05 December 2015

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Albums and Singles

End of Summer captures Johann Johannsson's journey to the Antarctic Peninsula to discover the calm scenery of a landscape changing seasons, barely influenced or even noticed by humanity. The super 8 film is a comforting study of a peaceful setting in one of the most crucial and endangered areas of our planet.

Accompanied by rich and detailed field recordings of the surrounding this footage makes a perfect foundation for Johann's musical compositions, performed together with fellow musicians and friends Hildur Gudnadottir and Robert A. A. Lowe. The varying use of cello, voice, synthesizer and electronics creates a listening experience that reflects both the vast beauty of the quiet scenery and the necessary cautiousness of its inhabitants. As if gliding through the steep ice, its rough edges and the harmonious water movements, organic arrangements are patiently devolving into voice and electronic based ambience that adds warmth to the icy, artefact laden environment.

The soundtrack to End of Summer is an emotional, enduring listen and a compelling experience. Forming a soundscape as broad as the view it was inspired by yet equally heartwarming, devotion to the music will slow down time and provide a moment of harmony within times of change.

Watch the trailer here.

Find more information here.

30 November 2015

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Albums and Singles

Even with two amazing solo albums last year and a new Wire album with subsequent touring, Graham Lewis managed to reactivate Hox with Andreas Karperyd (with whom he has collaborated as He Said Omala). The music, as always, exceeds expectations, and the duo has created an album of engaging electronic pop with enough strangeness befitting Lewis' lengthy and consistently magnificent career.

Editions Mego

While 2014's All Over featured Lewis once again displaying his unparalleled ability to blend the experimental with the musical, on Duke of York with Karperyd those conventional sensibilities are even more placed on the forefront.This is clear from the first 30 seconds of "Anthracite":propelled by a moderate tempo beat, molten synth tones are shaped into bass lines and an engaging, catchy bit of music is constructed by the two.Weird sounds and crunchy electronics underscore the spoken word vocals, coming together as oddly treated yet rhythmically powerful pseudo-industrial song.

The chunky bass and what sounds like a looped guitar melody that open the first half of "Correct Co-ordinates," and the vocals that appear towards the second half make for an odd, sort of loose feeling.It is that unique brand of off-kilter electronic pop Lewis spearheaded in the 1980s incarnation of Wire and their limited period as Wir.Speaking of the latter, the more tense and chaotic "It's Too Much" is locked into a jumpy beat and layered vocal structure rather early, but what very much resembles a sample from the opening of "Big Glue Canal" contrast the lighter vocal portions exceptionally well.

The ending pair of "Goodbye" and "Frequency" close the album on quite a strong note.The former is a complex mass of polyrhythmic drum programming and a gripping bass.As usual, Lewis' vocal delivery is majestic and captivatingly melodic, and the way the duo pair the voice and warm keyboard leads with the more erratic background sounds is another testament to how well the obtuse and enjoyable can be blended perfectly."Frequency" ends the album with warm bass guitar melodies and a metric ton of processing on both the music and vocals.Even with the unconventional alien sensibility, there’s a comfort and familiarity to the sound that makes it especially endearing.

Other than his work with Wire, Duke of York might be Graham Lewis' most approachable and conventional work since He Said's Take Care.But even the most conventional music from him remains exceptionally depth and complex.Works such as this cement the role he served as the mediator between Colin Newman's love of pure pop music and Bruce Gilbert's penchant for chaos and noise during Wire's most well regarded eras.Likely because of this, his expertise at blending those two disparate approaches to music is exceptionally strong.This is something that shines through in his solo work, and also in his collaborations such as here with Andreas Karperyd, who's electronic contributions give the record a timeless, yet forward thinking sensibility.Duke of York is an amazingly robust record full of innovative electronic sounds and textures, but wrapped in the cloak of a catchy pop record:a masquerade that effortlessly succeeds in both of those very different realms.

samples:

• Anthracite
• Correct Co-Ordinates
• Goodbye

 

