Marisa Anderson has quietly been one of the most reliably excellent solo guitarists around for years, slowly amassing a fine discography of limited releases that occasionally get a well-deserved reissue. The handful that I have heard, however, do not quite capture the full extent of Anderson's powers, as it has historically been very easy to lump her in with the overcrowded post-Fahey milieu. On Cloud Corner, her Thrill Jockey debut and most high-profile release to date, she simultaneously celebrates and transcends her folk/blues origins, drawing in Spanish and Taureg influences and fleshing out her sound with a host of effects, added instrumentation, and overdubs. It is remarkable how much difference making full use of a studio can make: Anderson's virtuosity and gift for strong melodies remain as delightful as ever, but her work has never sounded quite this vibrant, varied, and evocative. Cloud Corner is definitely Anderson's finest release to date (and occasionally also the best album that Six Organs of Admittance never recorded).
Look up Music for gazing upwards brought to you by Meat Beat Manifesto & scott crow, +/-, Aurora Borealis, The Veldt, Not Waving & Romance, W.A.T., The Handover, Abul Mogard & Rafael Anton Irisarri, Mulatu Astatke, Paul St. Hilaire & René Löwe, Songs: Ohia, and Shellac. Aurora Borealis image from California by Steve. Get involved: subscribe, review, rate, share with your friends, send images!
|
Carsten Nicolai and Ryuichi Sakamoto have a fairly lengthy history of collaborations, but this is an especially fascinating (if brief) one: an improvised performance in Philip Johnson’s legendary Glass House that coincided with the opening of a Yayoi Kusama installation. A lot of the appeal unsurprisingly lies in the duo's process, as they used the house itself as an instrument, contact mic’ing the walls and rubbing them with rubber mallets. However, Glass is also quite beautiful as a pure listening experience, striking an absorbing balance between ghostly ambiance and a crystalline and glittering rain of slow-motion glass fragments.
Unsurprisingly, Long Trax 2 sounds like a direct continuation of the first album Will Long (Celer) issued in 2016. Self-described as a "house" album, Long’s interpretation of the classic genre takes some liberties with expectations as far as the style goes.  Sure, the rhythms are there and the primary focus, but Long filters the standard facets of the style through his minimalist approach to sound he established in the ambient space of Celer, resulting in a meditative album that is far more calm than club friendly.
Ester Kärkkäinen’s 2016 debut as Himukalt, Conditions of Acrimony was an extremely impressive release that featured some excellently dark moments within ambiguous noise compositions. For her first vinyl album, Knife Through the Spine, she has fully embraced the early 1990s power electronic scene, creating a dark, disturbing, and at times extremely aggressive record that has a tighter, more specific focus in its sound. However, her unique take on the style, as well as her nuanced approach to creating music results in a fresh, unique release that sounds like no one else.
I still optimistically cling to the hope that Marc Richter will someday release another masterpiece in the vein 2009's Alphabet 1968 or 2014's Black to Comm, but his Jemh Circs project seems to be sticking around for the long haul and is proving to be quite an intriguing diversion in the meantime. Much like the first Jemh Circs album, (untitled) Kingdom is a deranged and fractured rabbit hole of cannibalized and re-purposed YouTube clips, though it feels like Richter has gone a bit deeper down that uniquely post-modern path this time around: this is very much a disorienting and lysergic playground of gleeful experimentation and deconstruction from start to finish. As such, much of (untitled) Kingdoms' appeal lies in its sheer otherworldly mindfuckery. However, the album's second half occasionally allows some unexpected vistas of alien beauty to break through Richter's stuttering and kaleidoscopic fever dream.
Shumoto & The Byrde, the duo of guitarists Austin Hatch and Jefferson Pitcher have collaborated before, but their shared connection with Pauline Oliveros, with Hatch being been a fan of her work, and Pitcher studied under her at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute helped to motivate this collaboration. With eight pieces spread across two records, all improvised live with a small amount of overdubbing when necessary, the duo have created a beautiful and fitting tribute to one of experimental music’s luminaries.
I have made a few sincere attempts to appreciate this shifting German collective over the years, but Datashock have proven to be a very hard act to wrap my head around. At times, they have seemed like an indulgent, improv-heavy pastiche of various seminal krautrock artists, yet they also have moments where it feels like they are actually the rightful heirs to the throne vacated by folks like Amon Düül II and Can. In fact, I suspect the latter would especially appreciate the perverse post-modern genius of Datashock being an ethnographic forgery of their own cultural heritage. I know I certainly do. In any case, this is the first Datashock release that has truly clicked for me. It is still uneven and exasperating at times, but such missteps are a rare exception and the second half of the album catches fire beautifully. While Datashock remain deeply and unapologetically in the thrall of the past, the best moments on Kräuter are inventive and inspired enough to transcend and surpass most of the bands they are hell-bent on channeling.
I have been casually familiar with London-based guitarist Cam Deas for years through his many "post-Takoma" releases on Blackest Rainbow, but the Cam Deas of the past bears virtually no resemblance to the artist responsible for the visceral and deranged Time Exercises. Deas' campaign of radical reinvention appears to have begun sometime around 2011 with his Quadtych series and fully blossomed (or so I thought) with 2014's String Studies, in which his guitar became a mere trigger for squalls of atonal and spasmodic electronic chaos. With Time Exercises, Deas gamely ventures still further from his comfort zone, setting his guitar aside completely to focus on complex modular synth experiments. The album's prosaic/academic-sounding title is an amusingly huge and deceptive understatement though–a far more appropriate title would be "Nightmare Studies" or "Holy Fuck–What is This?!?," as Studies aesthetically resembles a cross between Rashad Becker's Notional Species and a seething pit of digitized snakes from a hellish alien dimension.
This new project is the debut release on the new Nahal imprint, bringing together Mondkopf's Paul Régimbeau and Lebanese artist Charbel Haber. In a rough sense, Good Luck in Death shares Mondkopf's heavy drone aesthetic, but Haber's presence shifts that vision into more diffuse, fragmented, and hallucinatory territory. The result is frequently quite haunting and sublime, as the duo craft an immersive world of darkly beautiful and blackened ambient drone mingled with flickering glimpses of a buried organ mass.
This sprawling double CD of extended harmonium performances was my first real exposure to the solo work of Sylvester Anfang II's Glen Steenkiste and it is quite a curious introduction. The closest kindred spirits are probably La Monte Young's "The Second Dream of the High Tension Line" or Stars of the Lid at their most pastoral, as Steenkiste devotes his energies to crafting deep, meditative drones that strain towards lightness and transcendence. Hellvete's work is not nearly as harmonically adventurous as the just intonation/Pandit Pran Nath-inspired milieu, but Steenkiste compensates somewhat with an unusual feel for time and a willingness to blur together music, ritual, and chance intrusions from the natural world. The less inspired passages tend to feel like sustained and halcyon suspended animation to me, yet Droomharmonium occasionally transforms into an entrancing bit of magic and wonder when Steenkiste is joined by some curious birds or the harmonium disappears to make way for some eerily twinkling bells.
