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.
Get involved: subscribe, review, rate, share with your friends, send images!
I have a curious relationship with Axel Willner’s music, as I have always thought that he is kind of brilliant, but generally too perfect, poppy and dancefloor-focused to appeal to my personal sensibilities.  Also, I keep forgetting that he even exists for some reason, so I am continually surprised every time that he releases a new album and I discover that I like it.  Predictably, I am most drawn to his darker, weirder side, which previously peaked with Cupid’s Head’s stellar "No.  No…"  Every album by The Field has a couple of great songs though and The Follower is no exception to that trend.  In fact, it is probably my favorite of Willner's albums to date, as it is as flawlessly crafted as ever, but considerably more shot through with ghostly textures and undercurrents of melancholy than I ever would have expected.
One aspect of Willner's artistry that I find endlessly fascinating is his ability to brazenly embrace hackneyed techno tropes, yet still find a way twist them into something surprising and original.  Obviously, I would prefer it if he jettisoned rigid predictability altogether, but Willner's artistic decision to be creative and experimental within very limited "pop" structures is endearingly perverse.  A prime example of this aesthetic is the opening title piece, which takes a simple house-inspired kick drum and a very "trance" sequencer pattern and uses them as a propulsive foundation for a spectral, stuttering hook.  It is not exactly a revelatory feat, but it is an impressively nuanced one and it admittedly sounds quite great once the push-pull bass pulse kicks in.  There are also some unexpectedly dissonant howls of feedback near the end, making "The Follower" a wonderfully and covertly subversive bit of thumping, well-produced dance music.  Elsewhere, however, Willner steps more firmly into the ambient/dance grey area that he has staked as his own.  "Pink Sun" is probably the weakest of the lot, but it is still quite imaginative, bolstering yet another formulaic house beat with chopped-up, whispered vocal snippets and languorous, woozy guitar motif.  It never quite catches fire, but it shows that even Willner's most subdued and overly slick pieces often have some good ideas at their core.
Impressively, "Pink Sun" is the only real misstep/filler on an otherwise stellar album, as each of the remaining four pieces is exceptional in its own way.  The most obvious highlight among them is "Monte Verità," which combines several obsessively repeating and stuttering loops to wonderfully haunting and hooky effect.  There are also some echoing snatches of speech in the background to nicely enhance the hallucinatory tone.  In fact, I suspect this might be the triumphant birth of Hauntological Disco.  The following "Soft Streams" is even more spectral, slowing down the pace to a pleasantly dubby crawl to make space for a wonderful array of floating and panning voices.  "Raise the Dead," on the other hand, reprises the "Monte Verità" formula of a thumping kick drum pulsing beneath a gorgeous host of skipping loops, but does so in a much more understated and slow-burning fashion.  Finally, the closing "Reflecting Lights" takes The Field’s aesthetic in an unexpectedly divergent direction, stretching out for 14-minutes and gradually transforming from warm and hazy near-ambient drift into a considerably more interesting locked groove/skipping CD motif.  It admittedly comes dangerously close to leaving me cold, as Willner spends a little more time on the toothless ambient side of the spectrum than I would prefer.  Once the chord changes start to transform the final "locked groove" theme, however, "Lights" feels gorgeous and epic enough to make me forget how long it took to get there.
As far as I am concerned, the only significant flaw with The Follower is that "Pink Sun" is a 9-minute lull that immediately threatens the momentum begun with the title piece.  It is hard to be too disappointed in that though, as that still means that five of The Follower’s six songs are excellent.  That is a quite an impressive hit-to-miss ratio.  I suppose I also miss some of the impish humor that found its way into some of The Field’s earlier work, but I do not think it would have sat easily within The Follower’s darker mood.  This just is not the proper place for Lionel Richie samples.  Even without trying to inject humor into these pieces, however, Willner had quite a difficult balancing act on his hands, he is essentially two completely different artists: one fun and hook-savvy dance producer and one guy who is hell-bent on concocting the perfect hybrid of prime Oval and classic dub-techno.  Those two threads seem inherently incompatible and would lead most artists into the side-project route, but Willner seems to see reconciling those two sides as an endlessly appealing challenge.  More often than not, it works: experimental music is rarely this fun and pop music is rarely this experimental.  This is a niche that The Field owns quite conclusively and The Follower is one of the Willner's finest albums.
