Andrew Lagowski's S.E.T.I. project has been constructing dark ambient dramas with an extra-terrestrial sensibility for over 20 years, blending unidentifiable electronic passages with moments of identifiable synthesizers or samples, and Final Trajectory is the culmination of that. Culled from 30 years of recordings, this album drifts from fascinating to terrifying, much like massive expanse of the universe that influenced it.
Three new episodes for your listening enjoyment. After two weeks off, we are back with three brand new episodes: three hours / 36 tunes. Episode 697 features music from Beak>, Brothertiger, Kate Carr, Gnod, Taylor Deupree, FIN, Church Andrews & Matt Davies, Ortrotasce, Bill MacKay, Celer, Kaboom Karavan, and Ida. Episode 698 boasts a lineup of tracks from Susanna, Nonpareils, KMRU, A Place To Bury Strangers, final, Coti K., Dalton Alexander, Akio Suzuki, The Shadow Ring, Filther, Aaron Dilloway, and Ghost Dubs. Episode 699 is bursting at the seams with jams from Crash Course In Science, Chrystabell and David Lynch, Machinedrum, Ekin Fil, Finlay Shakespeare, Actress, Mercury Rev, Dave Brown / Jason Kahn, øjeRum, d'Eon, Jeremy Gignoux, and Shellac. Mountain photo taken in Japan by Chris. Get involved: subscribe, review, rate, share with your friends, send images!
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I have noted in the past that few artists are quite as chameleonic as Barn Owl, an observation that Jon Porras seems to have taken as a challenge, as he has now gone and made a dub techno album.  While I do not think that he should necessarily quit his day job, the better moments of Light Divide make it seem like Porras has been doing this forever.  In particular, the opening, "Apeiron," is 7-minutes of warmly hissing greatness.  The rest of the album is not quite on the same level, but it is certainly a pleasant and well-executed stylistic departure nonetheless.
Without a doubt, the fact that Klara Lewis is the daughter of Graham Lewis (Wire, Dome, He Said) is going to garner a significant amount of attention for Ett. While hopefully it helps to spread awareness of its release, by no means does she need to rely on her father’s reputation to garner acclaim for this album. Her penchant for deconstructing dance music into something completely different may be genetically inherited, but this is entirely Klara's show, and a brilliant show it is.
Nao Sugimoto's Spekk label had been doing an excellent job of establishing itself as an excellent source of abstract hybrids of organic and synthetic sounds that were sometimes challenging, sometimes beautiful, but always captivating. Because of that, the label’s disappearance after 2011's Phoenix & Phaedra Holding Patterns album by Janek Schaefer was disheartening. When these two new releases appeared, I was hoping that they would be a return to form, and that they are.
Suzuki Junzo has spent much of his career shifting between gentle, almost jazz influenced guitar playing and full on unhinged distortion, both as a solo artist and with projects such as Astral Traveling Unity. That hopping between extremities remains solidly in place on Portrait of Madeleine Elster, which is almost evenly split between gentle, jazz influenced playing and maximum, room clearing distortion. Its best moments, however, are when the two worlds overlap with one another and create an entirely different beast.
Eamon Sprod records music in the field, but don't mistake the product of his labor for a field recording. In some hands microphones and tapes are used to capture the buzz of insects or the sound of rain pelting the land—whatever the subject might be—with the intent of faithfully reproducing those sounds later in a living room or in a pair of headphones. Replication is the documentarian's craft. Sprod's is magnification. He singles out particular noises, brushes them off and, like a geologist or an archaeologist, excavates them from the sediment of ordinary commotion. His efforts yield an enlarged world of microscopic rhythms and porous surfaces, small remnants that point to the unbroken environments from which they were culled. But Sprod re-purposes those extractions as musical vehicles too, for both re-hearing and re-imagining the world.
As a genre or style, neofolk has always been more miss than hit for me. I am a huge fan of the early through mid period Death in June, Sol Invictus, and a few others, but too often it comes across like low rent Leonard Cohen with a questionable sense of nationalism. The debut from Barren Harvest, featuring members of Worm Ouroboros and Atriarch, does not fall into this trap by any means. With balanced implementation male and female vocals and a tasteful use of keyboards with the acoustic instruments, the album is somewhere between Nada! era DIJ and the stronger moments of mid-period Swans, while still retaining its own identity.
