In keeping with Sublime Frequencies' lengthy tradition of unearthing bizarre and amazing music that I didn’t even know existed, guerrilla ethnomusicologist Hisham Mayet’s latest offering delves into the raucous nightlife of Marrakech’s legendary open-air marketplace  Managing to talk his way through a longstanding ban on the close recording of performers, Mayet captures the raw power of three of Jemaa El Fna’s most compelling acts as they blast though blistering, electrified renditions of classic Moroccan pop using homemade rigs of car batteries and megaphone speakers.
Preserved for posterity as four-track tape recordings, Konrad Becker’s Piano Concertos for 4 Pianos have finally crossed the digital divide. While the man behind the music has been anything but listless, these recordings have until now, laid fallow for upwards of 25 years, making this the first release of his acoustic music. Originally used for the performance series Program for the 100% Resocialization of the Devil in 1982-83 and the experimental opera Parzival in 1984, the pieces are redolent with low-end perfumes, thick metallic fogs, and percussive walls of splendor. The simultaneous play of four roaring pianos creates music rife with subterfuge and illusion.
It has been roughly four years since the last Boduf Songs album (2015's Stench of Exist), but Mat Sweet is finally back with his seventh full-length. There are few artists who are as tirelessly focused on exploring a narrow stylistic niche as Sweet, so it was fairly easy to (correctly) predict what Abyss Versions would sound like: hushed vocals, slow-motion arpeggios, seething tension, and quiet intensity. However, the details are always a surprise and I was especially eager to hear this particular release, as its predecessor felt like an inspired creative breakthrough that added a bit more color and rhythmic dynamism to the Boduf Songs' vision. Perversely though, Abyss Versions does not build upon those particular innovations and instead makes a hard turn in the opposite direction: more understated, more intimate, more austere (though there are a pair stellar exceptions at the end of the album).  Despite that turn even deeper inward, Abyss Versions is yet another characteristically fine album, as Sweet unveils a solid batch of new songs that brood, creep, and smolder in all the right ways.
This impressively ambitious double album documents (in necessarily excerpted form) a month-long installation that ran during NYC's Storefront for Art and Architecture's 30th anniversary celebration back in 2013. Its true roots go much deeper than that, however, as Six Microphones is the culmination of a project that Robert Gerard Pietrusko has been fitfully struggling to perfect for almost two decades. It is easy to see why it took so long to realize, as Six Microphones is the sort of complex, process-based experimental music that only an electrical engineer or a rabidly gear-obsessed noise artist could hope to fully comprehend. Thankfully, grasping the intricacies of Pietrusko's system is not a necessary prerequisite for appreciating the resultant sounds, as Six Microphones is a quietly hypnotic symphony of drifting feedback that deserves a place alongside Nurse With Wound’s Soliquy for Lilith and Toshimaru Nakamura's No-Input Mixing Board experiments as a significant and inspired work of self-generating sound art.
Matt Johnson's first full-length release of new (or new to the public) music in over a decade is a collection of 26 short themes for the film by Gerard Johnson. There's no "hit single" and the music is not reflective of any of his mainstream LP releases for any phase of his career. However, it's a fantastic treat for those who have collected his singles over the decades, as there is a lot of commonality with the more thematic B-sides that have graced his short-players throughout the ''80s and early '90s.
Conceived while Jack Rose was on tour with Dave Shuford's (of No-Neck Blues Band) D. Charles Speer project, Ragged and Right is easily the most rocking thing Rose ever recorded. The band spends much of their time toying with Shuford's country-rock sound, and though Jack's talent and unique signature are definitely present, he disappears into the music more often than he dominates it.
Even as far as falling back into their historical release pattern of an album paired with an EP of unique, yet contemporaneous material, the resurrection of Godflesh has done everything possible to honor their legacy. A World Lit Only By Fire does not exactly see the band picking up where the last album, 2001's Hymns left off. Instead it goes back further into their history, to the era most Godflesh fans wish they had never left.
Frederik Sevendal has been a fixture in Oslo's experimental music scene for years, establishing himself as both an excellent guitarist and an imaginative purveyor of twisted Lynch-ian ambiance. His latest release, a mixture of old and new recordings, captures him seamlessly blending brooding Badalamenti-esque dread, drugged folk jangling, and strangled guitar noise into a very unique and disquieting (yet unexpectedly melodic) whole.