29 November 2015

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Albums and Singles

Listening to Amorphous Spores, it’s difficult not to think about sex. The title alone implies it. Spores are generally vehicles for asexual reproduction, and while that isn’t technically sex, it is at least related in that it is a method for securing growth and repetition over time. But Takahiro Kawaguchi and Utah Kawasaki chose to place mushroom caps on the cover of their album and many members of the Fungi kingdom can reproduce either asexually or sexually. The method utilized depends on the environment. In conditions favorable to a mushroom’s continued existence, spores are produced by mitosis. As genetic replicas of their parent, the spores simply germinate and continue the species over and over again, no partner required. When conditions aren’t so favorable, however, mushrooms go through a more complicated process involving cell fusion, the production of a zygote, and meiosis. It still doesn’t make sense to think of males and females (the gametes all look the same), but since the resulting spores are not clones of their parents, their offspring stand a better chance of surviving environmental changes. The newly mixed genetic material might, for instance, secure them a tolerance to drier climates. Though it would be a stretch to say that what they’re doing is sexual, Kawaguchi and Kawasaki also work with morphologically similar germs, "selfmade instruments" and "electronics" according to the slim liner notes. They begin as quantifiably distinct bodies, fuse, interact, and disperse, finally producing hybrid offspring. Although it’s a strange and unlikely symmetry, the structural and extra-musical content of the album point toward the similarities in fungal mating and creative collaboration.

Erstwhile

In getting to those similarities, it may be enough to point out that Amorphous Spores is shaped like a bell curve. The intensity, volume, and density of the record’s five parts can all be mapped to that form, expressing a movement from calm and stability to disturbance and volatility, then rapidly back to calm again. The circularity fits all of those reproductive graphs passed out in college biology classes and, appropriately, matches the shape of the mushrooms depicted on the album’s cover. Were the music a perfect representation of the progress from mycelia to basidiocarp and so on, each stage in the life cycle of the fungus, maybe the one in the artwork, would have an audible equivalent, and the whole project would be a representational work of art, a very strange translation of the procreative act to the realm of sound.

In all likelihood, that is not what Kawaguchi and Kawasaki had in mind when making their record. For one, the title is not Spores, but Amorphous Spores, suggesting shapeless and apparently unorganized elements colliding at random, not hyphae with cell walls and nuclei undergoing plasmogamy. Whether the duo hits the mark in that respect depends on which part of the music is supposed to be amorphous. Kawasaki’s electronic instruments and Kawaguchi’s homemade contraptions are all designed, and if they had wanted to they could have provided diagrams showing everyone how those instruments were built and how they function. For that reason, and because no such diagrams are present, they seem like poor candidates.

On a simple level, all of their sounds are also formal, vibrations of a particular size and shape, presented in a perfectly appreciable and ordered way, passing through a medium. That’s a murkier path to travel and probably just as unhelpful anyway. The obvious uncertainty at play is the interaction of the instruments and the noises, of the buzzing fan motors, synthetic bursts, and horn-like peals that spin and gurgle endlessly through the album’s middle portion, and of the heavy low-end drones Kawasaki lays down at the extremes, the seismic foundations for Kawaguchi’s curt interruptions. These interact, exchange properties, form structures, then fade away, recurring and resounding at the microscopic level from moment to moment, and at the generational level as the album loops back on itself in its final seconds, cutting a path toward its beginning.

How these parts relate, what they produce, and ultimately where they lead all depends on how the sounds are received. Beyond the big picture of repetition and diversification the inexhaustible matter of translation awaits. That’s where the sexual activity promised by the album’s title enters the equation. Electronic vibrations and organic receptors fuse, interact, and disperse, setting off a chain reaction. The process can end there, in the pleasure of repeitition, or it can spin off in any direction whatsoever, germinating in the minds of others.

samples:

• 12:32
• 10:59
• 10:01

 

29 November 2015

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Albums and Singles

This solo project of Adam Killing (who also works as Kill Memory Crash) might only have released its second full-length record, but the multifaceted sound of Kolektique is that of an exceptionally well-developed artist. Drawing from a multitude of minimal synth sounds, he utilizes the expertly to create sparse, yet extremely catchy compositions.  While this is all well and good, the subtle production and attention to the smallest of sonic details is where this album especially shines.

