It is increasingly difficult to discuss Alex Cobb's career without invoking the name "Andrew Chalk," as the similarities between the two artists are impossible to miss.  For one, they both run fine record labels and they both make elegant, understated, and quiet albums.  More importantly, they both seem to share a curious drive to endlessly revisit the same stylistic thread in hopes of someday distilling it to absolute perfection.  That being the case, Chantepleure will absolutely not surprise anyone who has picked up any of Cobb's previous albums: it offers more of the same (which is quite good), but it is now a bit more sophisticated and nuanced than it was last time around.
Two new shows just for you. We have squeezed out two extended release episodes for this weekend to get you through this week. They contain mostly new songs but there's also new issues from the vaults. The first show features music from Rider/Horse, Mint Field, Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, Anastasia Coope, ISAN, Stone Music, La Securite, Bark Psychosis, Jon Rose, Master Wilburn Burchette, Umberto, Wand, Tim Koh, Sun An, and Memory Drawings. The second episode has music by Laibach, Melt-Banana, Chuck Johnson, X, K. Yoshimatsu, Dorothy Carter, Pavel Milyakov, Violence Gratuite, Mark Templeton, Dummy, Endon, body / negative, Midwife, Alberto Boccardi, Divine. Cow in Maui from Veronika in Vienna. Get involved: subscribe, review, rate, share with your friends, send images!
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Two of the three songs that comprise Fraufraulein's Extinguishment start with a single foundational sound. On "Whalebone in a Treeless Landscape," it is Anne Guthrie’s French horn that initiates the performance. Dripping water and the ring of a large, resonant metallophone follow immediately after. "My Left Hand, Your Right Hand" commences with a solitary, almost piercing electronic pitch, like an emergency broadcast signal stuck on a single wavering tone. After a few seconds, it is joined by an echoey snap, a distant singing voice, and the booming of a bass drum or a floor tom. They are both deceptively simple beginnings, richer in content and potential than their starkness implies. Billy Gomberg and Anne Guthrie treat them like seeds from which to grow and prune their compositions. They blend field recordings, of rain and a patriotic Norwegian parade for example, with scrapyard detritus, pair foghorn drones with the bristly friction of surface noise, and balance the eerie ambience of humming wires against a distorted monastic chant, all while maintaining a delicate connection with those first embryonic moments. The way they achieve that consonance and balance—between the acoustic and electronic instruments and in the structures of the songs themselves—defines the album.
I had never heard Retribution Body before this album (which is a shame), but Aokigahara immediately got my attention for: 1.) being inspired by Japan's legendarily demon-haunted "suicide forest," and 2.) being released on the hyper-discriminating and oft-dormant Type label.  Also, it is a unique and near-great album.  Matthew Azevedo's singular drone performance/bass tone study has already drawn favorable comparisons to artists like Sunn O))) and Earth, but I actually see it much more in line with more formal electronic composers like Eliane Radigue, as it has a chiseled purity to it that feels very different than amplifier-worship (at times, anyway).  That said, Aokigahara is still quite heavy.
Eric Quach has been producing works of experimental guitar and electronic drone for about a decade as thisquietarmy. His first full length album since last year's Rebirths, Anthems for Catharsis has as much weight and heaviness as its dramatic title would imply. A perfect balance of dissonance and beauty, the six songs elegantly drift from darkness to lightness, often within the confines of a single piece.
For years, Netherworld's Alessandro Tedeschi has been curating a label that has embraced the cold, frigid minimalism of electronic music. Now via a new sub-label imprint, Iceberg, he has changed the template a bit. While Glacial Movements was a fitting name for the slow drifts of expansive sound, Iceberg fits this debut as a more kinetic, aggressive, and in this case, beat oriented sound.
For the inaugural release in their new Folio sub-imprint, Touch has paired Mika Vainio with photographer Joséphine Michel for a joint photography and music project heavily focused on the abstract nature sound and its impact on the other senses and mediums. With heavy use of white exposure on the photographs, and the heavily treated use of white noise on the CD, it culminates in a very strong synthesis of audio and visual.
Since returning to the world of music, ACL's Elden M. has been quite prolific, releasing a batch of new cassettes under his previous noise-associated moniker, while also taking on the world of rhythm-based electronic music as Avellan Cross. Although issued as Allegory Chapel Ltd., GNOSIS: Themes for Rituals Sacred & Profane draws from both of his major projects. Dissonance appears more in a compositional sense, but his use of undistorted synths is largely not something that can be danced to.
I can always count on Richard Skelton to find the strangest and most unexpected inspirations for his albums and he does not disappoint me with his latest: Belated Movements is largely based upon the "Lindow Man," a well-preserved body found in a peat bog in the ‘80s.  As far as ancient bog bodies go, Lindow Man surely ranks among the most hapless, having met a violent (possibly ritualistic) death by being strangled AND having his throat cut, then getting freeze-died and displayed in a museum two thousand years later.  Given that base material, it is hardly surprising that Movements is a much more sadness-steeped affair than any of Skelton’s other recent work, resembling nothing less than an atypically industrial-damaged and time-stretched requiem.
This very odd session was recorded live at Café Oto back in June 2013, pairing Palestine with Grumbling Fur's improv/drone guise for a night of truly bizarre and uncharacteristic fare.  Aside from some occasional vocals, much of the throbbing rustic psychedelia of the excellent first half sounds almost nothing like Charlemagne’s previous work (parts of it even resemble an Acid Mothers Temple-style freak-out).  Then, of course, there is the second half, which sometimes sounds like Steve Reich out of his mind on amphetamines, bashing away at a piano in the middle of a Japanese orgy that disturbingly also includes several sheep and some singing toys.
A reissue of a previously limited self-released cassette, the newest release from Christian Dubé is as uplifting as its title. While it might be (extremely) dark, it is also an exceptionally well done melding of clattering rhythms and harsh electronics dissonance that clearly pays homage to the two genres’ innovators, but the sound is anything but a direct copy.
