide an interesting insight into how he developed his own sound world. These pieces are the most traditionally concrète of all the works included in the box set, made at a time when Ferrari was learning the ropes which he would later cut. However, the humor, the playfulness, and type of sounds used are Ferrari through and through. The first CD finishes with "Music Promenade," which is reminiscent of Walter Ruttman’s 1930 movie for the ears "Wochende." It hints at the direction he would take over the course of his career, pushing natural sounds and human character to the fore and leaving inorganic music to his colleagues.
Far-West News is a sprawling catalogue of the people Ferrari and his wife, Brunhild, meet on their travels through the western United States in 1998. At one point, Ferrari describes how he envisions the piece: an audio newspaper. This again calls back to Ruttman’s "Wochende" and to similar experiments like the East Village Other Electric Newspaper but needless to say, Ferrari trumps them all. Recorded around the time of the scandal surrounding Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, Ferrari’s interviews with ordinary Americans find them mostly indifferent if not permissive of the former President’s private life (at odds with the mainstream media’s representation of public outrage at the time). The interviews are interspersed with readings from newspapers (including an article about the film version of Lolita, again Ferrari explores America’s views on sexuality). All this plays out over a backdrop of Luc and Brunhild ordering (or trying to order) food across the country, Ferrari being the stereotypical Frenchman whose twin desires are food and sex.
L’Œuvre Électronique is the most fitting monument to Ferrari’s. Bearing in mind that there are 10 CDs worth of impeccable compositions as well as a detailed book (in French and English) that features a short biography, notes by Ferrari and an interview with Brunhild; this is also an exceptionally good value too with INA/GRM keeping the price as low as possible. Hopefully, there will be a sister release of his works for traditional instruments to accompany his electronic works but for the moment there is more than enough material here to keep anyone going for a long, long time.
Deeming this meeting of minds a classic is certainly beyond cliché at this point, though to some degree the album still does not receive the recognition garnered by other ventures that the collaborators were individually involved in. Yet Bureau B, whose recent digs through the archives have revealed and shared some true gems of late, has graced the world with the album again, and its flow and thoroughness of conception is as apparent now as ever. There is a dignified sense of space here that fuels these compositions and promises them a life far beyond the 30+ years already lived by them.
Of course with a cast like this it is tough to go wrong, and this meeting feels far less like a collaboration between Hans-Joachim Roedelius, Dieter Moebius and Brian Eno than it does a logical meeting of minds that could well have lasted far beyond the two albums the trio would release together. Often touted as the first German ambient album, the release reads far more like an instrumental soundtrack whose purpose is not so much to drift into the background as it is to elevate the occurences happening around it.
This is apparent from the first track alone, the classic "Ho Renomo," which features Can bassist and conceptual rocker Holger Czukay's bobbing repetitions fueling the effervescent electronic and piano drift surrounding it. Each member's contribution can be clearly deciphered, a remarklable synthesis of sounds and styles that feels like all of them without sounding entirely like any of them.
The album's strong point is how effortlessly it moves from piece to piece, careening into outer bounds on the following "Schone Hande," whose clear melody line feels as fragile as the cloud-like atmospherics and hydrolic drops surrounding it. Like everything here, the work seems in a kind of shifting stasis, hovering above the floor without ever rising too high. The sorrowful "Steinsame" has more than its share of Eno's recognizable footprints, as does the following "Wehrmut," but the feel is lighter and slightly more compositional, with a subtle momentum where Eno would often let the piece stand. Elsewhere, "Mit Simaen" and "Die Bunge" read like true Cluster tracks, while the rhythmic chord progression and thudded bongos of "Selange" sound like neither.
Whereas much of the album uses its broad instrumental palette quite subtley, the sitar of Okko Bekker on "One," which also features electronic groundbreaker Asmus Tietchens, is a raga tune for the elctric age, the sitar subtly maneuvering the synthesizer dips and thumb piano pulses. It is a fitting and comparably rowdy setup for the plan closer "Fur Luise," whose piano opening invites a sensitive and melancholy drawing that perfectly suits the album's overall mood, ending it with just the question mark necessary.
