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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As a four piece from the Albany, New York region consisting of some of the most well known members of the small, but dedicated noise/psych scene, Sky Furrows is a project that is seemingly from another time that belies the band’s avant garde tendencies. Rather than blending disparate genres or delving into deep electronic improvisations, the album is a concise, somewhat predictable one, but that is in no means an insult. Instead this self-titled album is almost like a time capsule uncovered from some three decades past, and one that beautifully encapsulates a sound and a scene that was all too brief.
By a past era, I specifically mean the mid to late 1980s, where post-punk transitioned to "college rock" but before grunge and punk revivalism overwhelmed the genre.Given the fact that the members of Sky Furrows were active musicians of that generation (although not necessarily aware of each other at the time) rather than young people seeking to emulate a past they did not exist in.For this reason especially, the album has a sincerity and authenticity that only people who were "there" would be able to capture.
Lead by author/poet/music critic Karen Schoemer's spoken word narratives, the other three members (drummer Phil Donnelly, guitarist Mike Griffin, and bassist Eric Hardiman) are all members of Albany's long running psych rock collective Burnt Hills as well.Griffin and Hardiman are also active in more experimental guises: Parashi for the former, and the latter as Century Plants and Rambutan (both also have also been frequent collaborators with John Olson in recent years).Schoemer’s delivery fits the largely personal lyrical content well, with a dry yet not disconnected intonation as she presents detailed vignettes of life, ironically are timeless enough in their references that they could have been from 1986 or today.Both her writing and her delivery contain just enough self-awareness to never cross that threshold into "serious artist" pretension but still have the right amount of gravity to showcase what a brilliant writer she is.
The improvisational side of the band is not necessarily on display here, but it does not need to be.While Schoemer's narratives are at the center of the album, the music never comes across as sounding like just a backing band, nor does it ever take the spotlight away from the spoken word:it always remains in perfect balance.Right from the onset of "Alyosha" the groundwork is laid clear:Griffin's slightly twangy guitar over Donnelly's tight, light touch drumming and Hardiman's rich bass.Shifting between subtle accompaniments to heavy outbursts, the flow is perfect.
Shifting tempos and dynamics also keep things diverse in the concluding "Foreign Cities," ensuring it’s nine-plus minute duration never drags for a moment.There is a bit more consistency within the shorter songs, however."36 Ways of Looking at a Memory" is all fuzzy guitar leads and late 1980s modern rock sounds that resemble a multitude of artists but only by inspiration instead of imitation."The Mind Runs a Race and Falls Down" is a more uptempo excursion, punctuating the spoken word elements with heavier melodic passages.The album’s centerpiece comes early in the form of the 15 minute "Ensenada."Here the psych essence of Burnt Hills comes a bit more to the forefront, with Donnelly and Hardiman laying down a rhythm section that manages to balance the mechanical repetition of krautrock with just a hint of jazz looseness.Griffin’s guitar echoes and squalls out with less restraint, catching delays or the occasional passage of feedback, but in no way seeming random or self-indulgent.
When I say that Sky Furrows are not breaking any new ground on their debut, it is in no way meant to be demeaning, because that was not their intent.Instead it feels like the proverbial lost record of a band that just got to the edge of the popularity they deserved but were held back.Or one of the rare brilliant private press albums that no one has ever heard of, but is discussed with a holy grail-like reverence amongst record collectors.The authenticity is not just in the sound, but also in the approach:as previously stated, this a band who were active in these various scenes across the country before.Sky Furrows is not a band capitalizing on someone else’s history: this is entirely their own.
With 2018's Anticlines, this Berlin-based artist established herself as one of the more adventurous and unique composers to surface in the experimental music scene in recent years and I am pleased to report that this follow-up burrows even deeper into the oft-fascinating rabbit hole of its predecessor. On a conceptual level, that deepening manifests itself in No era sólida’s deeply unusual themes, as the album is billed as a "suspended auditory illusion" that "embraces the possibilities of possession." Thankfully, the possession in this case is not of the demonic variety, as Dalt instead envisions the album as a sort of interrogation room where she interacts with an invented character named Lia. If Dalt were a lesser artist, such a premise would likely send me running in the other direction, but she executes it in such a subtle and abstract way that listening to No era sólida feels akin to unexpectedly finding myself in Twin Peaks' "red room": everything familiar is unrecognizably transformed into something disconcertingly alien and enigmatic. While the rare songs that blur into pop-like territory (such as "Ser boca") are generally the album's strongest moments, the entirety of No era sólida casts an impressively unique and haunting spell.
