"Liberty" is one of those great terms that contains a trace of its inverse. It is usually taken to mean "freedom from" something, or immunity, as in the diplomatic kind everyone recognizes thanks to televised political dramas and George W. Bush. Consequent to that understanding, the less controlled or restrained a thing is, the more liberty it possesses. So the curtailment of action doesn’t usually figure into conventional senses of freedom, but think of all the liberties secured by the abridgment of desire, prejudice, and fear. License in one space often demands restriction, or constriction, or even conversion, in another. Something like that is at work on Severe Liberties, the benighted electroacoustic product of Kevin Parks and Vanessa Rossetto’s first collaboration. "Severe Liberties" are the kind of thing people take when they need to bend the truth, or when they simply don’t understand something. Here they are the kind of thing that transforms silverware and surface noise into music.
Two new shows just for you. We have squeezed out two extended release episodes for this weekend to get you through this week. They contain mostly new songs but there's also new issues from the vaults. The first show features music from Rider/Horse, Mint Field, Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, Anastasia Coope, ISAN, Stone Music, La Securite, Bark Psychosis, Jon Rose, Master Wilburn Burchette, Umberto, Wand, Tim Koh, Sun An, and Memory Drawings. The second episode has music by Laibach, Melt-Banana, Chuck Johnson, X, K. Yoshimatsu, Dorothy Carter, Pavel Milyakov, Violence Gratuite, Mark Templeton, Dummy, Endon, body / negative, Midwife, Alberto Boccardi, Divine. Cow in Maui from Veronika in Vienna. Get involved: subscribe, review, rate, share with your friends, send images!
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I definitely didn't think I would enjoy an all vocal improvisation album this much, or on such a grand level. I simply love the acoustics of the room where Jason Kahn recorded in, where he is belting out such interesting and nondescript sounds where, "In the rooms of a former Swiss-com telephone relay station in Zürich. I decided to use the main room, which was entirely empty. Its linoleum floors, bare walls and many windows made for a very resonant space. Double glass windows sealed off the world outside but many sounds still emanated from somewhere deep in the bowels of the building." I wasn't terribly sure what a telephone relay station is, so I googled imaged it, and saw that it was what I thought it was after all. Lines of machines, with women (sometimes men too?) would sit in front of huge electronic boxes with wires and patches, crisscrossing each other, while the operator there would take people’s requests for phone calls and to be connected with others. To me, then, there is a sense of irony, or even a haunting simile that almost reminds me of an echo of conversations that might have taken place in the building in the distant past.
Basinski and Chartier have collaborated a number of times in the past, and their disparate, yet complementary approaches to music have always complimented each other perfectly. An uncharacteristic vinyl release for Chartier (a digital loyalist), these two sidelong pieces embrace both loops and melody, coming together beautifully as a sparse, yet forceful piece of music.
On his previous album for 12k, Twenty Ten, Kenneth Kirschner compiled three full discs of material. On Compressions & Rarefactions, he ups that even more by including a download with the CD of three additional pieces, totaling over five and a half hours. It is a lot to take in, especially given Kirschner's understated approach to composition, but the result is more than satisfying.
Fun is too often ignored when talking about experimental music. The language surrounding works by composers like Iannis Xenakis or Luc Ferrari is usually technical or mathematical, and sometimes political, but it’s rarely euphoric or exuberant. Which is a shame, because the flash of their audaciousness and the buzz of excitement their music generates is just as dignified and as worthy as the theory running beside it. Devin DiSanto and Nick Hoffman’s Three Exercises, which takes some inspiration from both Xenakis and Ferrari, is a lot of things. There should be no shame or reticence in recognizing that chief among them is fun. Recorded at St. Thomas the Apostle Elementary School in West Hartford, Connecticut, it spins amusement and pleasure from sources both unusual and mundane, with humdrum objects like ping pong balls and duct tape, and with homemade instruments 
In the mid 1980s, there was no internet, eBay, discogs, and if you didn't live in a metropolitan area, music was expensive. These two releases were the first affordable releases to surface on the North American continent from Cocteau Twins, and while neither were issued by the band themselves in this form, the arrangement of the collection and the pairing of the two EPs are flawless and remain a fantastic listen three decades later.
The origin of this collection is a bit peculiar: originally sold through television commercials by the Polygram TV division in 1995, reclaimed by Beggars two years later, and now presented on LP for the first time, 20 years later. Essentially this is just about every Numan song a curious listener could want, featuring singles and popular album cuts. Aesthetically, however, the quality control in the art department could have taken a closer look.
For some reason, this seems to be one of the most weirdly overhyped albums of 2015 (at least in the underground/indie/experimental music spheres that I travel in), suggesting that: 1.) people absolutely cannot get enough Grouper, 2.) people are desperate to find a new album to be excited about, and 3.) widespread cultural amnesia has set in.  That is not a knock on the band though: Liz Harris’s garage/indie-pop trio is certainly enjoyable, but it is disorienting to see such a jangly, pretty, and breezily lightweight affair be so celebrated at a time when no one seems to clamoring to name-drop Tallulah Gosh, Opal, The Shop Assistants, or any similar late '80s/early '90s indie pop bands as major influences (though they totally should be).  In any case, The Original Faces certainly has its appeal–despite being inherently a modest event with very low-key aspirations, it is not every day that I get to hear Harris let down her guard and bash out fun indie-pop confections with her friends (imaginary and otherwise).
It has been roughly 10 years since Thighpaulsandra’s last solo album, which is notable because it definitely feels like an entire decade-long backlog of ideas has been poured into this sprawling and overstuffed release.  Fits of great inspiration, masterful songcraft, baroque orchestration, meandering filler, and plenty of very ill-conceived motifs all tirelessly vie for their moment in the sun over the course of an exhausting 2-hour tour de force of intermittently wonderful and oft-grueling excess.  The Golden Communion is simultaneously a celebration of the joys of unfettered imagination and the perils of complete creative freedom.  There is probably an absolutely perfect LP buried in here somewhere, but Thighpaulsandra certainly does not make it easy to find.
The moniker and title of this debut album from the enigmatic Russian artist translates to "radio sleep", the codename given to a secret USSR project during the Cold War. Much like similar experiments in the USA, it was an attempt by scientists to use radio waves and sound to control and subjugate the masses. Even though I had no idea about any of this for my first listen to this tape (the text describing the background is in Russian, with a URL for an English translation), I got a distinctly sinister feeling just based on the sound: a mix of dissonant textures and subtle, hypnotic melodies that lurk just beneath the surface, making for a multifaceted release that slowly reveals its brilliant secrets.
