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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Much of this album is constructed from the use of cassette tape loops, but the medium is usually secondary to the sound being played.A song such as "El Jarden Encanto" seems to be constructed from a plucked strings of some sort (Durand is fond of working with non-traditional instruments), and the whole piece ends up having an almost toy music box feeling to it.The brief "Mirador en la Montaña" (featuring Andrew Chalk on synthesizer) captures what could be gentle plucked strings and delicate chimes, with a distinct purity and clarity to the sound.
On "Teatro de Sombras," he once again constructs from sounds that most closely resemble chimes or pure, glassy tones, but by placing an emphasis on the lower end parts of the sonic spectrum, the resulting piece takes on a very different quality than some of the other, lighter moments on the record."Diorama" may be a bit lighter with the expansive tones and twinkling bits of noise that define it, but it is a cold, frosty beauty rather than a warm, embracing one."El Grillo de Nácar" is one of the album’s softest moments, with what could be a low fidelity nature recording blended with some light, airy plucked notes that is anything but cold.
Durand's use of analog tape as a source material does creep to the forefront at other moments, however."Linternas Junto a la Laguna" slightly sputtering analog noises and inconsistent tones feel much more in line with the unpredictability of cassettes, and also culminates in a piece that stands out due to its less pristine sound quality."Hora de Dormir"'s only obvious musical element seems to be a piano of some sort, but instead the focus is on the taped conversations, children in the distance, and so on.It has such a distinctly domestic feel to it that, while not specifically musical, fits in squarely with the more intimate moments of the album.The title song begins with wet noise akin to that of rewinding tape, with Durand including sustained, ghostly waves of reversed sounds.The early moments are more dissonant (at least in relative terms), but by its conclusion, the loops lock into a near groove, to end the album on an almost conventional passage of music.
Like his previous album El Estanque Esmerelda, Federico Durand blends the sparsest of instrumentation and the lightest of processing to make for an album that resonates with the most delicate of sensibilities.His unique approach to instrumentation and deliberately luddite-like approach to recording ties together as an inviting, extremely personal sounding record that renders the simplest string pluck into a dramatic, beautiful orchestral passage.
According to the website, Suppedaneum’s mission is, in part, to probe the relationship between music and composition. All the more reason to pay special attention to the score that accompanies The Letter, Joseph Clayton Mills's 22-minute cassette EP that comes close to not being an EP at all. With the exception of the first, each of the 100 cassettes that Mills assembled for this project is a hand-duplicated copy of an earlier copy. Thanks to the technological shortcomings of the medium, successive renderings of The Letter past the first contain imperfections not present in previous versions, meaning each tape is a uniquely worn-down object. As the liner notes put it, "The Letter is a piece of music designed to approach disappearance." Strangely, the music is not a performance of the aforementioned score, a piece titled Abscission that comprises the images of two trees and three pairs of musical staves. The tape’s sine tones, Throbbing Gristle-like noises, and warped piano phrases were inspired by those images, but the disconnect between them predominates. It’s one of the ways in which Joseph distills the disjunction and cohesion between sound and writing.
A phrase like "the letter" possesses clout. It means "the letter I received from my parents" or "the letter he wrote to me." Significance is implied. That’s true even if what is meant is something like "the letter S" or "the letter of the law." Mills could have intended any of those things and in different ways The Letter touches on each one. The piece begins with someone (or something?) reciting the English alphabet and ending on the letter "zed"—not "zee"—which might say something about the speaker’s origin or the recording’s original use. It then introduces a piano melody (letters A through G) and concludes with a story that sounds familial, a recollection of how someone came to be who they are and where they are. Law is in there too, in the confusion of compositional fidelity and performance.
But the familial tint is strongest. It stands out against the field recordings, buzzing plastic, and metallic howls. It’s the thing the ears strain to hear as the sound of a busy market blows through the speakers and it’s the element that draws the drama of the surrounding noise to it, as if by gravity—the voice of someone explaining what it was like to be poor at the end of the Great Depression, to pick strawberries for two cents a quart during the summer, and to deal with the hardships of a massive flood afterward.
Even if the narrator and Mills aren’t related, the details resonate empathetically. How else to interpret the black-and-white photograph of "Violet Cowie and her siblings" included in the set, apparently taken in Scotland, or Joseph’s decision to assemble in one place sounds recorded between 1989 and 2015? That span of time suggests someone thinking about the past. It’s a recollection that parallels the anonymous narrator’s. The music is another layer in that nexus, residing somewhere between the certainty of the details and the ambiguity of the score, which might remind some of a family tree and others of the cycle of the seasons.
