20 February 2016

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Albums and Singles

Few years ago, an idea germinated while reading The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. An idea not driven by the narrativity of the book, but by the traces and the aura invoked in it. That was it: an audible auratic journey trough the memories of a place lost in the heights of the Swiss mountains.

A century after the events depicted in the book, we went where the story took place, trying to capture the remaining sounds that could have been heard at the time, and the ghosts who might have still wandered around.

Zauberberg is based on these captures, on recordings of the music played by Hans Castorp (the novel’s main character), on acoustic/electronic instrumentation and digital processing. The result is an evocation of time and duration, an exploration of what remains and what is lost, a meditation of the dissolution and persistence of the aura surrounding everything.

— Kassel Jaeger, Nov. 19, 2015

More information can be found here.

20 February 2016

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Ethics and passion in their purest form. Welcome to the world of Sarah Records, active between 1987-1995, and possibly the most indie of all indie labels. This is a documentary where principles prevail and attitude and actions are just as important as the music. Heroics and belligerence, ephemeral-eternal-pop, fanzines and the incorruptible founders Clare Wadd and Matt Haynes. Their inspirations, the records, the bands, the letters, the long list of journalists that detested Sarah, the fans that love Sarah...The defiance and determination of our founding duo and and their final declaration. Their focus on something that was non-commercial and exciting, as if music could change lives and mean SOMETHING. My Secret World is a resounding reminder that music doesn’t need to be about posturing, production or money to be an outright success.

My Secret World.  The Story Of Sarah Records is the first feature length documentary to explore this influential and often misunderstood label. Now the label founders, former Sarah band members, music critics and those that have been inspired by the label tell their story.

The production of this documentary has been made possible by the generosity of everyone involved; the artists who've permitted their music to feature in the soundtrack, the interviewees for their time and help, the film makers who helped film the interviews and the Sarah fans who donated archive footage and photographs.

Directed and funded by Lucy Dawkins, My Secret World has been 4 years in the making.  More information can be found here.

"Intimate portrait of a quietly radical indie outfit" -Uncut

20 February 2016

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Front 242, Tuxedomoon, Eric Random and more not-disco classics for the dancefloor.

JD Twitch has done more than most to improve our record collections this year, introducing us to some incredible post-punk rarities on his Optimo Music compilation [Cease & Desist] and releasing an inspired intercontinental collaboration featuring young musicians from Glasgow, Ghana and Belize on his Autonomous Africa imprint.

For his next trick, Keith McIvor is going back to his roots with a compilation of club favourites from his earliest days behind the mixer. "So Low is an occasional night at The Poetry Club in Glasgow where I play some of the music I played when I first started DJing back in 1987," McIvor explains.

"At that time the audience I played to mostly loathed what I was playing and rarely danced, but then shortly after, when house music arrived, I found a different audience who actually liked to dance."

At the request of his wife, and some friends who were too young to hear these songs in the club at the time, he now runs the So Low night as an excuse to give records by the likes of Front 242 and Chris & Cosey another airing. "It has an extremely enthusiastic audience, a joyous atmosphere and is the antithesis of what a club in Scotland playing this music nearly 30 years ago would have been like," he explains.

The So Low compilation focuses on some lesser known stars of cold wave, from UK and European minimalists like P1/E, Colin Potter and Gerry & The Holograms, to US industrial band Hunting Lodge and avant-garde San Francisco collective Tuxedomoon, as well as a number of French and Belgian acts such as Siglo XX, Front 242, Marc Verhaeghen’s The Klinik and Clair Obscur.

Teaming up with The Vinyl Factory for the releases, McIvor has also enlisted contemporary cold-wave fans Powell and Helena Hauff to provide remixes for their favourite tracks on the compilation, which seems like a very good idea to us.

Check out the tracklist below, and look out for the compilation on February 19 on 2xLP, CD and digital, with the remixes following soon after.

More information can be found here.

