Superior Viaduct's Ike Yard reissue campaign continues (and presumably ends) with this, the band's woefully underheard debut EP. Night After Night was recorded shortly after the band formed and was originally released on Belgium's Les Disques Du Crépuscule back in 1981. It has never been reissued before now, which means that it was never actually available domestically (except as an import) during Ike Yard's brief initial lifespan. That is unfortunate, as it is objectively one of the better releases to emerge from NYC's No Wave scene, even if it was completely eclipsed by Ike Yard's classic full-length a year later. The difference between the two releases is quite an interesting and significant one, as Night After Night feels like the work of an actual human band with recognizable instruments rather than an audacious feat of stark, alienating production. On one level, the transformation between the two releases calls to mind pre-Martin Hannett Warsaw versus the iconic post-Hannett Joy Division, but the aesthetic itself is closer to a Public Image Ltd. homage by people who thought Jah Wobble and Keith Levene's parts were the only bits worth saving.
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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Since 2016, I maintained there would be the advent of a new mantra: "Make Music Great Again." Sometimes the reference became more specific, replaced with Punk or Deathrock depending on my mood, but the message remained the same: the impetus for music with a message would be opened. We’ve seen legends returning to take advantage of the era to release new work, so there was a mix of both surprise and lack thereof when, completely unannounced, legendary punk band X dropped ALPHABETLAND, their first studio release in 27 years (and the first with their original line-up in the past 35 years) to coincide with the 40th anniversary of their classic 1980 debut Los Angeles. A fresh blast from the past that looks to the future, X come racing out of the gate with the same ferociousness and insistent melody of any of their classics.
A collaborative project between guitarist/composer Michael Pisaro-Lu and Zizia (the duo of Amber Wolfe Rounds and Jarrod Fowler), Pisaura has debuted with quite a complex album, both conceptually and compositionally. Constructed from field recordings and found sounds and composition strategies guided by astrological maps, it is a dense and intricate work from a conceptual standpoint, but also a fascinating one that has secrets that are never fully revealed.
This unusual and inspired collaboration between a Finnish experimentalist and one of Jamaican music's most iconic rhythm sections has its roots in an even more unlikely previous pairing: 2018's Nordub album on the venerable OKeh label. On that album, Sasu Ripatti's role was primarily that of a producer for a melodic and accessible jazz/dub hybrid, but the very different 500-Push-Up documents the far more cacophonous and freewheeling side of their collaboration that resulted from Ripatti's move into the driver's seat. Moreover, this second reunion occurred at a particularly interesting time, as Vladislav Delay's harsher recent work is light years away from Ripatti's heyday as a dub techno producer. While I am sure that a version of this album featuring the Vladislav Delay of the early 2000s would have been absolutely wonderful as well, the less disparate aesthetics of the participants would have likely led towards considerably more familiar territory than this one does, so maybe it is for the best that this union did not occur until now. At its best, 500-Push-Up sounds almost like it is carving out an new genre that blurs the lines between hip-hop beat tapes, fluid reggae bass lines, and hallucinatory electronic chaos.
This Italian composer’s latest full-length is quite a significant departure from the aesthetic of 2018's inventively shape-shifting A Conscious Effort, as Novellino decided to head in an entirely non-conceptual direction (he correctly believes that abstract music too frequently has hidden meaning and significance projected onto it in order to lure in both listeners and acclaim). In keeping with that theme, the album's prosaic title translates simply as "strings." That title is certainly apt, as sounds conjured from strings are indeed the heart of the album's aesthetic, but it is also a bit of an amusingly misleading understatement: Strängar is not an orchestral album, but is instead largely a celebration of the many vivid and visceral sounds that one can produce from an inventively misused piano. It is also much more than that though, as Novellino's cavalcade of scrapes, dissonantly jangling metal strings, and assorted percussive sounds intriguingly bleeds in and out of a very different vision of spacey, hallucinatory synth motifs. Admittedly, that sounds like a potentially unwieldy marriage on paper, but Novellino executes it beautifully to achieve a compelling and unique blurring of the boundaries between disparate worlds.
I have to admit that I have always been somewhat confounded by stated The Ghost Box aesthetic of "artists exploring the misremembered musical history of a parallel world," as I have little nostalgia for hazily remembered '60s and '70s children’s television and a limited passion for the vintage sci-fi sounds of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. In short, I had insufficient whimsy in my heart to properly appreciate anything that sounds like a retro-futurist alternate soundtrack for The Wicker Man. After fully immersing myself in this latest fairy-themed opus from label co-founder Jim Jupp, however, I am beginning to see the unique appeal of the willfully anachronistic collective. I am not sure if the changing world or my changing self ultimately led me to this point, but the idea of spending some time in a kitschy fever dream evocation of a cheaply constructed puppet world suddenly seems extremely appealing to me. Granted, The Gone Away still rubs me the wrong way during its more "vintage lounge music" moments, but it nevertheless feels both good and pure that Jupp is so single-mindedly focused on extracting genuine pathos from our weird, dated, and ostensibly ridiculous cultural memories.
I was having a conversation with someone the other evening about what defines "pop" music, and if it can be considered good music. This is a loaded question since there are many varieties of music that could potentially fall into a pop category; the term means many different things, carrying both positive and negative connotations. As this isn’t meant to be an essay arguing the definition, let me simply say this: I enjoy what moves me. There exists simple, straightforward music which has the power to reel me in, winning me over with charming, catchy melodies, making my heart soar. With his sincere delivery, dreamy heartfelt melodies, eighties pop sensibilities and impressive vocal range, the talented John Jagos won me over as Brothertiger on his latest, Paradise Lost.
A truly multinational project, Staraya Derevnya is a collaboration of artists, poets and musicians across Israel, London and New York, released on independent record label Raash Records out of Jerusalem. The lyrics are sung, screamed, and chanted in a combination of Russian merged with a made-up language, with only the track titles — derived from a line of each song — translated to English. Knowing Russian is not required to be transported into a journey of epic aural proportions.
Embers: the smoldering or glowing remains of a fire. Something fading, but still capable of pain when touched. The transition of a bright flame being extinguished into darkness, mirroring the cycle of day into night. Vancouver-based composer Amir Abbey is Secret Pyramid, creating his transcendental neo-classical dreamworks at night, giving light to meditative sonic works that sound at home in a cathedral, offering sonorousness of awe and sorrow echoing majestically through vast space and settling in the soul. Abbey’s latest, Embers, works magic in these ways, offering a "less is more" approach creating the aural equivalent of wide open spaces filled with tranquillity and ephemerality.
Section 25 epitomize an uneasy classification of "post-punk," combining raw electronics, cast over with early shadows of gothic rock despair, and blended with a healthy dose of stark krautrock and sometimes even *gasp* danceable rhythms, fronted by tuneless, disaffected vocals. This formula has served countless experimental bands well that followed into today. This gorgeous 5 disc vinyl (or 2 CD) set of Always Now from Factory Benelux allows listeners old and new to dig deeper into the musical expanse of early Section 25.
