I am not particularly familiar with any of the four artists involved in this unexpectedly audacious and unique album, but Celadon is definitely a kindred spirit to Important's previous iconoclastic, raga-influenced drone epics by Catherine Christer Hennix.  Charlemagne Palestine is yet another artist that unavoidably springs to mind, but favorably so: while this album is anything but derivative, Maja Ratkje and her collaborators share his willingness to take drone music into some very dissonant, uncategorizable, and cathartic territory.  Put more bluntly: Celadon is probably not for the average drone fan, as Ratkje's vocals gradually build to an almost demonic, window-rattling intensity, but it is nevertheless a bold, striking, and deceptively ferocious artistic statement that is like absolutely nothing else that I have heard.
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In a perfect world, an artist of Amara Touré’s caliber would need no introduction at all, but the real world is weird and mysterious enough to definitely warrant one in this case, so here it is: Tour
Turn off the mechanical, logic-soaked part of your brain and sympathetic resonance sounds like a magic trick, and looks like one too. It’s the phenomenon that explains why opera singers can shatter glass from across the room with nothing but their voice. Whether bright or ominous, the spontaneous ring (or explosion) of an untouched body or an unplayed string is provocative. It is a sign of sound’s invisible inner life, the one that has nothing to do with intentions or compositions, the one that John Cage implied when he suggested that writing music was a means of "waking up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and one’s desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord." That is the sort of life Mike Majkowski is after on Neighbouring Objects, his latest cassette on Astral Spirits. The title suggests sympathetic resonance abstractly, but it also describes Majkowski’s instrumentation, which for the first time includes bass guitar, accordion, piano, and percussion alongside the core of his double bass. Magical though it may seem, Majkowski uses these tools to emphasize both the affective and the measurable, more physical properties of sound.
The New Crimes is a dense, imposing boxed set in the way that legendary noise collections such as Ramleh's Awake and Sutcliffe Jugend's We Spit on Their Graves are. Previously released in 1995 in an edition of 10, this material obviously did not receive significant exposure. Murder Corporation might not be amongst the most well known of Italian noise artists, which is a shame given the diversity contained on these eight discs. However, the brown and murky, analog heavy lo-fi sound is one that can at times be impenetrable and oppressive. Though daunting, the varying approaches Moreno Daldosso uses in composition result in a diverse, yet still bleak and violent piece of art.
Initially I was not sure what to expect from this pairing. I know Sachiko's solo work can be a varying mix of beauty and ugly, and Junko via Hijokaidan, which is always intensely, yet brilliantly abrasive. On Vasilisa the Beautiful, harshness is the clear winner. Two vocal performances of raw throated dissonance over a bed of electronics, recorded live, makes for anything but an easy album to listen to.
With these two near-simultaneous releases, Joao Da Silva's Luciernaga takes two different approaches to his not quite noise, not quite musical. To the Centre of the City in the Night is the more fleshed out release, with its five pieces running the gamut from bowed string drones to harsher electronics. Tile II, a follow up to the similarly titled release from last year is more immediate, which is fitting a super-limited tape and free digital release. They are two sides of the same coin, with both being enthralling in their own ways.
With only a handful of releases available, Granite Mask is quite an enigma. Little information about the project can be found online, and the artwork on their output is abstract to stay the least. The lack of information is fitting their murky, abstract sound, which does a brilliant job of mixing conventional electronic rhythms with dissonant, abstract blasts of noise.
Initially founded as a side project of Club Rialto, with the line-up expanded over time to include the likes of Roel Meelkop and Frans de Waard (so a veritable who’s-who of Dutch experimental music), THU20 has been sporadically active since their formation almost 30 years ago. This set collects compilation pieces and unreleased live performances largely from the 1980s and early 1990s, and acts as an excellent overview of this period, while still managing to compliment their studio albums.
I hate to throw around the woefully overused phrase "great lost album," but Aguirre stumbled onto something quite amazing with this record.  I have no idea if Tim Robertson is still involved in music at all these days, but in his teens he was a church organist who traveled the world with his missionary parents.  After returning to Barcelona following a few years in Africa, he bought a four-track and spent two years obsessed with the idea of creating music "for future temples on Neptune and Saturn."  Eventually, that bizarre phase passed and Tim threw out all of his recordings except for two tapes, which he gave to his (presumably bewildered) parents as a gift.  Roughly 20 years later, those surreal experiments have now publicly surfaced thanks to a chance meeting in a thrift store.  This is "outsider" music for sure, but its guileless simplicity and elegiac beauty nevertheless place it very high in the pantheon of early New Age fringe-dwellers.
This sort of dark, atmospheric work has always been a favorite of mine, but too often I find the records hard to discern from one another. Between the Horizon and the Abyss does not have this problem at all, because while there is a consistency from piece to piece, it is far from monochromatic. Each individual composition has a distinct sound and mood that makes for a dynamic, ever changing piece of music. That variation from piece to piece is where this album excels.
