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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Xiu Xiu’s Jamie Stewart and Lawrence English are not two artists that I would have ever thought to pair together, but a shared appreciation for David Lynch is probably as solid a foundation for a collaboration as any.  Also, HEXA makes perfect sense given the circumstances:  Xiu Xiu recorded an incredible Twin Peaks homage,  Brisbane's Gallery of Modern Art assembled a major retrospective of Lynch’s work, and Lawrence English is one of Australia’s most prominent and distinctive sound artists.  Notably, however, this commissioned accompaniment to Lynch's photographs of abandoned factories sounds almost nothing like either English or Xiu Xiu.  Instead, it sounds a hell of a lot like an artfully restrained and simmering noise album.  More specifically, Factory Photographs is industrial music in the most literal sense of the word, resembling nothing less than the troubled dreams of a ruined and long-deserted factory.
The most immediately striking aspect of Factory Photographs is how completely Jamie Stewart's aesthetic is subsumed by this commission.  There is absolutely no distinctive aspect of Xiu Xiu’s sound that survives at all, aside from the vaguest elements imaginable, such as "a tendency towards darkness" and "a fondness for harsh textures." Of course, English’s vision does not assert itself all that much either, though Photographs does bear some textural resemblance to his upcoming Cruel Optimism album, albeit with absolutely all of the musical elements excised.  English has worked extensively with field recordings in the past though and that is what Factory Photographs most closely resembles: field recordings of crunching and clanging machines collaged, embellished, and enhanced.  The opening "Sledge" effectively presents the template for the entire project:  echoing clashes of metal, deep crunches and rumbles, subdued and pulsing machine rhythms, menacing feedback, and unexpected transformations of mood. Admittedly, the mood palette here is quite limited, probably only covering "tense," "brooding," and "haunted," but those are all moods that I am quite fond of.
Yet another immediately noticeable feature of this album is that feels like part of an installation (which I suppose it is) rather than a series of stand-alone compositions.  It often feels like quite a harrowing installation though, so if English and Stewart were aiming for mere industrial ambiance, they chose a particularly visceral and menacingly intrusive strain of it.  This album definitely has some teeth.  That said, the overall feel throughout Factory Photographs is that of rusted, churning machinery violently rattling and spraying sparks alone in a cavernous empty space.  With that as the baseline, however, Stewart and English periodically erupt into a handful of striking set pieces.  The gnarled feedback of the opening "Sledge" is one such moment, but it was not until the one-two punch of "Lumber" and "Ring Bark" that Factory Photographs truly grabbed and held my attention.  In "Lumber," a clipped, locked groove-style rhythm relentlessly carries along a howling and crunching cacophony that sounds like a giant machine has gone mad and started tearing apart its surroundings.  "Ring Bark" is a bit more subtle, but no less mesmerizing, as its initial ghostly hum of feedback unexpectedly explodes into a stuttering rhythm of static that sounds like the end of a record being playing at a disconcerting speed.  I suspect Lynch himself would appreciate that small nightmarishly surreal touch.
To my ears, those are probably the strongest pieces on the album, but there are number of other wonderfully haunting motifs strewn through Photographs, like the slowly quavering and uncomfortably harmonizing moans of "There Never Was," the dissolving eruptions of flutters in "Over Horizontal Plains," and the slow-motion volcano of shuddering static that is "The Body."  Given that two of the album’s ten pieces are mere snippets that last less than a minute, English and Stewart rack up quite a strong hit-to-miss ratio, even if it all tends to rapidly flow by in an all-too-brief blur. Weirdly, I am not quite sure if that is a triumph of sequencing or a flaw, as it is hard to tell if Factory Photographs was intended a series of incidental pieces seamlessly stitched together into a coherent whole or an attempt at a fully formed album that needed a little padding to reach an acceptable length.  More likely, it is the former, but it still feels more like a (delicious) snack than a meal.  Of course, that also means that no pieces ever overstay their welcome, which I greatly appreciate.  More importantly, I was quite impressed at how completely Factory Photographs succeeds in other regards.  For one, it feels like a true collaboration with a strong and distinctive vision: if it sounds a bit like a Lawrence English album, it at least sounds like a sinister negative image of one.  Also, HEXA unquestionably nails the grainy, desolate, and unreal mood of Lynch's photographs, which was the whole point of this collaboration.  While it probably is not an essential release within either artist’s canon, it feels like much more than just a soundtrack and is a fine way to imbue my home with an appropriate atmosphere of Lynchian dread.