Tracklist:

• John Bender – ‘Victims of a Victimless Crime’
• Hunting Lodge – ‘Tribal Warning Shot’
• Throbbing Gristle – ‘Discipline (Berlin)’
• Front 242 – ‘Kampfbereit’
• The Klinik – ‘Moving Hands’
• P1/E – ’49 Second Romance’
• Colin Potter – ‘Power’
• Eric Random – ‘Fade In’
• Conrad Schnitzler & Wolfgang Seidel Meissner – ‘Fabrik’
• Gerry & The Holograms – ‘Gerry & The Holograms’
• Chris & Cosey – ‘Passion’
• Hard Corps – ‘Porte Bonheur (Remix)’
• Holger Hiller – ‘Das Feuer’
• Siglo XX – ‘Dreams of Pleasure’
• Clair Obscur – ‘Toundra’
• Tuxedomoon – ‘No Tears’

20 February 2016

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Front 242, Tuxedomoon, Eric Random and more not-disco classics for the dancefloor.

JD Twitch has done more than most to improve our record collections this year, introducing us to some incredible post-punk rarities on his Optimo Music compilation [Cease & Desist] and releasing an inspired intercontinental collaboration featuring young musicians from Glasgow, Ghana and Belize on his Autonomous Africa imprint.

For his next trick, Keith McIvor is going back to his roots with a compilation of club favourites from his earliest days behind the mixer. "So Low is an occasional night at The Poetry Club in Glasgow where I play some of the music I played when I first started DJing back in 1987," McIvor explains.

"At that time the audience I played to mostly loathed what I was playing and rarely danced, but then shortly after, when house music arrived, I found a different audience who actually liked to dance."

At the request of his wife, and some friends who were too young to hear these songs in the club at the time, he now runs the So Low night as an excuse to give records by the likes of Front 242 and Chris & Cosey another airing. "It has an extremely enthusiastic audience, a joyous atmosphere and is the antithesis of what a club in Scotland playing this music nearly 30 years ago would have been like," he explains.

The So Low compilation focuses on some lesser known stars of cold wave, from UK and European minimalists like P1/E, Colin Potter and Gerry & The Holograms, to US industrial band Hunting Lodge and avant-garde San Francisco collective Tuxedomoon, as well as a number of French and Belgian acts such as Siglo XX, Front 242, Marc Verhaeghen’s The Klinik and Clair Obscur.

Teaming up with The Vinyl Factory for the releases, McIvor has also enlisted contemporary cold-wave fans Powell and Helena Hauff to provide remixes for their favourite tracks on the compilation, which seems like a very good idea to us.

Check out the tracklist below, and look out for the compilation on February 19 on 2xLP, CD and digital, with the remixes following soon after.

More information can be found here.

Tracklist:

• John Bender – ‘Victims of a Victimless Crime’
• Hunting Lodge – ‘Tribal Warning Shot’
• Throbbing Gristle – ‘Discipline (Berlin)’
• Front 242 – ‘Kampfbereit’
• The Klinik – ‘Moving Hands’
• P1/E – ’49 Second Romance’
• Colin Potter – ‘Power’
• Eric Random – ‘Fade In’
• Conrad Schnitzler & Wolfgang Seidel Meissner – ‘Fabrik’
• Gerry & The Holograms – ‘Gerry & The Holograms’
• Chris & Cosey – ‘Passion’
• Hard Corps – ‘Porte Bonheur (Remix)’
• Holger Hiller – ‘Das Feuer’
• Siglo XX – ‘Dreams of Pleasure’
• Clair Obscur – ‘Toundra’
• Tuxedomoon – ‘No Tears’

20 February 2016

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Ecstatic offer a fascinating, often dizzying insight to the primitive industrial minimalism of Italian siblings, Giancarlo and Roberto Drago, a.k.a. The Tapes, via Selected Works 1982 - 1992 sourced from original tapes and pressed to vinyl for the first time ever.

Following on from Ecstatic’s issue of "mail artist" Danielle Ciullini’s Domestic Exile Collected Works 82-86, this set surveys a blind-spot in most people’s knowledge of early '80s Italian underground music, framed against a backdrop of the Anni di Piombo, or Years of Lead - a period of domestic political turmoil between the late '60s and early '80s - and the mushroom shadow of nuclear war.

