As far as I can tell, this is the first major Silver Apples album to appear in almost 20 years, though Simeon Coxe has kept busy with singles, remixes, collaborations, and his other band (Amphibian Lark) in the meantime.  Interestingly, the Silver Apples aesthetic of 2016 is almost identical to that of 1968: the production is a bit different and Coxe has adapted to playing without a drummer, but Clinging to a Dream sounds every bit as bizarre and unique as the band's self-titled debut.  If there is a significant difference, it is merely that Coxe has gone from sounding like an iconoclast ingeniously ahead of his time to sounding like an ingeniously retro-futurist iconoclast.  Admittedly, Coxe’s imagination, inventiveness, and instrumental prowess continue to exceed his songwriting and vocal talents, but Dream's weaknesses are generally rendered irrelevant by the singularity of his vision.
Angharad Davies and Tisha Mukarji’s contribution to Another Timbre’s "Violin+1" series takes the already blurry distinction between composed and improvised music and blurs it beyond meaning. As odd a title as Ffansïon | Fancies is, it encapsulates the process of investigation and refinement evident everywhere in Davies and Mukarji’s sympathetic playing. "Fancy" here connotes the formation of images, synthetic activity, and the work of the imagination—a de- and re-construction of both the piano and the violin that produces a pseudo-Cubist view of both instruments. Exploded and rearranged, they slip in and out of familiar configurations, darting constantly between energy and form.
This terrific debut from Indonesia shows how passion, rage and sorrow translate into any language. It's a concept album reflecting cultural destruction and persistence; echoing Melt Banana, Naked City, and zeuhl before devolving into folk laments with added flute.
While there doesn't seem to be any specific concept to unify both sides of this split LP, there doesn’t need to be. Instead, it is a strong paring of a relatively young artist and one who has a long and established career, with both providing material that is quite different from each other.
Last year I reviewed Seaworthy's 
The last Boduf Songs album featured a reproduction of a Zdzisław Beksiński painting. His fantastic art always conveys a sense of doom which reaches far beyond the borders of the picture itself. On this album, Mathew Sweet fully captures this same sense of unearthly displacement: "There’s no way out and no way home." The music of Boduf Songs has also been pushed further than before; while the dreamy campfire arrangements are still present there is also a massive diversion into previously unexplored (at least by Sweet and company) musical territories. The end result is the best Boduf Songs album yet.