On his last couple of albums, Glenn Jones has let the world into his music. Back in 2011, the rattle of Commonwealth Avenue’s B-line train snuck into The Wanting. More or less an invisible addition, it was the consequence of recording in an apartment that sits on one of Boston’s busier thoroughfares. My Garden State opened the doors and windows and walked out into the New Jersey neighborhood of Glenn’s youth. It has a thunderstorm and chimes and an annotation about frogs, and they are more than just filigree on the proverbial fretboard. "Alcouer Gardens" would be a different song without the rain and thunder, and the non-stringed sounds add details to the loose narrative announced in the titles. Now comes Fleeting, Jones’s sixth solo album, recorded in Mount Holly, New Jersey with Laura Baird. The studio windows are open again and there are birds in the trees, but the emphasis placed on the influence of people and places cuts at the idea that there is an inside and an outside to begin with. It argues that music, often tucked away inside headphones or living rooms or performance spaces, is more than a confined curiosity of the wider human world.
Fleeting begins with the sprightly see-saw rhythm of "Flower Turned Inside-Out." It’s a cheerful song that contrasts the up-and-down pulse of alternating strings with Glenn’s dexterous left hand, which snaps, rolls, and darts across the fretboard in a kind of dance. The melodies and harmonies are bright and inventive, sounding both controlled and spontaneous, and the mood is playful—this is Glenn Jones in a familiar place letting his mind and instrument meld into a single intuitive apparatus.
Then the light goes out and the rhythm unwinds. Jones’s chords transform into floating clouds, as if he were playing them and then getting out from his chair and walking around them. Time slows down and space collapses to a free-moving point. The rest of the album is calmer. Not exactly darker, but aware of the shades of joy and sadness that come with remembering the past and seeing that it’s different from the future.
"In Durance Vile" is where the inside and outside have their first overt meeting. After a short run of angular and surprising melodies, Glenn lets out a broken chord and pauses for a moment to let it resonate in the room. At that exact moment a bird trills three or four times and pauses, like it’s waiting to see if Glenn will sing back. Everything about the song is gorgeous: its unmoored structure, which bends and stretches in all the right places, its tight melodies and unexpected developments, and Jones’s technique—the way he uses volume, tempo, and the sharpest of sharp dynamics, keen enough to cut the toughest ears in two. Together they give "In Durance Vile" the semblance of infinite variety, and yet when that bird lands in the silences between the notes, something extra pops. Call it synchronicity or coincidence, it puts Glenn in a space and time that is not the abstract space and time of a modern recording.
It’s the same space and time in which Glenn’s influences, not to mention his friends, have lived and died—Robbie Basho and Jack Rose, John Fahey and Jimi Hendrix. It’s the place where people celebrate their loved ones and remember them in all of their complexity, and with all the complexity that remembrance brings. Listen to the way Jones weaves happiness and longing together on "Mother’s Day." Listen to how he commands concrete images, moments of doubt, and uncertain feelings, pulling them all in a line when he wants with a big bluesy hook and an uncanny sense of timing. Notice how he invokes personal feelings with understated banjo lines on "Spokane River Falls," how he refuses to commit to sentimental nostalgia but simultaneously evokes familiarity and belonging. Pay close attention to the enormity in "Robbie Basho as a Young Dragon," which is curious and firm, both seeking and reaffirming, as is the way with good friends.
These connections are all sounds from the outside too, received from beyond and returned to it, with something new added. If that sounds magical or mystical it’s because Fleeting deals with magical and mystical materials. Glenn closes the album with "June Too Soon, October All Over," an extroverted panegyric to the joys of the northeast’s warmer months. It ends with the omnipresent chirping of crickets, a whole field of them trumpeting away as twilight fades to dusk. Time resumes its forward movement here, toward colder temperatures, darker beers, and shorter light, but the switch from atemporal introspection to the usual procession of events is fluid, suggesting we can move in and out of either mode at will—that, in fact, the two coexist, just like the inside world and the outside one, the soul and the universe. There’s a Wallace Stevens poem that begins, "The soul, he said, is composed / Of the external world." It ends claiming, "The dress of a woman of Lhassa, / In its place, / Is an invisible element of that place / Made visible." Glenn Jones might agree. At the very least, he knows what it means to make the invisible visible.