This winter marks the 20th anniversary of Maurizio and Roberto Opalio’s singular My Cat is an Alien project, a milestone that they are celebrating with a pair of fascinating and divergent releases.  Originally recorded back in 2015, Eternal Beyond is the fruit of an explosive and wildly experimental 4-day session with French black metal vocalist Joëlle Vinciarelli that does not sound at all like black metal.  RE-SI-STEN-ZA!, on the other hand, is billed as a sort of culmination of My Cat is an Alien’s entire career.  As I have not yet heard much of the Opalio’s earlier work, I cannot vouch for the truth of that, but I was pleasantly surprised by the title piece, which sounds like the work of a radical art commune a la Amon Düül embellished and collaged by a talented noise/musique concrète artist.
The other two major pieces on the album are similarly compelling, particularly "Eternal Albert Ayler," which enhances Maurizio Opalio's harp-like backdrop and the buzzing electronic periphery with a wonderfully strangled and primal trumpet solo from Vinciarelli.  The 22-minute "Eternal Eclipse du Soleil" is the album’s massive centerpiece though, unleashing a buzzing and sizzling bed of electronic textures, wordless ritualistic chants and moans, and plenty of crunching and scraping metal textures.  As it progresses, some of the components grow increasingly unreal in texture.  Also, it often sounds like there is a hapless noise-guitar band a la The Dead C trying to be heard above the din.  The overall effect is quite a difficult one to convey, but the closest description I can muster is "it sounds like approaching a remote monastery through a jungle while the earth shakes and fire rains from the sky."  As with many great MCIAA works, it could arguably benefit from more aggressive editing, but the length feels fundamentally crucial for pulling me completely out of my reality in time for the heavy and beautifully crafted final crescendo.
To my ears, Eternal Beyond was an ideal collaboration for the Opalios at this stage in their career, as they have plunged as deeply and completely into a hallucinatory rabbit hole of otherworldliness as anyone. While I am sure Maurizio and Roberto will no doubt go even deeper into that singular headspace with future albums, this release is an unexpectedly explosive lateral move away from that expected trajectory.  Most MCIAA albums evoke and explore an increasingly vibrant and fully realized alien soundworld totally unlike anything else I have heard–on Eternal Beyond, the Opalio’s vision instead feels like it is ripping through a dimensional barrier to bleed into our own.  That is a welcome twist: as much as I love being totally unmoored in unfettered imagination run wild, some earthbound context and contrast adds some very effective sharp edges to MCIAA's strange dreams.
The atypically earthbound and representational cover art provides an immediate clue that RE-SI-STEN-ZA! might not be a typical My Cat is an Alien album and that is indeed a safe assessment. For one, it is the most personal of the Opalio brothers' releases, standing as a tribute to their family, their region, and the culture of resistance, all of which come together in the cover photograph of the duo's maternal grandparents.  I never expected overt political statements from MCIAA, but it is understandably hard to be a bystander in such an increasingly frightened and xenophobic era.  That said, the theme of resistance is one that has arguably shaped MCIAA's entire career, as there are few other artists who have been so unwaveringly challenging and iconoclastic for as long as the Opalios.  The average My Cat is an Alien album has absolute zero common ground with anything happening in the mundane world of the masses, as Maurizio and Roberto seem to exclusively look to the stars or search inwardly for their inspirations instead.