DKA

The instrumentation that makes up the bulk of this album is nothing too esoteric or unexpected:pulsing analog synths, stiff drum machines, and heavy vocal processing define most of the 10 songs on here.What especially drew me in, however, was the nuanced production on those standard sounds.For example, the simple synth sequence and drum program that drives "Adagio" (featuring guest vocals by Le Sprite) sounds rather by the numbers, but the depth and variation of those individual notes and beats is what makes it sound exceptional.Complex, layered synth notes, a fat, thudding kick drum and the metallic crunch of the snare gives the song a distinct (and wonderful) identity.

On "Magnus," Killing builds from a thumping bass drum that is pummeling at even reasonable volume levels, and the ghostly, haunting synth melodies that underscore the song give it a distinct and captivating feel.For "Forest Floors," it sounds as if he brings in a live bass guitar to underscore the piece, adding additional depth.Echoing synthesizer sweeps cut through consistently with metallic tinged voices appearing.Again, the sequences that drive the piece are structurally rather basic, but the tones that are being produced have a beautifully nuanced and unconventional sound to them.

"Diamonds" features again what sounds like a live bass lead that, when mixed with the healthy application of reverb, reminded me of Floodland era Sisters of Mercy, but with a much more synth pop bent.The piece itself is rather simple, with distant and cold vocals by Killing appearing throughout, but the echoing and reverb results in a heavier and oppressive, yet warm feeling throughout.The record’s conclusion, "S-Gerat," is a bit slower and has Killing working with a looser, less rigid approach to rhythm.The more dissonant elements and the complex melodies that are weaved in and out make for a different sounding, yet no less brilliant sounding song.

Circa Tapes' Kolektique may draw from many well tread electronic and synth-based music grounds, but the secret for its success lies heavily in its production.Adam Killing's subtle treatments and processing is not well lent to being described in terms of specific effects, but he makes even the most mundane bass drum sound a multilayered, physically tangible thump of noise.Beyond just fascinating sounding instrumentation, however, is a series of strong, memorable songs that are laden with catchy melodies and strong rhythms, with everything coming together in a beautiful, yet appropriately icy and robotic piece of music.

samples:

• Adagio
• Forest Floors
• S-Gerat

 

29 November 2015

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Albums and Singles

Perspective in film or literature is an easy enough concept to explain. Appeals to height and distance or attitude and intention help situate what it means for a director or author to have a view of something, even if the subject matter is abstract. Perspective in music requires a little more: more context, more imagination, more patience maybe. Program music utilizes narrative by design, but what about music that is supposed to have eliminated narrative, that is intended as sound and not as storytelling? What about an album like Coppice’s Matches? Noé Cuéllar and Joseph Kramer’s second album this year is a puzzle box of rattling noise and growling materials, drawn from shruti boxes, pump organs, and sphygmomanometers. In that way, it is reminiscent of Cores/Eruct, a record that alternately divulged and concealed the architecture behind its construction, and which utilized music recorded and performed since 2009. Matches also incorporates music from the last six years: studio recordings and live performances from Texas, Illinois, and Iceland. It is set apart by its focus, by its cleaving to claustrophobic spaces, its tight framing, and its mechanical sequences, by the perspective it brings to Coppice’s corner of the musical cosmos. Cuéllar and Kramer have called Matches a "story with many holes." Whether they are presenting a tattered cloth or a series of missing pieces, and whether there is a difference between the two, is a question worth keeping in mind as the album folds, unfolds, and spins through its many configurations.

Category of Manifestation

The loud, long, and reedy drone that begins and continues throughout all six and a quarter minutes of "Bromine" implies that Noé and Joseph interpret the matter of musical perspective spatially. Shruti boxes and pump organs are mainstays in their repertoire, instruments they have portrayed from different vantage points over numerous full-lengths, EPs, cassettes, and CD-Rs, but this intense closeup, which produces a metallic, insect-like buzz, fills the song’s entire frame and is unique in its consistency and nakedness. The only accompaniment are a few squeaking noises, which might be from the bellows or the case of a shruti box, and a handful of mysterious overtones.

It resolves seamlessly into "Labile Form," the contents of which are more varied: a few convulsing melodies, more tactile noises like rattling springs and spinning tape heads, and a deep, satisfying bass tone. As it concludes, the track shakes and trembles like the mic has been dropped into a leather bag and let loose in a wind tunnel. Much of what happens during Matches seems to happen from the inside out, and that might be one way of thinking about the group’s insistence that this album be "handled from all sides."

