It has been roughly four years since Ashley Paul's last album and I was beginning to despair, but she has been busy moving to London and becoming a mother. While the latter is not particularly conducive to tirelessly crafting brilliant experimental music, she somehow still managed to compose her finest album to date during a brief residency in Spain. Characteristically, the pointillist, prickly dissonance of Jandek is probably the nearest touchstone, yet Paul radically transforms that stark foundation into something sensuous and eerily beautiful (sometimes even embellishing it with perversely festive splashes of color).  In fact, a few pieces even sound like grotesque caricatures of nursery rhymes (Paul’s baby was perhaps a subconscious and subversive muse), which only deepens Lost in Shadows' dreamily wraithlike and otherworldly spell. While it can definitely be a challenging, dissonant, and disturbing listen at times, Shadows is unquestionably Paul's masterpiece.
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. Get involved: subscribe, review, rate, share with your friends, send images!
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I have been casually aware of Slomo since the murky, gnarled gloom of 2008's The Bog, but apparently not familiar enough to realize that each of their infrequent releases tends to unveil a significant evolution. As a result, I slept on this 2017 release, only belatedly realizing that it was one of the year's most woefully overlooked masterpieces. With Transits, Chris McGrail and Howard Marsden shed all traces of their doom-shrouded ambient sludge past to craft a transcendently lysergic tour de force of pulsing minimalist drone brilliance. I am always hesitant to throw around Coil as a comparison for any artist, yet I am legitimately hard-pressed to think of any closer kindred album than Time Machines, as Slomo achieve a similarly singular feat of reality-blurring slow-motion wizardry that feels far more like a ritual or invocation than a mere album.
It was quite a pleasant surprise to discover that latest Hawthonn album was getting a physical release in the US, as few things scream "zero commercial potential" quite like Phil and Layla Legard’s quasi-pagan and psychogeography-inspired drone-folk reveries. While characteristically arcane and anachronistic to its core, Red Goddess actually drew its initial inspiration from relatively current culture, as the Legards were (rightly) fascinated by the primal themes of Lars von Trier's Antichrist. From there, however, Red Goddess evolved into something far more mysterious and temporally ambiguous, abstractly exploring the symbolic role of mugwort in folklore and tradition ("an herb associated with dreaming, travel and menstruation, mugwort particularly favors edgelands: those abandoned, untended places, part man-made, part rural, where nature begins to reclaim what humanity has left behind").
While I doubt I would ever use the term "peaceful" to describe Jim Haynes' prolific solo output, this newest record makes his previous work seem just that. Electrical Injuries may not be far removed from his body of work sonically, but there is a different edge, a malignance to it, and one that is not so subtly referenced in the album’s title. With literal and metaphorical references to the unpleasant nature of electricity, this is perhaps his most harsh work to date, but one that clearly bears his signature brand of audio decay.
New Zealander Clinton Williams has been operating as Omit since the late 1980s, but his hermetic approach to electronic music has kept him largely on the periphery of any related musical scene. His early works were handmade tapes and, once the technology became available, CD-Rs created on his own label, with his own artwork, and produced by none other but himself. His insular approach to his art meant work was only known to a handful (I myself had heard the name, but none of the music prior to this review) until this new box set joint released by Lasse Marhaug's Pica Disk and NZ based End of the Alphabet Records. Not intended to be a career overview, it instead is a compilation of five self-released CD-Rs from 2011 through 2016, packaged with a lavish booklet that only sees the surface of Williams’ unique brilliance.
Earlier this year, Staalplaat took a break from their plunge into Bryn Jones' seemingly endless archive of unreleased/hyper-limited material to put out a double-LP vinyl reissue of this beloved landmark album from 1998. While the vinyl format is an odd choice for this particular release (I have the digital version), I am delighted by this new reissue campaign: the sprawling Muslimgauze discography is a hopelessly intimidating and overwhelming labyrinth for all but the most die-hard fans, so the world definitely needs a knowledgeable curator to call attention to the most timeless and essential releases in the Muslimgauze canon. This is one of those. Normally, my own favorite Muslimgauze albums tend to be the more ethno-percussion-driven ones, but Mullah Said's heady drone/dub-inspired collage aesthetic is a striking exception, as it stands as one of Jones' most immersive, evocative, and fully formed works.
The work of Andrew Chalk and Daisuke Suzuki seems as if it has been intertwined forever, so I was somewhat startled to discover that this is their first new collaborative release in almost a decade. As befits the re-convergence of these two masters of understated tranquility, Yama to Nashi feels like a relaxed and unhurried reunion of old friends rather than a bold new vision. As such, it is a somewhat minor (if lovely) addition to the Siren/Faraway Press oeuvre that mostly lingers in familiar territory, but there are a couple of divergent gems lurking amidst these new pieces that longtime fans will not want to miss.
This latest opus from the Opalio brothers continues their restlessly experimental hot streak, taking inspiration from a characteristically bizarre event: two years ago, Roberto discovered that a bunch of his records were corroded by an "inexplicable oxidation process." After some time, he decided to listen to one of them anyway and found himself fascinated by the way the listening experience was transformed by the surface noise. Naturally, the instantaneous composition that resulted from that revelation is considerably more bizarre and idiosyncratic than a mere celebration of crackle and hiss, but the added layer of noise beautifully adds an evocative textural layer to The Sky With Broken Arms' sublime and eerily otherworldly reverie.
A month ago, I had absolutely no idea who Patrick Flegel was, but the buzz surrounding Superior Viaduct's Cindy Lee reissue series piqued my interest and Flegel quickly became one of my new favorite people. In a past life, Flegel was the frontman of Canadian indie-rock band Women, who famously imploded in a Halloween-costumed, guitar-smashing onstage meltdown in 2010. Soon afterwards, Flegel began dressing in drag and his "diva alter-ego" Cindy Lee was born. Sometimes a full band, sometimes a solo act, Cindy Lee has a strikingly guileless, idiosyncratic, and oft-disturbing aesthetic that almost feels like outsider art. On Act of Tenderness, Flegel's vision focuses primarily on intimately and eerily channeling '60s girl-group pop through a hissing and hallucinatory fog of melancholy. Some songs certainly work better than others, but when Cindy hits the mark, it feels like a memory-haunted chanteuse has stepped directly out of David Lynch's imagination and become actual flesh and blood.
I was a bit surprised to belatedly discover that Irisarri’s latest release was conceived as an imaginary soundtrack to the Doomsday Clock, as Midnight Colours is often an atypically warm and beautiful release, shedding much of the pervasive melancholy that runs throughout his previous work. Perhaps, however, it would be more accurate to say that Irisarri has merely become a bit better at effectively wielding that melancholy, as the shadows that shroud the lush heaven of Midnight Colours tend to add depth and gravitas without crossing the line into brooding reverie. That may sound like a subtle evolution, yet it is quite an important one from my standpoint, as Irisarri's eternal somberness was always a bit of an obstacle for me. I am not normally one to praise accessibility, but I am delighted by it in this instance, as his grainy, hissing, and gorgeously enveloping drones have rarely been more listenable than they are here.