Renowned Japanese innovators Boris and Merzbow have teamed up with Relapse for their new collaborative 2xCD/4xLP Gensho, one of their most daring collaborations to date. Named after the Japanese word for "phenomenon," Gensho is a unique release featuring over 150 minutes of new music spread across two CDs and four LPs, available as two separate double LP sets or a deluxe 4xLP edition.
The Boris songs are completely new, percussion-less reinventions of classic tracks from the band's storied catalog, while Merzbow's songs are entirely new compositions. The two sets are intended to be played at the same time at varying volumes so that the listener can experience their own "gensho/phenomenon" every time. As with every Boris/Merzbow collaboration, the only thing to expect is the unexpected, lending the album near-infinite potential for aural discovery and encouraging direct interactivity with the listener rarely found in such unconventional music. An untouchable paroxysm of noisy, droning experimentation!
Twelve years have passed since Editions Mego boss Peter Rehberg released his last full length release Get Off on the Hapna label. In the interim, along with running the label, Rehberg has embarked on a series of soundtracks for the French artist and choreographer Gisele Vienne. Out of this collaboration the seeds were planted for the prolific KTL, guitar/computer duo with Stephen O Malley.
After a surprise return to live performance in 2015 we are now presented with Pita’s new full length document under the banner of Get In.
Get In extends the perennial Pita sound into a paradox of intimidation and beauty. "20150609" teases the juncture between the human and the tool, the improvised and composed and the analogue and digital. "Aahn" inhabits a field of electronic nebula, simultaneously inviting and alien. "Line Angel" could be a new form of minimalism for the post internet crowd. "S200729" harks to an acid most splintered whilst "Mfbk" completes proceedings as an ambient drift underscored with classical overtones.
Get in is a beautiful, engaging and unsettling listen. A multi-headed hydra presented as the ultimate dystopian sonic journey.
Prolific Japanese artist Masami Akita, aka Merzbow here teams up with session musician, producer, and singer-songwriter Eiko Ishibashi for anew work which showcases yet another side to Akita’s monumental catalogue.
Kouen Kyoudai consists of two side long tracks that could be read as a contemporary take on the traditional avant-garde. Skittering electronics, percussion, piano, doom and noise all feature as exponents in this epic release which seamlessly incorporates many strands of experimental thought and practice.
The tension that arises from the human use of the tool is made explicit as these works unfold in a storm of ecstatic human/instrument/machine interaction. Drums hammer alongside an ecstatic drone. Notes on a piano jostle with a storm of splintered electronics.
Kouen Kyoudai highlights the pull between beauty and chaos, structure and the abyss leaving behind a thrilling display of human and technological interplay whilst opening up new paths for both musicians involved.
Following her acclaimed debut Ett (Editions Mego) and the subsequent Msuic EP (Peder Mannerfelt) Editions Mego is very proud to present the second full length LP by Klara Lewis.
Lewis' skill at sculpting the hermetic shines on Too as she twists her idiosyncratic vision into nine tracks of blurred rhythms and haunted backdrops. Too is a powerful statement where the individual works tread a vast landscape as dour and aggressive elements rub shoulders with warmer optimistic works. Neither looking behind nor forward these works spiral in a time of their own devising, presenting themselves as a most audacious theatre for the ear. With a strong momentum developed from an organic outset the works move into a logic of their own, forming themselves as abstract landscapes, jitered rhythms and even pop like structures.
Too is a deeply engaging display of sound and skewered sensibility which hovers the cusp of reason and eludes the concrete. The results are Lewis’ boldest statement to date.
In a continuation of an amusing trend begun with 2014’s stellar Feeling Tropical Feeling Romantic Feeling Ill mixtape, Demdike Stare have yet again coaxed another odd non-Shapes release out of the singular Mica Levi.  This one is perhaps even stranger than its predecessor, as it is centered around an infectiously skittering and warbling 2-step "single" that Levi and frequent collaborator Tirzah released to YouTube all the way back in 2011.  The rest of Taz and May Vids is filled out with a few other excellent Tirzah collaborations, a Demdike Stare remix of a Tirzah collaboration, and a couple of very different outliers.  While the Brother May-assisted "More Red" is admirably bonkers, the primary appeal of this EP is definitely the murky, poppy, and beautifully warped Tirzah pieces.  Admittedly, it seems like Sean Canty and Miles Whittaker had quite a struggle in collecting even a mere EP's worth of material (the three Tirzah songs add up to barely 8 minutes), but these scraps from the vault offer some dazzling (if fleeting) glimpses of Levi's skewed and inscrutable pop genius.