The first time I heard No era sólida, I was amusingly reminded of the pivotal scene in 1997's Air Bud in which a referee announces that there is nothing in the rule book that states that dogs cannot play basketball.Thankfully, any similarities between the Air Bud franchise and Dalt's work begin and end there, but there is definitely something striking about how effortlessly she disregards and circumvents convention in both her approach to songwriting and how she wields the various tools in her starkly minimal palette.While Dalt is far from the first experimentalist to approach music in an unique way, her occasional proximity to pop music greatly heightens the disorientating effect of her innovations.In essence, she achieves the musical analogue of the "uncanny valley" effect.My favorite piece on the album, "Ser boca," is the most mesmerizing example of this phenomenon: all the expected elements of a catchy song are arguably in place (a great groove, a strong hook, a vocal melody, etc.), yet there is something profoundly "off" about absolutely all of them.The beat is hollow and sluggish, the hook feels hazy and stuck in an obsessively repeating loop, and the main vocal melody is intertwined with something that resembles distracted ululating.And yet it is great both because of and in spite of all that.In this case, the wordless warbling sounds seem to originate from a synthesizer rather than Dalt's own vocal cords, but one of her stated intentions was to "channel a Surrealist's automatism" to dissolve "language into an evocative collection of glossolalia."In that regard, No era sólida is a resounding success, as several of the other pieces make me feel like I just wandered inside a psychedelic birdhouse (especially the fluttering flute-like tones of "Seca" and the strangely lurching whines of "Di").
I suspect "Seca" is also a prime example of one of Dalt's other recent interests: finding ways to creatively exploit "harmonic distortion in tape delay" (it is presumably no coincidence that Dalt and Aaron Dilloway have become repeat collaborators).I also suspect that an entire book could be written about all of the other interesting techniques and concepts that went into this album, as I have said absolutely nothing about the various transformations that Dalt's imagined protagonist undergoes or the central role they play in shaping the album's arc.In broad strokes, however, the album purportedly mirrors Lia's emergence "from primal, sensory states to the sentient and active conditions" of "revolt" and understanding.As a listener, I experience much of that structure as an elusive and enigmatic abstraction, but the woozily angelic title piece does feel like it ends Lia's journey in a place of calming beauty, coherent form, and clarity.Lia's evolution before that point can feel quite murky and inscrutable though, as the album unfolds as one strange and hallucinatory vignette after another like a hall of mirrors in a phantom carnival.In fact, Dalt’s aesthetic is so alien and disorienting that I am hard-pressed to guess at even a single one of her influences.One inspiration is admittedly mentioned in the album description ("griot singer Fanta Damba"), but knowing that does not change the fact that everything ultimately emerges in completely unrecognizable form once it passes through the prism of Dalt's artistic vision.Consequently, it is best to abandon any attempts to either place No era sólida in a larger cultural context or unravel what any individual piece might mean.The album's true pleasure lies in simply entering the psychedelic bird house and allowing the cavalcade of unpredictable sensory experiences to work their weird magic.
There are three main periods The Fall may be grouped into: the raw punk early years, the more "melodious" classic years, and the post-'90s period up to Mark E. Smith’s passing in 2018. The Frenz Experiment, originally released in 1988 and reissued this year by Beggars Banquet, is part of the "classic" years, a time when the band churned out a series of nearly perfect albums.
I came upon The Fall in 1987 by way of the compilation of early singles Palace of Swords Reversed. I remember not being entirely sure what to make of them, but loved "Totally Wired." In those days, I got most of my music from college radio and MTV’s 120 Minutes, so unless either were spinning The Fall, I had so much other music vying for my attention.
When lo and behold, the band had themselves a bonafide radio hit with "Hit the North (Part 1)," a funky, groovy little number that, what’s this? — was danceable? The wonderful and frightening world of The Fall was suddenly opened to myself and so many others. Additionally, along came a lovely rendition of The Kinks’ "Victoria" that saw airplay on MTV, and the band started to have greater access to the American psyche. It was the album in which I fell in love with The Fall, and became a lifelong listener (as well as a glutton for punishment in attempting to obtain their entire catalog).