Abscission is what trees and plants do when they drop their leaves, needles, or fruit, usually to protect themselves, as in winter, or to reproduce. In the case of The Letter, it’s the process by which music, time, and memory are cut away. And as with the trees, something persists after the foliage falls. It takes root in innuendos and multiplicities and subsists through silences and interruptions even as it disappears into the past.
Newly resurrected by Oren Ambarchi’s Black Truffle imprint, this would-be landmark 1987 recording was originally slated to be released on Glenn Branca’s short-lived Neutral Records.  After sadly sitting on the shelf for roughly a decade, it was finally issued by Dutch label Barooni in 1998 and thankfully reached enough people to warrant yet another resurfacing almost 20 years later.  It is hard to understand how this album wound up so cursed while the very similar Strumming Music became so revered, but the world is not a fair place, I guess.  In any case, Godbear is a suite of three solo piano pieces recorded in a church and it is wonderful.  While perhaps not quite as essential as Palestine's more ambitious and unusual recent work (2015’s Ssingggg arguably eclipsed absolutely everything that came before it), Godbear’s rumbling storms of overtones are quite visceral and inventive by solo piano performance standards.
In a curious bit of temporal coincidence, Godbear is being reissued at roughly the same time as La Monte Young’s Dream House, making 2016 a banner year for former Pandit Pran Nath students who released seminal albums on Shandar.  Unlike Dream House, however, Palestine’s 1974 Shandar release Strumming Music got a major reissue in the '90s and kickstarted a career resurgence.  Remarkably, given how prolific he is today, Palestine did not release a single album between 1974 and 1997–a hiatus that the doomed Godbear would have ended.  Aside from being 1.) cursed, and 2.) quite good, Godbear is also significant for essentially being a reprise and improvement upon the 13-year-old Strumming Music.  In fact, Godbear’s second piece is even called "Strumming Music," though it condenses the previous album's epic 52-minute duration into a mere 11.  The other two pieces have different names, but the simple, underlying idea is very much the same for all: rapidly hammered notes at neutral intervals (octaves and fifths) that gradually become much more complicated and much less neutral.
The first side of the album is filled completely by the 20-minute "The Lower Depths," which is arguably the album’s highlight (though competition is fierce).  The title likely has its root in the fact that the piece gradually descends into the more rumbling, lower reaches of the piano's range, but its infernal connotations are warranted as well.  It does not take long at all for the ringing and rolling harmonies to descend into a darker mood, but Palestine does an excellent job rationing out the tension and dissonance, always returning to calmer, more consonant harmonies…until he finally stops circling around and decides to get dark in earnest.  Taken on its face, "The Lower Depths" is a dynamic and compelling piece of music, but its real power is somewhat sneaky and not instantly apparent with casual listening: there are the notes that Palestine is actually playing and then there are the complex clouds of dissonance that start to cohere with increased regularity due to the use of the sustain pedal.  Once I became fully aware of the latter, the piece took on a whole new unpredictable life for me.  The combination of the clattering, rumbling lower keys and the oscillating, spreading black mass of overtones is quite spectacular when it comes together just right.  Also, it is kind of a neat magic trick, as the piece often feels improvisatory and roving, but it is all in service of creating eventual rich and unexpected blossoms of looming, dissonant harmonies.
"Strumming Music" is considerably more radiant and rippling in nature, using the same tools to evoke a very different mood.  It also seems considerably more structured and indebted to earlier minimalist composers than the rest of the album, as it feels like a single strong motif that recurs and evolves, whereas "The Lower Depths" is significantly more freewheeling and messy (albeit in a good way).  That said, "Strumming Music" is still absolutely lovely, cohering into a wonderfully shimmering and undulating haze of bliss.  That respite is brief, however, as things get heavy again for the closing "Timbral Assault," which immediately delivers exactly what it promises.  In fact, it sounds a lot like an impressively prescient precursor to Tim Hecker’s "Virginal."  Unlike "The Lower Depths," however, "Timbral Assault" is instantly dissonant and ominously minor key in mood.  Also, it is the most rhythmically unusual and unpredictable piece on the album, as its forward motion is constantly disrupted by stuttering flurries of notes.  Despite those strengths, or perhaps because of them, "Assault" is the weakest of the three pieces, as it lacks the slow-burning build-up to a pay-off that makes "Depths" and "Strumming" so satisfying.  "Timbral Assault" certainly starts off wonderfully, but it does not leave itself many places to go when it does and consequently starts to fade and meander a bit as it unfolds.
