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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In a lot of ways, this latest Roly Porter release sounds like a sister album to Paul Jebanasam’s Continuum, which is not all that surprising given that Jebanasam and Porter co-run Subtext Recordings (along with Emptyset’s James Ginsburg).  Like Continuum, Third Law is an ambitious, forward-thinking, and viscerally produced monster of an album.  Unlike Jebanasam, however, Porter completely leaves both Earth and conventional composition far behind in favor of complex, futuristic abstraction.  It is a unique aesthetic to say the least, veering unpredictably from warmly stuttering electronics to rib-cage rattling percussion flourishes to sci-fi choral music to absolute planet-smashing intensity with the all the restraint that one normally associates with mad geniuses.  While Porter's bold, speaker-shredding, and universe-spanning vision could be said to lack a healthy amount of restraint, no one will ever say that he lacks an incredibly rigorous attention to detail.  That combination yields quite an unusual result, as Third Law sounds like what I imagine you would get if you typed "create epoch-defining masterwork" into a supercomputer.
I have spent a large portion of my life chasing, hearing, and obsessing over unusual music, but Third Law is unexpectedly one of the most confounding albums that I have ever tried to wrap my head around.  That situation is doubly weird because this is not even the first Roly Porter album that I have heard, though I probably just did not pay close enough attention to the other ones.  The issue is this: Third Law sounds like an album that was literally made in the future.  Or in a future, as in "possibly not ours."  Porter is working at a level of complexity and immensity so far beyond that of everyone else that it just seems futile and wrong-headed to try judge his work by current standards.  For example, while other musicians were spending 2015 sitting around trying to think of cool melodies or beats, Porter was busy dreaming up something that sounds like all the damned souls in hell raising their voices in chorus as the world is ripped apart by a black hole (the opening "4101").  If he was not making music, it is easy to imagine Porter filling his time with something akin to designing and building the Death Star in his garage.
The question that I am wrestling with is whether or not that makes Third Law a great album.  The best analogy that I can come up with is that hearing Third Law in 2016 would probably be a lot like seeing a Pink Floyd laser light tribute show in the late 1950s: regardless of its merits (or lack thereof), most people would definitely walk away from that gig thinking that Think Pink or Shine On was a hell of a lot better than an old-timey snooze like John Coltrane.  That said, of course, Porter has a considerably more vision and originality than any mere time-traveling Pink Floyd tribute band.  Conversely, however, Third Law lacks a lot of the characteristics that music normally needs to be loved and/or memorable, such as strong recurring motifs or expected song structures.  My guess is that Porter cast such concerns aside as regressive, but this album occupies a weird grey area between structure and abstraction that makes their absence noticable.  To compensate, Porter instead offers up something more like a series of dazzling set pieces, such as the "bouncing ball" bass hits in "Mass;" the alternating beautiful, skipping synth loops and crushing industrial rhythms of "In Flight;" and the lushly gorgeous melodies he unleashes during the crescendo of "Departure Stage."  Actually, now that I have tossed out the phrase "set pieces," it occurs to me that Third Law is probably best judged entirely by film standards, despite having absolutely no visual component.
Viewed in that light, Third Law can best be described as a wildly audacious sci-fi epic that unrelentingly blasted me out of my seat for 90 minutes, after which I stumbled out of the theater feeling like I lived an entire second lifetime.  And if anyone asked me what I thought of the film, I would only be able to describe it as "intense."  Several days later, however, after my over-excited synapses had a chance to calm back down and process things, I would start to think about the film more critically and realize that I completely did not remember entire sections of it and that it did not elicit any real emotions deeper than just pure awe.  And that maybe the whole thing a bit too conspicuously overwrought for my taste.  Of course, "pure awe" is still quite wonderful.  Also, my analogy is a slight oversimplification: Third Law is much more than just mere spectacle, as there are plenty of great moments strewn all over the place and they follow a very coherent and dynamically satisfying arc.  And, of course, this album is an absolute tour de force of sound design.  What I will remember is mostly just the spectacle though, as most of Third Law’s other traits are hopelessly eclipsed by its sheer immensity and power.