These 21 tracks, drawn from 10 different, limited tape releases, perfectly distill a wandering, weirdo spirit, ranging from the funereal swagger of Tanz Fabrik and the darkwave hip-thrust of The Day of Silence to freeform, motorik trajectories such as Time Out of Joint and singular enigmas like the Actress-esque bobble of The Wait and Falso Movimento B2’s weightless, hyaline spindles.

Collected and compiled by Alessio Natalizia (aka Not Waving) and remastered by Matt Colton, Selected Works 1982 - 1992 represents a decade of modest but searching and instinctively grooving experimentation of the rarest, precious and compelling kind.

As Giancarlo Drago explains:

“The Tapes was an unplanned experience, an unplanned need to express myself.  Looking back on this music I wonder sometimes how I did it - the whole process from the concept to the completion. Everything I do now seems trivial and obvious and I just end up aborting the idea. And exactly for this reason I think that everything has its time, with a beginning and an end...”

More information can be found here.

14 February 2016

Administrator

Albums and Singles

This is a well-deserved and expanded vinyl reissue of the absolutely stellar My Body is A Dying Machine EP, which Justin Broadrick quietly released in digital-only format back in 2010. So quietly, in fact, that I completely missed it the first time around.  As with most expanded releases, the added material in this case is not exactly crucial, as most of the best songs were already on the original EP.  It is quite good though and the appeal of Black Dollars does not lie so much in its enhancements as it does in the fact that Downwards have resurrected some prime Broadrick material that snuck by most casual fans.  Stylistically, Black Dollars is very much in the "instrumental version of Jesu" vein, capturing Broadrick at his shoegaze-mode zenith.

Downwards

Black Dollars opens in fine fashion with its previous namesake, "My Body is a Dying Machine."  Built upon an insistent, overdriven bass throb, "Body" unfolds as a languorously swaying and sizzling haze of slow-moving guitar and synth tones.  The bass foundation is an essential part of the piece's success, as the deep undercurrent of dense, distorted rumble prevents the dreamy foreground from ever seeming too weightless.  Also, Broadrick makes some inspired textural choices, as the bass has a nice stuttering sizzle that sounds like a hapless amplifier being pushed to its limits.  Also, one of the many half-buried layers in the piece sounds like a vocal track that has been time-stretched and reversed.  That creates an extremely cool effect in which it seems like words are trying to fight their way through all the guitar shimmer, but never quite making it far enough to be intelligible.  It is an absolutely sublime and perfectly realized piece of music.

Happily, "Body" is not the only piece of that caliber birthed during that fertile creative period, as both "Gravity" and "Black Dollars" scale similar heights.  In fact, "Gravity" both reprises and improves upon the same formula of driving, distorted bass; drifting guitar shimmer; and buried vocals by ratcheting up the sizzle, hiss, and snarl.  "Black Dollars," however, goes in a bit of a different direction, pushing the bass deep into the background to make room for warmly hissing ambiance and a beautifully slow-moving, twinkling, and reverberant guitar melody.  The remainder of the original EP was rounded out by a live version of "My Body is a Dying Machine" (straight-up filler) and a likable bit of lazily glimmering treated-guitar drift ("A Slight Return").  Naturally, both appear on Black Dollars as well (albeit in different sequence).

Unexpectedly, one of the bonus tracks added for this reissue manages to be something of a highlight itself, as "Flow River Flow" reprises the territory of "A Slight Return" in considerably more gnarled, textured, and vibrant fashion.  In fact, it sounds a lot like a cool outro guitar solo on a classic shoegaze song being played over warped and pitch-shifted field recordings of church bells and a bubbling cauldron.  I sincerely hope that it births a hot new sub-genre.  "The World is Not Waiting for You" is yet another pleasantly surprising addition, returning to the more "rock" structure of Black Dollars' best songs, but doing it in a more soft-focus, burbling, melodic, and feminized way (the vocals are softened and pitch-shifted to the point of at least androgyny).  The remaining dreamy ambient-meets-feedback squall of "The Eternal Daydreamer" is also quite likable, if a bit less memorable than Black Dollars' more propulsive and structured pieces.