Another way would be to think about how Cuéllar and Kramer recycle their previous work. "Held Cascade" and "Bramble" both employ Vinculum recordings, an archive of CD-Rs the band describes as "sonic artifacts." An album that uses previously recorded material could be seen as a tool for re-seeing and rethinking that material, either on its own or in relation to a bigger picture. It’s impossible to determine the origins for any of these parts in the first place, as the album is a kind of reconstructed compilation of previously recorded sounds. The "story with many holes" would be, in that case, a story composed of holes, of segments tied together to form the illusion of a whole. It's a kind of retrospective, but with the added twist that it’s a synthetic retrospective representative of nothing beyond itself. The organizational principle is partly intuitive and partly mechanical, a map of the way every part interacts, relates, and behaves.

Theoretical considerations about parts and wholes aside, the music is surprisingly cohesive. The sizzle of electrical systems, the crackle of distorted tapes, and the chunky rhythms of songs like "Bramble" and "Caper" are all heavy. They feel and sound like physical forces, not just loud and insistent noises. They’re broad and dense things made up of identifiable elements: wood, metal, rubber, magnetic film, pressurized air, each one of their audible instances matching their physical forms. Whether that is what Coppice means by naming their album Matches is questionable. They pair and blend musical sources on this record, but they also set them against one another, creating a music of conflict and agitation. Telling the two apart is, in the case, a matter of perspective.

samples:

• Bromine
• Discharge Form
• Bramble

 

23 November 2015

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Albums and Singles

Brannten Schnüre is an experimental dark folk group out of Würzburg, Germany. Christian Schoppik composed and played all the music, Katie Rich whispers, recites and sings. Together they make astoundingly beautiful folk with a rich instrumentation leaning towards the atonal spectrum. Instrumental wanderings stand alongside Nico-esque poetry tales. Christian plays the accordeon and in some songs guitar and flute. Inspired by hierophants like Nový Svět and David Jackman, solemn song fragments (a lot of old greek rembetiko-recordings) are modified and looped, with additional instruments and voices being integrated later on. His music has been described as "surreal folkcollage" and "German hauntology."

With the emergence of Schoppik's second project, a dada cabaret called Agnes Beil in 2010, Brannten Schnüre moved closer to the song structures of its frivolous sibling. The songs of Schoppik’s latest creation Sommer im Pfirsichhain are further accompanied by a female singing voice, lending the pieces the voluptuous quality of a stickily tense midsummer.  Sommer Im Pfirsichhain (Summer In The Peachgrove) is the second part of a quartet of releases. The first being Aprilnacht which got released on Sic Sic Tapes last year. Part three Geträumt hab' ich vom Martinszug and part four will follow later.

Reference points are bands like Winter Family and Twinsistermoon. Music etched on folkloric, ritual elements transferred into the 21th century. Also worth mentioning is the hand-drawn artwork which is made by artist Gwénola Carrère.

More information can be found here.

22 November 2015

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Albums and Singles

It wasn’t an accident of the imagination that inspired Pieter Bruegel the Elder to portray undead soldiers playing musical instruments in his Triumph of Death. Long before various religious sects decided that dance was an expression of unchecked desires, and therefore a temptation to be avoided, philosophers like Plato and Aristotle had connected music to moral incontinence. For Aristotle, the aulos, a double reed flute, was especially problematic because it prevented the player from speaking and because it drove men to irrational behavior. Bruegel, perhaps less concerned with prodigality than with mockery, chose a hurdy-gurdy, a violin, and drums for his skeleton warriors, but in the bottom-right corner of Triumph painted two oblivious nobles busy with a lute, neither panicking nor struggling against their fate. Their heads might as well be buried in the sand, their asses branded with the word "coward." Equally well known is Italian violinist and composer Niccolò Paganini who, because of his talents, his appearance or maybe out of jealousy, was rumored to have made a deal with Satan, securing him a legend and at least one painfully bad dramatic biography directed by Bernard Rose. That gets us back to the modern association of the violin with the devil, and to Alex Cunningham’s Kinesthetics, his debut solo violin album on the Close/Far label.