DDS
Mica Levi is an artist that I have always had a very hard time wrapping my head around, as she seems to effortlessly bounce from one direction to another with the only consistent thread being that she sounds like absolutely no one else who is working similar territory.  She also seems at times to be like the creative equivalent of a broken fire hydrant, either spewing out great ideas too quickly to fully explore them or else presenting them in a fractured, over-caffeinated way.  However, her incredible score to Under The Skin stands as a very convincing counterargument to that theory.  The Taz and May Vids EP, however, does not: these (barely) 7 songs are basically one tossed-off stellar idea after another, which is simultaneously wonderful and exasperating.  For example, the piece that birthed the entire release ("GO") is essentially just a decent beat, the word "go," and a completely generic chord progression at its core, but that meager content is executed absolutely brilliantly and audaciously.  For one, the chords sound like they are coming from a broken calliope.  Secondly, it is piled with chopped and gibbering vocal snippets that sound absolutely deranged and hallucinatory.  Sadly, it all lasts just two minutes, but that is more than enough to make a huge impression: "GO" lies in the lunatic nexus in which a circus, a precocious child who has eaten too much sugary cereal, Aphex Twin’s "Windowlicker," and a seizure all gloriously intersect.
"Dare You," also featuring Tirzah, is built from similarly bizarre and minimal content, sounding like someone chopped up a percussion loop from Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation, then decided to slow it way down and make it seem seasick.  While not nearly as strong as "GO," it does feature an absolutely killer break where it settles into a heavy, shuffling groove.  Unfortunately, "Dare You" does not even manage to hit the two-minute mark, so it is nice that there is an extended Demdike Stare remix at the end of the album.  Canty and Whittaker do not do anything particularly transformative with the material, but they do a fine and reverent job of stretching it out, focusing on the best part (the great beat), and downplaying the weaker aspects.  The third Tirzah collaboration ("Trip6Love"") is even less of a complete song than the other two, but its clattering percussion and fuzzed-out jabbering happen over a very cool and obsessively repeating loop of fat synth swells.  In fact, it sounds like Levi and Tirzah just decided to go crazy over an extremely promising Under the Skin piece that somehow did not make the cut for the soundtrack.  Elsewhere, "More Red" is another wonderfully brainsick stand-out, sculpting a clanging industrial percussion loop, sirens, and pitch-shifted rapping into something so relentlessly annoying and one-note that it almost becomes brilliant.  Almost.
The EP is rounded out by a couple of incidental pieces, the 52-second "Intro" and 3-minute "Chimes 7."  Unsurprisingly, both are quite strange.  I would probably like "Intro" quite a lot, however, if only its plinking and lurching calliope groove had been given a chance to blossom into something more rather than just abruptly ending.  "Chimes 7," on the other hand, maybe goes on a little too long (a truly rare crime for Mica).  It does feature some great twanging and rusted-sounding string textures though.  All of that basically adds up to an alternately disorienting, dazzling, frustrating, and fascinating mixed-bag of an EP: the better moments are legitimately great, but they are always far too short-lived and it is quite clear that Mica did not lose any sleep worrying about songcraft.  Taz and May Vids reminds me of one of those bonus "sessions and outtakes" discs that are often appended to classic albums by folks like Miles Davis, but in this case, these are sessions and outtakes are from a great album that does not actually exist.  That said, I like it anyway: it is not fully formed by any means, but it is both original and inspired.  Also, it is certainly more visceral and attention-grabbing than some of Mica's other releases.  The only caveat is that it is definitely the musical equivalent of a delicious junk food fix rather than a satisfying meal.
On their second album as a duo, Marco Marzuoli and Alessandro Sergente lay out a reticulated blanket of pulsing guitar tones and modulated electronic pitches dedicated to the moon. Luna’s three programmatic tracks do a remarkably good job evoking their subject. Each one sounds like it has been washed in silver light and painted onto a blue-black canvas. Their shapes are uncertain, as much shadow as form, and they radiate with uneasy energy like they know they hide more than they reveal. Appropriately, the album's every sound hovers uneasily in place, shifting the air and color around it in long undulating waves both oceanic and astronomical.
