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Sometimes it snows in April.
Episode 784 features all new music by The Veldt, Noveller (feat. Iggy Pop), Lea Bertucci, Mi And L'Au, Mammo, Kikù Hibino & Merzbow, Bergsonist, Meitei, Hoavi, Black Flower, Tristan Allen, and Aaron Shaw.
Sunset in Costa Rica photo by Jonny.
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This latest opus from the Brooklyn-based composer/puppeteer is the second part of a planned trilogy that began with 2023’s Tin Iso and the Dawn. Notably, that last album absolutely floored me and was easily one of my favorite releases of the year, so my expectations for this next installment were quite high indeed. Happily, Osni the Flare is yet another stunner, but it feels like a bit more like a score to a larger work than it does a stand-alone album. That makes sense, as it is exactly that, yet the same was true of its predecessor as well—the music and visual elements just seem to be more intimately intertwined this time around. That is perfectly fine by me, as Allen’s concise self-description of their art as “building a world with music & puppets” is a literal (if understated) fact that wildly undersells the sheer magic and wonder of this expanding mythology brought to life through a virtuosic ballet of music, marionettes, and light.
It is fair to say that I am not normally the target demographic for either puppetry or self-created mythologies unless they are coming from an endearingly unhinged outsider art direction. However, I am eternally drawn towards artists with a bold and singular vision like a moth to a dragon’s ember and Allen certainly fits the bill in that regard. Unsurprisingly, the execution of that vision is yet another crucial consideration, as everyone knows someone who can make the most mundane anecdote seem absolutely mesmerizing and someone else who can make even the most dramatic events seem punishingly dull. Allen is very much one of the former rare souls who can seemingly make anything seem beautiful and poetic. Moreover, telling this particular story has consumed the last decade of Allen's life and it absolutely shows. This project feels like both a life’s work and a genuine labor of love painstakingly chiseled to perfection. In fact, I was genuinely amazed that this album only took three years to make given that Allen played every instrument while simultaneously crafting the hauntingly surreal puppet world that the album inhabits (and there was plenty of sound design involved as well).
Looking over his discography, Conclusio marks the first solo work from Asmus Tietchens since 2022’s Schatten Ohne Licht, which is quite a significant stretch for him. He has been consistent with his collaborations, but solo material has been less frequent in recent years. Compared to the previous album, Conclusio is less sparse in its construction, and instead is rather dense, focused, and quite intense, while consistently displaying Tietchens’s careful crafting of sound.
One consistent thing on the 12 individual pieces that make up the album, all of which are traditional song length, is Tietchens's employment of drastic shifts in volume and dynamics, with occasionally shocking results.
This is the debut release from the duo of Brian Foote (Nudge/Kranky/Peak Oil/False Aralia) and Paul Dickow (Strategy/Community Library), but the two artists have been collaborating off and on for roughly a quarter century now. Notably, however, there is absolutely no stylistic carryover from the duo’s previous projects together (Nudge and Fontanelle), as High Cube is the musical equivalent of an ‘80s Trapper Keeper featuring a bitchin’ camaro, palm trees, and the word “California” in bright pink neon letters. I suppose the same could be said of any number of forgettable vaporwave artists, but Foote and Dickow also bring serious production chops and some more eclectic influences to their bleary and simmering post-modern dance party as well. My best attempt at describing their shared vision is “it sounds like contemporary dubplates of ‘80s Japanese ‘city pop’ infected with subtle strains of early techno and hip-hop,” but the vibe is what truly matters here and High Cube beautifully evokes nothing less than an imagined and hypnagogic late-night drive through ‘80s Los Angeles with the top down and the breeze in my hair.
