While not much time has elapsed since his last full length album, Matt Weston has created another masterwork of unconventional electronics, bizarre found sounds, and some of his idiosyncratic drum work. Compared to last year's This is Your Rosemont Horizon, this feels a bit darker and bleaker, amidst the fragmented electronics and snatches of melody. Regardless of the downer mood, it is another brilliantly unique piece of music that sounds like no one else but Matt Weston.
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After a few recent, highly conceptual and very long-form works, Francisco López has gone back to basics with his latest release. Consisting of a single 60 minute piece, packaged in a plain sleeve with the most limited of artwork, he is at his traditional, reductive best. With little information given as to the source material or the strategies used in creating the piece, it emphasizes the sound above all else, and it is another diverse, brilliantly composed piece of art from the legendary composer.
The enigmatic Norweigan duo of D√∏dsmaskin made the decision to intentionally split the sound of √òdelagt into two distinct types on their first vinyl release. The first half showcases their more structured industrial tendencies: surges of noise, harsh abstract rhythms and rumbling bass synth passages. On the other half there is less structure and more flow: melodic passages that drift like a harsher Tangerine Dream and a sound that is dark, but not oppressive. Taken separately both are great, but paired together it makes for an even better release.
The concept of artists re-purposing existing music and other recorded sounds into an abstract collage or new composition has certainly been done before, and quite often. However, when it is done expertly, such as on Exploded View, it can be an amazing method of work. Colin Andrew Sheffield and James Eck Rippie approach the methodology from two technological extremes: analog turntables and digital samplers. The final product bears little resemblance to anything identifiable, resulting in a piece of music that is entirely their unique work and is captivating regardless of its construction
I cannot think of many other artists in the ambient/experimental milieu who are as unwaveringly reliable as Scott Morgan, although his last major release (Monument Builders) admittedly threw some unexpected new elements into the mix. With Equivalents, however, he returns to his comfort zone for yet another lovely suite of lush and elegantly blurred ambient soundscapes. Morgan’s inspiration this time around was Alfred Stieglitz's iconic series of cloud photographs, which could not possibly be less surprising or more apt: the Loscil aesthetic has long been the musical equivalent of a sky full of slow-moving, abstract cloud shapes and Equivalents is an archetypal example of that. Nevertheless, the Loscil aesthetic still continues to evolve in subtle ways, as Morgan eases up a bit on his characteristic melancholy, resulting in one of his warmest and most quietly lovely releases to date. It is possible that Morgan may have learned a thing or two about balancing light and dark from Stieglitz's striking photos, but the real beauty of this album lies in how he masterfully and seamlessly dissolves chords and melodies into gorgeously dreamlike and gently churning abstraction.
Following their last work, the lengthy two CD Circular Time, the double record The Great Unlearning features core Ramleh members Gary Mundy and Anthony Di Franco again staying largely in rock mode, but comparably bringing a bit more of their noise history back into the fray. With an expanded roster of both drummers Stuart Dennison and Martyn Watts, as well as long time collaborator Philip Best and his Consumer Electronics partner Sarah Fröelich, the final product is their most varied, fully realized work to date, blending their guitar focused sounds with the early electronic experimentation from the band's inception.
After two amazing, although tantalizingly short albums in the past five years (2014's Estuary English and 2015's Dollhouse Songs), the Consumer Electronics trio lineup of founder Philip Best, Sarah Fröelich, and Russell Haswell have decided to go all out on this hour long, double record masterpiece. Turning the thematic focus from the bleakness of austerity, pre-Brexit United Kingdom to the bleakness and violence of Donald Trump's America (where Best and Fröelich emigrated before the recording of this record), Airless Space is another work of fragmented, destroyed electronics and forceful, violent vocals. Besides how strongly it stands as an individual work of art, Airless Space also makes it abundantly clear how much CE has evolved since beginning as a teenaged Best with a shortwave radio, a microphone, and a lot of annoyed people around him.
I was recently very surprised to discover that Kali Malone is from Colorado, as she has been quite an uncannily ubiquitous and quietly influential presence in European experimental music circles over the last couple of years. That role is especially remarkable given how her solo work increasingly sounds like it could have been composed a few hundred years ago (a direction largely rooted in a fateful meeting with an organ tuner). This latest release is the culmination of Malone's recent passion for pipe organs, following in the wake of last year's brief yet excellent Organ Dirges 2016-2017 EP (Ascetic House). The two releases are quite similar aesthetically, as Malone remains quite found of slow-moving and meditatively drone-like compositions, but The Sacrificial Code is simultaneously simpler and more ambitious than its concise predecessor.  In fact, this sprawling double album of organ works is an absolutely monolithic statement (and a fitfully mesmerizing one at that). To my ears, it admittedly errs a bit on the side of overwhelming, but The Sacrificial Code is probably exactly the album that longtime fans were hoping Malone would someday release.
This latest release from Lea Bertucci ambitiously follows in the footsteps of Pauline Oliveros' landmark Deep Listening album (1989), though site-specific performances are certainly nothing new for the NY-based saxophonist/composer. In this instance, the site was the Marine A Grain Elevator at Silo City in Buffalo, which NNA Tapes describes as a "silent, hulking concrete corpse" that stands 130 feet tall. Unlike Oliveros, Bertucci chose to make her celebration of extreme natural reverb largely a solo affair, using the 12-second decay of the cavernous enclosure to create a rich haze of sustained drones and ghostly harmonies. After the initial performance, however, she reworked the material with the aid of some collaborators, so the final album is a bit more complex and layered than a solo sax performance might have been. Not much more though, as Resonant Field's primary appeal lies in those original performances, making it a very different animal than its more composed predecessor Metal Aether.
This second installment of Blank Forms' ongoing Christer Hennix archival series is quite a radical departure from the wonderful Selected Early Keyboard Works, which is a hell of a surprise as both albums originate from roughly the same period (Stockholm, 1976). The key difference is that Keyboard Works was composed of (mostly) solo rehearsal tapes made during the Dream Music Festival, while Hegikan Roku captures the ensemble's actual public performance. In fact, it was to be The Deontic Miracle's only public performance, as Hennix wryly notes that the trio were "the most rejected band ever formed in Sweden." While that is somewhat heartbreaking, it is easy to see why this project was not warmly embraced: challenging art is often described as being "ahead of its time," but The Deontic Miracle must have seemed like they existed outside of time altogether. Even by today's standards, an amplified Renaissance oboe and sarangi trio playing dissonant, Just Intonation drone music would likely clear a room instantly (as would a lot of other albums that I like). As such, this is definitely one of Christer Hennix's most difficult releases, but it features some very bold and uncompromising work indeed. It is wonderful to see it finally surface.
