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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Shirley Collins – legendary folk singer and one of England’s most respected song collectors – has announced her return to recording after 38 years. The new album, Lodestar, will be released on November 4th, and with it, Shirley has created the unlikeliest release of the century so far.
Lodestar is a collection of English, American and Cajun songs dating from the 16th Century to the 1950s, recorded at Shirley’s home in Lewes by Stephen Thrower and Ossian Brown of Cyclobe and produced and musically directed by Ian Kearey.
The first track to be shared from Lodestar is ‘Cruel Lincoln’. Shirley explains the history of the song: “This is an ancient ballad, found only rarely in England. The theory is that Cruel Lincoln was a mason who was not paid for the work he did for ‘the Lord of the Manor’ and so extracted a terrible revenge”. It also features bird song recorded at the back of Shirley’s cottage.
Born in Hastings in 1935, Shirley was fascinated by folk songs as she was growing up, songs she heard on the radio or sung by her grandparents in Anderson shelters. She left home for London to immerse herself in the burgeoning folk scene; at a party held by Ewan MacColl she met Alan Lomax, and in 1959 she joined him in the USA on the renowned field trip ‘Southern Journey’, recording American folk songs and blues, a formative journey for her personally and professionally.
On her return to the England, Shirley cemented her role at the forefront of the Folk Revival, recording over a dozen albums including the influential Folk Roots, New Routes with avant-garde guitarist Davy Graham, and No Roses, from which The Albion Country Band was formed. However, in the 1980s, Shirley lost her singing voice – later diagnosed as a form of dysphonia - and withdrew from performing live. It was only in 2014, after coaxing from David Tibet (Current 93), that Shirley sang in public for the first time since 1982.
Though Shirley Collins (MBE) has been absent from the music scene for many years, her impact has not diminished, the likes of Graham Coxon, Jonny Greenwood, Stewart Lee and Angel Olsen laud her and a documentary The Ballad of Shirley Collins is currently in progress. Additionally, she was given the ‘Good Tradition’ award at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards in 2008, elected President of the English Folk Dance & Song Society in the same year and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Music from Sussex University this year. Shirley released her first memoir, America Over the Water, in 2004 and is currently working on her second book.
Now Shirley Collins has sung once more (with a mischievous delight in defeating expectation), the accepted canon of her great recordings will have to be comprehensively recalibrated, yet again.
Reinier Van Houdt has performed as a classical trained pianist in premieres of works by Robert Ashley, Charlemagne Palestine and many others. He has worked with composers such as John Cage and Luc Ferrari and plays in Current 93, recently releasing an album with contributions by Nick Cave, John Zorn and Antony Hegarty.
This album taps into the artist's obsession with recording everyday objects, situations and moments. The act of recording seems to create a third ear, a little loophole in time through which sometimes unimagined parallel fields of sound can enter. Here listening is delving into the imagination already contained in matter. Perception is a vice that constantly hallucinates realities. Creating music from these recordings was fort the artist like a process of divination of things found crawling under rocks, whirling in shaded corners, traversing the atmosphere, propelling through the ether. The ears focused as if in a gaze – but an errant gaze, sleepwalking through the different strata of matter; a gaze uninterested in possibilities, complexity, openness or totality; an errant gaze, melancholy as well as pervasive, inviting contingency by ignoring it.”
"I’ve never heard a better mix of piano, electronics and amplification than during van Houdt’s program."
Live review, New York Times
“Reinier van Houdt’s performance was radical, extreme and without compromise. One of the most impressive examples I have witnessed of maximally mesmerising an audience with ever more reduced materials.”
Unsurprisingly, this newest work from Maryland’s Jeff Barsky is cut from a similar cloth as his recent works, such as his split record with Earthen Sea from 2014. To be clear, this is a very good thing, as it is clear that Work again emphasizes his judicious use of effects and processing on understated guitar work. Because of this, he is able to hit that difficult sweet spot between novel sound treatments while still retaining the instrument’s natural sound. As a result of that careful production and performance, Work is a beautiful, complex record that demonstrates his skill both as a performer and as a sound artist.