If Black Dollars can be said to have any flaws, they are not particularly significant ones.  For example, I do not see any need for the live version of "My Body is a Dying Machine" to be included, as it is not radically different from the studio version in any way.  However, the decision to bookend the album with two versions of one of its best songs is admittedly a nice sequencing move.  Also, the more "ambient" pieces are generally not on the same level as the rest of the album, but that is because the rest of the album is so great, not because the album is padded with substandard material.  I suppose I should not be surprised that Black Dollars boasts at least three instant classics, given Justin Broadrick's long history of excellent and innovative music, but…damn, I am.  Quite pleasantly so.  At its best, Black Dollars hits the absolute perfect balance between heaviness, hooks, and experimentation.  And at its worst, it is merely another very good release by a musical titan.  This is a hugely welcome reissue.

• My Body is a Dying Machine
• Gravity
• Black Dollars

 

14 February 2016

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Staalplaat’s Muslimgauze Archive Series has been nothing if not totally perplexing and erratic in both quality and content, but this latest pair of releases easily stand among the series' most quixotic and self-cannibalizing entries yet.  On the one hand, there is Abyssinia Selasie, a truly excellent and (debatably) previously unreleased 7-song EP that has been inexplicably stretched into 15-song album by ambitiously ballsy and redundant repetition alone.  One the other hand, there is the previously released Libya Tour Guide, which originally surfaced as part of the limited edition Tandoori Dog (1998) box set.  Granted, not many people have that set (I certainly do not) and there is some new material added, but Libya is far too half-baked (even by Muslimgauze standards) to warrant any kind of reissue at all.  I love Bryn Jones's work as much as anyone, but no one needs to hear such an unpolished avalanche of sketches and rough ideas, as a few one- or two-minute flashes of brilliance are not nearly enough to sustain an album.

Staalplaat

In general, it is usually a very good sign when a Muslimgauze Archive release is said to originate from a tape in which Bryn Jones had actually made it to the "writing down song titles" stage.  That indicates that the tape in question was probably destined to be an actual Muslimgauze album at some point, but never quite got the chance.  In a perverse way, that rule-of-thumb proved to be correct yet again here, but the reason Abyssinia Selasie never got released is a bit suspicious: as indirectly noted by an alert Discogs user, only two of these songs are actually "new" (possibly even fewer than that).  For example, three songs already appear on Syrinjia (1998) with the same names, while a version of "Abyssinia Selasie" turns up on that same album with the title "Holy Man."  Other significant parts of these songs also appear on Baghdad and possibly Nommos’ Return (I regrettably could not confirm that one). Consequently, the best way to look at Abyssinia Selasie is as a dub album culled from Syrinjia-era material.  Of course, Syrinjia itself is already a dub-influenced album, so things have gotten very "meta" very quickly.  Adding to the chaos is the fact that every song on Abyssinia appears twice (in seemingly identical form), except for the title piece, which appears in no less than five(!) incarnations of varying similarity.

Ignoring all that, however, Abyssinia Selasie is still an excellent album.  For one, the endlessly recurring title piece is one of Muslimgauze's most fun moments, combining a lazily funky bass line with all kinds of clattering and echoing dub reggae effects and electronic bleeps.  "Benzedrine Wallah" is similarly delightful, rolling propulsively along with a deep, blooping pulse and a crackling vocal melody.  The more subdued and ominous "Negative" is yet another highlight, but otherwise every single song on the album boasts an appealing groove and plenty of nice dub-wise touches.  Also, all uncharacteristically seem perfectly fleshed-out and complete.  As a result, I actually did not mind hearing them all again a second time, even if it that is a totally weird and inexplicable sequencing decision.  In short, I have absolutely no idea why Abyssinia Selasie exists or why it exists in the crazy form that it does, but I find myself loving it in spite of myself solely because it is all absolutely top-shelf material.