The Fall were a band for whom the word "prolific" could have been created, releasing more than 30 studio albums, nearly 18 live albums, and appeared on countless compilations in their 42 years existence. With so many albums to choose from, why reissue Frenz Experiment, as opposed to, say, an earlier classic from their catalog like Perverted by Language? Many have tried to rank the band’s albums, or at least provided a guide through their massive catalog.
It is precisely on the strength of the aforementioned tracks, along with string of nearly perfect tunes that make this a perfect choice for reissue. From the opening track "Frenz" it is obvious the band is favoring tuneful, near pop sentiments, making this one of their most accessible albums in their catalog. The band sounds almost positively joyful, particularly on tracks like "Athlete Cured" and the suave "The Steak Place," the usual blaring politics dampened in favor of downright humor and joy, MES at his snarkiest but most fun (have a listen to "Oswald Defense Lawyer" or "Guest Informant" as proof). The band sounds as if they had a great time making the album.
The reissue contains the original album, singles and b-sides from "There’s a Ghost In My House," "Hit the North" and "Victoria" releases. "But wait, there’s more! Act now and you’ll also get..." a previously unreleased 4-track BBC session, and finally, a cover rarity of The Beatles "A Day in the Life." There is a 24-page booklet with new interviews included in the set.
Longform Editions 16 presents four new pieces from a diverse set of artists exploring ideas through sound composition surrounding listening, perception and focus, both in the abstract and our everyday.
claire rousay it was always worth it LE061 Having forged a stark individual path with her deeply personal domestic and field recordings, Texas-based claire rousay offers a compelling exploration into the dynamics of human relationships and self-perception. Listening to it was always worth it—heavily scored with voice-to-text—is to recast your ears towards the ghosts of lost loves and find a new perspective.
"I love the sound of voices, especially the voices of my loved ones. Those are the sounds I listen to."
Taylor Deupree Canoe LE062 Head of the influential 12K label, New York's Taylor Deupree's own work plays on rich, abstract atmospherics and, along with his solo work, has found immense acclaim through collaborations with kindred spirits Ryuchi Sakamoto and David Sylvian. Canoe is a supreme work of stillness and meditation with a mysterious sense of calm, evocative of being adrift at sea.
"With Canoe I hope to instill a sense of solitude, loneliness, and the hushed searching for and unknown something, just out of reach."
Clarice Jensen Platonic Solids 1 LE063 Melding cello composition and electronic elements, Clarice Jensen has been fascinated by the five shapes that make up the platonic solids, writing graphic scores based on these along with the elements of earth, fire, air, water and the quintessence Plato assigned to them. Platonic Solids 1 portrays sound that evokes stasis and movement at the same time, and very generally, explores the perception of sound through dimensional space and time.
"I'm fascinated by what happens to my perception of time when I'm listening to music, particularly work that is minimal and long… I find myself getting lost in galaxies inside the minutiae of something my ear has attached to."
Strategy The Babbling Brook LE064 Strategy, the long-running alias of Portland mainstay Paul Dickow, offers The Babbling Brook, a stunning sound collage of continual, rolling change, rotating on a seemingly unending axis of calm and chaos. An ode of sorts to the movement of water, the piece represents Dickow's ongoing quest to challenge the more traditional sense of ambient music.
"This concludes a long series of explorations of unsequenced, improvised approaches to music which does not commit fully to the traditional sense of "ambient" music as purely contemplative in nature, but instead offers moments of confrontation, surprise, dream logic, or disorientation interwoven with sustained, immersive elements."
"I am sitting in a garden, I haven't left the property in weeks, someone is dropping off food once a week. I haven't seen a human being in ages, I feel like a reverse Schroedinger cat - do I exist when nobody sees me? I must be somewhere in France but I don't remember. I have lost my consciousness again. When I wake up I hear a broken record looping somewhere in the mansion. A washed-out opera. Behind the trees I see the dilapidated hermaphrodite sculpture in a field of verdant nettles and fern. I hear gunshots far afield, aeroplanes in the sky, sirens on the main road.
When unconscious I dreamt of sitting on the Concorde observing the scarab blue ocean and iridescent clouds from above, an erstwhile receding memory. Sometimes I hear the organ of the nearby Renaissance Cathedral merging with the Russian Church bells.