Anticlimactic final act aside, Godbear boasts a solid half-hour of near-perfect music that is both distinctive and powerful, so it definitely deserves a place in the upper echelon of Palestine's oeuvre.  It makes complete sense that the later phase of his career spread out in such varied, experimental, and eccentric directions, as Godbear and Strumming Music both took Palestine’s solo piano vision as far as it could reasonably go.  Until they build a Bösendorfer Imperial Grand Piano with even more keys in the lower octaves or make some radical breakthroughs in sustain pedal technology, there is no need to ever return to this well again.  The definitive statements have been made–they are just waiting around to be heard.
Back before the days of MP3s and file sharing, it was not uncommon for me to slowly lose my goddamn mind because there was some album that I desperately wanted to hear, yet could not find anywhere.  Naturally Coil, Current 93, and Nurse With Wound were all regular members of that exclusive club, but the reigning king of maddening elusiveness was always La Monte Young–more specifically, The Well-Tuned Piano, though Dream House (now finally reissued) would have been a lovely consolation prize (both albums have regularly turned up on Discogs' "most expensive items sold" list).  The reason for my obsession is quite simple: Young was the ur-visionary at the root of many of the more compelling strains of underground culture that have blossomed over the last 18 years, heavily and directly influencing the aesthetics of Brian Eno, Andy Warhol, The Velvet Underground, and Terry Riley (in fact, John Cale, Angus MacLise, and Riley were all members of Young's Theatre of Eternal Music ensemble).
The first and far more distinctive piece, "13 I 73 5:35-6:14:03 PM NYC," features a stripped-down version of the Theatre of Eternal Music ensemble, in this case just future avant-garde luminaries Jon Hassell and Garrett List.  The general idea is quite simple, as it is basically just a drone piece built from Young’s sine waves, Zazeela’s voice, and the ensemble’s sustained brass tones.  Over that, however, are Young’s otherworldly, nasal, ritualistic, and chant-like vocals.  On one level, Pandit Pran Nath’s influence is abundantly clear, but there is a buzzing, quasi-insectoid quality to Young's voice as well.  As such, the piece still sounds quite alien today, so I cannot begin to imagine what unsuspecting American listeners in the early ‘70s made of such a bizarre, time-stretched blending of Indian classical music and the hum of high voltage power lines.  Nor can I imagine what listeners would have made of the hyper-minimal second piece, "Drift Study 14 VII 73 9:27:27-10:06:41 PM NYC," a gently oscillating 39-minute sine-wave solo.  Neither piece offers anything in the way of conspicuous evolution or strong melody, as the emphasis is quite squarely on the hypnotic properties of endless repetition and on small-scale shifts in harmony and oscillation.  Dream House was far more than an unusual synthesis of Eastern music, minimalism, and the more experimental strains of jazz and classical music–it was a radical experiment in transforming how we hear and experience music.
There is no question at all that Dream House is a radical and significant work by a woefully underdocumented and hugely influential figure.  However, the inevitable downside to being a groundbreaking visionary is that when one of your seminal masterpieces is finally reissued 40 years after it was recorded, the rest of the experimental music world has already long caught and surpassed it.  Granted, the first half of the album still sounds quite unusual by 2016 standards, but its capacity to blow anyone's mind has long expired.  In the case of most composers, there would be some sadness to that, but La Monte Young’s career almost seemed completely independent of his albums.  Dream House is merely a snapshot of an ephemeral instant in an endless evolution, as any clips that I have heard from Dream House installations are considerably more immersive and harmonically complex than what is documented here.  Also, "13 I 73 5:35-6:14:03 PM NYC" is allegedly just a mere section of a larger piece called "Map Of 49's Dream The Two Systems Of Eleven Sets Of Galactic Intervals Ornamental Lightyears Tracery."  And, of course, that piece is itself allegedly just a section of Young’s even larger and never-ending opus "The Tortoise, His Dreams And Journeys."  Odds are quite high that most of Young’s greatest work probably existed only live or in concept alone, so we are probably lucky to get to hear any of it at all.  There is not much available, so every single bit is cause for excitement.  I am absolutely thrilled that this has finally been reissued.