As I have mentioned in previous reviews, Barsky's work as Insect Factory is remarkable because he manages to avoid that pitfall of over-effecting his guitar work into an indistinct mass of noise, yet enough so that the album often bears little resemblance to the instrument.This ends up being abundantly clear from the opening moments of "We’re All Just Here for the Money."The shimmering melodies that appear early on sound more traditional, but the synth-like pulses are distinctly alien in comparison.By the end, the piece is a complex structure of interlocking layers of playing and treated loops, but one that retains a sense of form and order.
That does not mean that Work never sounds like a guitar-based record, of course.For "Junk Machine," (featuring Chris Brokaw on additional guitar) the vibrating strings are up front and bathed in a nicely metallic (yet natural) sheen.From this, however, Barsky and Brokaw expertly weave in electronic accents and processing, and a more electronic-tinged melodic segment in the second half just serve to enrich the already strong piece.The brief "Cigarette" is also more guitar-centric, being just shy of three minutes of mostly naked guitar playing, albeit in weird and unconventional ways.
The two lengthier pieces are where this record excels."Slow Oxygen Loss" again features markedly guitar-like sounds, mostly taking the form of long, spacious harmonics that help propel the piece forward.However, restrained use of what could be radio static and electronic processing fills the piece out extremely well, keeping it sounding dynamic and ever evolving.The second half has Barsky shifting the structure to a more rhythmic one, with heavy use of clipped and echoing guitar notes.It builds to a chaotic, panicked climax that is extremely appropriate given the title of the piece.
The 17-minute concluding "Sleep Instruction" is not too dissimilar, also beginning with a pairing of static heavy noise and submerged melodies.The changes here are a bit more understated in comparison compared to what preceded, with most of them taking the form of variations on hushed melodies and loops, coming together with a more placid and relaxed sound.Towards the conclusion, Jeff rolls back the layers of noise, leaving the skeleton of weird melodies and digital processing to conclude the album in a bizarre, yet beautiful manner.
With Work, Jeff Barsky again shows his exceptional ear for unconventional guitar sounds, using the instrument in ways it was never intended but never losing sight of the core sounds it can create.Thus, he has given this record an exceptional sense of depth and refinement, making for a sound that is adventurous, yet still engaging and enjoyable from beginning to end.
The influences that helped shape Turkish artist Ekin Üzeltüzenci’s latest work, and her work under the name Ekin Fil overall are not hard to place. For the most part, Being Near is an album of pop songs, yet enshrouded in gauzy reverb and blurry production that gives them a somewhat alien, but simultaneously melancholic edge. Sounds of guitar, voice, and electronics all define these eight songs, but the whole is greater than the sum of those familiar parts, culminating in an achingly beautiful excursion of music.
The album actually begins with some of its more abstract moments, in the form of two instrumental works."Sel" is at first all deep synth pulses and sad, complex melodies that have so much more depth than they seem to at first pass.None of the music sounds particularly natural as far as instrumentation goes, yet there is an undeniable human quality to it."Vapor" drifts a bit more into standard dark ambient territory with its depressive tones and reverb by the pound, but the expanding tones keep it fresh and dynamic, rather than a simple wall of dull, bassy tones.
When the title song appears, the album's first distinct appearance of vocals are strongly prominent.Üzeltüzenci’s voice is quiet, but with a captivating delicateness.At first it is a richer arrangement accompanied by distinct, echoing synth thumps that almost resemble conventional percussion.Her voice is definitely used as a secondary element compared to the rest of the music, but the isolated sound is distinct, even if it is extremely difficult to discern a single word being sung."Almost Silence" features an even more conventional sounding song structure, with Üzeltüzenci’s voice a bit more prominent as lush melodies surround the entirety of the piece.
Other vocal-based songs again feature the sound drifting more into lovely, but bleak abstraction."Mankind" heavily features Üzeltüzenci utilizing a pulsating synthesizer passage, but with indistinct noise sweeps and waves of sound crashing through, including some completely indefinable, alien bits of noise.The final piece, "Stranger Than Them" concludes the album on an especially high note.With a more overt use of programmed rhythms and gorgeous, airy vocals placed more at the forefront, it is a soaring, wonderful conclusion to an exceptionally strong record.
