Brainwashed Radio: The Podcast Edition

Art table in Hammond, Indiana photo by Hilary

It's another weekend of multiple podcast episodes of brand new music and gems from the vaults.

Episode 694 features Belong, Annelies Monseré, People Like Us, Chihei Hatakeyama & Shun Ishiwaka, Causa Sui, Lee Underwood, The The, Dadadi, Nový Svět, Shuttle358, Keiji Haino, and Peter Broderick & Ensemble 0.

Episode 695 has Miki Berenyi Trio, Shackleton & Six Organs of Admittance, Olivier Cong, France Jobin & Yamil Rezc, The Cat's Miaow, Daniel Lentz, Efterklang, Mick Harvey, Lightheaded, Internazionale, Dettinger, and Jóhann Jóhannsson.

Art table in Hammond, Indiana photo by Hilary.

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The Tear Garden, "The Brown Acid Caveat"

cover imageI had absolutely no idea what to expect from a new Tear Garden album, as it has been nearly a decade since the last one and The Brown Acid Caveat slowly came together while cEvin Key was dealing with cancer and Edward Ka-Spel was deeply immersed in I Can Spin A Rainbow.  Despite that, the impending release bizarrely took on a near-mythic significance for me, as this project has inspired several of Ka-Spel most enduring moments of genius ("Romulus and Venus," "Hyperform," etc.) and he has been riding quite a (fitful) hot streak over the last few years.  Also, the time simply felt right for The Tear Garden to return.  Happily, Caveat largely lives up to my unreasonably high expectations even while it subverts them, as the duo largely eschew deep psychedelia in favor of propulsive, tightly structured electronic pop (albeit with some inspired detours along the way).  Naturally, the album’s hookiness is mingled with Ka-Spel and Key's deeply skewed and oft-hallucinatory aesthetic, but I was still completely unprepared for the throbbing disco groove of the opening "Strange Land."

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Edward Ka-Spel, "High On Station Yellow Moon"

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Edward Ka-Spel is certainly having quite an amazing year, already releasing two great albums in the form of I Can Spin A Rainbow and The Brown Acid Caveat.  This deeply strange and proggy solo effort is kind of a bizarre bridge between those two peaks, featuring occasional contributions from Amanda Palmer and seemingly expanding upon the thematic premise of The Tear Garden's "Lola’s Rock."  High On Station Yellow Moon also feels like a repository for all of Ka-Spel's recent ideas that were too abstract and unstructured for his "proper" albums–like a pressure-release valve for an overactive mind.  In that sense, there is a definite resemblance to the collaged, free-form aesthetic of The Legendary Pink Dots' Chemical Playschool series, albeit with a fairly consistent and intriguing thematic thread weaving through it all.  Another similarity to the Chemical Playschool series is that Yellow Moon can be a meandering and frustrating listen at times, but patient listeners will be rewarded by an occasional sustained passage that captures Ka-Spel at the absolute peak of his powers.

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Yair Elazar Glotman & Mats Erlandsson, "Negative Chambers"

cover imageYair Elazar Glotman's monster Études album lamentably slipped by me when it surfaced in 2015, but I immediately became quite a fan once I finally heard it.  As a result, I was thrilled to discover that he was returning once more to wood and strings after last year's Blessed Initiative album.  His collaborator, Mats Erlandsson, is a part of the primarily noise-based Posh Isolation milieu, which makes this an intriguing pairing for the task at hand: creating "imaginary, dislocated 'folk' music for the current dark ages" (exactly the sort of endeavor that seems tailor-made for Miasmah).  Given that the two artists are primarily known for experimental/electronic fare, it is a bit eyebrow-raising to find them exclusively wielding an eclectic array of zithers, singing bowls, Moroccan lutes, and other traditional instruments here, but their production talents prove to be quite useful for shaping their acoustic ethno-appropriations into a shadowy suite of appealingly seething and grinding neo-classical brooding.