Close/Far

In his music, the St. Louis-based Cunningham makes no mention of the Great Adversary or any other power of darkness, but the name he chose for his debut gets right to the relationship between violin and movement, and more specifically to the sense of muscular effort and strength felt within the human body. Cunningham’s technique is, in one sense, muscular. He cuts and grinds at his instrument and digs into its strings, cutting off pitch and wrenching noise from them instead. As a result, the constant back-and-forth of the bow, the way it rocks and darts over the instrument, comes to the fore, until it is more the subject of the music than the melodies or even the instrument itself. On a song like "Drop Leaf," movement becomes a microscopic event, something that depends on tiny movements and minuscule physical properties, enough so that the violin is almost completely disguised. On "The Cage Knocked the Cloth Over" it breaks down even further, into waves of color and dispersing vapors.

Alex has a lighter touch too and finds space for more lyrical expressions in the same song, for small interludes that sound, for lack of a better term, classically executed. "Kinesthetics No. 2" and "Ida" both also contain similar passages, as do nearly all the other songs to varying degrees. Though improvised, Kinesthetics is clearly the product of someone who has been trained to play the instrument. Watching video of him on his website, it’s easy to see that Cunningham can work the fingerboard with precision, and his command of dynamics, including some wrist-breaking transitions from light and sonorous to blurred and taut, is on constant display.

The way he cobbles his performances together, from both traditional and extended techniques, is reminiscent of his collage work as a visual artist, which is formally meticulous and materially playful. That is another kind of movement Cunningham captures, between two spheres of musical expression. In the one, his playing might have once been called devilish, and certainly energetic, prone less to reason and more to feeling. In the other, he’s an improviser testing where and how different approaches fit, and whether they can stay within the same orbit for long. With Kinesthetics he posits one solution, which is to smear the two together until they cease to be at odds.

samples:

• We Become Difficult
• Drop Leaf
• Ida

 

22 November 2015

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Albums and Singles

This has been an uncharacteristically prolific and creatively fertile year for Benjamin Finger, as he has released three very wonderful albums in three very different directions.  Thankfully, Finger’s characteristically warm, woozy, and hallucinatory aesthetic remains intact for all three, but he achieves that end with quite a variety of instruments and covers a lot of stylistic ground along the way.  The most notable of the three is arguably Motion Reverse, which can be viewed as a dubbier and more subdued continuation of Mood Chaser's deranged techno experiments.  Equally satisfying is Pleasurably Lost, which reprises and builds upon the dreamy psychedelia of past successes like 2009's Woods of Broccoli.  Amorosa Sensitiva, on the other hand, is a bit of a wild-card that unexpectedly dips its toes into dissonance, modern composition, free-jazz, and sundry other surprises.

Eilean

I am very pleasantly surprised at how well Finger has handled the transition into more beat-oriented music.  I loved 2014's Mood Chaser, but that seemed more like a wild, one-off "let’s see what I can get away with!" experiment than a sustainable new direction.  Motion Reverse proves me quite wrong though, as Finger has found a very appealing middle ground that somehow blends the best elements of Mood Chaser and his dreamier soundscape work to yield a vibrantly hallucinatory strain of warmly burbling, aquatic-sounding dub.  The pieces that best exemplify this new direction are "Frontal Waves," "Dubstore Light," and "Sunny Echoes," as Finger embellishes his delightfully wobbly and undulating pulses with an impressive host of crackling, squelching, panning and echoing studio flourishes and manipulated voices.  While those pieces and few other similar ones definitely comprise the meat of the album, there are also a few very enjoyable divergences scattered about.  I especially enjoyed the bookends: "Vocal Limited" and "Dream Logic."  "Vocal Limited" is a hypnotically skipping "locked groove" type of piece, but Finger lets himself go deliciously wild on the periphery, unleashing quite an impressive torrent of skittering and sputtering electronic chaos (albeit highly controlled chaos).  "Dream Logic," on the other hand, is a bit of a return to Finger’s past dream-drone comfort zone, but stretches out into a pleasantly swaying and pulsing slow-burner.  The languorously flanging groove of "Bright Exit" is yet another gem, but there are not any weak songs to be found at all on this amiable and understatedly fun excursion.