It may not be hard to come up with reference points and other records that resemble Being Near, but when something familiar is executed with such brilliance and verve, that is the most essential part.From beginning to end, this is a lush, yet sad record that covers significant emotional ground, and even with some familiar seeming moments, is still a unique piece of gorgeous and gripping music.
It’s been over a decade since Roy Montgomery’s last album, and R M H Q is a hell of a return. This release contains four distinct records of new material. Listening to any of his work is a visceral experience—repeating phrases swell and decay, immersing the listener in the cyclical narrative of his compositions.
Montgomery was in his rock band period in the eighties, when the dark, minimalist post-punk of The Pin Group lead into the gloriously open-ended freedoms of Dadamah. After a quiet spell, he returned in the late nineties, producing towering spires of guitar lines that exposed fragility between the strums. With his solo releases and in collaboration with Flying Saucer Attack, Bardo Pond (Hash Jar Tempo), and Chris Heaphy (Dissolve), his focus shifted from the truth-mining of rock music to epic celestialism. His ambitious yet humble tracks outstrip their origins, and Montgomery toured the world sitting cross-legged on the floor, playing twenty-plus-minute compositions.
"Long-in-the-making debut album from Modern Love’s most elusive operator G. Howell. Recorded with a DR550, a battered Charvel guitar + assorted pedals.
From the disputed border somewhere between Lancashire and Yorkshire, G..H. claims a no mans land where he is free to decimate distinctions between black metal and concrète techno by drawing upon an elusive, metaphysical force that’s exclusively common to music rooted in that region; from Muslimgauze and Autechre thru Shackleton and Demdike Stare.
The inarguably mongrel Housebound Demigod is G.H.’s debut solo album, following the Ground EP (2011) and his involvement with the hexed Pendle Coven project & HATE, alongside Miles Whittaker and Andy Stott, respectively, between 2003 - 2009. It sounds like nothing out there; the result of countless hours at the grindstone, using sound as tonal therapy and a purely expressive sculptural material to best render the feel of his bleak but extraordinarily beautiful surroundings with all the rugged texture and captivating aesthetic of some ancient cave graffiti.
The album unfolds as a treacherous topography of boggy drones, entrenched subbass and deforested, windswept feedback, strewn with the charred remains of black metal in opener "Screaming Demon Pickups" and the hollow-eyed stare-down of "Angels & Doormen," or prone to bury the senses with unpredictable slow techno mudslides in "Mickey Cosmos" or the subsidence of "Packhorse."
He often underlines that physicality with a drily ambiguous wit; check the bitterly clipped narrative on "Yorkshire Fog," or, equally, when he puts all his weight behind the stylus-troubling, bestial shudder of "Devils Bit Scabious," and you can’t shake the feeling that he’s gurning like an evil loon behind the rotten torque of the album’s titular parting shot.
While ostensibly monotone, overcast, the devil is found in the album’s subtleties of timing and mixing detail; riddled with phantasms that lurk and lash out from the crevices of its granite slabs and pitch black ravines, all placed at oblique angles in his surreally folded, labyrinthine and unheimlich soundfield."
The word "Aven" refers to an underground shaft that leads upward from the roof of a cave passage.
Bethan Kellough creates sound worlds that weave together instrumental materials, sound design and ambisonic field recordings. Her composition "Aven" is based on a recording made in Iceland in 2015, which features the booming sound of underground geothermal activity escaping to the surface through a small shaft. “Looking down into the darkness, there was a sense that a whole world existed in an unknown space beneath. The sound world of Aven is a journey through such an imagined environment.”
The composition is driven by this sonic encounter, but enters the imagined worlds beneath through the instrumental material developed throughout the work. These melodic passages predominantly feature violin, which Bethan has played since childhood exploring traditional Scottish music, rock violin, free improvisation and classical studies. The field recordings used in Aven were made in Iceland during the Wildeye sound recording workshop with Chris Watson and Jez Riley French, and in South Africa during the Sonic Mmabolela residency with Francisco Lopez and James Webb. Each of the recordings explore a world of sound beneath a surface, reflecting upon the initial recording environment at the geothermal site. In South Africa, an approaching storm was heralded by wind blowing through bushes in the savanna, underneath which was hidden a Soundfield microphone. A contact microphone on a fence in South Iceland revealed the tones of the wind contained inside the wires, and in an Icelandic nature reserve the wind was also captured by microphones buried underneath a layer of grass – a miniature world sheltered by the strands of dry straw.