Traditional Synthesizer Music is a collection of songs created and performed live exclusively on the modular synthesizer by Aaron Funk. Each sound contained within was created purely with the modular synthesizer. No overdubbing or editing techniques were utilized in the recordings on Traditional Synthesizer Music. Each song was approached from the ground up and dismantled upon the completion of it's recording. The goal was to develop songs with interchangeable structures and sub structures, yet musically pleasing motifs. Many techniques were incorporated to "humanize" or vary the rhythmic results within these sub structures. An exercise in constructing surprises, patches interrupting each other to create unforeseen progressions. Multiple takes were recorded for each song resulting in vastly different versions of each piece.
Few years ago, an idea germinated while reading The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. An idea not driven by the narrativity of the book, but by the traces and the aura invoked in it. That was it: an audible auratic journey trough the memories of a place lost in the heights of the Swiss mountains.
A century after the events depicted in the book, we went where the story took place, trying to capture the remaining sounds that could have been heard at the time, and the ghosts who might have still wandered around.
Zauberberg is based on these captures, on recordings of the music played by Hans Castorp (the novel’s main character), on acoustic/electronic instrumentation and digital processing. The result is an evocation of time and duration, an exploration of what remains and what is lost, a meditation of the dissolution and persistence of the aura surrounding everything.
Ethics and passion in their purest form. Welcome to the world of Sarah Records, active between 1987-1995, and possibly the most indie of all indie labels. This is a documentary where principles prevail and attitude and actions are just as important as the music. Heroics and belligerence, ephemeral-eternal-pop, fanzines and the incorruptible founders Clare Wadd and Matt Haynes. Their inspirations, the records, the bands, the letters, the long list of journalists that detested Sarah, the fans that love Sarah...The defiance and determination of our founding duo and and their final declaration. Their focus on something that was non-commercial and exciting, as if music could change lives and mean SOMETHING. My Secret World is a resounding reminder that music doesn’t need to be about posturing, production or money to be an outright success.
My Secret World. The Story Of Sarah Records is the first feature length documentary to explore this influential and often misunderstood label. Now the label founders, former Sarah band members, music critics and those that have been inspired by the label tell their story.
The production of this documentary has been made possible by the generosity of everyone involved; the artists who've permitted their music to feature in the soundtrack, the interviewees for their time and help, the film makers who helped film the interviews and the Sarah fans who donated archive footage and photographs.
Directed and funded by Lucy Dawkins, My Secret World has been 4 years in the making. More information can be found here.
"Intimate portrait of a quietly radical indie outfit" -Uncut
Front 242, Tuxedomoon, Eric Random and more not-disco classics for the dancefloor.
JD Twitch has done more than most to improve our record collections this year, introducing us to some incredible post-punk rarities on his Optimo Music compilation [Cease & Desist] and releasing an inspired intercontinental collaboration featuring young musicians from Glasgow, Ghana and Belize on his Autonomous Africa imprint.
For his next trick, Keith McIvor is going back to his roots with a compilation of club favourites from his earliest days behind the mixer. "So Low is an occasional night at The Poetry Club in Glasgow where I play some of the music I played when I first started DJing back in 1987," McIvor explains.
"At that time the audience I played to mostly loathed what I was playing and rarely danced, but then shortly after, when house music arrived, I found a different audience who actually liked to dance."
At the request of his wife, and some friends who were too young to hear these songs in the club at the time, he now runs the So Low night as an excuse to give records by the likes of Front 242 and Chris & Cosey another airing. "It has an extremely enthusiastic audience, a joyous atmosphere and is the antithesis of what a club in Scotland playing this music nearly 30 years ago would have been like," he explains.
The So Low compilation focuses on some lesser known stars of cold wave, from UK and European minimalists like P1/E, Colin Potter and Gerry & The Holograms, to US industrial band Hunting Lodge and avant-garde San Francisco collective Tuxedomoon, as well as a number of French and Belgian acts such as Siglo XX, Front 242, Marc Verhaeghen’s The Klinik and Clair Obscur.
Teaming up with The Vinyl Factory for the releases, McIvor has also enlisted contemporary cold-wave fans Powell and Helena Hauff to provide remixes for their favourite tracks on the compilation, which seems like a very good idea to us.
Check out the tracklist below, and look out for the compilation on February 19 on 2xLP, CD and digital, with the remixes following soon after.
Front 242, Tuxedomoon, Eric Random and more not-disco classics for the dancefloor.