The hazy, neon-soaked, and vaguely retro-futurist world of High Cube was apparently a deliberately chosen “narrative mood,” which is quite an unusual wavelength for two artists to share, but I have no idea how often Foote and Dickow improvised together before they ultimately found this direction. I bring that up because the duo specifically note that the album’s direction was not defined by their gear choices. Despite that claim, however, the pair’s gear and working methods did loom large in this album’s conception in other ways, as they worked with strict, self-imposed constraints: “five machines, a one-hour timer, and a total ban on overthinking.” While Foote and Dickow do note that High Cube takes a “drier, sparser, and decidedly chunkier” approach than their previous work as a result of those decisions, the most significant impact from their newly constrained working method was that it forced them out of familiar patterns and allowed something new to organically grow as “an accident of chemistry.”
This wild second collaboration between French producer Simon Aussel and Egypt-based singer/poet/trumpeter Abdullah Miniawy is the latest installment in Dekmantel’s UFO series championing “ranky darkwave funk and industrial textures, jagged body music and overall destructive energy from the world’s most talented and tenebrous souls.” Notably, very few of those descriptors overtly apply for most of this particular album, as Dying Is The Internet feels like a bit of Trojan horse in which auto-tuned vocals, accessible songcraft, and big hooks transform subversion into a series of Arabic club-friendly bangers. That curious approach seems to fit the album’s philosophical intent appropriately, however, as the two artists envision the album as “reflection on the nature of club culture and digital fatigue” in which the internet has become “less about sharing ideas and more about surviving in a digital business ecosystem." While I unsurprisingly have absolutely no idea what Miniawy is singing about as a functionally monolingual American, he certainly brings a visceral intensity to Simo Cell’s endlessly inventive and cutting edge techno visions.
The press release for this album describes Simo Cell as “a leading light in contemporary leftfield club music, twisting up adventurous rhythms and flamboyant production in pursuit of a perpetual freshness for the floor,” which feels accurate to me as a casual fan of his shapeshifting “bass-heavy minimalism” over the last few years, as the only real constants seem to be continually reinvention and a talent for razor sharp sound design. Abdullah Miniawy, on the other hand, is a bit of an enigmatic chaos element for me, as he is known as a singer, poet, trumpeter, author, and actor and his musical output has largely been a varied series of freewheeling and eclectic collaborations that blur the lines between techno, jazz, and Arabic music. On Dying Is The Internet, he is most prominently a vocalist, lyricist, and trumpeter, but he is also credited with composing the beatless, hallucinatory, and hazed out instrumental “Tear Chime.”
This latest opus from the eternally evolving Cécile Schott continues her recent fascination with synth-centric compositions, but the resemblance to any previous Colleen releases begins and ends there, as these five pieces feel like a bold leap into challenging and surprising new territory. The album’s title (“Free before the ending”) alludes to Schott’s 2024 decision to learn to swim again after three decades of water phobia, which is an exceptionally rich metaphor about navigating an “unstable environment…its discomfort, the doubts about your abilities and the reality of facing your own limitations.” In keeping with that theme, the sea is itself an excellent metaphor for this album, as Schott casts aside familiar melodies and patterns to plunge into a vision that is churning, alive, unpredictable, and uncharacteristically visceral.
It is not surprising that Schott’s uneasy relationship with water loomed large in her life in recent years, as she moved to Barcelona in 2019 and notes that “the sight of the Mediterranean Sea made me feel this limitation more and more acutely with each passing year.” Alert readers may note that the world as a whole started to go to shit in greatly accelerated fashion soon after that, so Schott’s dread of the seemingly infinite, unknown, and unpredictable expanse eternally lurking on her horizon mirrored an increasingly threatening and unpredictable era for humans in general. The trigger for Schott’s transformational life event came during a performance in the Azores (her 250th live show, coincidentally), as she was struck by the dolphin-filled natural beauty of her surroundings and realized that she needed to “stop making excuses” and get in the fucking water. Unsurprisingly, her triumphant return to the sea proved to be a revelatory experience that “catapulted” her into a more physical and active life and she considers the album “an ode to movement, to the body, to water, to urgency; to repairing old wounds, overcoming personal blocks and starting all over again.”
