Plenty of new music to be had this week from Laetitia Sadier and Storefront Church, Six Organs of Admittance, Able Noise, Yui Onodera, SML, Clinic Stars, Austyn Wohlers, Build Buildings, Zelienople, and Lea Thomas, plus some older tunes by Farah, Guy Blakeslee, Jessica Bailiff, and Richard H. Kirk.
Lake in Girdwood, Alaska by Johnny.
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The album opens in lovely (if deceptive) fashion with the subtly smeared psychedelia of "I’m Following You," a woozy reverie for Fender Rhodes organ.  For better or worse, that is Atkinson's sole foray into conventional melodicism on Hand in Hand, a decision that will never stop perplexing me given her oft-stellar past work as a multi-instrumentalist.  Intellectually, of course, I get it: during the prime of the first phase of her career, Atkinson was one of the most compelling voices in the cassette underground, but she fit very comfortably within that milieu.  With her more recent work, she has forged a much more divergent path that is very much her own.  That is certainly gutsy and inspired, but I wish the break with her past had not been quite so decisive sometimes, as it is like watching a great boxer fight with one of his arms tied behind his back.  Initially, however, Atkinson's radical minimalism serves her fairly well in the Phillip K. Dick-inspired "VALIS," as the overlapping, French-accented voices of her breathy and sensuously whispered monologue feel increasingly disconcerting and inhuman as an undercurrent of noise-damaged and insectoid textures swells below.  While she never attempts anything quite as gauche as singing, Atkinson is admittedly quite skilled at using her voice as an instrument, managing to imbue even the most mundane passages with magnetic intensity and mystery while subtly employing effects to add a patina of hissing, out-of-focus unreality.
The following "Curious in Epidavros" unveils still more of the album's recurring themes, namely a sort of plinking, hollow metal percussion and a blurting, squiggling arsenal of modular synth textures.  Variations on those two elements surface quite a lot in the following songs, which is a very disorienting and counterintuitive aesthetic indeed: half primitive home-made marimba, half retro-futurist space music.  Naturally, such a strange blend of the ancient and the future leads to some interesting directions, such as the broken, shuddering, and wobbly dub-techno of "Adaptation Assez Facile" or the druggy bass slide and clattering ping-pong ball soundscape of "Monstera Deliciosa."  The downside is that many pieces feel like brief, sketch-like experiments rather than fully formed ideas.  One notable exception to that trend, however, is "Visnaga," as the hollow plinking percussion feels like a dull, broken bell resonating through the eerie streets of a deserted town and the strangled, sputtering synth flourishes only deepen the air of menace and desolation.  Atkinson's hushed and fraught vocals seem especially unsettling and confessional, which is an impressive testament to the perverse genius of her art, as the text merely extolls the virtues of a desert plant.  Elsewhere, "A House A Dance A Poem" reprises the deeply broken and warped dub of "Adaptation," tweaking the formula with a buried transmission of chopped, stammering vocal snippets and an invasive, random-sounding high-hat that feels like a grotesque parody of dance music.
I was initially planning to write something like "somehow this wonderfully sublime 2015 release managed to slip by me completely unnoticed," but immediately realized that there was no mystery at all: the only effective way to keep abreast of Andrew Chalk's quietly expanding oeuvre is to actively keep an eye on the Faraway Press website and hope that anything I gamble on is up to Chalk's usual high standards.  While a few of his recent releases have admittedly been a bit too pastoral to fully connect with me, the glistening and gently hallucinatory reverie of this single extended piece for electric piano completely hits the mark.  In some ways it reminds me of William Basinski's eroding tape loops or Steve Roach's classic Structures From Silence album, but not in any sort of direct way.  Rather, A Light At The End of The World just feels like a mesmerizing soundscape of almost liquid textures that I could happily listen to an infinite loop for hours.
At its surface, this album is essentially a single very simple and meditative motif extended for album-length duration.  There is no clear beginning or clear end, as "A Light at the Edge of the World" essentially just begins happening and then eventually stops happening with no overtly significant evolution in-between.  Rather, Chalk is content to just quietly, tenderly, and languorously improvise around a few arpeggios.  The magic, of course, lies in the details, as Chalk has made his career as a master of nuance and understatement and this album perversely takes those (non-extreme) tendencies to their hypnotically beautiful extreme.  The single most striking aspect here is the glistening tone that Chalk conjures from his piano, as each individual note seems like a sun-dappled droplet of water slowly rolling down a windowpane.  That curiously radiant, fluid, and organic texture, coupled with the flowing, arrhythmic pace of the notes combines to evoke a slow-motion cascade of shimmering globes leaving a blearily spectral and hallucinatory after-image in their wake.  Chalk truly weaves a near-perfect illusion here, masterfully erasing himself from the picture to leave just a lazily undulating mist of warm and elegantly blurred heaven that seems to extend forever.  In short, this album is basically a lysergic summer rain experienced in extreme slow-motion (not a particularly common aesthetic).