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Janek Schaefer, "Glitter In My Tears"

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This is apparently Janek Schaefer's 30th album in 20 years, a milestone which surprised me a bit, as there is a considerable portion of his oeuvre that I have not heard.  That said, the handful of albums that I have heard have been kind of hit or miss, as Schaefer often errs a bit too much on the side of high-concept, cerebral sound art for my liking.  Glitter In My Tears, however, is right up my alley: a sustained and hallucinatory fever dream of brief and frequently beautiful vignettes (or "microcosms of haunted memory," as Schaefer himself describes them).  The inevitable downside to such an ambitious endeavor, of course, is that Glitter is exasperatingly populated with wonderfully promising themes that appear and vanish again in a minute or less.  In most hands, that would be quite a big problem, but Glitter is so uniformly strong and flows along so fluidly that I am left with little time to lament the more substantial pieces that might have been.  This is a wonderfully shifting, evocative, and immersive album from start to finish.

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Träd, Gräs Och Stenar, "Tack F√∂r Kaffet / So Long"

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Fifty years ago, one of the greatest (and most short-lived) psych-rock bands of all-time (Pärson Sound) was formed in Sweden, though it was not until 2001 that their amazing collected recordings were finally released.  Despite only recording one album, the core of Pärson Sound never actually went away and the band has evolved and taken on new guises over the ensuing decades (International Harvester and Träd, Gräs och Stenar), erratically surfacing every now and then and sometimes flirting with greatness anew.  This latest release is a somewhat bittersweet affair, as two founding members (the whole rhythm section, actually) passed away during the recordings, albeit not before leaving an intermittently stellar and incandescent swansong in their wake.  Tack För Kaffet / So Long is easily the best Träd, Gräs och Stenar album in ages.

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Fovea Hex, "The Salt Garden II"

cover imageClodagh Simonds and her impressive coterie of collaborators have returned for the much-anticipated second installment of the planned Salt Garden trilogy.  In a broad sense, this latest EP is a clear continuation of its predecessor, consisting of three timeless and drone-informed pieces of sublime and Siren-esque choral beauty and an instrumental coda.  However, this release also marks an intriguing evolution upon the aesthetic of the first Salt Garden, opting for a more understated and unadorned approach.  As such, there is not much here that offers quite the intensity and immediacy of "The Golden Sun" or "The Undone Mother," but the compensation is that Simonds has further distilled her vision into something more naked and pure, eschewing ornamentation and orchestration to shift more of the heavy lifting to her voice and her words.  They can certainly handle it.

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Brainwashed Premiere: Scratched Glass, "Two"

cover imageBrainwashed is happy to premiere the first song (and video) from Scratched Glass's new release, Two, due out July 7 on Negative Capability. The duo of Nicol Eltzroth Rosendorf and Jonathan Lukens are both multimedia artists, and this is evident on "Duet". The video's pulsating, digital/organic hybrid visuals perfectly accompany the sound: a lush mixture of warm, surging tones and skeletal beats that are hypnotic from beginning to end. The nine song album will be released on cassette (limited to 100 copies) and digital, and mastered by Lawrence English.

Check out the video here.

An exclusive preview of the album is available to stream here.

Physical and digital pre-orders are available now through Bandcamp.

Tor Lundvall, "Nature Laughs as Time Slips By"

cover imageFor his third boxed set on the label since 2011, prolific ambient artist Tor Lundvall collects another four previously released (but limited) albums and a rarities compilation into a diverse sounding, yet thematically unified collection. Essentially the soundtrack for virtual environments, such as rainy days or visiting a park, Nature Laughs as Time Slips By is another suite of beautiful, if often melancholy instrumental music that covers the vast spectrum of Lundvall’s beautiful work.

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Can, "The Singles"

cover imageI must admit to still being a bit perplexed by this release. Can, for all their greatness, were never really a singles band. Most of those that were issued were edits of album material, so there is little exclusive material to be had here, barring said edits, which usually just remove material rather than presenting it in an appreciably different way, and a handful of non-album material. However, when viewed as a career overview or sampler (something essentially replacing those Cannibalism compilations), it is a different matter, and the set provides a good opportunity to revisit the latter, often maligned recordings.

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Richard H. Kirk, "Dasein"

cover imageThe usually prolific Richard H. Kirk has been unsurprisingly quiet as of late. Playing shows as Cabaret Voltaire again (which I have conflicted feelings about) and a small reissue campaign via Mute and Die Stadt has been about the extent of his recent activity. Which, admittedly, is odd from a man who used to make up projects just to fill out his own solo compilation albums. So when first hearing about the new material that makes up Dasein being released, I was eager but unsure what to expect. Thankfully, the hiatus has done nothing to deter Kirk, who has put together yet another exceptional work of his own take on electronic music, and one that channels moments from his entire career.

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