It is quite rare for two artists with successful solo careers to team up for a genuinely strong collaborative project that offers a fresh vision, but this debut full-length from Marielle V. Jakobsons and Chuck Johnson is the elusive exception that is arguably better than the sum of its parts. I say "arguably" only because each artist is already responsible (or at least partly responsible) for some albums that I have absolutely loved in the past. Notably, however, both artists have undergone significant stylistic evolutions in their careers, which may very well be the secret to a truly egoless and organic confluence of visions: neither was rigidly tied to a signature style, so finding a fertile common ground was probably just a natural outcome after playing together for a while. That said, the clear antecedent to this project is Johnson's gorgeous Balsams album (his first on pedal steel). As someone who was thoroughly beguiled by that album, it never would have occurred to me that Johnson might have been able to reach even greater heights with the help of a sympathetic foil on Fender Rhodes, but I am delighted that it occurred to Jakobsons (and that she was completely right).
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Releases from this Swedish free-folk ensemble have historically not been particularly easy to obtain, as only their reissued debut (2015's Inom Dig, Inom Mig) has thus far seen wide distribution (and most are not digitally available either). Happily, their fifth album is now getting a well-deserved reissue too, as 2017's Det Finns Ett Hjärta Som För Dig ("There is a heart for you") will see a US physical release in December. I actually snapped up the original version when it came out on Omlott, as I love this band, but I have yet to hear the first three releases that followed Inom Dig. I am certainly curious to hear what directions they take, as the gulf between Enhet För Frei Musik's debut and this album is quite a large and unexpected one: Inom Dig had a disjointed, haunted, and almost Jandek-ian feel, whereas this latest opus blends simple, tender and melodic songs with wonderfully strange and hallucinatory collages. While both albums are excellent and unique in their own right, Det Finns Ett Hjärta Som För Dig sounds far more like the work of a project with a fully defined and realized identity.
The last time I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness released a record, George W. Bush was president, Twitter was the latest social networking innovation, Burial was a new buzz word on everyone’s lips, and James Brown was still alive and touring. The Knife were riding high on the success of Silent Shout and Brainwashed readers were placing records by bands like Wolf Eyes, Comets on Fire, and Xiu Xiu high atop the annual reader’s poll. I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness won some recognition that year too. According to Plan nabbed a spot in the top five singles of the year and "The Owl" nearly beat out Boards of Canada’s "Dayvan Cowboy" for Brainwashed’s best loved music video of 2006. Then a seemingly terminal eight-year silence ensued. Now the band has returned with Dust, as if nothing happened. Their lineup is unchanged, Ministry’s Paul Baker is still behind the mixing board, and the artwork is as austere as before. And though much in the music is also familiar, the group’s focus has changed. They cast a wider net on Dust. There’s more variety and the songs are denser this time around, layered thick with circular melodies and crisscrossing guitars.
On this self-titled LP, the core duo of Sungod: Michael Sharp and Braden Balentine, create an odd combination of synth heavy folk infused rock music. A certain genre-hopping, overall post-rock feel may be notable, but for the most part the album is a strange amalgam of styles, combined in a way that sounds very different than the sum of its parts.
In the 32 years since beginning the project, Philip Best has made the transition from teenage instigator to respected artist and academic, with erratic smatterings of solo releases ever since. He might be best known for his time in Whitehouse, but the infrequent series of solo releases and collaborations as Consumer Electronics were nothing to be ignored either. Years in the making, Estuary English represents a new zenith in the project, in both content and presentation.
With its careful, hushed vibe and slow pacing, it is only all the more amazing that this 24 minute piece is the work of pure improvisation, without the benefit of practice or rehearsal. It is simply the product of four disciplined, like-minded individuals captured in the moment perfectly.
After two excellent recent split releases, the duo of Faith Coloccia and Aaron Turner have put out a full length CD that manages to spread out over an hour and still retain the variety of moody and complex sounds that they did so well in previous shorter bursts.
Following 1983's Soul Possession, Annie moved into a shed in Adrian Sherwood’s garden and slowly began assembling an album's worth of new material with his then-wife, Kishi Yamamoto.  The new songs were very different than her previous work: the scary and disturbed-sounding elements completely disappeared and Annie began to make a conscious attempt to assimilate pre-rock influences like Marlene Dietrich and Edith Piaf into her work.  The actual impact of those divas on her sound was still fairly slight at this point (1987) though, as Jackamo turned out to be a very weird, difficult, and transitional album.
This is the final part of a collaborative trilogy that Henrik Nordvargr Björkk and Masami Akita began back in 2004 and it reaffirms my long-standing belief that Merzbow is almost always more compelling when he is working with other people.  While the two artists divided up creating the raw material for the album, the end result certainly sounds like the duo shared a common vision.  For the most part, the blend of brooding synth drones, subtle pulsing, and Merz-blasts of white noise and dissonant feedback works beautifully, but Henrik and Masami admittedly lose a bit of steam over the album's second half when they ill-advisedly flog a single simple motif for almost half an hour.  Up until that point, however, Partikel III is a quite stellar effort.
This is the first LP by this Northern California sound artist, but he has been active for almost a decade and is most closely associated with the scene around the excellent Root Strata label.  Students of Decay is another appropriate home for Davis though, as Ask the Dust (a rare John Fante reference!) offers up quite a bit of warm drone that also dabbles its toes a bit in stuttering electronic chaos, field recordings, and more formal composition.  Ultimately, it is a bit too chameleonic and intermittently pastoral to fully work for me as a complete work, but several of the individual pieces are quite wonderful.