Naturally, creating a texturally rich and dreamily shifting soundscape that feels like a living organic entity is considerably more complex than it may seem from the apparent simplicity of the central theme.  While I have admittedly encountered a few loops that were perfect enough to warrant infinite repetition, the idea of an endless loop or floating stasis tends to be a hell of a lot more compelling than the reality.  Consequently, maintaining such an illusion requires a masterful sleight of hand to inconspicuously sneak in some much needed unpredictability and dynamic variability.  Chalk achieves that objective by quietly ensuring that his rippling tumble of individual notes unfolds over a constantly shifting haze of sustained lower tones.  Also, while he is not overt about it, the arpeggios in the foreground lazily follow the drift of the underlying chords rather than lingering around the same small cluster of notes.  Consequently, what feels like a warm, amorphous drift is actually a glacially unfolding flux of constantly evolving new harmonies (and one that is beautifully deepened by the lingering, quavering cloud of overtones to boot).
Less significantly, Chalk peppers the piece with a host of small-scale dynamic touches, such as understated space-y whooshes and washes of hiss.  His greatest small-scale dynamic feats occur with the central arpeggio motif though, as he sensitively varies his attack to give his notes a wonderfully physical and multi-dimensional feel.  It seems as though they are billowing through the mist at varying levels with varying degrees of force: some seem like they barely break the surface, while others feel like a small-scale eruption.  In Chalk's hands, the cumulative effect of all these small acts and behind-the-scenes plate-spinning is quite a wonderfully absorbing spell that feels like a natural event.  I am always in awe of composers who manage to completely dissolve into their work (there are not many around).  Naturally, I feel a bit silly hailing an Andrew Chalk album for all of the same slow-burning, nuanced, and thoughtful virtues that essentially define the bulk of his oft-wonderful oeuvre, but this album definitely feels like one of the more immersive and perfectly executed jewels in his sprawling and under-heard discography.
The new EP from Fovea Hex "The Salt Garden, Part 2" is the second in a series of 3 EPs released released on Headphone Dust in conjunction with German label Die Stadt, and contains 4 brand new tracks. Issued as a beautifully packaged limited edition 10 inch vinyl that also includes a CD copy of the EP. Pre-ordered copies also include a bonus remix CD EP by Abul Mogard.
The Institute of Sonology in Utrecht has earned its international reputation mostly for pioneering work in the field of computer-assisted algorithmic composition and digital sound synthesis by composers such as Gottfried Michael Koenig, Werner Kaegi, Paul Berg and Barry Truax. Anyone familiar with the music of these composers would have to admit that even within this ‘genre’ there were no stylistic dogmas. The stylistic range of Sonology’s artistic output becomes even broader when the work of other staff and frequent guests is taken into account, for example the compositions based on field recordings and audio-visual projects by Frits Weiland, the radiophonic works and pieces for tape and instruments by Luctor Ponse, the cybernetic tape compositions by Roland Kayn, or the experiments with computer graphics by Peter Struycken, to name just a few. And then there was Jaap Vink.
Jaap Vink (Den Helder, 1930) studied engineering at first, but then became interested in electronic music. He attended courses in electroacoustics at Delft University of Technology and installed a pedagogical studio for electronic music in 1961 at the Gaudeamus Foundation in Bilthoven with the help of the Nederlandse Radio Unie (NRU). He was a staff member at the Institute of Sonology as a teacher in analogue studio techniques from 1967 until his retirement in 1993.