This is a well-deserved and expanded vinyl reissue of the absolutely stellar My Body is A Dying Machine EP, which Justin Broadrick quietly released in digital-only format back in 2010. So quietly, in fact, that I completely missed it the first time around.  As with most expanded releases, the added material in this case is not exactly crucial, as most of the best songs were already on the original EP.  It is quite good though and the appeal of Black Dollars does not lie so much in its enhancements as it does in the fact that Downwards have resurrected some prime Broadrick material that snuck by most casual fans.  Stylistically, Black Dollars is very much in the "instrumental version of Jesu" vein, capturing Broadrick at his shoegaze-mode zenith.
Downwards
Black Dollars opens in fine fashion with its previous namesake, "My Body is a Dying Machine."  Built upon an insistent, overdriven bass throb, "Body" unfolds as a languorously swaying and sizzling haze of slow-moving guitar and synth tones.  The bass foundation is an essential part of the piece's success, as the deep undercurrent of dense, distorted rumble prevents the dreamy foreground from ever seeming too weightless.  Also, Broadrick makes some inspired textural choices, as the bass has a nice stuttering sizzle that sounds like a hapless amplifier being pushed to its limits.  Also, one of the many half-buried layers in the piece sounds like a vocal track that has been time-stretched and reversed.  That creates an extremely cool effect in which it seems like words are trying to fight their way through all the guitar shimmer, but never quite making it far enough to be intelligible.  It is an absolutely sublime and perfectly realized piece of music.
Happily, "Body" is not the only piece of that caliber birthed during that fertile creative period, as both "Gravity" and "Black Dollars" scale similar heights.  In fact, "Gravity" both reprises and improves upon the same formula of driving, distorted bass; drifting guitar shimmer; and buried vocals by ratcheting up the sizzle, hiss, and snarl.  "Black Dollars," however, goes in a bit of a different direction, pushing the bass deep into the background to make room for warmly hissing ambiance and a beautifully slow-moving, twinkling, and reverberant guitar melody.  The remainder of the original EP was rounded out by a live version of "My Body is a Dying Machine" (straight-up filler) and a likable bit of lazily glimmering treated-guitar drift ("A Slight Return").  Naturally, both appear on Black Dollars as well (albeit in different sequence).
Unexpectedly, one of the bonus tracks added for this reissue manages to be something of a highlight itself, as "Flow River Flow" reprises the territory of "A Slight Return" in considerably more gnarled, textured, and vibrant fashion.  In fact, it sounds a lot like a cool outro guitar solo on a classic shoegaze song being played over warped and pitch-shifted field recordings of church bells and a bubbling cauldron.  I sincerely hope that it births a hot new sub-genre.  "The World is Not Waiting for You" is yet another pleasantly surprising addition, returning to the more "rock" structure of Black Dollars' best songs, but doing it in a more soft-focus, burbling, melodic, and feminized way (the vocals are softened and pitch-shifted to the point of at least androgyny).  The remaining dreamy ambient-meets-feedback squall of "The Eternal Daydreamer" is also quite likable, if a bit less memorable than Black Dollars' more propulsive and structured pieces.
If Black Dollars can be said to have any flaws, they are not particularly significant ones.  For example, I do not see any need for the live version of "My Body is a Dying Machine" to be included, as it is not radically different from the studio version in any way.  However, the decision to bookend the album with two versions of one of its best songs is admittedly a nice sequencing move.  Also, the more "ambient" pieces are generally not on the same level as the rest of the album, but that is because the rest of the album is so great, not because the album is padded with substandard material.  I suppose I should not be surprised that Black Dollars boasts at least three instant classics, given Justin Broadrick's long history of excellent and innovative music, but…damn, I am.  Quite pleasantly so.  At its best, Black Dollars hits the absolute perfect balance between heaviness, hooks, and experimentation.  And at its worst, it is merely another very good release by a musical titan.  This is a hugely welcome reissue.
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.