Following hot on the heels of this year’s synth-centric Dominions, Sarah Davachi returns to Students of Decay for a bit of an unexpected curveball: an album with no synthesizer at all.  Employing an organ, some strings, a piano, and her own voice, Davachi mostly reprises the minimal, drone-centered aesthetic of her previous work (she is quite fond of sustained notes and slow-building harmonies), but also impressively expands her niche with a few more conventionally melodic pieces.  As a result, the elegant and understated All My Circles Run is likely the most diverse of Davachi’s albums to date, sustaining a slow-burning and subtly shifting reverie for forty sublime minutes.
The album opens in characteristically Davachi-esque fashion, as a simple, gently undulating violin drone unfolds for over a minute before any overt transformation begins to creep in.  In fact, "For Strings" may very well capture Davachi at her most minimalistic, as the entire piece is essentially just a hazy, slow-motion massing of notes into a lush chord (or at least a more harmonically rich drone).  There is a bit of a minor surprise at the end, however, as all of the strings gradually disappear to leave behind an unexpected wake of quietly throbbing and stuttering noise.  It is quite a clever bit of compositional sleight of hand: using an ostensibly straightforward drone piece to secretly weave a complex undercurrent of uncomfortably oscillating harmonies, then pulling back the veil to reveal it.  I enjoy surprises and neat tricks.  I was actually quite a bit more taken with the following "For Voice"  though (matter-of-fact song titles abound here).  Using only her own voice and a sustained and wobbly thrum, Davachi casts a haunting and evocative spell as the various soft-focus layers of wordless, angelic voices intertwine to form eerie minor key harmonies.  Unlike many Davachi pieces, "Voices" appears in a fully formed state and stays that way for nearly ten minutes of dreamlike, otherworldly beauty, as there is no need to blossom into anything more. "Chanter," which follows, is yet another divergence from the expected, albeit a somewhat less heavenly one.  While a "chanter" is part of a bagpipe, the piece sounds very much like it was played on a submerged piano.  Much like "For Strings," it is yet another piece where a very simple theme undergoes a very subtle and slow-motion transformation.  In this case, the repeating two-chord theme is gradually muddied by the addition of other notes, which gradually darkens the harmonic waters to increasingly hallucinatory and disquieting effect.
"For Organ" returns to a bit more familiar and established territory, as a sustained organ drone gently undulates in apparent stasis as other notes slowly and sneakily seep in to subtly shift its mood and coloration.  Unexpectedly, however, Sarah begins playing actual, overt notes around the halfway point and the transformation is greatly accelerated into a lush, shimmering haze of gently pulsing harmonies.  The album’s final piece, however, does not seem particularly indebted to Davachi’s previous work at all, as "For Piano" is essentially a simple, gentle, and melodic piano miniature that falls within shouting distance of artists like Harold Budd and Stars of the Lid.  The sole "Davachi" touch is merely that the piano is competing for the foreground with a very prominent and visceral string drone that provides a sharp counterbalance to the piece’s more pastoral aspects.  It is not my favorite piece on the album by any means, but it works quite well nonetheless, as Sarah has found a way to expand outwards into more serene territory without quite losing her bite.  Also, I was caught very much off-guard when the piano part actually changed into something new and became fairly loose and improvisatory, a tactic that seems almost radical in the context of Davachi’s history of patient, glacially unfolding accretion.