Jaap Vink always tried to break out of the periodicity of the sounds so abundantly available in the electronic music studio. Although his music was entirely produced with purely electronic sound material, its textures resemble the richness of orchestral sounds, or large natural sound-complexes, as a result of recursive processes. The density of this sound material increases and decreases by careful control of feedback networks with configurations of analogue tape recorders (delay lines), filters and modulators. It should come as no surprise that his work is being rediscovered at a time when a new generation of musicians has conquered the stage with modular synthesizer setups and 'no-input mixers,' in which feedback of audio and control signals plays an important role. And although Jaap Vink’s music wasn’t performed live but produced and recorded on magnetic tape in the studio, it is exactly the human interaction with feedback processes that connects his work with the current generation of live electronic music performers. To some extent Jaap Vink’s pieces are indeed recorded live improvisations, and extending his patches and ‘rehearsing’ with them was an ongoing process. To see Jaap Vink at work in the studio was to hear the studio coming to life. After his composition "Screen" (1968) had been performed at concerts and released on the famous Electronic Panorama LP-set (Philips 6740 001), Jaap Vink was asked regularly to contribute to Sonology's concerts in the Netherlands and abroad. It was for these occasions that his recorded studio improvisations were brought to the level of fixed compositions and given titles. The selection presented here gives an overview of Jaap Vink’s works made in Utrecht, ranging from his first composition "Screen" up to "Tide 1985," produced during the Institute of Sonology’s last year in that city.
Following the widespread critical acclaim of his recent Centres album (July 2016), Vancouver-based vocalist / composer Ian William Craig returns with Slow Vessels, an album-length EP which both extends and radically re-imagines Centres, rendering six of its tracks in a stunning new light. While not quite an “unplugged” version, it is fundamentally stripped back, raw and predominantly acoustic, the songs included have been returned to their point of origin.
Slow Vessels sees Ian paring back the dense, billowing layers and heavily distressed textures that dominated the album and re-playing these tracks on a borrowed acoustic guitar and piano. While four of the tracks also feature some minimal tape manipulation, it’s a move that foregrounds the strength of the songs, imbuing them with a heightened sense of nearness and intimacy and briefly reframing their author in the more traditional mantle of singer-songwriter. Deeply affecting and almost devotional in character, this utterly gorgeous re-setting of the songs sees them bathed in a warm, golden glow and throws a brilliant new slant on Ian’s prodigious creativity.
"With Zhark's first release of 2017 - its follow-up to aces from Casual Violence and Stärker - Kareem takes the reins with Your Markets Are Volatile for a superb session helming to the tenets of production that have served him beautifully well thus far, effectively divining a proper sort of frequency pressure that translates brilliantly over sound systems which are worth their weight, as opposed to the saturated waveforms and in-your-grill intensity favoured by too many other producers to mention.
With only a corner of tongue-in-cheek, his opening statement "My Degree Is A Black Belt" demonstrates his unique approach in bleakest, suspenseful style with a palette of bone-dry drums, viscous subs and tense strings elegantly arranged with nuff space for bony bodies to move within, whilst "There Is No End In The Light Of The Tunnel" coolly defines a core idea of dark techno - it’s about the journey not destination - in pure blank-eyed, slogging and haunting terms.
Turn over and "Your Markets Are Volatile" offers one of his signature steppers, stripped down to grubbing acid grind, whipcrack snares and swirling darkroom voices with loads of fetid air between he grooves, seemingly prepping you for the Vainio-esque halfstep killllller, "Holy Alliance."
Bonus to the digital, you’ll find the hulking trudge of "Approaching Dying Planet At 65,702qms," and the ‘floor-caving subs of "El Pato" hearkening back to his nastiest gear c. 1999-2000, but choking under fathoms of sub-bass weight."
Editions Mego is proud to present the first release of a brand new project from JG Thirlwell. This is Xordox.
Xordox orbits a universe inhabited by darkness, wit, mystery adventure and experimentation. The cinematic quality that exudes from Thirlwell’s bent being presents itself in Neospection; unlike Thirlwell’s other works, this is predominantly a synthesizer record, including recording sessions from his residency at the legendary EMS studios in Stockholm. Sarah Lipstate (aka Noveller) plays her super-processed soundscape guitar on three of the tracks on the album, and additional mixing took place at Lazer Sound studios with Al Carlson (who works extensively with Oneohtrix Point Never).
Gosheven is the solo project of Budapest’s Balint Szabo, a musician who has developed his guitar's voice against its typical confinement. Where the fundamentally out-of-tune Western tuning has withheld some musicians in its history, Gosheven has researched and concerned himself with just intonation and other non-typical tuning systems for this debut release on Opal Tapes. Balancing blunted poetics and an intimate self-analysis of his place in sexual society, guitar, voice and elegant processing tell a story of metamorphosis and realisation of what is important in our short lives.
Featured tunings: just intonations by Wendy Carlos (#2, #10) and Ben Johnston (#11); La Monte Young's The Well-Tuned Piano tuning (#1, #4); Japanese koto tuning (#7); Banda Linda horns tuning (#9); Pythagorean tuning (#6), Meantone temperament (#12), Just intonation (#3, #5, #8)
DELIA GONZALEZ Horse Follows Darkness OUT ON MAY 5, 2017!