Titles like "From the Village to the Country Under the Moonlight" and "Midnight: Song of Crickets on the Green Hill" bring to mind Luc Ferrari and Presque rien No. 1, less for their titles and more for their intent. Instead of grabbing a few microphones and setting out to capture an audio portrait of a moonlit landscape, Mazuoli and Sergente grabbed a guitar, some pedals, and a fistful of tape and set out to paint an abstract narrative—they call it a triptych—inspired by the quotidian and simultaneously magical passage of the moon through the night’s sky. The titles provide context where Ferrari’s sounds would normally do that job, only Luna doesn’t need much help. If the aforementioned songs fail to inspire images of villages or crickets, they evoke the sharp glow of the lunar surface and the curved shape of the Earth and its satellite with just a few carefully layered tones.
Timbre is the biggest contributor to that success. The guitars are glassy, lightweight, striking, almost uniformly smooth and still restless. It’s an optical illusion for the ears: pay attention to the pattern of the waves from peak to peak and the music will seem stationary. Focus on the descent and ascent of the wave and suddenly it’s an animated affair filled with trembling lines and nervous energy.
The careful application of interference helps too. Minor tones and a faint electrical texture, like the washed-out hue of an old television screen, complete the picture. There are rolling hills somewhere in these sounds, maybe crickets too, but more noticeable are the landscapes, the trees jutting up into the blackness of the sky, haloed by their own internal light, blurred shadows, white stone, and a grey presence that almost slips into daylight near the end. The details of a nocturnal stroll are lost in these wider strokes, but the mood of a place, and the mood of a kind of seeing, are captured with supernatural clarity.
Cloudland Canyon is a band that has seemingly been around forever, remaining constantly in the periphery, yet never quite making much of an impression on me with their reverb-drenched, chameleonic psych/krautrock revivalism.  I always saw them as an almost-good band of people with great record collections who were a bit too self-conscious, over-meticulous, and reverent to fully realize their potential.  On this, improbably only their third album since forming in 2002, they have cleverly punched-up their sound with a lot of fun ‘80s-style electronic grooves, resulting in something unexpectedly resembling a Chris & Cosey/Panda Bear mash-up at times.  That admittedly innovative aesthetic still does not click entirely for me, but the handful of songs that lean heaviest on hooks and retro-dance grooves are quite good.  And some of the other ones are even better.
Cloudland Canyon’s Kip Ulhorn is a rather unique artist, seemingly part gear fetishist, part chameleon, part studio wonk, and part endless jam session.  Given that precarious balance, it actually seems somewhat surprising that Cloudland Canyon have finished any albums at all: it is immediately obvious from the opening "Where’s the Edge" that An Arabesque was a Herculean effort for a two person band to assemble.  Thankfully, Kip and Kelly Ulhorn managed to enlist a bewildering murderer's row of collaborators this time around to ease some of the burden (though I suspect Kip probably still spent months of his life overdubbing, piecing together, and processing tracks).  Returning to fold once more is Spacemen 3 alum Sonic Boom, but he is joined by a number of other folks ranging from the ubiquitous M. Geddes Gengras to former members of Flaming Lips, LCD Soundsystem, and even Big Star(!).  If that is not enough, the cover art was done by a fellow (Brian Roettinger) who was nominated for a Grammy and has worked with Jay Z.  Sadly, Jay Z himself does not appear anywhere in the credits, but that might just be because his record label put their foot down.  While no one involved seems to be credited with anything specific, I think it is probably safe to say that ex-Flaming Lip Kliph Scurlock quickly makes his appearance known with the wild live drumming in the otherwise throbbingly motorik opener.  The rest of the guests tend to generally be well-hidden behind a battery of analog synthesizers throughout the album.
