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Give us an hour, we'll give you music to remember. This week we bring you an episode with brand new music from Softcult, Jim Rafferty, karen vogt, Ex-Easter Island Head, Jon Collin, James Devane, Garth Erasmus, Gary Wilson, and K. Freund, plus some music from the archives from Goldblum, Rachel Goswell, Roy Montgomery. Rubber ducks and a live duck photo from Matthew in the UK. Get involved: subscribe, review, rate, share with your friends, send images!
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High-volume, high-velocity, whiplash-inducing noise torn screaming from the guts of a haywire machine. As the Pilgrim Talk website notes, Ian M. Fraser programs his computer to make noise. Once finished, circuitry and code do the rest, no human interaction required. The result is so quick-moving and chaotic that absorbing it in the first four or five listens is about as likely as a windshield absorbing a brick in a hurricane.
 
While it has only been seven years since my first exposure to Jenks Miller's Horseback (2009's The Invisible Mountain), the amount of change and evolution the project has undergone is astounding. What began as classically minimalist Sabbath worship veered toward psychedelic southern rock and has now come back as an idiosyncratic electronic record full of untreated vocals and captivating melodies. Even with this wide variation in sound, Dead Ringers manages to stay consistent with Miller's previous body of work while still sounding like a different, but no less amazing beast.
Little Annie’s latest solo album is a bit of a freewheeling evolution upon her recent cabaret/torch song work with pianist Paul Wallfisch, though Wallfisch was notably still involved in the lead single "Dear John."  For the rest of the album, however, Annie alternately collaborated with Toronto multi-instrumentalist Ryan Driver and Brooklyn electronic trio Opal Onyx.  Naturally, the more rhythmic and spoken-word-themed electronic pieces are the more dramatic departures, recalling some of her ‘80s work as Annie Anxiety.  While the Driver pieces show a considerably more subtle change, that seems to be the more significant and (presumably) more lasting one, taking Annie’s "chanteuse" persona in a more lush, lively, and conventionally beautiful direction.  Also of note: the title piece is easily one of the finest pieces of Annie's career.
Following up the concept of their most recent works, the duo of noise artist Mattin and Brainbombs member Anders Bryngelsson have again chosen to subvert two niche genres of music and attempt to recreate them in their own, deconstructed noise rock style. In this case, one album of Harsh Noise Walls, and the other three lengthy treatments of various subgenres of heavy metal. Unsurprisingly, the duo's reconstruction of this music ends up being less about imitation and more of a study and critique of what is expected by those specific styles.
Blizzard is a luxurious reissue of a CDr Aaron Dilloway originally put out on his Hanson imprint back in 2009, presented here in high quality double vinyl. Dilloway and Robert Turman recorded these four pieces together during an actual blizzard, which not only further enhances mood, but also seems to creep in throughout these lengthy compositions. Largely based upon analog synthesizer and tape manipulation, the duo not only captures the frigid, isolated mood of being caught in a massive snowstorm, but the sounds of one as well.
The quartet of Nakama (Adrian L√∏seth Waade on violin, Ayumi Tanaka on piano, Andreas Wildhagen playing drums, and Christian Meaas Svendsen providing double bass) expand upon their use of silence in juxtaposition with experimental jazz from their previous record, Before the Storm, into this newer, more conceptually structured work. The album is based upon Svendsen's structuring, which instructs the performers to improvise their playing reacting to a visual structure, giving the work an additional layer of complexity that makes the album all the more compelling.
M. Geddes Gengras’s Collected Works (The Moog Years) was a huge album for me, but one of reasons that it is so great is that it distilled the best material from several tapes and several years of work.  I wish such retrospectives were more frequent: Gengras’s prodigious output has an exasperating tendency to dilute his artistry, as he is extremely restless in his creative evolution and it seems like every new step winds up publicly documented.  That tendency is probably cool for obsessive fans, but it also has the unfortunate result of leaving a voluminous wake of releases that fail to live up to their potential.  Granted, Gengras is never short on ideas–I just wish he would linger on them long enough to craft something lasting and great more often.  Consequently, this latest record under Gengras's analog techno guise is quite a wonderful surprise, capturing him in unwaveringly fine form.  This is exactly the kind of album that I was hoping for.
Hallow Ground continues their impressive recent run with two vinyl reissues from these erstwhile Coil collaborators and eternally provocative and intriguing iconoclasts.  Both of these releases were originally issued as very limited CDrs on the band’s own Anarcocks label in the mid-2000s, so they never managed to get the attention that they richly deserve, making this quite a worthy pair for a vinyl resurrection (one more so than the other, admittedly).  Unsurprisingly, the Coil influence is quite strong on both, as Massimo and Pierce traffic primarily in stuttering, hallucinatory electronics and eerie moods.  In fact, Jhonn Balance himself even contributes vocals (of a sort) to Toilet Chant’s "E2 = Tree 3."  If Black Sun Productions are derivative of Coil here, however, they seem to have been focused primarily upon the bizarre and unpredictable fare of the Unnatural History series.  More Coil-eque music in that vein is certainly fine by me, but each album also boasts at least one piece that admirably transcends that long shadow to blossom into something wonderfully beautiful and unique.
New Jersey based harsh electronics trio Concrete Mascara have a handful of limited releases since their inception in 2011, but Perennial Disappointment is only their second full length album, following 2014's Blossoms of Shame. The title is obviously a tongue-in-cheek, self-effacing joke, however, because the eight songs that comprise it seethe with menace, creating a dark, violent environment via aggressive vocals, destroyed electronics, and perverse attempts at building rhythm.
After a bit of a long slumber, Kranky has resurfaced with the first full-length from New Orleans’ Melissa Guion.  Guion’s previous discography is a bit lean, as she has previously only released one cassette back in 2014, but she seems to have quite a fully formed aesthetic that will no doubt delight fans of the Kranky milieu.  In fact, it is quite hard to discuss Precious Systems without making favorable comparisons to Grouper, as Guion is quite a similarly enthusiastic proponent of hazy, reverb-swathed vocals.  Musically, however, MJ Guider is far more indebted to shoegaze and gauzy 4AD-style Romanticism, crafting propulsive and hook-filled songs that feel artfully hollowed-out and slowed to a narcotic crawl.