Samples:

Beats are nowhere to be found at all on Pleasurably Lost, Finger’s stellar return to his primary area of expertise: warm, abstract psychedelia.Like much of his recent beatless work, Lost is primarily built upon very simple and melodic piano motifs, but it is what Finger does around those motifs that makes his work so compelling and dinstinct.

Shimmering Moods

The best description that I can think of is that it resembles an Erik Satie performance experienced through the filter of an especially wonderful dream: there is an elegant melodic thread that runs throughout everything, but it fades in and out of a beautifully warped and fragmented haze of disembodied voices, stuttering strings, beating hearts, burbling streams, bird songs, snatches of old records, shimmering electronics, and various bubbling swells of unrecognizable electronic weirdness.  The best song is arguably either the title piece or "Edges of Distortion" due their beautifully tender melodies, but Pleasurably Lost is best experienced as a complete album, as that is the only way to reap the full benefits of its otherworldly, immersive spell.  It is certainly a spell worth being beguiled by, as this album ranks alongside Woods of Broccoli as Finger's current zenith: he truly does everything exactly right this time around.The details are certainly great (melodies, textures, etc.), but the real brilliance of Pleasurably Lost is far more fundamental.For one, Finger is a true rarity among abstract psychedelic artists in that he is also a gifted songwriter–perhaps not in the conventional sense, given the smeared, kaleidoscopic unreality of the finished pieces, but it is easy to see that these ten pieces were songs at one point, as they all have hooks, a satisfying arc, and a knack for ending long before they overstay their welcome.Equally importantly, Finger has a unique gift for infusing his work with an endearing fragility and human warmth that is all his own.  This is an ideal place to start with Finger's sublime oeuvre.

Samples:

• Pleasurably Lost
• Weepingdictionaryhands
• Edges of Distortion

I do not know quite what to make of Amorosa Sensitiva, though I certainly like it.  It kind of feels like a clearing house for all of Finger's material that did not fit on any of his other albums, except that much of it is quite strong and super-producer James Plotkin was called in to master it all.  I suppose that means that it is deliberately and triumphantly kaleidoscopic by design.

Blue Tapes

In any case, Amorosa is stylistically all over the place.  The opening "Headspincrawl," for example, is 10-minutes of lazily warped, lushly gorgeous organ drone that gradually dissolves into a surreal haze of skipping vocal snippets, deconstructed techno tropes, and chopped-up classical music.  "When Face was Face," on the other hand, is a lovely and languorous cello piece dappled with twinkling synthesizer flourishes.  "Waltz in Clay" is a similarly elegant and melancholy cello work, but embellished with rippling piano arpeggios, subtle field recording textures, and gently hallucinatory studio effects.  Naturally, none of that prepared me at all for the clattering, noir-ish, and smoky saxophone eruption of "Whirlbrainpoolin." Nor was I prepared for both the free-jazz and guest saxophonist Are Watle to unexpectedly return in fractured form on the beautifully tender and masterfully warped piano interlude of "Bum Finger Notes" (to which Watle also contributes a wonderfully unconventional guitar solo).  Finally, the dreamy, shimmering ambiance of the brief closer "Darnskullgreyness" harkens back to Finger's classic earlier work, but enhances it with drifting snatches of violin and echoing, indistinct conversations.

Each of the six pieces is quite good in its own way ("Bum Finger Notes" is great, actually) and none of them quite follows the expected course, so I guess Amorosa Sensitiva qualifies as yet another fine Benjamin Finger album.  It is curious that this is Finger’s highest profile recent album though (vinyl, James Plotkin-produced, etc.), as it lacks the cohesive, overarching vision of his last three albums (all released as CDrs or cassettes).  There is a certain logic though, as Amorosa Sensitiva is basically a Benjamin Finger sampler of sorts.  If a curious listener cannot find anything to like here, it is safe to say that Benjamin Finger is categorically not for them (and that there is also probably something wrong with their ears).  I personally found it to be one of Finger’s more uneven releases, but only because I am contrasting it with the rest of the recent hot streak that he has been on.  There is plenty to like here.