The opening title piece is a surprise exception to that trend, as it instead looks backward to the music of revolution-minded rock and communal free-improv.  At least, it does initially, as Roberto declaims his titular poem over a lurching and oddly timed quasi-tribal rhythm of deep toms and ringing ride cymbal.  That nod to the radical past is both precarious and fleeting though, as the groove is soon beset by a haze of oscillating and chirping space toys.  As long as Roberto is speaking, the piece remains somewhat subdued, though there is clearly the feel of a gathering storm beneath him. Eventually, however, it finally erupts into wildly bubbling and churning stew of electronic chaos and it is glorious.  Unexpectedly, however, it quickly settles back down into a woozily plinking and ringing simmer…before absolutely exploding into a roiling crescendo of howling noise and swirling alientronics.  The remaining and similarly lengthy piece, "Let Their Voices Speak Through The Wind," is a bit more in the vein of recent MCIAA albums such as Psycho-System and The Dance of Oneirism: heavy psychotropic drone built from chirping electronic pulses and Roberto’s wordless layered cooing. Nevertheless , it marks an intriguing (if subtle) evolution, as Roberto and Maurizio occasionally cohere into a bit of a more structured composition than usual with a simple and languorous one-finger keyboard melody and some ghosts of a chord progression.  Of course, the primary appeal is still the sheer otherness and enveloping haze of pulse and oscillations, but the spectral hints of poignant melody and unexpected harmonies add a welcome extra shade of depth and beauty.
It is hard to say if RE-SI-STEN-ZA! is better than any other recent My Cat is an Alien albums, as their last few opuses have all been absolutely absorbing masterpieces of outsider psychedelia.  This album does stand apart as distinctive for a couple of reasons though.  The most obvious one is that it delves deeply into an uncategorizable sort of spaced-out, noise-damaged psych rock quite different from their recent abstract drone-fests.  Also, Maurizio unexpectedly unleashes quite a gorgeous and rippling guitar coda at the end of "Let Their Voices Speak," which is rare treat from a duo so devoted to unconventional instrumentation (and with such a liberated approach to scales and chords).  The less immediately apparent innovation is that these "spontaneous compositions" seem to have more of a premeditated dynamic and compositional arc than usual.  That is a welcome innovation; particularly since the sneaky intrusion of structure does nothing dispel to the mind-warping transcendence of the Opalios' alien vision–it merely makes it a bit more accessible.  Most likely, everyone already indoctrinated into My Cat is an Alien’s singular vision already knows that this is an essential release, but it may very well be the perfect entry point for the curious as well.
UnicaZürn build their long, ceaselessly evolving musical compositions through a process of improvisation followed by careful editing and processing. Their music, drawn from subconscious associations while recording, is frequently aquatic or oceanic in overall mood and texture. Knight has spent most of his life living on the banks of the Thames while Thrower resides on the East Sussex coast, and their musical flights of imagination tend toward rolling river dynamics and the open seas of synthesised sound.
For UnicaZürn, tidal imagery, oceanic forms and the slow rhythms of coastal water are a recurring structural presence, with strong associations of rootlessness, of being far away from home, a stranger in a strange land. The inability of human lungs to breathe water endows rivers and seas with a special poetics: a boundary between two different but inter-related states. On the one hand, solidity, clarity, definition; on the other, fluidity, uncertainty, dissolution. The sense of a threshold between opposites gives rise to an elusive otherness, suggesting a portal through which the everyday world can be escaped. Death under the water, the survivors of a lost kingdom clinging to the rocks of an unfamiliar island, a coastal boat ride into deepest abstraction, a deserted beach expressing a world outside reality.
A sexual frisson too: a hovering at the brink, poised at the turbulent edge of pleasure, swept away into oblivion. Do we head toward the sea when we want to escape? And at the coastline, do we walk to the edge because we want to jump, or be swept away by an unexpected wave? There’s a darkness in the sea, even if illuminated by the most dazzling sunshine. Open horizons shows the clutter of our lives to be transient, and as we look to the sea we feel a dizzying sense of the eternal. Aquatic sensibility, oceanic timescales: the action of the salt sea beating on the shore. Each grain of sand a rock smashed to dust. Beaches are cosmic, elemental. They are images of time.
UnicaZürn’s core instrumentation blends analogue synthesiser, mellotron and electric piano with electric guitar and clarinet. Both Thrower and Knight draw upon their love and wide experience of of electronic music, from the outer shores of Stockhausen to the outer spaceways of Tangerine Dream. In addition, Knight is reknowned for his pioneering multi-textured fretwork with Danielle Dax and his ambient guitar settings for Lydia Lunch, while Thrower’s reed playing provided a distinctive melancholy in Coil and emerged as electro-acoustic texture in Cyclobe.
A Pink Sunset For No One is the eighth studio album from Noveller, the solo electric guitar project from US composer and filmmaker.