• Abyssinia Selasie
• Benzedrine Wallah
• Negative

Sadly, the opposite is largely true for Libya Tour Guide, though it gets off to an interesting start with "Lalique Gadaffi Jar," which derails a fairly likable groove with obnoxiously shrill horns and disruptive electronic blurts.  In a weird way, it kind of sets the tone for the rest of the album, as Libya seems to be the place where Jones worked out a thankfully brief fascination with loud blurts.  They do not appear in every song, but they certainly do appear a lot.  Like, to an obsessive degree.  In fact, at least four or five songs appear to exist solely to be backdrops for annoying skwonks.  They are not good songs either.  In fact, it is legitimately difficult to imagine any piece being lazier than "Great Satan Shadow," as it is literally nothing more than a backward tambura or sitar loop and an endlessly repeating one-note electronic bloop that a toddler with a synth could likely replicate with ease.  Curiously, that complete non-event clocks in at over four minutes while seven considerably more inspired pieces all clock in at under two.  That situation basically summarizes everything that is wrong with Libya: it feels like a dumping ground for finished songs that were not good enough to wind up elsewhere and great ideas that never quite made the leap into songhood for one reason or another.

That is truly lamentable, as there are some stellar snippets and no one has helpfully stopped forward yet on Discogs to tell me if they have turned up in more complete form elsewhere.  Being a Muslimgauze fan can be quite exasperating sometimes.  In any case, "Benghaze Hotel" is (almost) amazing, transforming the Muslimgauze aesthetic into a sexy disco thump that tragically lasts only a minute.  Alas.  So close.  "Moving Further into Land" is yet another would-be classic, resembling some sort of misguided lo-fi stab at a floor-filling club banger, but not quite sticking around long enough to go anywhere.  Jones was a lot of fun when he purposely made totally wrong-headed dance music.  At least I hope it was purposely–I liked some bad music in the '90s too.  A lot of Libya sounds like an awful lot like an inept and overexuberant techno DJ making a rough pass at a Muslimgauze remix.  As for the rest, it is generally a collection of half-successful experiments ("East of Tarabulus") and a smattering of pleasantly hypnotic loops ("Down Chad" and "Goodbye and Never Come Back").  Unfortunately, there are 22 songs here and it is almost never the good ones that stick around for longer than a minute or so.  Consequently, Libya is a real slog of an album that will probably only appeal to completists with extremely dubious judgment.

• Benghaze Hotel
• Moving Further in Land
• Down Chad

 

14 February 2016

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Althogh not yet quite as well-known as his peers, Paul Jebanasam is an integral part of Bristol's Subtext Recordings milieu, a loose cadre of erstwhile dance producers who have now moved onto far more conceptual and abstract art.  While it is not uncommon for Subtext releases (this one included) to sound cringe-inducingly pretentious and/or overly grandiose on their face, the reality is that artists like Emptyset, Roly Porter, and Jebanasam are currently making (or at least trying very damn hard to make) some of the most ambitious and forward-thinking art in the experimental music scene.  Admittedly, Continuum shares a lot of common ground with other artists like Tim Hecker, Johann Johannsson, and Ben Frost, but it does not feel derivative so much as it seems like Jebanasam heard the mangled organs of Ravedeath, 1972 and thought "Not a bad start, but it really should have gone much further."

Subtext

According to Continuum’s description, Jebanasam (formerly Jabba from Moving Ninja) set out to accomplish nothing less than to create "a speculative soundtrack to a timeline stretching from the primordial emergence of organic life through to the unknowable trajectory of the universe, [which] explores the magnitude of science's reach and the precarious role of humanity within this vast evolving system."  Knowing that, it is easy to see the opening piece as an attempt at recreating the Big Bang, but I did not find the album's underlying concept at all important in appreciating the music.  Also, the less said about the crazily obtuse, impenetrable, and overlong song titles, the better.  Lofty ambitions aside, however, Continuum is actually not a particularly complex album at all at its core, as each of these three lengthy pieces is essentially built on the exact same simple idea: take a lushly epic chord progression or a lovely melody, then completely blast it with cascades of stuttering white noise.  Sometimes Jebanasam even leaves out the "chords and melody" part.  The magic, of course, lies in the execution and Jebanasam proves himself equally (and brilliantly) adept at composing sweeping, Romantic melodies; unleashing satisfyingly ferocious eruptions of electronic entropy; and focusing closely on small-scale textural nuances.  Well, perhaps "equally adept" is an oversimplification: Jebanasam’s compositions are undeniably quite good, but his abilities as a producer/sound designer are on another level altogether.  These pieces work so well because Jebanasam is able present his themes with both crystalline clarity and visceral force.  When it comes to details, Continuum is actually every bit as complex as its root concept.

