Bill Fay says David Tibet is probably the only person who would have released this 2CD set. The first disc covers demos and live material from 1970-1971 with Fay’s singing, piano, guitar, bass, and drums combining at times to astonishing effect. The second, lighter disc, recorded at home in 2008, begins with Fay's vocals added to a Michael Cashmore instrumental from The Snow Abides and ends with a song written by his brother, John Fay.
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Mark Kozelek has recorded several brilliant albums over the last two decades, but this 1993 collection of odds and ends left over from the Red House Painters' first eponymous album is generally not considered one of them. Nevertheless, it remains of his most strangely compelling releases to date and features some of the most achingly perfect distillations of everything that made his early work so unique and powerful.
From the joyous opening song to the last note of the final track I am captivated by the fierce instrumentation and solemn warmth of Slow Six. Serious yet playful they remind me that I don't need to jump out of an airplane or ski down the alps to experience the rush of exhilaration; all I have to do is turn on my stereo and put on this beautiful record.
Robert Lowe seems to be the busiest man in music, as well as his own Lichens project he is popping in up in so many different bands: The Cairo Gang, Om and Twilight (the metal band, not the film) to name a few. On this second collaboration with Rose Lazar, Lowe again contributes the music and the duo worked together on the artwork. Musically, it is a far cry from the Robert Lowe I already know; soft synthesiser rhythms and melodies are the order of the day. It is entrancing, comforting and magnificent all in one go.
After a four-year hiatus, this slumbering drone supergroup has returned with a deeply unsettling and surreal new album. That time was not spent idly, as Above The Sky sounds like it has been sculpted and tweaked to razor-sharp perfection. Despite being the work of three people with three different aesthetics, there is no absolutely trace of ego, compromise, bloat, or wasted time here. This is as perfect as drone music gets.
Hungry Shells documents the meeting of two remarkable avant garde spirits. In 2018, Pekka Airaksinen presented Ka Baird with Buddhist parables that had been revealed to him in a mediative state. The result is a glorious recording, as the collaboration dissolves their individual states, their voices, flutes, and synths, into an organic harmonic discord.
His story is somewhat legendary in the noise/power electronics scene: recording as MB, Bianchi put out a slew of albums in the early 1980s that helped to define the genre during its nascent days. Then, in the middle of the decade, he left music for personal reasons (rumoredly he became a Jehovah’s Witness). He reappeared in the latter part of the 1990s, with work I had been told (either directly or via a place like alt.noise) resembled a more avant garde Yanni. Needless to say I avoided it. Once this album was available, something told me to check it out and, while not in the same league as his early work, it channels enough of it to still be an interesting listen.
This is one of those kind of albums that is impossible to pigeonhole in any sort of specific genre. There’s some drone elements, but those are mostly overshadowed by tribal drumming. There’s dubby production, but also layers of noise and mutated psychedelic rock. All the while there’s a little bit of metal here and there. Named for a giant squid, this Italian project certainly has its tentacles entangled amongst themselves to create an unclassifiable blur, but it’s a compelling racket.
Newly reissued with different artwork, Porter Ricks' second album is a fitfully compelling and somewhat perplexing mixed bag that I somehow managed to never hear until now. My befuddlement is largely due to the fact that the first Porter Ricks album (Biokinetics) is an all-time dub techno classic, so I would have expected Andy Mellwig and Thomas Köner to expand further upon the formula that they had perfected to great acclaim. Instead, the duo took a more stylistically fluid approach, occasionally returning to Biokinetics-style dub, but also dabbling in dark ambient and some unexpectedly funky strains of house music. That said, it is probably wrong to view Biokinetics and this album as intentional statements or clearly delineated phases of a linear artistic evolution, as both releases are compilations of singles and EPs and Biokinetics got all the great Chain Reaction ones from 1996. This one collects all the Force Inc. EPs from the following year, so these pieces could be anything from Chain Reaction-era outtakes to stylistic experiments to a stab at greater accessibility (though that is hard to imagine, given the cold bleakness of Köner's solo work). In any case, there are still enough strong pieces to make this an enjoyable album, but anyone hoping for the focus and distinctive vision of Biokinetics will probably want to moderate their expectations a bit before diving into this one.