Horse Follows Darkness is the second record by Delia Gonzalez, her follow up to the album “In Remembrance”.
The title is taken from a werewolf genre film her 8 year old son Wolfgang had created. At this time, Wolfgang also turned Delia onto a genre of cinema she had always resisted - the American Western.
Delia explains that what she observed “was all relevant - the album is based on our personal experience of moving back to America (from Berlin) and the journey that followed. The record is a manifestation of that, and what one creates for themselves under the given circumstances. Coming back to America, I felt like a foreigner and NYC / America felt like the Wild West. Most Westerns from the 1960s to the present have revisionist themes. Many were made by emerging major filmmakers who saw the Western as an opportunity to expand their criticism of American society and values into a new genre.”
The narrative of the record is one of re-encountering the frontier mentality that shaped the country but somehow never faded. This time as a foreigner. The genre of the Western remains pertinent, many of the same stories of that brutally deromanticised era are still relevant today. America hasn’t changed - the cast, times and settings have, but we still hold onto the same ideal.
Horse Follows Darkness is essentially a modern electronic soundtrack for the Revisionist Western. Even the idea for the record cover is inspired by one of the most well known modern Westerns, Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs Miller.
The album was recorded with Abe Seiferth at Transmitter Park studios, which Delia likens to “going to the finest tailor”. Abe became an integral part of the recording, playing guitar and helping to suggest experimenting with different synthesizers, something Delia was keen to do. Delia refers to Abe as a magical and incredibly intuitive collaborator” regarding the sound of the record.
The music that emerged from these recording sessions combines a range of influences - from the compositions of Erik Satie to ‘Salon De Musique’, the solo piano record by Su Tissue (of the L.A. punk band Suburban Lawns). The record also took on a much different shape and sound with the introduction of the Sequential Circuits Prophet VS, as well as a vintage Korg Poly synth and the Roland SH-101. The golden era Krautrock recordings of bands like Neu!, Cluster & Harmonia were touchstones as well, the repetition, swirling soundscapes and locked-in rhythm tracks.
Delia Gonzalez is a Cuban-American musician and artist, based in both New York City & Berlin. Her disciplines include everything from composer to filmmaker, dancer / choreographer, sculptor, painter & performance artist. Her musical career with DFA Records began in 2004 when the label released the 12” single “Relevee”, followed by the album of cosmic acid-house “The Days of Mars”, with Delia and then musical partner Gavin Russom.
In 2015, DFA released Delia’s first solo album entitled “In Remembrance”, which was a full piano score for a 30 minute filmed ballet, a perfect example of the type of work Delia creates as a multi-disciplinary artist.
Major new work from Kara-Lis Coverdale, her solo debut vinyl release following Aftertouches (2015). A blissfully introspective 22 minute piece for keys, samplers and EQs in three parts.
A sublime and quietly hypnotic work belied by steadfast conceptual rigour, Grafts is the most ambitious and involving work yet from Kara-Lis Coverdale, her first since 2015.
In three parts of cascading yet plaintive multi-instrumental gestures, Grafts expands on the processing and self-temperment techniques explored on 2014's A 480 into a more encompassing palette. Uncompromisingly distinct while redolent of modal minimalism, '70s, new age, and folk music, Grafts effectively blurs distinctions between traditional composition and more open, overlapping genres that hover in the half-light between acoustic and electronic refinement.
Rather than anything grandiose or explicitly seductive, the effect of Grafts is best compared with the subtle intoxication of micro-dosing on LSD or the clarity afforded by quiet meditation, in a sense dilating the listener’s focus to a heightened awareness of the piece’s intricate peripheral tones as much as its melodic centerground, with a beautifully understated, surreal resolution. The piece flickers with gentle optimism, never at random, illuminating unseen spaces that quickly gradient into nothingness.
In both concept and execution, Grafts firmly resonates with Kara-Lis Coverdale's deeply established roots as an improvisational virtuoso and accomplished pianist as much as her academically informed approach to electroacoustic composition that showcases a distinct omnivorous appetite for the digital. But it's an emotional generosity that proves to be its defining, most intangible characteristic. Never fully coming to a resolution. Lingering on like a slowly dispersing plume of smoke.
In classic Important Records fashion, this intriguing collaboration came together as a celebration of a specific vintage analog synthesizer (in this case, the EMS Synthi).  The Synthi is apparently quite well-known for its ability to generate striking analog "sci-fi sounds," which goes a long way towards explaining why Alessandro Cortini does not particularly sound at all like Alessandro Cortini here.  The singularly reliable Masami Akita, however, always unavoidably manages to sound exactly like Merzbow.  As such, this collaboration is best appreciated as an excellent and appealingly divergent Merzbow release, as Cortini's arsenal of drones, blurts, swoops, bloops, and chirps adds a welcome splash of vibrant color to Akita's characteristic howling blizzard of white noise.
