Just as I begin to become burned out on Kawabata Makoto and the rest of his musical family, some flash of genius on their part pulls me back in. Most often, this is in the form of a live performance that sets me up for another year or so of worship. In this case, it is a reissue of a long out of print and glorious live album. Documenting the group during a tour of America and Europe in 1999, the classic line-up tear through time and space with some of the finest psychedelic rock to grace any stage at any point.
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!
|
Amid a string of releases from Kompakt this fall—including Total 12 and albums from Gui Boratto and Walls—comes the label's crown jewel of 2011, Axel Willner's third full-length as the Field. Looping State of Mind holds up to Willner's impressive back catalog, and features several of his most fully realized songs to date.
This companion release to this year's stellar Ravedeath, 1972 draws back the curtain to unveil what Tim Hecker compositions sound like before they are properly ravaged, carved up, and reassembled.  As it turns out, they still sound remarkably good: some depth and power is understandably lost, but the increased clarity and intimacy makes that seem like a perfectly acceptable sacrifice.  Naturally, the target audience for Dropped Pianos is primarily those who already know and love Hecker's work, but these stripped-down piano sketches are strong enough to transcend their skeletal status and stand on their own.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to finally grasp exactly what was so special about Nathan Amundson's work, as it is very easy to lump Rivulets in with '90s slowcore bands like Codeine after a casual listen.  That "casual" part was my mistake, as work like this demands complete attention to reveal its true depth. We're Fucked took five years to fully gestate and it sounds like it, as Amundson painstakingly distilled his songs to their very essence, leaving only naked honesty and restrained, but unflinching intensity.  The best moments are quietly devastating in a way that would be impossible if the songs were any less stark and glacial, as Nathan makes damn sure I don't miss a single word.
When Bermuda Drain came out earlier this year, Dominick Fernow was knowingly releasing a highly polarizing album. Bringing in things like melody and rhythm is a cardinal sin for the noise scene, and the rest of the record was simply too harsh for the beat oriented crowd to digest. In a way, this companion EP is more reined in, keeping the melodies in beats in some tracks, and allowing the harshness to dominate others.
Aaron Turner was pushing the boundaries of what was "metal" during his time in Isis, and his side project work, such as Greymachine and House of Low Culture, has done this in an even more dramatic fashion. After a slew of split and collaborative releases, many with Mamiffer (a project spearheaded by Turner's wife Faith Coloccia, who also plays here), Poisoned Soil is perhaps his first true "album" as HOLC in nearly a decade. That period of collaborating with others has paid off, as the album is a complex one that showcases Turner’s strengths within a tight, focused approach.
It has been 15 years since Helge Sten's iconic Deathprod project last surfaced with proper new material (aside from a teasing collaboration with Biosphere back in 2015) and he has been missed. Unsurprisingly, that long hiatus did not result in Sten's characteristically grim vision brightening at all. In fact, it has only grown darker, as the bulk of Occulting Disk is bleak void of seismic drones and nerve-jangling insectoid dissonance that Sten describes as an "anti-fascist ritual." I am not particularly optimistic about this album's chances in eradicating fascism any time soon, but the album definitely delivers on the ritualistic part, as this seems like a hell of a great soundtrack for summoning demons. While I am still on the fence about whether I love the stark, crushing blackness of Occulting Disk quite as much as the slightly wider emotional palette of earlier Deathprod, this album is undeniably an impressively visceral and monolithic artistic statement. That is more than enough to reaffirm Sten's status as one of the reigning kings of heavy drone, but the album builds towards an explosive climax that ensures that Occulting Disk feels like an exciting new chapter as well.
Mark Nelson's Pan•American project has been very quiet over the last several years, as he has been focusing instead on his Anjou collaboration with former Labradford bandmate Robert Donne. With A Son, however, Nelson returns to his solo work in bold and unexpected fashion (by his own quiet and understated standards, at least). In fact, there is very little that stylistically recalls Nelson's post-rock or smoky ambient-dub past at all here, though his aesthetic generally remains a very moody and slow-moving one. At the heart of A Son lies a handful of hushed vocal pieces that capture Nelson's vision at its most stripped-down, direct, and intimate. Those pieces are occasionally quite wonderful, making this release a fitful creative breakthrough of sorts. The rest of the album is not quite as striking, but the blend of songs, sleepily lovely ambient work, and hammered dulcimer pieces add up to pleasantly gentle and dreamlike whole.
A few months past its sell-by date for Valentine's Day, Skullflower's latest excursion into brutal, uncompromising noise-rock is not to be missed by those who'd rather skip the flowers, dinner and dancing, and get straight to the, uh... consummation.
