Jakob Olausson follows up his acclaimed album Moonlight Farm with another entrancing record. Its hypnotic quality comes partly from song structures which seem looser than they actually are, and from the stark contrast between emotionally raw lyrics, some sparkling guitar notes, and his doubled or heavily echoed voice.
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This live recording from 2009 sees Steven Stapleton and Colin Potter team up with Fabrizio Palumbo, Paul Beauchamp and Julia Kent to perform one of, if not, the classic Nurse With Wound album Soliloquy for Lilith. I cannot pretend that they have succeeded in recreating that amazing work but they have made something equally engaging if aesthetically different to the original. Stapleton is still acting as an aerial or a receiver for the basic sound but the other players build on it to form an entirely novel and separate entity.
Despite a career spanning decades as both a performer and music theorist, Ustad Abdul Karim Khan rarely played in front of a microphone. This album is just an instance in his artistic life, recorded in Bombay only a handful of years before his death but it shows a singer in his prime. His command of his voice and reverence for his art comes through the fog of the 78 recordings with a vigor undiminished by time or culture.
Start to finish, Mirrorring's debut is submerged in a hazy, blurred production aesthetic. This is not only unsurprising, it's exactly what I would have predicted from this collaboration between Liz Harris (of Grouper) and Jesy Fortino (of Tiny Vipers) before hearing a single reverbed note. Fortunately, Liz Harris' age-old trick is a good one, and Fortino's contributions are key, making Foreign Body more than the sum of its contributors' parts.
Between this and the recently released Imikuzushi live collaboration with Keiji Haino and Jim O’Rourke, Ambarchi's work is drifting more and more into the realm of "music" rather than his more abstract tendencies. While the collaboration is a full on psychedelic rock blast, Audience of One is a more restrained, structured affair that features, among other things, an Ace Frehely cover.
For the third installment of what has become a yearly tradition, three of contemporary music's foremost free improv players joined forces for a three-hour live show in Melbourne, Australia. The four tracks on Imikuzushi are excerpts culled from that blistering performance.
As much as I enjoy all of the musicians involved, the recently reincarnated Fenn O'Berg has thus far failed to recapture the deranged magic of their early years for me.  They can still be quite good though (and occasionally surprising).  These recordings from their 2010 Japanese tour share some of the muted, brooding tone of 2010's In Stereo, but also demonstrate that this laptop trio has not entirely abandoned their more wild, spontaneous, and absurdist tendencies.  I'm not sure if that necessarily makes In Hell stronger than its predecessor, but it at least seems a bit more striking and memorable.
I am not at all surprised that Jim Jarmusch has finally made an album, but given his past links to folks like RZA,  Mulatu Astatke, and Tom Waits, I did not exactly expect his musical debut to be a duet with a Dutch lutenist.  As it turns out, however, Jozef van Wissem turns out to be a very comfortable and effective foil for Jarmusch's rather abstract guitar work.  While this isn't a deep or substantial album by any means (despite the grandiose implications of the Swedenborgian title), it is nevertheless quite a warm and likable one and it never sounds at all tossed-off or overwrought.
This album is hailed as boasting the most energetic and concise songs of White Hills' career, which seems like a very ill-advised direction for the band to take, given that they are not a band known for great songcraft.  I look to them solely for drugged-out, guitar-worship excess—trying to be direct and hard-hitting does not suit them at all.  Fortunately, they still balance their punchier songs with several prolonged, space-y freakouts.  When those avoid sinking into self-parodying extremes, they can be absolutely brilliant.  I just wish that there were fewer uneven, underwhelming, and frustrating moments between them.