JD Twitch has done more than most to improve our record collections this year, introducing us to some incredible post-punk rarities on his Optimo Music compilation [Cease & Desist] and releasing an inspired intercontinental collaboration featuring young musicians from Glasgow, Ghana and Belize on his Autonomous Africa imprint.
For his next trick, Keith McIvor is going back to his roots with a compilation of club favourites from his earliest days behind the mixer. "So Low is an occasional night at The Poetry Club in Glasgow where I play some of the music I played when I first started DJing back in 1987," McIvor explains.
"At that time the audience I played to mostly loathed what I was playing and rarely danced, but then shortly after, when house music arrived, I found a different audience who actually liked to dance."
At the request of his wife, and some friends who were too young to hear these songs in the club at the time, he now runs the So Low night as an excuse to give records by the likes of Front 242 and Chris & Cosey another airing. "It has an extremely enthusiastic audience, a joyous atmosphere and is the antithesis of what a club in Scotland playing this music nearly 30 years ago would have been like," he explains.
The So Low compilation focuses on some lesser known stars of cold wave, from UK and European minimalists like P1/E, Colin Potter and Gerry & The Holograms, to US industrial band Hunting Lodge and avant-garde San Francisco collective Tuxedomoon, as well as a number of French and Belgian acts such as Siglo XX, Front 242, Marc Verhaeghen’s The Klinik and Clair Obscur.
Teaming up with The Vinyl Factory for the releases, McIvor has also enlisted contemporary cold-wave fans Powell and Helena Hauff to provide remixes for their favourite tracks on the compilation, which seems like a very good idea to us.
Check out the tracklist below, and look out for the compilation on February 19 on 2xLP, CD and digital, with the remixes following soon after.
Ecstatic offer a fascinating, often dizzying insight to the primitive industrial minimalism of Italian siblings, Giancarlo and Roberto Drago, a.k.a. The Tapes, via Selected Works 1982 - 1992 sourced from original tapes and pressed to vinyl for the first time ever.
Following on from Ecstatic’s issue of "mail artist" Danielle Ciullini’s Domestic Exile Collected Works 82-86, this set surveys a blind-spot in most people’s knowledge of early '80s Italian underground music, framed against a backdrop of the Anni di Piombo, or Years of Lead - a period of domestic political turmoil between the late '60s and early '80s - and the mushroom shadow of nuclear war.
Like their international tape-scene allies, The Tapes reacted to this world thru a matrix of mono- synths, drum machines, microphones and 4-track recorders, mostly recording/experimenting ideas direct-to-tape in one take and making a virtue of their lo-fi set-up’s infidelities and imperfections - randomness and mistakes were embraced rather than discarded - whilst absorbing the counter-cultural influence of William Burroughs or Throbbing Gristle, and the sci-fi dystopia of J.G. Ballard and John Foxx.
These 21 tracks, drawn from 10 different, limited tape releases, perfectly distill a wandering, weirdo spirit, ranging from the funereal swagger of Tanz Fabrik and the darkwave hip-thrust of The Day of Silence to freeform, motorik trajectories such as Time Out of Joint and singular enigmas like the Actress-esque bobble of The Wait and Falso Movimento B2’s weightless, hyaline spindles.
Collected and compiled by Alessio Natalizia (aka Not Waving) and remastered by Matt Colton, Selected Works 1982 - 1992 represents a decade of modest but searching and instinctively grooving experimentation of the rarest, precious and compelling kind.
As Giancarlo Drago explains:
“The Tapes was an unplanned experience, an unplanned need to express myself. Looking back on this music I wonder sometimes how I did it - the whole process from the concept to the completion. Everything I do now seems trivial and obvious and I just end up aborting the idea. And exactly for this reason I think that everything has its time, with a beginning and an end...”
Althogh not yet quite as well-known as his peers, Paul Jebanasam is an integral part of Bristol's Subtext Recordings milieu, a loose cadre of erstwhile dance producers who have now moved onto far more conceptual and abstract art.  While it is not uncommon for Subtext releases (this one included) to sound cringe-inducingly pretentious and/or overly grandiose on their face, the reality is that artists like Emptyset, Roly Porter, and Jebanasam are currently making (or at least trying very damn hard to make) some of the most ambitious and forward-thinking art in the experimental music scene.  Admittedly, Continuum shares a lot of common ground with other artists like Tim Hecker, Johann Johannsson, and Ben Frost, but it does not feel derivative so much as it seems like Jebanasam heard the mangled organs of Ravedeath, 1972 and thought "Not a bad start, but it really should have gone much further."