After all these years a lot of these now archaic electronic tactics should sound outdated but in the hands of authentic musicians such as these—whose senses of color, invention, and discriminate choice guide the proceedings with such care—the results are far from outdated. It seems instead that these pieces, though not necessarilly directly influential toward any specific genre, have become so engrained in the way that music is conceived today that these works make as much sense now as they ever have. It has become second nature.
Since the early '90s, C. Spencer Yeh has followed the typical path of the contemporary noise-maker, releasing dozens of solo and collaborative works through numerous labels on every format imaginable. Whether it is released under the Burning Star Core moniker or under his proper name, the varying quality and availability of Yeh’s work makes understanding it, let alone assessing it, a difficult task. It shouldn’t be that way. Challenger provides all the proof needed to establish him as versatile and provocative musician.
What makes Challenger such a clear statement of Yeh’s talent is that it’s an album in the standard sense, a collection of interrelated songs on one format, rather than some random hodge-podge of disembodied “content” released without formality or context. Without its intended sequencing, each piece on Challenger would suffer in isolation. The title track, which starts off the album, glides placidly along on an organ drone only to disintegrate into a mass of piercing chimes and tape hiss. The ending is succinct but violent, a tiny preview to the howling din of the following piece, “Beauty Hunter.” Its synth eruptions and off-kilter guitar loops sound wild and immense, but without the slow warning of the preceding track, “Beauty Hunter” would be a little less sublime. Sequencing is even more vital to the short and odd interludes that populate the middle of the album. “No Memories, No Pains,” a torrential assemblage of anonymous shouts and unidentifiable clicking, would seem aimless if was not followed by the menacing synth drones of “Hopelessly Devoted.”
C. Spencer Yeh knows when to hold back and when to go in for the kill. Challenger is unpredictable yet it is so well organized. When a cascade of noise appears on any given track, the effect is one of calculated surprise rather than random selection. Challenger also possesses a rough hewn quality despite its tightly controlled dynamics. This stems partially from wide-ranging recording quality of the album. The overall fidelity doesn’t differ, but each sound element within a given piece varies quite a bit. Most of Challenger was composed by Yeh at his home in Cincinnati, but parts of it were derived from fragments recorded in Kentucky, New York, Germany, and Portugal. The crowd sounds, tape hiss, and button noises (presumably from those recordings) worm their way onto otherwise pristine sounding synth tones. Calling this collage would be accurate, but that would denigrate Yeh as an artist. Anyone can make a collage. It would be better to call Challenger a mosaic, where the individual facets are shaped to form an original image. That Yeh reuses his own material does not suggest a lack of ideas. By fitting the pieces of his artistic past so well together, he is thinking critically about his art and by extension himself. His song titles, using words like beauty, memory, plans and mysteries, suggest a more personal approach on Challenger, rather than the routine and mechanical application of musical (or anti-musical) forms.
It is easy, but somewhat awkward, to call Challenger entertaining and thoughtful. Never mind them being considered contradictory, but those two words are almost never used to describe a "noise" album. It’s hard to guess whether Spencer had any audience in mind at all when he made the album or whether he put as much effort into it as any other record. It’s also hard to guess whether he will follow up with something just as enjoyable and as it is visceral. Perhaps it will be a retreat to his normal routine of recorded improvisations and collaborative projects, but those releases lack the coherence of his composed material. Like his peers in Wolf Eyes, Double Leopards, and Hair Police, Yeh’s best work is his most structured. That may contradict the free-wheeling zeitgeist of the American underground, but an artist of C. Spencer Yeh’s talent shouldn’t bother with churning out substandard work. Challenger is proof that noise-makers be can powerful even when they are disciplined and painstaking.