One of the most adept guitarists of our time, Lipstate returns with her signature breathtaking cinematic, experimental soundscapes. Eloquent and striking, her instrumentals evoke colorful and otherworldly imagery. Lipstate writes in majestic, emotional strokes with pieces ranging from remarkably tense environments to shimmering psychedelic rock or unraveling into something darker.
A few years ago, my dear friend and bandmate Jamie Stewart and I were talking about SWANS. I started to mention how much I admired the utterly personal approach to guitar that Norman Westberg had developed on those early records and moreover how that had blossomed out so richly on this latest incarnation of the band. During the course of the conversation Jamie mentioned a CDR that Norman had passed to him, which collected a few pieces of solo work that Norman had been working on. I was instantly curious to hear these pieces and started to track down the recordings online. After some investigating I found Norman’s CDRs available through an Etsy shop he had set up. I ordered one and a couple of weeks later, after I’d listened to that first CDR non-stop for a few days, I order all the others I could get my hands on.
The first solo work I heard from Norman was this recording, Jasper Sits Out. I was instantly struck by the textural sensitivity he managed to create with nothing more than a guitar and some modest pedals. He managed to find a depth in what was a very limited palette and that impressed me greatly. The connections to his work with SWANS was clear, in that his trademark relation to tonality was present. Instead of relying on volume to achieve this sonic state though, Norman’s solo practice relied on a sense of swaying harmony and orbiting loops to create a tonally dense sound world that was very much personal, but overtly invitational to the listener.
Jasper Sits Out, the title referencing the Westberg family mascot who has now sadly departed, reflects Norman’s interest in minimal structures and the processes of iteration that are formed through the manipulation of looping fragments. Creating almost tidal surges across these pieces, Jasper Sits Out speaks to his abilities to contour sound in time. The lead track for example is truly oceanic in that is has a remarkable tidal flow of strumming textures that seem to sink below one another in a effortless wash of textural density.
I could not be more pleased to be able to share this music through Room40. This edition comes completely remastered and features a bonus piece recorded exclusively for this edition. I encourage you to listen deeply.
So complex and substance-affected was their evolution, Bardo Pond have been creating their dreamy riffs for 26 years alongside a myriad of side projects and their prolific Record Store Day releases. Returning with a career defining album, Under The Pines sees them delve into the subconscious with their transcending cosmic post-rock.
Over 41 minutes The Pond’s fermentation, their languid throb and textured groove (flute, violin, Isobel Sollenberger’s haunting vocals) sounds like cathartic dream pop wrapped in a delicately constructed barbwire shroud.
“Playing fuzzed-out stuff of stoner dreams since the mid '90s,” (thanks Pitchfork) and beyond the mentions of free jazz, the avant garde, Sun Ra and The Book Of The Dead, Bardo Pond’s remarkable career and exemplary output has seen them gain fans from all corners of the pond. In 2010 Lou Reed and his wife Laurie Anderson invited them to perform at the Vivid festival they curated at the Sydney Opera House, not forgetting they were recently handpicked to support Jesus & Mary Chain at London’s Roundhouse as part of Mogwai’s 20th Anniversary and Stewart Lee chose them for the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival which he curated just last year.
Hailed for their space rock, drone, shoegaze, noise and/or psychedelia, and in a super lengthy interview in Ptolemaic Terrascope enthused (back in 2001) that they were somewhere between John Cage’s silence on 4’33 and Japanese noisenik Merzbow’s total ear-splitting cacophony.
One of their finest albums to date and nearly three decades on, Bardo Pond are in it for the long haul and remain one of the most significant underground rock bands of our time.
Ultra-modern computer music duo Second Woman offer a preview of their forthcoming Spectrum Spools opus, S/W, with an exclusive EP taking cues from the furthest fringes of digital dub and experimental software composition. “I E/P” and “II E/P” utilize percussive stutter, micro-processed echo, and negative space to explore the limits of rhythmic abstraction, blurring the boundary between human artistry and artificial intelligence. A pair of remixes by Grecian dub-techno progenitor Fluxion and Midwest avant-footwork producer Jlin round out the collection, innovatively mining the source material for vivid rhythmic contours.