While Continuum's three pieces are essentially just variations upon a single very good idea, each nevertheless has its own distinct identity.  For example, the first piece ("Depart") is initially a lovely, droning two-chord organ piece before it becomes consumed by rapturous, reverberating eruptions that shred it into mere stuttering, crackling snatches of its former self.  Despite all that chaos, the underlying music still manages to sneakily evolve over the course of the piece into more soundtrack-esque grandeur as swells of lush strings begin to surge through the white noise apocalypse.  That Romanticism is short-lived, however, as the final destination of "Depart" turns out to be a crushingly dense wall of buzzing, fuzzed-out drone.  The tender and beautiful "Eidolons" dials down the intensity quite a bit, resembling a beautiful string piece heard through a broken radio: grainy, wobbly, hissing, and prone to unexpected volume shifts.  Stylistically, it shares a hell of a lot of common ground with William Basinski's loop experiments, but Jebanasam lacks Basinski's self-imposed restraints, so there is quite a bit more variation and activity here.  Naturally, Continuum closes in resurgent fashion with "Search Another," though it takes a while to get there, as it is mostly just all drifting, diffuse, and splintered atmosphere until Jebanasam unleashes an onslaught of pummeling, blown-out techno bass-drum hits.  Melody is absolutely nowhere to be found until the warm, dreamy, and almost mass-like coda, but the piece still works quite nicely as a massive, throbbing, and roiling show of controlled force.

Significantly, Continuum is one of those rare albums in which there are a number of elements that rub me the wrong way, but the ambition and execution are impressive enough to win me over regardless.  For example, the 16-minute "Search Another" feels like it is built upon the most cursory of foundations and also seems to mash two unrelated pieces together, yet Jebanasam puts on such a stunning display of Ben Frost-style maximalist bludgeoning that it renders the composition itself largely irrelevant.  Similarly, there is no clear reason why it needs to be so goddamn long, but it is essentially a spectacular sonic fireworks display from start to finish, so I cannot say it necessarily overstays its welcome.  Also, while it is extremely easy to spot Jebanasam’s major influences, he does a truly admirable job of transcending them.  He seems to be an extremely observant and resourceful sonic magpie, assessing what is possible, then using that merely as a jumping-off point.  While shades of other artists abound, they are almost always filtered confidently into Jebanasam’s own vision (not always seamlessly, but always effectively).  And, of course, much of Jebanasam's music is absolutely wonderful: "Depart" is 15-minutes of absolute heaven and "Eidolons" is not far behind it at all (even if it is noticeably more subdued).  Consequently, Continuum is at least 2/3 of an absolutely perfect album and the remaining third is delivered with such force and virtuosity that any flaws are almost beside the point.  I realize that it is only February, but I can guarantee that this album will be on a hell of a lot of "best of" lists at the end of the year.

• depart as | air dx stop ??/? /dt somewhere = +?¬∑(? sigma*(y waiting -x) v)=0 ??/dy/dt for = you x dim
• eidolons beginning p = (m2A 2 am to (rho-z)-y ?t+(? see to wait dz/dt = it xy that I -beta* do not z countless
• search another 3Hf? = lose you i), place i=0 doubt I V (f) am ? exp( v 16p to meet you again pm2 P f

 

14 February 2016

Administrator

Albums and Singles

On one hand, it is kind of astonishing that Andreas Brandal has not been covered on this site before, as the shape-shifting/multi-guised Norwegian experimentalist has been on the scene for more than two decades and has made plenty of excellent music covering an impressive amount of stylistic territory.  On the other hand, it makes absolutely perfect sense, as Brandal’s career is not unlike that of Machinefabriek: a seemingly constant and unrelenting stream of new projects, limited editions, and collaborations that no hapless fan (much less a casual listener) could possibly hope to keep up with.  I believe I personally have at least 8 Andreas Brandal albums at this point and I am certain that I do not have even the most tentatively grasp of the depth and scope of his discography: I have not just missed key album–I have missed entire genres.  I do know that I like him though and his newest release is an absolutely stellar one, occupying the unique nexus where heavy drone, languorous strings, and oversaturated Tim Hecker-esque textures wonderfully collide.