22 November 2015

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Albums and Singles

I have admittedly become quite numbed to the power of Acid Mothers Temple in recent years, but that has certainly not stopped me from appreciating the unique talents of Kawabata Makoto.  If anything, I am weary of Makoto's primary outlet because their high-volume maximalism hides or precludes so many appealing facets and nuances of his artistry.  Thankfully, his solo albums–especially the ones on VHF–do no such thing and allow his exotic and eccentric vision to unhurriedly blossom without distraction (most of the time, anyway).  On this latest opus, Makoto adeptly blends echo-heavy Krautrock guitar, traditional Indian music, and his own distinctively lysergic tendencies to weave a sprawling fantasia of warped and trance-inducing drones.

VHF

Kawabata Makoto is clearly not one to shy away from throwing down the gauntlet, as he opens Astro Love & Infinite Kisses with quite a quixotic tour de force: "Dos Nurages" is basically an entire album by itself, stretching out for over 40 minutes and consuming both sides of an LP.  My initial impression was that it sounded like a crazily stretched-out Mark McGuire song filtered through a nightmare.  That is not quite fair to Makoto though, as Mark McGuire did not invent this style of guitar playing–he just happens to be very prominently obsessed with it.  More likely, Makoto just fired up his echoplex one day and decided to channel his inner Manuel Göttsching, then decided that it needed some kind of additional twist to make it worth releasing.  In essence, "Dos Nurages" is an endlessly shifting and rippling trance of clean guitar that seems far more focused on creating a restless sense of motion than on building into any sort of distinct melody or structure.  That is merely the foundation, however: the twist is that Makoto embellishes his gently roiling ripple-fest with a distant-sounding and infernal host of sliding and dissonant synth flourishes.  That makes for an intriguing collision of disparate themes, but it is not quite intriguing enough to sustain my interest for 40 minutes, as it exasperatingly never develops into anything more.  It is a lot like watching a master juggler that is monomaniacally fixated on repeating on the same trick into infinity.

Thankfully, the second LP is far more to my liking, though Makoto still seems quite content to stretch out and luxuriate in a single idea for the entire duration of an epic song.  The important difference is that the ideas get considerably better as the album progresses.  On the nearly 18-minute title piece, for example, Makoto unfurls an elegiac and temporally dislocated arpeggio progression that evokes some kind of melancholy ancient procession, a stylistic niche that Natural Snow Buildings fans will no doubt recognize.  Despite a similarly "funeral march" approach to percussion and some similarly corroded and wrong- sounding strings, Makoto's variation on that theme takes an ingenious and distinctive turn, as the piece is gradually consumed by a massive, engulfing roar that seems to be developing completely independently.  It feels like the fabric of reality is being pulled apart to reveal enigmatic flickers of yet another reality.  That is quite a neat (and absolutely apocalyptic) trick.

The closing "Woman from Dream Island" is considerably less world-ending in scope, but compensates by again being appealingly hallucinatory and trance-inducing.  As is his wont, Makoto again decides to more or less flog just one theme for the entire song, but the buzzing tamboura, backwards guitars, and descending melody are rich enough to remain fairly compelling without much development.  With a little but more work, "Dream Island" probably could have been crafted into a perfect and endlessly hypnotic infinite loop.  Instead, it ends up overstaying its welcome slightly before Makoto unexpectedly shifts gears to close the piece with a gently pastoral acoustic guitar outro.  It does not seem to belong with the rest of the song at all, but it makes for a perversely appropriate ending for an album where unpredictable tonal shifts, perplexing pacing, and bizarre song structures are basically the norm.  Kawabata Makoto is quite an inscrutable artist and Astro Love & Infinite Kisses is quite an inscrutable album.  On one hand, it is dogged with overlong songs, an over-reliance on improv, and a disorienting tendency to pastiche Makoto’s many disparate influences.  On the other, "Astro Love & Infinite Kisses" is an absolutely revelatory and stunning piece of music.  The catch with Makoto is that the two sides are hopelessly intertwined.  It seems quite unlikely that he will ever make an entire album that I hail as uniformly brilliant or wildly original, but it is certainly very interesting to see all of the unexpected places that his muse takes him each time he tries.