The beginning of "Danse Inverse" is somehow one of the more cohesive works.A pulsing bit of electronics at first; it suddenly becomes a mutant synth take on folk music, with the guttural vocals channeling darkness not unlike a black metal album.Later, on "Dobra Nasza," an expansive opening of improvised, shimmering electronics and inhuman vocalizations eventually give way to a jazz-heavy rhythm section and almost conventional rock music vocals (structurally at least, the voice itself is still quite inhuman).
Even with its rhythmic opening and occasional plucked string, "The Far Horizon" is overall dissonant and unpleasant, with a lot of menace in its occasionally open spaces.The drums on "Wild East Blues" may be an almost conventional reference point, but the slow shuffle tempo and terrifying vocals are anything but normal, and even the accordion thrown into the mix takes on a dark hue.Later, on the somewhat peaceful "The End of Western World," the nearly operatic vocal style casts a menacing shadow onto the piece’s bowed strings and chiming percussion, which, on their own would have an almost classical sound.
Perhaps the most unsettling moments are courtesy of the two part "Wolves and Birds" (the second piece is not on the vinyl album but on the companion CD version of the album).The title is rather descriptive, with the first part being field recordings of birds chirping in the distance.However, the hollow drone and far off vocalizations (the wolves part, I assume) give the ambience of an oppressive jungle at night.Things can be heard, not really identifiable and not at all human sounding, but just far enough away to build tension rather than having the trio opt for horror movie scares.The second part is more field recording collage based, with only a bit of cymbal sounding musical, and has the same sense of the oppressive unknown throughout.
The adorable kitten that features on the cover of Carp's Head could not be less of an accurate representation of what is included.This is one of those records where the weirdness comes across not as a contrived attempt to be bizarre or unique, but gives the record a genuinely unsettling quality.Even without Tazartès’ intentionally unpleasant vocals, the sound would be uncomfortable, but the voice just pushes it even further.But I am always an advocate that art does not have to be pleasant to be enjoyable, and this is definitely one of those cases.It is not the type of music I would put on often, but when I am in the mood to be challenged and a bit unsettled, this is one I will reach for.
Grand Line, Nakama’s last release and the project’s second overall, was a sometimes-chaotic mass of free jazz improvisations held together by a structured sense of composition that seemed to be at odds with the music itself. Most Intimate has a similarly focused conceptual foundation, but rather than the grand gestures of the last album, here they are much more personal, with the quartet members each writing parts for one another to play. The concept is admittedly complex and convoluted, but in execution it works in more ways than just being a novelty.
Most Intimate is made up of a series of "Dedications," "Gratitudes," and "Unifications."The dedication pieces involved one member of the quartet writing a piece in honor of another member, with the caveat that the performer receiving the dedication did not perform.The subsequent gratitude piece is that recipient playing a solo performance in response.Finally, the unification is a performance by the full quartet, but with the person giving the dedication and the person receiving swapping instruments.This is bookended by two full band pieces, and an improvisation in the middle where the members play the instrument they did not in one of the previous arrangements.
Yes, it is complex enough that a diagram or a flow chart could have been provided to specify all of these varying arrangements, but it really is unnecessary to appreciate the album.Unsurprisingly the opening and closing pieces ("Intimate" and "Most Intimate", respectively) are the most traditionally composed and rich sounding, with not only all performers involved, but also playing their preferred instruments (as duos).For "Intimate" a slow, intentionally repetitive passage of Christian Meaas Svendsen's bass and Adrian L√∏seth Waade's violin as first establishing a rhythm, with Ayumi Tanaka's piano adding a delicate counterpart.Percussionist Andreas Wildhagen's contribution is a sparse, but effective passage of cymbal playing.Concluding "Most Intimate" is less of an insistent rhythm and more of an expansive piece of music.Driven by piano and violin, with the bass and percussion being more of an accent, there is a gentle peacefulness to the piece that is subtle and light without being insubstantial.
The first "Dedication" piece, omitting percussion, is also an extremely graceful sounding work, one that at times drifts precariously close to an easy listening jazz sound, but never crosses that line.The following "Gratitude" piece is therefore a performance for solo drums and has Wildhagen doing a lot with just a standard kit.With the toms played lightly enough to have a resonating melodic quality to them, there is significant depth to the solo, and the exceptionally high quality recording really helps magnify these subtleties.The short "Unification" that follows has a higher tempo and a looser, more urgent improvised sound that at times drifts nicely into more abrasive territory.