This latest release from the seemingly endless Muslimgauze archive is a bit of an enigma and a surprise, as it was apparently “assembled posthumously” from “previously unreleased material.” Admittedly, that half-true claim could reasonably be made about A LOT of archival Muslimgauze album releases that have surfaced in the years since Bryn Jones’ untimely passing in 1999, but the difference is that this album was assembled by Staalplaat rather than being one of the many “finished” albums that had previously only surfaced in a limited edition or simply got shelved and forgotten about due to the staggering pace with which Jones churned out albums in his lifetime.
In the world of Muslimgauze, however, normal distinctions between albums and eras are blurred into meaninglessness, as at least three of these pieces have previously been released in relatively similar form elsewhere. If normal rules applied, such obvious recycling would definitely annoy the hell out of me, but these eight pieces feel right together and capture some of the more killer grooves of Muslimgauze’s mid-’90s Indian/Bhangra-inspired work.
Seemingly a post-script to David Jackman's subscription series of CDs that were conceptualized as a single piece, these two 7" records both continue the themes of the eight albums that preceded them. With one as Organum Electronics and the other under his own name, one of the singles is an extension of what had come before, but the other seems to venture into new spaces, which I suppose may or may not be indicative of a future direction in Jackman’s work.
Available individually to the public, or in a colored vinyl double 7" old school gatefold package for the subscribers, the construction of these two singles is aligned with Jackman's history of presenting two slightly different variations on the same sound. "Fiire," as Organum Electronics, is the one that is most representative of the discs that made up the subscription set. Taking that almost-but-not-quite harsh noise blast sound that has been consistent with his use of that name, the relative brevity adds to the intensity. Over the two sides, I can almost detect some of the elements of his non-electronic work (bells, ravens, etc.) bleeding through the jet engine blast, but that could be entirely a figment of my imagination. Like the long form works, however, the endings of the pieces are just as jarring as the openings.
Back in 2022, Bill Orcutt released his excellent Music for Four Guitars album, which led to the formation of a killer touring quartet featuring fellow avant-guitar luminaries Shane Parish, Wendy Eisenberg, and Ava Mendoza. Orcutt clearly found that experience inspiring, as he later started a similarly formidable trio with Sonic Youth’s Steve Shelley and Comets on Fire’s Ethan Miller. In keeping with that theme, Music in Continuous Motion is yet another album composed for a quartet of guitars, but this one “pointedly steps away from the cut-and-paste constructivism” and “discrete, mechanistic precision” of its predecessor to embrace a more melodic, human, and performance-driven aesthetic. While Orcutt himself impishly summarizes this latest direction as “a bridge pickup record more than a neck pickup record,” my own take is that it feels like a spiritual descendant of the best bits of Glenn Branca, Gang of Four, Built to Spill, and Archers of Loaf with a distinctly Orcutt spin. Unsurprisingly, it also feels like yet another great album from one of the most reliably compelling and singular guitarists around.
To my ears, the opening “Giving unknown origin” is the piece that best captures Orcutt at the height of his powers, as it features a bright and memorable melody, an incredibly cool and intricate central motif, and plenty of snarl, bite, and obsessive repetition. He also makes incredibly effective and dynamic use of the stereo field, which makes it possible to discern how all of its masterfully interwoven moving parts are evolving and interacting. While I certainly dig the various riffs and melodies and the shifting dynamics, “Giving unknown origin” is also an excellent showcase for some of the more general aspects of Orcutt’s vision that I love, such as the way he balances machine-like pattern repetition with more viscerally slashing elements. The best bits feel like a duel in both a literal sense (staccato rhythmic interplay) and a more profound and abstract sense (beauty vs. violence, order vs. chaos, etc.). Also, I would be remiss if I did not also note that I was surprised to discover that Orcutt can unleash taut, angular, and urgent-sounding riffage as well as any ripping post-hardcore band, which is not something I would have guessed from his previous work.