On one hand, it is kind of astonishing that Andreas Brandal has not been covered on this site before, as the shape-shifting/multi-guised Norwegian experimentalist has been on the scene for more than two decades and has made plenty of excellent music covering an impressive amount of stylistic territory.  On the other hand, it makes absolutely perfect sense, as Brandal’s career is not unlike that of Machinefabriek: a seemingly constant and unrelenting stream of new projects, limited editions, and collaborations that no hapless fan (much less a casual listener) could possibly hope to keep up with.  I believe I personally have at least 8 Andreas Brandal albums at this point and I am certain that I do not have even the most tentatively grasp of the depth and scope of his discography: I have not just missed key album–I have missed entire genres.  I do know that I like him though and his newest release is an absolutely stellar one, occupying the unique nexus where heavy drone, languorous strings, and oversaturated Tim Hecker-esque textures wonderfully collide.
As much as I enjoy Brandal’s work (what little I have heard, anyway), I have to admit that I was instantly predisposed towards loving this tape because the opening "From the Bed to the Fire" awakened memories of a long-forgotten Fetisch Park album (Trost) that I played to death in the mid-‘90s.  The two albums have almost nothing in common aside from a talent for deep, warmly crackling, and seismic-sounding subterranean swells, but it was enough to get my "fond nostalgia" synapses happily firing.  Unintended memory-triggers aside, however, "From the Bed" is an absolutely gorgeous piece of music, especially coming from someone with such a long history of blackened and malevolent noise.  Brandal is the rare artist who excels both as a composer and as a sound designer, though he is probably most accomplished at the latter, as nearly everything he does winds up sounding richly textured, vibrant, and immediate.  While a somewhat minimal piece musically, Brandal makes "Bed" sound massive, haunting, and eerily distant, shrouding his lushly shimmering and bell-like chords and spectral melodies with plenty of hiss and grit to wonderfully otherworldly effect.  It feels a lot like hearing a distant and beautiful classical music performance during a minor earthquake on an impenetrably foggy day.
The following "A Moment Passed and All was Changed" takes quite a different path, as its buzzing synthesizer drone erupts out of the speakers and quickly blossoms into something akin to blurting, panning, and snarling electrical storm. The lengthier "A Murmured Name" returns to the beauty of the opener, augmenting a gently undulating thrum with a beautifully melancholy and reverb-swathed violin or cello theme before unexpected being consumed by a host of wonderfully crisp field recordings of grinding and scraping metal.  Curiously, the longest piece on the album (and title piece) is not nearly as distinctive as the rest of the album, as it is basically just ten minutes of deep, quavering synth drones.  It still has some character though, albeit much more subtly presented than elsewhere.  In fact, it is kind of a tour de force of understated nuance, as Brandal spends the entire duration unleashing an arsenal of throbs, shudders, rumbles, flutters, and quivering feedback swells that alternately hang in the air or bubble through the dense bed of drone.  The similarly lengthy "No Symbols Where None Intended" closes the album as a far more clear-cut highlight, as a muted, elegiac organ progression is slowly consumed by deep bell tones, throbbing synthesizer, and mysterious field recordings (owls?).  Ultimately, the entire piece is consumed by a densely throbbing electronic buzz, which nicely illustrates my high opinion of Brandal as a sound designer: musically, there is very little happening, but what little is happening is so frequency-saturated and psychoactive that it is just as compelling as Brandal more eventful side.
Curiously, it is the weakest piece ("The Thursday Curses") that best illustrates the high level of Brandal’s artistry: there is very little that excites me less than ten minutes of straight-forward minimal synth drone, but "Curses" easily held my attention due its many buried layers and vibrant microcosmic dynamic variations.  Conversely, it is very easy to imagine a great piece like "A Murmured Name" completely falling flat in the hands of a different artist, as the central theme is wonderful and elegant, yet very simple.  So much of Brandal's spell is rooted in intuitive and intangible things that go much deeper than mere melody or harmony.  If he did not have such a seemingly effortless knack for space, texture, frequency manipulation, and contrast, these pieces would not have nearly the beguiling and forceful presence that they currently possess.  The details are everything.  Consequently, The Thursday Curses at its worst still sounds like a much better than average drone album.  At its best, however, it sounds like a heavenly organ mass heard through a heavy fog of hallucinogens or a goddamn dimensional rift.  Or both.  Which is, of course, great.  I am totally the target demographic for that sort of thing.  Lamentably, I have absolutely no idea if The Thursday Curses is one of Brandal’s best albums or not, but I do know that it is definitely the best one that I have heard. Anyone curious about Brandal's work would be well-served by starting here.