An Arabesque is very conspicuously front-loaded with all of its best songs, which I suppose is very convenient on vinyl.  Krautrock homage "Where’s the Edge?" aside, however, the Ulhorns cover some unexpected territory on the album’s first half.  For example, the Kelly-sung "Try Faking It" is a near-perfect dose of early '90s synthpop: all throbbing and burbling synths, an insistent groove, and some fine reverb-drenched vocal hooks.  The gorgeous title piece, on the other hand, is a dreamy, bubbling, and radiant concoction of hazy dual vocals and expertly manipulated dynamics.  Also, there is some well-used saxophone that further ensures that I feel like I just discovered an incredible deep cut on a forgotten New Romantic album.  The ends start to fray a bit with "Faulting Fate," however.  Just about every song on An Arabesque sounds like a great vamp that has been fleshed out until it feels like a song, but "Fate" feels like the Ulhorns almost forgot to get around to writing a hook to go with their fat, propulsive synth groove and hoped that enough reverb would hide that.  Fortunately, there is a cool bridge where the piece finally comes together beautifully.  The rest of the album does not offer any similar last-minute songcraft surprises, sadly, but the three remaining pieces still boast some legitimate flashes of inspiration.  The best of the lot is "Staying Awake," which sounds like a great Jesus & Mary Chain song that had all of its instrumentation replaced with just burbling sequencer arpeggios, shimmering synth swells, and a booming kick drum.
The obvious critique that can be leveled against An Arabesque (and Cloudland Canyon in general) is that it is quite derivative, albeit in a free-floating, "anything goes" kind of way.  The Ulhorns are definitely a pair that is not at all shy about displaying their influences, but I actually do not mind in their case.  They push all the right nostalgia buttons here and offer more than enough energy and well-crafted hooks to make it work.  A much more significant issue is the overuse of reverb on vocals, as it tends to blur them into just another instrument.  That works in some cases, but it definitely creates distance and has a negative impact presence-wise.  A very vocal-centric song like "Psychic Instant," for example, would work a hell of a lot better if the vocals were not reduced to kind of a soft-focus haze.  Yet another issue is that most of Cloudland Canyon's songs clearly originate from jams and they sometimes fail to mask that.  It would not matter so much if they had a white-hot rhythm section or some incendiary solos, but it does matter when it is just a twinkling synth motif over a straightforward beat.  That can get very dull without strong hooks.  "Rebuilding Capture" is a solid example, as it is basically a one-note motorik groove with vocals that have been flanged into robotic oblivion.  Thankfully, it does not completely fall flat due to some very spirited drumming and steadily escalating atmospheric enhancements, but it is nevertheless the weakest piece on the album (excluding the flickering 40-second-long instrumental closer).  Of course, all of that grumbling is basically about Cloudland Canyon sounding exactly like Cloudland Canyon, which misses a key point: An Arabesque captures them firing all cylinders and is one of the best possible manifestations of their sound that I could hope for.  There a lot of excellent songs here and very few weak ones (and the title track is pure heaven).
Matt Elliott’s first release under the Third Eye Foundation moniker now sits at a full two decades ago. What is most striking is the fact that, considering how deeply rooted in the era drum 'n' bass/jungle music sounds now, Semtex is largely still as fresh sounding today as it was then. Because of less reliance on the overused "Amen" and "Funky Drummer" loops (though they appear), Elliott produced a work with significantly more depth and nuance, which is why it seems much more timeless than its contemporaries. Reissued here with a bonus disc of demos from the same era, and a lengthy selection of downloadable extra material, it is a nearly four and a half hour revisiting of one of the seminal albums of the mid 1990s.
Semtex was one of the first attempts to transfer the distinct sound of a genre heavily associated with dance clubs and the last antecedents of rave culture into a distinctly different, colder and more diverse one.While many associated with the ambient dub/illbient access made similar attempts (a notable amount of Justin Broadrick and Mick Harris related side projects come to mind), Semtex was one of the first fully realized attempts.
Right from the opening of "Sleep" the style is set:bent guitar melodies and distortion paired with extremely hard-hitting percussion that blends together wonderfully, rather than being all about the beats.That is not to say that the high BPM chaotic rhythms of the drum ‘n bass scene are insignificant, however:"Still-Life" is wonderfully underscored by a chaotic cut up rhythm section, but that it is not the sole focus.An up front passage of guitar, low vocals, and a broken AM radio breakdown in the middle of the song keep it from being anything close to predictable or stagnant."Next of Kin" keeps the sputtering rhythms, but they are buried in a ton of reverb, with ghostly vocals appearing distant in the mix.