The rest of the album follows this model, with the violin-less "Dedication II" taking on percussive throb that makes it stand out, both from rattling snare drums and more aggressive piano with a more aggressive sound.It is followed by the violin solo "Gratitude II" featuring L√∏seth Waade's instrument played in mostly unconventional ways, such as sharp string bowing or muted plucks."Gratitude III" omits the piano and in turn becomes a less melodic, slowly building rhythmic piece, and Meaas Svendsen's subtle vibrations of "Gratitude IV" compliments the spacious and delicate preceding "Dedication IV" very well.
Nakama is all about conceptual complexity, and Most Intimate is no different.However, it is not necessary to fully appreciate the album.My first listen was actually without any knowledge of the underlying theory and structure used, and I found it enjoyable just on that superficial level.The varying arrangements make for a diverse sound, mostly following a pattern of a more open sounding piece, then a solo, then a full band improvisation that has a distinct rawness to it likely magnified by the fact that half of the band are not on their primary instruments.With that alone it is a wonderful album of pieces of varying complexity, and the knowledge of how it was conceived is just an extra dimension to appreciate.
It occurred to me the other day that there was an incredible wave of great, experimentally minded solo guitarists several years back (Area C, Black Eagle Child, Talvihorros) that has either gone completely silent or moved into very different territory and that no one has quite risen up to replace them.  Thankfully, however, the wildly prolific Justin Wright has not gone anywhere and continues to be a tireless torchbearer, both through his Sonic Meditations label and his own Expo Seventy project.  Given the sheer volume of Expo Seventy releases, I tend to only check in on the major ones and this one fits the bill: recorded as part of a three-week art event in Kansas City (America: Here and Now), Wright was able to assemble a like-minded quartet featuring two drummers to back his slow-burning psych-rock pyrotechnics.  At its best, the results are surprisingly accessible and anthemic, like a time-stretched and deconstructed Black Sabbath jam experienced through a heady fog of drugs.
These sessions were originally intended as part of a larger and more ambitious project, as Kansas City musician Ashley Miller hoped to record multiple bands for a planned compilation.  Unfortunately, the necessary funding for that endeavor did not materialize, but Expo Seventy managed to record before it dissolved.  Aside from Wright and Expo Seventy bassist Aaron Osborne, the line-up for this album is expanded with a couple of recurring Sonic Meditations artists from Sounding the Deep and Shroud of Winter (David Williams and Mike Vera).  Interestingly, I would have expected Wright to immediately exploit the vibrant polyrhythmic possibilities of a two-drummer band, but the first half of the album goes in a considerably more restrained (but no less effective) direction.  There is admittedly a bit more cymbal and tom activity than a lone drummer could deliver, but the rhythm section primarily just focuses on providing a slow, heavy, and viscerally deep groove to ground Wright’s smoldering, drone-damaged shredding.  Eventually, the drums in "First Movement" snowball into something a bit more rolling and propulsive, but Williams and Vera generally just hang back in the pocket to make room for Wright’s blurred and lysergic strain of rock guitar heroics.  The drums do get a bit wilder in the more drone-based "Second Movement" though, gradually building into a roiling eruption of tribal toms and splashes of cymbals.  At one point, the percussion even reaches an apocalyptic and punky crescendo, but it quickly simmers back down into a throbbing avant-blues pulse.
