This is Psychic Circle's oddest compilation yet. Cult actors and UK game show hosts mingle with ethnic novelties, opera singers, prostitutes and unknowns. The liner notes acknowledge some utter crap and complete nonsense within: welcome relief from talk of forgotten gems and legends which has set me up for disappointment with several of PC’s previous efforts.
Hotter than July. This week's episode has plenty of fresh new music by Marie Davidson, Kim Gordon, Mabe Fratti, Guided By Voices, Holy Tongue meets Shackleton, Softcult, Terence Fixmer, Alan Licht, pigbaby, and Eiko Ishibashi, plus some vault goodies from Bombay S Jayashri and Pete Namlook & Richie Hawtin. Solstice moon in West Midlands, UK photo by James. Get involved: subscribe, review, rate, share with your friends, send images!
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In 2006, the rather enigmatic and aberrant Mudboy recorded a live session for the Dutch radio station VPRO, but it took three years for it to finally see release. Upon hearing this odd and uneven set, that delay seems quite justified- there are certainly some moments of sublime beauty and weirdness captured here, but they are few and far between. This probably should have stayed in the vault.
This is a fun album. It takes a high art concept and makes it playful. Albums that are made up purely of percussion are few and far between as it is, and the fact that the instrument in question here is the Mid-Hudson Bridge makes this a rare bird indeed.
This latest Folklore Tapes collection is a perfect illustration of why they are possibly the most unique and fascinating label around, assembling 31 different artists to create free-form sound art based upon their research into a specific plant. I certainly like the concept and appreciate the depth and breadth of their commitment to it (there is accompanying literature, a film, and a pack of seeds), yet none of that would matter all that much if the music was underwhelming. As it happens, the music is absolutely wonderful, as the many brief and varied vignettes form a wonderfully surreal and kaleidoscopic whole. A few of the participants were familiar to me beforehand (Dean McPhee, Bridgett Hayden), but most were not and nearly every single one brings something delightfully bizarre, hallucinatory, or enigmatically esoteric to the table.
Few artists continually push their art into strange and unfamiliar new places quite like Jan St. Werner has been doing with his Fiepblatter series.  Some installments have certainly been better than others, yet St. Werner always brings a unique blend of bold conceptual vision, rigorous craftsmanship, and playful experimentation.  With Spectric Acid, he continues that noble trend in supremely vibrant fashion, taking inspiration from ceremonial West African rhythms to weave a dense tapestry of dynamic shifting pulses, dense synth buzz, and squalls of electronic chaos.  At its best, it sounds like a particularly visceral blend of exquisite sound art and an out-of-control train.
Coldkill is the duo of Rexx Arkana (FGFC820) and Eric Eldredge (Interface), and was created as an attempt to get back to the roots of EBM and 1980s industrial music, an era from which both musicians have drawn influence throughout their careers]. With the use of vintage gear and a more minimalistic aesthetic when it comes to construction and dynamics in these songs, they do an exemplary job of being forward thinking, yet still clearly acknowledging their past.
Alex Keller and Sean O'Neill may have been collaborators since 2015, but Kruos is actually their debut release. That relative youth does not translate to lack of experience on the album, however, as the duo’s work is a complex, nuanced work of sound art, conjured up from some rather rudimentary sources, largely just field recordings and a telephone test synthesizer. It is a bit of a difficult, unsettling experience at times, but a strong one nonetheless.
The second full-length album from this bass-driven Australian "freak unit" is an intriguing evolution from the bleary, haunted atmospheres of 2015's Hide Before Dinner. For one, the mood is considerably less unnerving, but the trio has also incorporated a significant dub influence (a move that always makes my ears perk up). Naturally, F Ingers is still as unrepentantly bizarre, prickly, and indulgent as ever, but they seem to found a way to make their fractured nightmares feel a lot more playful, spontaneous, and kinetic. At its worst, Awkwardly Blissing Out sounds like a batch of willfully wrong-headed, dub-damaged, and sketchlike experiments that blossomed from the corpses of murdered songs. At its best, however, it transcendently resembles a newly discovered cache of extended and deeply hallucinatory dub remixes of imaginary early UK post-punk classics.
Ben Frost continues to mine the rich vein of recordings he made with Steve Albini with this full-length follow-up to this year's excellent Threshold of Faith EP. Naturally, The Centre Cannot Hold is a similarly face-melting eruption of ambient drone beefed up to snarling, brutal immensity, yet it feels a bit anticlimactic and redundant after the EP, as three songs are repeated (although usually in different versions) and one piece clocks in at a mere 13 seconds. A few of the totally new songs are quite good, however, and Frost allows himself to indulge and experiment a bit more with structure and melody than he did with the more punchy and concise predecessor. I personally prefer the punchy and concise approach in Frost's case, but the less essential and somewhat over-extended Centre could have been a similarly strong EP if it had been distilled to just its high points. There is some prime Frost to be found here, even if the presentation is less than ideal.