According to Continuum’s description, Jebanasam (formerly Jabba from Moving Ninja) set out to accomplish nothing less than to create "a speculative soundtrack to a timeline stretching from the primordial emergence of organic life through to the unknowable trajectory of the universe, [which] explores the magnitude of science's reach and the precarious role of humanity within this vast evolving system."  Knowing that, it is easy to see the opening piece as an attempt at recreating the Big Bang, but I did not find the album's underlying concept at all important in appreciating the music.  Also, the less said about the crazily obtuse, impenetrable, and overlong song titles, the better.  Lofty ambitions aside, however, Continuum is actually not a particularly complex album at all at its core, as each of these three lengthy pieces is essentially built on the exact same simple idea: take a lushly epic chord progression or a lovely melody, then completely blast it with cascades of stuttering white noise.  Sometimes Jebanasam even leaves out the "chords and melody" part.  The magic, of course, lies in the execution and Jebanasam proves himself equally (and brilliantly) adept at composing sweeping, Romantic melodies; unleashing satisfyingly ferocious eruptions of electronic entropy; and focusing closely on small-scale textural nuances.  Well, perhaps "equally adept" is an oversimplification: Jebanasam’s compositions are undeniably quite good, but his abilities as a producer/sound designer are on another level altogether.  These pieces work so well because Jebanasam is able present his themes with both crystalline clarity and visceral force.  When it comes to details, Continuum is actually every bit as complex as its root concept.
While Continuum's three pieces are essentially just variations upon a single very good idea, each nevertheless has its own distinct identity.  For example, the first piece ("Depart") is initially a lovely, droning two-chord organ piece before it becomes consumed by rapturous, reverberating eruptions that shred it into mere stuttering, crackling snatches of its former self.  Despite all that chaos, the underlying music still manages to sneakily evolve over the course of the piece into more soundtrack-esque grandeur as swells of lush strings begin to surge through the white noise apocalypse.  That Romanticism is short-lived, however, as the final destination of "Depart" turns out to be a crushingly dense wall of buzzing, fuzzed-out drone.  The tender and beautiful "Eidolons" dials down the intensity quite a bit, resembling a beautiful string piece heard through a broken radio: grainy, wobbly, hissing, and prone to unexpected volume shifts.  Stylistically, it shares a hell of a lot of common ground with William Basinski's loop experiments, but Jebanasam lacks Basinski's self-imposed restraints, so there is quite a bit more variation and activity here.  Naturally, Continuum closes in resurgent fashion with "Search Another," though it takes a while to get there, as it is mostly just all drifting, diffuse, and splintered atmosphere until Jebanasam unleashes an onslaught of pummeling, blown-out techno bass-drum hits.  Melody is absolutely nowhere to be found until the warm, dreamy, and almost mass-like coda, but the piece still works quite nicely as a massive, throbbing, and roiling show of controlled force.
Significantly, Continuum is one of those rare albums in which there are a number of elements that rub me the wrong way, but the ambition and execution are impressive enough to win me over regardless.  For example, the 16-minute "Search Another" feels like it is built upon the most cursory of foundations and also seems to mash two unrelated pieces together, yet Jebanasam puts on such a stunning display of Ben Frost-style maximalist bludgeoning that it renders the composition itself largely irrelevant.  Similarly, there is no clear reason why it needs to be so goddamn long, but it is essentially a spectacular sonic fireworks display from start to finish, so I cannot say it necessarily overstays its welcome.  Also, while it is extremely easy to spot Jebanasam’s major influences, he does a truly admirable job of transcending them.  He seems to be an extremely observant and resourceful sonic magpie, assessing what is possible, then using that merely as a jumping-off point.  While shades of other artists abound, they are almost always filtered confidently into Jebanasam’s own vision (not always seamlessly, but always effectively).  And, of course, much of Jebanasam's music is absolutely wonderful: "Depart" is 15-minutes of absolute heaven and "Eidolons" is not far behind it at all (even if it is noticeably more subdued).  Consequently, Continuum is at least 2/3 of an absolutely perfect album and the remaining third is delivered with such force and virtuosity that any flaws are almost beside the point.  I realize that it is only February, but I can guarantee that this album will be on a hell of a lot of "best of" lists at the end of the year.