This “ambient transsexual” homage to Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska (“his dark night of the soul with red text on a black background”) was inspired by the eleven months spent in Iowa after “avowed club rat, alt pop star aspirant, and sophisticated film composer Lia Ouyang Rusli hauled herself and her two parakeets there from Bushwick unto the relative quiet and spaciousness of the plains.” Unsurprisingly, that move was a bit of a culture shock, as OHYUNG traded raves and Brooklyn nightlife for “prairie sunsets, transgender care bans, all-ages hardcore shows, screaming hog farms, corn reaching for the heavens, tornado sirens, big beautiful skies, the world’s largest truckstop, and a brutal winter,” but she also notes that Iowa gave us Arthur Russell, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and Transcendental Meditation as well. Fittingly, the album mirrors that unique mixture of beauty and menace and shares Springsteen’s own pared-to-the-bone starkness, which is quite an unexpected and haunting reinvention in the wake of 2025’s stellar pop-minded opus You Are Always On My Mind yet remains every bit as compelling (if not more so).
Self-Released
In a roundabout way, it seems like OHYUNG could not have made Iowa without making a “pop” album first, as it got her thinking about what remains “when she removes the scaffolding” and “grinds up the bones of the song.” Notably, she did not treat that as a purely rhetorical question and concluded that the answer was “ghostly echoes, mouth sounds, simulated tape hiss, and late-night gloom.” To my ears, it seems like OHYUNG used that as the starting point of Iowa, then built upwards from there using a palette of “mangled chorales, lo-res rips of devotional music, surreptitious field recordings, and assorted synth pads.”
The premise of this quixotic tour de force admittedly sounds like a joke that went waaay too far, which certainly explains why Bill Orcutt agreed to release it on Palilalia before ever hearing a single note, as his own A Mechanical Joey occupies similarly improbable and seemingly deranged terrain. As Philip Sherburne sagely observes in his album notes, "This record shouldn’t, strictly speaking, be possible at all." In reality, however, Autechre Guitar is the end result of a multi-decade labor of love for Parish, as he has made a career out of challenging and unexpected covers and his wife is quite a big fan of Sean Booth and Rob Brown’s singularly inscrutable, obtuse, and time-bending techno mutations. Consequently, making an album like this one has probably always been Parish’s inexorable destiny.
Palilalia
Before the album was released, I was predictably quite curious about how the hell Parish was going to pull off such a feat, yet I was also mystified about why he would even want to attempt such a thing in the first place (aside from the sheer challenge of it). Notably, Parish has covered electronic artists before, but Repertoire’s cover of Aphex Twin's “Avril 14th” notably singled out one of the most nakedly beautiful and melodic pieces in Richard James’ oeuvre and Autechre are definitely not an act that I associate with timeless melodies. Parish would certainly beg to differ, however, as Autechre’s melodies are the heart of this album (though few will be surprised that he chose to focus primarily on their comparatively accessible early ’90s work like Incunabula, Amber, and Tri-Repetae).
This latest transmission from the Opalio brothers is the result of a major creative breakthrough of sorts, as they recently had the epiphany that their signature “spontaneous composition” process could also work in reverse as well. Always metaphysically minded, the Opalios realized that infinity itself was passing through their compositions, as the revelation that they could now play with time in either direction was both creatively liberating and also kind of heavy in a Zen/cosmic sense (“a flux with no beginning and no end, apparently always the same yet always different, that flows in an eternal becoming”). In less mind-expanding terms, that means that this album’s two longform pieces were created by subtracting layers from a spontaneous composition that had already reached “the apogee of the real-time creation.” The effect of that temporal sorcery is impressively dramatic, however, as IN∞FI∞NI∞TO captures MCIAA at their most hypnotically minimal and hallucinatory peak.
The heart of this album is essentially just two deceptively simple motifs: a murmuring backwards pulse and and a sliding and fluttering tone that leaves smeared and pulsing after-images in its wake. The combined effect is quite an evocative one, however, as it feels like I am sitting on a desolate alien beach watching a swirl of psychotropic seagulls swooping and diving as waves rhythmically roll in from the sea.