Sacred Phrases

As much as I enjoy Brandal’s work (what little I have heard, anyway), I have to admit that I was instantly predisposed towards loving this tape because the opening "From the Bed to the Fire" awakened memories of a long-forgotten Fetisch Park album (Trost) that I played to death in the mid-‘90s.  The two albums have almost nothing in common aside from a talent for deep, warmly crackling, and seismic-sounding subterranean swells, but it was enough to get my "fond nostalgia" synapses happily firing.  Unintended memory-triggers aside, however, "From the Bed" is an absolutely gorgeous piece of music, especially coming from someone with such a long history of blackened and malevolent noise.  Brandal is the rare artist who excels both as a composer and as a sound designer, though he is probably most accomplished at the latter, as nearly everything he does winds up sounding richly textured, vibrant, and immediate.  While a somewhat minimal piece musically, Brandal makes "Bed" sound massive, haunting, and eerily distant, shrouding his lushly shimmering and bell-like chords and spectral melodies with plenty of hiss and grit to wonderfully otherworldly effect.  It feels a lot like hearing a distant and beautiful classical music performance during a minor earthquake on an impenetrably foggy day.

The following "A Moment Passed and All was Changed" takes quite a different path, as its buzzing synthesizer drone erupts out of the speakers and quickly blossoms into something akin to blurting, panning, and snarling electrical storm. The lengthier "A Murmured Name" returns to the beauty of the opener, augmenting a gently undulating thrum with a beautifully melancholy and reverb-swathed violin or cello theme before unexpected being consumed by a host of wonderfully crisp field recordings of grinding and scraping metal.  Curiously, the longest piece on the album (and title piece) is not nearly as distinctive as the rest of the album, as it is basically just ten minutes of deep, quavering synth drones.  It still has some character though, albeit much more subtly presented than elsewhere.  In fact, it is kind of a tour de force of understated nuance, as Brandal spends the entire duration unleashing an arsenal of throbs, shudders, rumbles, flutters, and quivering feedback swells that alternately hang in the air or bubble through the dense bed of drone.  The similarly lengthy "No Symbols Where None Intended" closes the album as a far more clear-cut highlight, as a muted, elegiac organ progression is slowly consumed by deep bell tones, throbbing synthesizer, and mysterious field recordings (owls?).  Ultimately, the entire piece is consumed by a densely throbbing electronic buzz, which nicely illustrates my high opinion of Brandal as a sound designer: musically, there is very little happening, but what little is happening is so frequency-saturated and psychoactive that it is just as compelling as Brandal more eventful side.

Curiously, it is the weakest piece ("The Thursday Curses") that best illustrates the high level of Brandal’s artistry: there is very little that excites me less than ten minutes of straight-forward minimal synth drone, but "Curses" easily held my attention due its many buried layers and vibrant microcosmic dynamic variations.  Conversely, it is very easy to imagine a great piece like "A Murmured Name" completely falling flat in the hands of a different artist, as the central theme is wonderful and elegant, yet very simple.  So much of Brandal's spell is rooted in intuitive and intangible things that go much deeper than mere melody or harmony.  If he did not have such a seemingly effortless knack for space, texture, frequency manipulation, and contrast, these pieces would not have nearly the beguiling and forceful presence that they currently possess.  The details are everything.  Consequently, The Thursday Curses at its worst still sounds like a much better than average drone album.  At its best, however, it sounds like a heavenly organ mass heard through a heavy fog of hallucinogens or a goddamn dimensional rift.  Or both.  Which is, of course, great.  I am totally the target demographic for that sort of thing.  Lamentably, I have absolutely no idea if The Thursday Curses is one of Brandal’s best albums or not, but I do know that it is definitely the best one that I have heard. Anyone curious about Brandal's work would be well-served by starting here.