While I am definitely drawn to well-done guitar drone like the proverbial doomed moth, it is the more conventionally "rock" piece ("First Movement") that strikes me as most essential here.  There are obviously plenty of great psych-rock and stoner-metal bands out there, but I have not heard any that sound quite like prime Expo Seventy.  Whereas other bands are sludgy, indulgent, wildly explosive, or prone to improv-heavy freak-outs, "First Movement" embodies trance-like repetition, simplicity, and simmering restraint.  All of that is appealing enough on its own, but Wright also has a real talent for anthemic riffage, casually tossing off bitchin' hooks, moaning string-bends, and dual-guitar harmonies in a haze of delay and just letting them dissipate as he coolly moves onto his next idea.  Of course, Wright gets a hell of lot of help from the rest of the band, as his layered haze of druggy riffs would not be nearly as compelling without the density and momentum of the underlying groove.  While it is probably just as good, "Second Movement" is considerably less distinctive as an artistic vision, as Wright initially focuses his attention on a simple, gently throbbing synth drone.  It is damn hard to sound unique as a minimalist armed with a synthesizer.  If the piece continued exclusively in that vein, it would be little more than a competent retro/kosmiche pastiche, but it ultimately becomes a showcase for some wild dual-drummer pyrotechnics.  Thankfully, Wright does not completely fade into the background, as he colors the percussion explosion with some chirping synth flutters and some nicely roiling and groaning guitar noise. While it does not quite transcend feeling like a purely improvised jam session, the drumming is at least explosive enough to make it a compelling one.  Also, it may all just be an amusingly extended introduction to the throbbing and bluesy coda.  It is very hard to guess what was planned and what was not.
As I listened to America Here & Now Sessions for the first time, several successive thoughts flashed rapidly into my head.  The most immediate revelation was that "First Movement" was remarkably great, reminding me that I have been lax in my attention to Expo Seventy lately and have probably missed out on some similarly fine work.  Then I marveled at how cool and improbable it was that Wright was hard at work churning out experimental drone cassettes in Missouri instead of fronting a band like High on Fire.  It is all too easy to take an artist for granted when they have been around for a long time and seemingly have a new release every month.  Lastly, I reflected upon how wonderful it would be if Wright could actually keep a two-drummer band together long enough to write, rehearse, and record an absolutely killer studio album.  Sadly, I suspect Wright does not quite have a King Crimson-level budget, so there will probably not be any apocalyptic Mainliner-caliber opuses in his future.  I am certainly delighted that he got to record this though, as I like this direction quite a lot.
"Sindroma" is also one of the rare pieces on Fluida Mekaniko to prominently feature vocals.  Describing Evangelista’s vocals as "spoken" or "shouted" does not quite hit the mark, as they have a distracted-sounding and somewhat arbitrary element that makes me feel like I am overhearing half of a cell phone argument in Spanish.  Curiously, that does not detract from the piece at all, as–again–the groove is absolutely everything.  The vocals are just one more thing that happens to be occurring.  As much as I like "Sindroma," however, it is "Kooperativo Centrifugilo" that is the absolute zenith of the album, resembling an unstoppable juggernaut of a mechanized Latin dance party bulldozing through a protest rally: no frills, just pure hypnotic and all-consuming rhythm.  Elsewhere, "Todavia Mas" is an arguable dark horse contender for the album's centerpiece: though it boasts a fairly standard-issue EG groove, the surrounding music is surprisingly harrowing and ambitious, resembling a pitch-shifted fascist rally being dive-bombed by menacing swoops of swirling and flanging electronics.  The deep, lurching, relentlessly forward-moving shuffle of "Objektiva" is also quite absorbing, even going so far as to break with tradition by attempting a sort of stuttering left-field hook.
Within the extremely narrow confines of the EG sound, however, Evangelista and Arturo Sanz do sometimes find room to experiment a bit.  For example, "Tempa Akso" keeps the percussion at a bubbling background simmer for a bizarre soundscape of gurgling and gargling vocals that sounds like an infernal choir of cicadas or crickets.  It is probably not one of the album's best pieces, but it is an interesting and unexpected detour nonetheless.  A bit closer to my expectations is "Tenante La Ritmon," which intriguingly deconstructs EG's penchant for crushing rhythms into little more than a rolling bass rumble that sounds like a contact mic at the base of a mountain as a distant avalanche approaches.  My favorite (and the most endearing) of the anomalies, however, is definitely "Eterno Della Vita," which (unintentionally?) boasts a repeating loop that makes me think that Lanz and Evangelista are about to grab their surfboards and hit the beach.  Second prize probably goes to "Mosselprom," which sounds like the bizarre middle ground where Middle Eastern rave, mass demonstrations, and "hip" action movie soundtracks all improbably come together (picture Jason Statham suavely administering choreographed beatings to everyone who stands in his way at a crowded and churning rooftop party in Abu Dhabi).