The second disc's bonus tracks sound exactly as I expected them to:rough and at times more like experiments than actual songs, but still of a strong enough quality to not be simply there for historical value."Alarm Song," for example, showcases Elliott's early flirtation with crunchy drum loops, but with an erratic and unpredictable tempo and an overall more open mix."Sleeping" features stiffer drum machine like beats with watery crackles and droning organ sounds, so similar to what was finally released but not fully formed.The same can be said about the nest of swirling melodies and processed voices on "Shard" that are consistent with the main album’s sound, just missing the rhythmic structure and thus not sounding quite complete.
The additional download-only material is even rawer, both in its composition and presentation.Culled from cassette demos dating back to 1991, many of the pieces (some nearing a half-hour in length) seem to draw from both the growing isolationist variation of ambience, but also the harsher noise world, such as the feedback loops and echoing churn of "A Cry for Help" that at times seems like a nod to the Broken Flag axis of artists.For what they are, they are extremely well done, but it also makes sense to place them as downloadable ancillary material, rather than using the limited physical space.
So much of the beat driven music of this era has not aged well:I know to this day any time I hear one of the overused rapid fire drum loops my brain immediately thinks "this sounds so late 1990s", but Semtex is one of the exceptions.While yes, the drum 'n' bass elements do channel a specific era, it is the remainder of Matt Elliott's approach to composition, drawing from a variety of different sounds and styles and culminating in a lo-fi, but perfectly fitting aesthetic that makes this album so strong.Even 20 years after it first appeared, Semtex sounds like the work of no one else, and with the significant amount of additional content included, it makes for a perfect excuse to revisit one of the classic albums of the 1990s.
My first experience with Svendsen's work was his W/M debut split release with guitarist Christian Winther. Even though it was their first official release, both were well-established Norwegian artists who approached their respective instruments in ways that generated strange and unexpected sounds from them. Svendsen's newest work expands upon that, with four performances using only double bass, but played with a physicality and performance that blurs the lines between Svendsen himself and the instrument he plays.
The centerpiece of Forms & Poses happens to be the first song on the album, "Vita."At just shy of 20 minutes, this single composition comprises nearly half of the album.Looking at the title’s two possible interpretation:one being Latin for "life" and the other shorthand for an artist's collected works and experience, both apply perfectly.Beginning with deep, clean string sounds, Svendsen builds from a simple, yet rhythmic basis.The repeating bass rhythm he plays is expanded upon, emphasizing both the individual notes and the hard, percussive playing.
It is from this template of percussive bass (that sounds extremely similar to a full rhythm section) that he continues to work from.His rapid, repetitive playing builds tension, with variations on his approach creating sounds that resemble bass guitar, drums, and even synthesizers, though the only effects that seem to be here is a small amount of reverb.The piece hits a peak of intensity and then he begins to draw it back in.The performance never relents, but the sound becomes lighter and more melodic, transitioning to a subtle conclusion that makes for a perfect encapsulation of Svendsen's virtuoso playing and ear for strong compositions.
The three shorter pieces that follow feature him going in other directions with his playing, further demonstrating his ability and proficiency."Aria Prefix M-" is largely built upon plucked, muted bass strings.At first the volume is rather light and the overall feel spacious, but he slowly increases the volume and intensity to the dynamics.By the end he is bending notes left and right, but still within the confines of a clear compositional structure.
"Forms & Poses" stands out distinctly with its overall more experimental and collage-sounding approach.The piece erratically stops and starts throughout, with bits of voice sneaking through.His playing is all over the place:the song was compiled from recordings of him playing with his hands, feet, body, and a more conventional bow, and so there is an intentionally jumpy feel to the piece.It finally closes in a wonderful rhythmic/melodic progression that is sadly too short.The concluding "Chidori" features Svendsen in a different approach:here his playing stays largely in the higher registers at first, with abrasive scrapes that almost mimic a violin.The varying pitches and playing do not sound too significantly removed from a modular synthesizer piece, oddly enough.Eventually he brings the pitch down to a more conventional bass range, resulting a wonderful combination of low end drone and rapid fire weirdness before concluding the piece on a fitting chaotic note.
Forms & Poses may feature only a single instrument and a basic amount of processing and editing, but the most captivating moments are clearly the result of Svendsen's playing.The physicality he brings to the performance is where the album especially shines, and very few can manage to make a single instrument sound like such a diverse and varied ensemble.While I feel the slow burning, tension building moments of "Vita" are the definite standout, the remaining pieces as well are just as exceptional in showing the distinctly different styles in which he can play and perform, peerless in his composing and instrumental ability.