The first few moments of "MCAA" essentially convey all there is to know about this album, as an unpredictable squall of squelches and gnarled, stuttering electronics erupts over a deep, machinelike throb.  And then, of course, the expected firestorm erupts.  Initially, it is not quite typical Merzbow fare, as the noiser elements sound more like strangled feedback or a violently sick shortwave radio than an ear-shredding cascade of static.  To most ears, that is an insignificant distinction (like being beaten by a crowbar instead of a bat), but it matters a lot here.  While I suspect trying to articulate the difference between shades of punishing harsh noise is a fool's errand, this particular strain of hellish miasma is noticeably a bit more dense and texturally varied than usual.  Also, it is quite prone to wild swoops and squishy, bubbling electronic textures.  Sometimes it sounds like a field recording of an auto race filtered through an enormous amount of howling interference.  Other times, it sounds like a microphone placed inside an active volcano.  In every case, it proves to be quite a visceral experience. Of course, every Merzbow album is a punishingly visceral experience, so the most interesting bits are all the various ways that Cortini and Akita manage to give each piece its own vibrancy and character.  Being explosive is one thing, but keeping that explosion compelling and unpredictable enough to combat listener-fatigue in the face of such an unrelenting and prolonged onslaught is a much trickier challenge altogether.
Each piece reveals a new twist upon album’s viciously pummeling formula, such as the slowed-down and pitch-shifted "car alarm" central motif of the opening "ACMA."  Naturally, that sound is not particularly easy on the ears, but it is constant, giving the piece a graspable and perversely hypnotic pulse.  Cortini and Akita then capitalize upon that solid foundation by crafting an alternately skittering, shuffling, and crunching rhythm around it.  That is quite a cool trick, as the endless shifting rhythm below the endlessly static and woozy swooping is appealingly disorienting and sometimes even adrenalizing.  That is probably not quite enough to sustain the piece's 22-minute running time, but it does unexpectedly cohere into a groove of sorts around the 15-minute mark to reward those of us willing to ride out the storm until the end.  The last few minutes are especially enjoyable, as all of the harsher textures fade out to leave only sputtering and gurgling synth tones over a thudding beat resembling a slow-motion, malfunctioning heart.
Extended song durations are a bit of recurring feature among these five pieces, incidentally, as only the third piece ("AAMC") clocks in at less than 10 minutes.  Most pieces are much closer to 20 minutes.  Though "AAMC" probably exists primarily to eat the remaining time on a side of vinyl, it is not noticeably weaker than the rest of the album (it often sounds like someone attacking a bunch of contact mics with a power sander).  In fact, it is arguably stronger due to its brevity, though its massive crunching industrial throb and howling chaos never get a chance to evolve into anything else.  The rest of the album is rounded out by two more wonderfully eviscerating pieces with some inventive twists.  For example, "CMAA" locks into a very insistent gibbering and squiggling rhythm, while "MCAA" steals the show with an unstoppable earthquake rumble and a snarling, jabbering, and roaring tide of merciless electronic turbulence.
Obviously, the one major caveat with this album is that attempting to listen to two full albums of searing extreme noise in one sitting can be a bit exhausting (even for those of us fully acclimated to it).  On the bright side, this is an album where sequencing is essentially meaningless: this release is vinyl-only and any one of the four sides cheerfully offers up a similarly prolonged and vicious aural strafing (and with a similarly cryptic and interchangeable song title to boot).  Of course, yet another possible issue is the complete absence of Cortini's excellent melodic sensibility, a trait that was partially responsible for luring me to this album in this first place (I like Merzbow just fine, but Akita already made his impact on me long ago).  Surprisingly, however, that absence is more interesting than glaring, as Cortini impressively holds his own with Akita in the realm of dynamically compelling ferocity.  Any hint of a melody would actually seem badly out of place here, as this album is a crushing avalanche of jagged and corroded elemental power wielded masterfully.  I do not know how much Cortini fans or synth enthusiasts will get out of such an unmitigated storm of sonic ruin, but this is a legitimate monster of an album nonetheless: the textural benefits of the Synthi make a huge difference in making the old seem new again.  Anyone numbed to the genius of Merzbow will likely find this album to be a bracing reminder of the invigorating pleasures of pure noise done right.