• Dos Nurages
• Astro Love & Infinite Kisses
• Woman from Dream Island

 

16 November 2015

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Albums and Singles

When Gary Mundy's Ramleh reemerged in 2009 after over a decade of inactivity, both the recorded output and performances were mostly skewed towards the project’s noise and power electronics history. With long time member Anthony Di Franco, the duo released the excellent Valediction album and embarked on a series of performances, updating the harsh electronic sound Mundy began as a teenager in the 1980s. Circular Time, however, is a return to the idiosyncratic psychedelic rock sound Mundy and Di Franco (along with other collaborators) fully realized in the 1990s. I have enjoyed every variant of Ramleh that I have heard, but I always had a soft spot for this more musical era and, thankfully, Circular Time is a return to form in every possible way.

Crucial Blast

The 2000s incarnation of Ramleh did not totally abandon their more conventional moments, however.Also in 2009, the 10" of Switch Hitter/The Machines of Infinite Joy was released, to somewhat less acclaim."Switch Hitter" had most of the standard Ramleh sound, but with an almost too traditional sound structurally, with the sound teetering towards far less unique hard rock sounds.The instrumental b-side, however, was more faithful to the band's previous work.The line-up on this double album (just shy of two hours of material) is the same as that single:Mundy on guitar and vocals, Di Franco on bass, and Mundy’s Breathless bandmate Martyn Watts on drums.This time, however, the music contained within touches on all facets of the project’s guitar-centric incarnation.

The opening acoustic strums of "Re-Entry" are at first unexpected, but the humming feedback that punctuates the mix soon takes over, resulting in a fully blown-out bass lead and pummeling, insistent drums.It does not take too long before that aggressive, but loose and improvised sound from the Shooters Hill (half of Works III) album shines through.Mundy's pained, barely controlled guitar tone emanates from the mix as the juggernaut of a rhythm section decimates all around."Incubator" continues, but with the addition of almost 1970s hard rock guitar soloing deep in the mix: an oddly clean and delicate sound compared to the remainder of the mix, which sounds as if it is on the verge of collapse for the song’s six minute duration.

The vaguely blues influenced opening to "American Womanhood" is comparably much more spacious and less oppressive than the two preceding pieces.With Mundy's clean, improvised guitar and fuzz heavy bass from Di Franco, there is more than a passing resemblance to the prog rock influence that appeared throughout the Be Careful What You Wish For album."The Ascent" features the band syncing together in similar complexity, with Watt’s drumming taking on a more intricate, though no less heavy tact, as layered guitar, both dissonant and melodic, is weaved in and out of the song.

At other times, such as on "The Tower," the material stands as some of the most conventional music the project has ever done.With the spiky rhythm and stabbing guitar, shades of early Public Image Ltd. are hard to ignore, and it is one of the few vocal pieces on this set, though like most Ramleh, they are anything but emphasized.These less challenging moments are easily balanced by some of the record's more difficult ones, such as the expansive wall of guitar and pummeling, complex drum rolls of "Renaissance Warfare."With the multilayered guitar and a bass tone that verges on a dull roar of distortion not far removed from their noise work, the entirety piece lies somewhere between structured music and chaotic noise.Both "Entropy" and "Weird Tyranny" are drumless, atmospheric compositions of droning bass and feedback-laden guitar, never too harsh though, and call to mind similar pieces on Homeless.

The final song, "Never Returner," makes for the perfect conclusion for the album.Di Franco's fuzzed out bass, Watts pounding out a nuanced but slower rhythm, and Mundy's guitar generating both beautiful melodies and ugly squalls of noise captures everything that makes this album (and Ramleh) so exceptionally brilliant.If it were not for the comparably cleaner production (which is a characteristic of this entire record), I could easily have thought it a song that was left off of Works III, complete with the strained, depressive vocals.The bit of acoustic guitar that closes the song perfectly ties it back to the opening of disc one, as well.

Everything and anything I could have hoped for on a new release from Ramleh can be found on Circular Time.The perverse psychedelia, the motorik rhythms, and the oppressive, noise heavy ambience all appears here, and hangs strongly with the band’s previous records.I do wish there were a few more vocal tracks, as Mundy's vocals, as well as Consumer Electronics member Philip Best's (a staple of the band's 1990s output that is not on this record, but has performed with the band in recent years) were consistent on my favorite songs from the era.That makes for a minor gripe, however, because this album just perfectly encapsulates everything I have loved about the band, and with an unquestionable freshness and sense of invigoration.Without a doubt on my short list for best albums I have heard this year.

samples:

• American Womanhood
• Entropy
• Never Returner