I am hallucinating again. Someone's humming in the kitchen? Singing? A radio? I overhear two young women talking about art galleries in the neighbor's garden. Bees attack, again…..again and again. The hairspray finally intoxicates them. An amphoric Japanese voice is whispering in my head saying I will die soon. Someone (something?) bangs on the vases. The fountain's water turns dark red.
Fleur calls and says mum died. The funeral will be televised on Tuesday. We opt for the synthetic choir for the service. The call is suddenly interrupted. Mold is slowly taking over the house. I go back inside."
After recent mixtape 88, Actress reveals new album Karma & Desire.
Karma & Desire includes guest collaborations from Sampha, Zsela and Aura T-09 and more. It's "a romantic tragedy set between the heavens and the underworld" says Actress (Darren J. Cunningham) "the same sort of things that I like to talk about – love, death, technology, the questioning of one's being." The presence of human voices take the questing artist into new territory.
Flute-like melodies contributed by Canadian organist and instrument builder Kara-Lis Coverdale.
It was on a winter's night ('Nuit d'Hiver' indeed) five days before Christmas 2018, when My Cat Is An Alien and Jean-Marc Montera converged onstage to perform for the second time as a trio, proving once again their heavenly graced and powerful music-mind-soul connection. As it happened at their very first live encounter in 2015 (released by San Francisco cult label Starlight Furniture Co. under the title Union Of The Supreme Light in 2017), "Before jumping on stage, NO word was spoken about the concert we were going to play, nor even trying to figure out any sort of basic music scheme to be followed" recalls Roberto Opalio.
In 2018, at the opening of the final edition of the REEVOX-NUIT D’HIVER festival at GMEM inside the restored industrial complex of La Friche La Belle de Mai in Marseille, the spaceship-like dome of Le Module shook like never before. Nuit d'Hiver is a true musical hurricane of radical free jazz and "Spiritual Noise."
Brothers Maurizio and Roberto Opalio are world-renowned for their radical aesthetics of "instantaneous composition," their innate skill in creating articulated and ever-evolving improvisations that develop as if they were proper written scores from beginning to end. The same approach occurs in every duo's collaboration with other artists too—be they Lee Ranaldo and Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, Italian electronic pioneer Enore Zaffiri or Hungarian avant-garde poet-performer Endre Szkarosi to name a few—as well as in whatever situation they might be invited to perform—including the opening of Venice Art Biennale or Milan Fashion Week.
Jean-Marc Montera is a revered guitar maestro whose skill in non-idiomatic improvisation surpasses the mastery of all his companions for his willing to explore new sonic territories instead of repeating classic formulas nowadays become too much "academic." Co-founder of GRIM (Groupe de Recherche et d’Improvisation Musicales) in 1978 and now associated artist of GMEM in Marseille, Montera debuted as soloist on legendary label FMP (Free Music Production). Over the years, he has collaborated with many free jazz and avant-garde musicians including Famoudou Don Moye of Art Ensemble of Chicago, Fred Frith, Chris Cutler, Barre Phillips, Jean-François Pauvros, Pauline Oliveros and Christian Wolff, and set up several groups specializing in the interpretation of graphic scores by 20th century composers (Cornelius Cardew, John Cage, Earle Brown, etc.).
When you walk outside, in the light, and the sparks in your head define your map of the world, your relation to time and thoughts that lead and follow, full of light, discharging constantly. When you talk to others, an exchange of pleasantries, the flow of humanity, breath through a flute, bow on string, colors, sounds. How you never feel it all at once, the best you can do is hop on a wave and ride it.
Our age has us filled to bursting with anxiety, recriminations, separations and segregations, categories, colonies, tribute, miniscule compensation, tokenism, lip service, creeds, dogmas, easy answers, false hopes, compromise, disappointment, emperor's new clothes, and wolves in sheep's clothing.
Spires That in the Sunset Rise have wandered these woods for nearly twenty years. Psychic Oscillations is an active meditation, an album that probes how time works and reworks itself through cyclical structures, loose improvisation, and wordless vocal play, plaints and praises. While at times celebratory, there is also a palpable urgency underlying the entire record. In the wordless vocalizations of sound and breath it is unabashedly body and at the same time entirely transcendent.