• From the Bed to the Fire
• A Murmured Name
• No Symbols Where None Are Intended

 

14 February 2016

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Albums and Singles

In a lot of ways, this latest Roly Porter release sounds like a sister album to Paul Jebanasam’s Continuum, which is not all that surprising given that Jebanasam and Porter co-run Subtext Recordings (along with Emptyset’s James Ginsburg).  Like Continuum, Third Law is an ambitious, forward-thinking, and viscerally produced monster of an album.  Unlike Jebanasam, however, Porter completely leaves both Earth and conventional composition far behind in favor of complex, futuristic abstraction.  It is a unique aesthetic to say the least, veering unpredictably from warmly stuttering electronics to rib-cage rattling percussion flourishes to sci-fi choral music to absolute planet-smashing intensity with the all the restraint that one normally associates with mad geniuses.  While Porter's bold, speaker-shredding, and universe-spanning vision could be said to lack a healthy amount of restraint, no one will ever say that he lacks an incredibly rigorous attention to detail.  That combination yields quite an unusual result, as Third Law sounds like what I imagine you would get if you typed "create epoch-defining masterwork" into a supercomputer.

Tri Angle

I have spent a large portion of my life chasing, hearing, and obsessing over unusual music, but Third Law is unexpectedly one of the most confounding albums that I have ever tried to wrap my head around.  That situation is doubly weird because this is not even the first Roly Porter album that I have heard, though I probably just did not pay close enough attention to the other ones.  The issue is this: Third Law sounds like an album that was literally made in the future.  Or in a future, as in "possibly not ours."  Porter is working at a level of complexity and immensity so far beyond that of everyone else that it just seems futile and wrong-headed to try judge his work by current standards.  For example, while other musicians were spending 2015 sitting around trying to think of cool melodies or beats, Porter was busy dreaming up something that sounds like all the damned souls in hell raising their voices in chorus as the world is ripped apart by a black hole (the opening "4101").  If he was not making music, it is easy to imagine Porter filling his time with something akin to designing and building the Death Star in his garage.

The question that I am wrestling with is whether or not that makes Third Law a great album.  The best analogy that I can come up with is that hearing Third Law in 2016 would probably be a lot like seeing a Pink Floyd laser light tribute show in the late 1950s: regardless of its merits (or lack thereof), most people would definitely walk away from that gig thinking that Think Pink or Shine On was a hell of a lot better than an old-timey snooze like John Coltrane.  That said, of course, Porter has a considerably more vision and originality than any mere time-traveling Pink Floyd tribute band.  Conversely, however, Third Law lacks a lot of the characteristics that music normally needs to be loved and/or memorable, such as strong recurring motifs or expected song structures.  My guess is that Porter cast such concerns aside as regressive, but this album occupies a weird grey area between structure and abstraction that makes their absence noticable.  To compensate, Porter instead offers up something more like a series of dazzling set pieces, such as the "bouncing ball" bass hits in "Mass;" the alternating beautiful, skipping synth loops and crushing industrial rhythms of "In Flight;" and the lushly gorgeous melodies he unleashes during the crescendo of "Departure Stage."  Actually, now that I have tossed out the phrase "set pieces," it occurs to me that Third Law is probably best judged entirely by film standards, despite having absolutely no visual component.

Viewed in that light, Third Law can best be described as a wildly audacious sci-fi epic that unrelentingly blasted me out of my seat for 90 minutes, after which I stumbled out of the theater feeling like I lived an entire second lifetime.  And if anyone asked me what I thought of the film, I would only be able to describe it as "intense."  Several days later, however, after my over-excited synapses had a chance to calm back down and process things, I would start to think about the film more critically and realize that I completely did not remember entire sections of it and that it did not elicit any real emotions deeper than just pure awe.  And that maybe the whole thing a bit too conspicuously overwrought for my taste.  Of course, "pure awe" is still quite wonderful.  Also, my analogy is a slight oversimplification: Third Law is much more than just mere spectacle, as there are plenty of great moments strewn all over the place and they follow a very coherent and dynamically satisfying arc.  And, of course, this album is an absolute tour de force of sound design.  What I will remember is mostly just the spectacle though, as most of Third Law’s other traits are hopelessly eclipsed by its sheer immensity and power.

• Departure Stage
• In Flight
• Mass