There was always the fear that the reformed Swans might have been a one-shot moment of greatness but The Seer counters any argument that My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky was an aberration. Across the two hours, the group cover more ground here than most bands cover in a career. This is visionary, powerful statement that manages to be both visceral and transcendental, something more akin to a birth than rock music.
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This is easily one of the most intriguing and enigmatic debuts to surface this year, as two musicians that I am completely unfamiliar with (Daniel Lea and Matthew Waters) have managed to assemble a killer noir jazz ensemble and enlist collaborators as impressive as Ben Frost and David Sylvian. Although they draw their inspiration from a wide array of disciplines (Gerhard Richter and Paul Auster are influences), the resultant music is extremely narrow in scope (or, more charitably, "focused" and "thematically coherent"). Night Within is essentially all brooding nocturnal atmosphere and texture with little in the way of songcraft, but Land are almost so good at what they do that it does not matter.
I have seen this album described elsewhere as "virtually a new Monos record" due to the participants, but Tate's latest effort is a bit more modest than that.  Originally recorded as a guitar and synth solo album, Darren handed his work over to the very capable Colin Potter for a thorough "re-imagining."  I can only guess at what No Longer Here sounded like before Potter's involvement (the droniest drone ever?), but the end result is 45 minutes of beautifully immersive and darkly hallucinatory bliss.
Equal doses of Hell’s Angels, bad drugs, and Russ Meyer; Clayton Burgess' downer biker metal hits the spot like a tire iron across the jaw. More The Born Losers than Sons of Anarchy, Satan's Satyrs deserve the term badass as much as any b-movie anti-hero. This is music that has come to town, decided it wants your girl and she has decided she prefers them to you.
Having recently put out a double disc package with Anthony Pasquarosa, and another collaboration with Noise Nomads, the Albany, New York area noise master Mike Griffin has managed to compile yet another set of spacey, at times aggressive, but always fascinating abstract electronics. The first is a full vinyl LP of solo work, courtesy of the always amazing Sedimental label, and the second a collaborative release with meme slinger John Olson. Griffin’s style is consistent between the two work, but the differing contexts give each a unique and distinct feel, differing from one another.
Scrine is one of the earlier works from Hands To, the name solo artist Jeph Jerman was working with at the time. With the project's first release just a year before in 1987, he was already a seasoned practitioner in the mid to late 1980s noise cassette scene. Even at this stage his work was highly conceptual, using his environment as a primary source for his compositions. Compared to his later works under his own name, however, there is a major emphasis on the sounds of urban and suburban environments, and a raw, rough edge that summarizes that era of noise perfectly.
Dead Can Dance released a string of unique and wonderful albums during their prime, but I absolutely loathed 1996's Spiritchaser, so their break-up in its wake seemed like a fine artistic decision to me.  I never expected them to ever record new material again, as Lisa Gerrard seemed to be doing quite well on her own as a soundtrack composer and lives on a completely different continent than the comparatively dormant Brendan Perry, and yet...here we are.  As I expected, the reunited duo do not quite recapture the magic of classics like The Serpent's Egg, but there are still some glimpses of it amidst this oft-perplexing effort.
It has been an atypically quiet year for Barn Owl, but Jon Porras and Evan Caminiti have filled the void somewhat with major solo albums every bit as good as their main gig.  While Porras' Black Mesa heavily favored the band's lonely desert rock side, Caminiti's deceptively titled Dreamless Sleep takes a dreamier, dronier approach.  While its shimmering bliss sometimes lacks distinctiveness, Evan does a wonderful job balancing his ambient tendencies with healthy doses of tape hiss, unpredictability, and artfully controlled guitar squall.
This debut full-length from the Berlin-based Ekomane shares a lot of conceptual common ground with Caterina Barbieri (one of Important's previous break-out sensations), though the two artists have radically different approaches to composition. For example, both artists are quite enamored with using slow shifts in repeating patterns to wonderfully hypnotic and near-psychotropic effect. Ekomane, however, largely eschews hooks or anything resembling conventional songcraft in favor of a visceral, slow-motion onslaught of phase-shifting fragments in immersive quadraphonic sound. Given that focus on intensity and psychoacoustic sorcery, I am not sure that this live document from 2018's Ars Electronica festival quite captures Ekomane at the peak of her powers, but the opening "Solid of Revolution" is certainly a beguiling introduction to Ekomane's distinctive aesthetic.