Spires That in the Sunset Rise come together with this crisis point in the now and offer this vessel, filled with psychic energy made physical in time. Psychic Oscillations was written over a span of time which included a condensed period of focus during an artist residency at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, summer of 2018. The instrumentation on this record hones in on cello, alto saxophone, flute, synthesizers, and voice. It is the Spires' twelfth album. Here and now.
While the 1980s output of Australia's oft misunderstood Severed Heads is well known, the 2000s were also an intensely creative period for the group. Along with a periodical magazine/album called Op, Severed Heads released limited hand-cut discs, two computer games and a handful of ultra-rare artworks. Medical Records is proud to present a new museum entitled Clifford 2000: a 180gm double album holding 18 years of music over four sides of continuous montage personally segued by Mr. Ellard himself.
The midnight hour crept unto thee with hasty caution, revealing A Little Night Music: Aural Apparitions from the Geographic North, our third putrid prowl into Halloween-inspired sounds to torment and tantalize throughout the season. For this bout of distinguished dementia, we culled 31 brand new tracks of haunted hysteria conjured by some of the most alluring ambientists and outer auteurs from around the world.
Spanning over two hours across two cassettes, A Little Night Music… unfurls itself in a literary horror structure, appearing and disappearing through a stirring Prologue and Epilogue by London-based cellist Oliver Coates, with each side of the cassettes introducing its Chapter with a chilling dirge courtesy of the inscrutable Geographic North House Band.
What fills the ensuing pages is a mirthful tale concocted by an assembly exploring a realm all at once mournful and fatalist at its core. Entries from Clarice Jensen, Malibu, and the collaboration of Like a Villain and Christina Vantzou bring about endless glacial landscapes accented by pitch-grey skies. Conversely, transmissions from Michael Valentine West, M. Sage, Gregg Kowalsky, and Austrian ambient stalwart Fennesz explore richly textured mines of foreboding glee.
Suspicion is the word when considering Zelienople's eerie horse-carriage clip-clop, Nick Malkin's neon-lit noir-jazz, or Carmen Villain's gripping dub excursion. Elsewhere Ki Oni, Takagi Masakatsu, and Mary Lattimore (joined here by Paul Sukeena) provide glimmers of warmth amidst a tortured chill.
Notable is the resurrection of Lotus Plaza and his solemnly hopeful piano composition, while barren hallucinations courtesy of Alex Zhang Hungtai, Ilyas Ahmed, and Danny Paul Grody set the stage for a third act confrontation from Atlantans Fit of Body and Algiers, providing a one-two serving of sensual unrest and cautionary homily.
With hope and resolve shimmering through the final moments of our journey, know that all proceeds from the digital and cassette editions go directly toward Feminist Women's Health Center, an Atlanta-based nonprofit providing safe, accessible, and compassionate abortion and gynecological care to all those who need it without judgement.
Prana Crafter is William Sol, a musical mystic who blends the raw energies of nature with guitars, synthesizers, singing bowls, and a dose of flow-consciousness. The resulting sonic nectar flows out from the amplifier, cascading in the mind of the listener, splashing mantras against the listener’s third ear. Some music is meant to entertain, to be consumed like flashing patterns on a TV screen. Not so with the music of Prana Crafter. This music is a sonic-tapestry of energies that are meant to envelop the listener and deliver a message that, as Sol puts it, cannot be known through symbol or through sign.
Likened to artists across the psychedelic and folk spectrums—Popul Vuh, Agitation Free, Six Organs/Ben Chasny, —Sol's self-professed mentors-in-spirit Jerry Garcia, Jimi Hendrix, and Manuel Göttsching are present as well in familiar and surprising ways. In reviews it has been said that Prana Crafter’s music is "an example of psych-folk at its finest" (Raven Sings the Blues), "like a long-lost pressing from the early '70s, it's a mist-shrouded mysterious meditation" (Shindig Magazine), and even that, "few other musicians are making music as ambitious and genuine as Prana Crafter" (The Active Listener).
Will has said he thinks of himself as a conduit when recording and with MorphoMystic, Prana Crafter are creating truly Cosmic Music, a synthesized mediation – think if you will of Terry Reilly and Sandy Bull blending their hypnotic energy flow together. MorphoMystic is a 35 minute kosmische-inspired acid opus that lets your mind venture in the slipstream, between the viaducts of your dream before gently floating you back down to earth.