In a way, "For Piano" might actually be the most significant piece on the entire album, as even the similarly divergent "For Voice" sticks quite close to Davachi’s comfort zone of skillfully crafted, slow-moving threads that twist together to yield vibrant textures and rich harmonies.  That aesthetic obviously works quite well, but it is necessarily a somewhat constrained one that is hard to explore for long without everything starting to sound over-familiar.  While several of the other pieces are much more to my liking (particularly "For Voice"), it is "For Piano" that shakes up Sarah’s aesthetic the most by incorporating loose and evolving melodies and drifting quite far from the original motif.  It will certainly be interesting to see where Davachi evolves from here, but all bets are off for now, as she is about to release her third album of 2016 on Important and there is no clear arc that I can unravel with such a condensed chronology.  In any case, All My Circles Run is yet another fine album from Davachi, using deceptive simplicity as a foundation for sneakily escalating complexity and vivid harmonic depth.  I do not think that it necessarily surpasses Barons Court, but it is very much on a similar level.
The Overtone Ensemble project is a fairly recent development in Catlin's career, as he formed it in 2012 to focus on his Vibrissae works (the instruments borrow their name from cat whiskers).  Prior to the birth of the Ensemble, Catlin was primarily known as an experimental guitarist with an impressive talent for instrument modification, building an array of guitars (and a zither) designed for bowing and unusual harmonics.  He also built gongs and bells from scuba tanks and heaven knows what else.  Catlin is very much an "idea man."  Conceptually, the Vibrissae are an extreme but logical extension of Tim’s earlier experiments with pick-up placement, eBow modification, bowing, and unconventional fret locations.  While it is quite a big leap in practice to move from playing a guitar to "activating" metal rods with longitudinal stroking, it is not hard to see a piece like the ghostly, droning "Adumbration" as a bowed performance on an unfeasibly large, multi-person guitar.  In essence, Catlin just ingeniously found a way to get the sustained, deeply resonant, and spectral sounds that he always wanted without having to use any effects or processing.
Of course, the downside to the Vibrissae is that rubbing a metal rod offers an extremely constrained palette, achieving a very specific sound quite beautifully, but not leaving many options for stylistic or dynamic variety.  Consequently, these four pieces tend to take their individual character from whatever accompanying instrumentation Catlin and his ensemble throw into the mix.  On "Scintillation," for example, there are some clattering metallic sounds, some gongs, and a host of harsh feedback-like whines coaxed from wineglasses or bowls.  Elsewhere, "Oscillation" sounds like the ensemble is playing a complex battery of cymbals and large bells, though it gets more compelling as it gets less busy, as all the clattering racket conceals any of the microtonal harmonic activity happening in the background.  In fact, it kind of sounds like a wild free-jazz drum solo if the hapless drummer in question suddenly found himself missing his snare, toms, bass drum, and high-hat.  Sadly, it is not quite as great as that scenario might sound.  The closing "Accretion" is great, however, as the ensemble uses a battery of handbells to create a vibrantly twinkling, surprisingly physical, and queasily dissonant unreality.  It is like the air itself is somehow transformed into a visceral and malign entity.  There is nothing else quite like it that I have heard.
To my ears, it is exclusively the bookends where the Overtone Ensemble seem like they are realizing their full potential.  I would even go so far as to declare "Accretion" an absolutely singular and legitimately evil-sounding piece of music.  While the middle of the album is definitely eclipsed by the surrounding pieces, I would not say that this album has any significant flaws that could be avoided: the fundamental premise is necessarily a hugely limiting one.  The Overtone Ensemble's appeal lies primarily in the unique and resonant sounds that Catlin's self-built instruments generate, which can sometimes be quite amazing given the absence of processing.  On pieces like "Adumbration," Catlin creates a microtonal cloud of harmonies that seems to hang in the air, shimmering and undulating with a life of its own and "Accretion" sounds like nothing less than the very fabric of reality being gleefully ripped apart.  That is reason enough to hear this album, as far as I am concerned.  Of course, the complex and unpredictable interplay between notes is quite wonderful as well, but the Overtone Ensemble's talents are strictly limited to texture and harmony.  An argument could probably be made that there is quite a bit of hyper-nuanced melodic and rhythmic activity unfolding as well, but it is not anything that is happening on a scale that normal humans can pick up on: anyone looking for great compositions should look elsewhere, as should anyone expecting Catlin's unnerving harmonic swarm to ever blossom into a beautiful vista of warmth and consonance.  This album is what it is.  And what it is most closely resembles is an impossible rich, alien, and sometimes absolutely mesmerizing sound art installation that unexpectedly sprung up in my apartment.