This long-gestating new release from David Tibet and his shifting orbit of collaborators is an unexpected late-career throwback to the dazzling and immersive epics of Current 93's golden age. In Tibet's parlance, it is common for recordings and performances to be described as "channelings" and that seems especially appropriate for The Light Is Leaving Us All, which at times feels like it effortlessly transcends time and space and dissolves reality to open a fleeting portal into an alternate world swirling with unknowable mystery, unearthly beauty, and ineffable sadness. At its best, this album feels like a motley and wild-eyed caravan of minstrels, actors, and puppeteers unexpectedly appeared in a medieval town to share a vividly haunting, hallucinatory, and deeply eschatological fairy tale that will be the last thing that any of the villagers ever hear.
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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Originally only available on cassette during dal Forno's summer tour, this EP of six eclectic covers is now available digitally. As anyone who has heard her occasional NTS Radio DJ appearances can attest, dal Forno has delightfully wide-ranging taste and definitely appreciates a great hook when she hears it, so it is not at all surprising that there are some extremely deep cuts here (The Kiwi Animal) mingled with a few names that actually have spent time at the top of the pop charts (Lana del Ray and The B-52s). While the latter's early "Give Me Back My Man" undergoes quite an impressive transformation, Carla is generally quite reverent with her source material, taking a handful of great songs and simply paring them down to their stark and intimate essence.
Elemente is a dynamic and hypnotic record, not at all reliant upon listener knowledge of the three incarnations of K/C/Qluster nor of the relentless creativity of Hans-Joachim Roedelius. The trio play a range of analogue synths and tracks are coherently sequenced into a whole album: two elements which combine to give a richness, depth and balance to their expression.
As Murderous Vision, Ohio's Stephen Petrus has been one of the pioneers in the US death industrial/power electronics scene for over two decades now. It is a stylistic variation that has largely managed to avoid many of the pitfalls of its European counterpart ("provocative" political ambiguity, rampant misogyny, etc.) but retained the more creative, occasionally occult-tinged, depressive darkness. On Voided Landscapes, he continues this trend with a bit more environmental influence, both overt and subtle. Darkness Descends is a compilation for a festival Petrus curated this past summer in Cleveland and, while produced for the festival itself, stands strongly apart as a compilation of artists that have defined the style.
In four lengthy segments, each inhabiting its own side of vinyl, Brooklyn based Bob Bellerue presents a record that draws from his multitude of styles, from carefully constructed drones and outbursts of harsh noise, to less traveled territories, such as subtle melodies. Combined with experimental strategies learned from Bellerue’s work as a sound technician and Music of Liberation becomes a fascinating work in the canon of experimental sound and music, exceptional from both its composition as well as the production.
The Heather Leigh that recorded 2015's excellent I Abused Animal seems to have split into two separate artists this year: one who plays wild experimental guitar in a duo with Peter Brötzmann and another who is something of an outsider art-pop vocal diva. This is the latter Leigh. Ostensibly "a record of late-night Americana and heavy femininity," Throne is quite a bold and radical departure from expected territory, often resembling a bizarre and hallucinatory collision of Lou Reed and Kate Bush. That is only the tip of a very strange and intimate iceberg, however, as Leigh also has a curious approach to structure and a bent for confessional subject matter. For the most part, Leigh manages to make this experiment work, as Throne is a memorably unique album, but it only truly catches fire when her guitar playing bursts into the foreground.
Brainwashed and 
I have never been all that deeply immersed in the international noise scene, but I have certainly been aware of the scatological insanity of Rudolf Eb.er for a couple of decades now. I always viewed his work like an anarcho-punk might have viewed GG Allin: a compelling spectacle, for sure, but in a completely different category than the serious music that truly mattered. After hearing this singular and bizarrely brilliant mélange of "psychomagick spells and occult yogic instructions," however, I definitely need to go back and cautiously revisit more of Eb.er's previous ouevre: he clearly grasps something elusive and profound that most other people do not. This release may be the birth of a transcendent and entirely new phase, however, as Eb.er has allegedly "conquered the nether scatological regions" and moved onto "psycho-spiritual cleansing rituals." As a listener, I did not feel particularly psychically cleansed by this album, but I did not feel coated in filth afterwards either, which is an unexpected step in the right direction. With Om Kult, Rudolf Eb.er seems to have emerged from the grotesque purification ritual of his previous work as some kind of wild-eyed and uncomfortably intense shaman operating at an unusually high plane of consciousness.
While he has long been one of my favorite artists, Tim Hecker has truly blossomed into a creative supernova over the last several years, as each fresh album seems to set a new standard for the state of electronic music. For the most part, this latest release continues that improbable streak of masterpieces, though Konoyo's vision is radical in a much different way than Love Streams or Virgins. The raw material was quite a bold departure from the norm, however, as Hecker collaborated with a gagaku ensemble in Tokyo. Despite the unusual instrumentation and the unexpected participants, Konoyo still sounds perversely like a classic Tim Hecker album, albeit the broken, squirming ruins of one. I suppose that makes it feel like slightly less of visionary bombshell than some other releases at times, but that is merely because Hecker's focus was on more subtle evolutions this time around, stripping away unnecessary density and adventurously playing with textures and structures to present a hallucinatory masterclass in experimental composition that seethes and churns with dark emotion.
While this is improbably the first Orphax release to be covered on Brainwashed, Amsterdam's Sietse van Erve has been a significant figure in experimental music circles for nearly two decades, running the fine Moving Furniture label and organizing events at the STEIM Foundation and elsewhere. This latest album is kind of a decade-spanning labor of love, as van Erve solicited audio files from a number of planned collaborators back in 2006 for a project that was eventually abandoned. However, he recently rediscovered some saxophone recordings made by James Fella and decided to revisit them, resulting in the cacophonously brilliant opening piece "JF." To complement that piece, Sietse then enlisted his father to make some fresh new recordings for him to work his transformative magic upon for a companion piece. While the two pieces sound quite different from one another, both are compellingly unusual forays into longform drone that lysergically swirl and undulate with vibrant harmonic interplay.