"The first vinyl release of Charlemagne Palestine‘s Godbear, a 1987 solo piano recording originally scheduled to sit alongside Sonic Youth and Swans in the catalogue of Glenn Branca‘s Neutral Records but eventually released on CD by the Dutch Barooni label in 1998. Although Palestine has worked in an enormous variety of media, his long form performances for solo piano are perhaps his most acclaimed works. Palestine immersed himself in the study of overtones throughout the 1960s, working first with carillons and then with electronic synthesis, searching for the 'golden sound.' Beginning in the early 1970s he continued his exploration of the complexities hidden within seemingly simple tones and intervals on the Bösendorfer Imperial Grand Piano, the ‘Rolls Royce’ of pianos. With the piano’s sustain pedal constantly depressed, Palestine hammers out rapidly repeated notes, allowing a complex cloud of overtones to rise above the percussive texture of the struck keys. Initially working with simple intervals such as octaves and fifths, Palestine gradually expanded the harmonic range of his piano performances over the years, while still retaining their ecstatically single-minded nature. Revisiting his signature piano style in 1987 after several years focusing on visual art, Godbear presents three distinct variations that demonstrate the development of his piano music after the classic recordings of the early 1970s.
Occupying the entire first side, "The Lower Depths" stages a slow descent from the piano’s mid-range to the Bösendorfer’s cavernous additional low octave, building into a thundering swarm of booming overtones. Breaking entirely with the stereotype of clinical minimalism, Palestine’s journey to the depths embraces passages of darkly romantic melody before slowly ascending to its starting point. The version of "Strumming Music" performed here condenses the developmental arc of the piece into eleven minutes, fanning out from a single octave to a complex harmonic wash that calls to mind Palestine’s enthusiasm for Debussy and Ravel. "Timbral Assault" is like an evil twin of "Strumming Music," transforming its insistency and harmonic complexity into aggressive intensity and creeping dissonance, foreshadowing Palestine’s later collaborations with Christoph Heemann. A classic release, and one that, because of the variety of approaches surveyed within, serves as an ideal introduction to Palestine’s ecstatic and mysterious sound world" –Francis Plagne.
Remastered and cut by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin. Presented in a deluxe gatefold sleeve designed by Stephen O’Malley.
This collection is an impeccable and crystalline assortment of beautiful music from the deep southwestern provinces of Menabe and Tulear in Madagascar, recorded and assembled by Charles Brooks. Charles has made many friends in these lesser-travelled regions over the past 20 years. Outlier: Recordings from Madagascar represents a compilation of his more recent encounters (2011-2012).
"Madagascar is an island that would bleed into obscurity if not for the rhythm of its name and the mysterious tailwind that follows it. Filled with natural wonder, it’s a land where places, conversations, and names are spoken with a liquid tongue, where people and setting come together to create a unique array of music and culture. Sites can become extraordinarily charged with an unseen presence where heavy air, summoned spirits, and a transformative energy collapse natural constraints of place. The Malagasy call this mingling of forces ‘maresaka’—a permeating vibrational aura. Maresaka pulls you in and places you in the moment, to participate through a saturation of sounds, smells, and colors. When caught inside this kind of atmosphere, levity comes; you release your anchors of self-control. Beautiful unfettered music surfaces. Here, that is to say where I’ve been brought to listen, music lives and moves.
The artists represented in this compilation play, and their music has many different roles—both natural and supernatural. Music can be performed as much as it can be recorded, but here it’s mostly played. These exceptional artists share within such practice.”
- Charles Brooks - 2015
(Limited Edition LP comes with full-size insert of text and photographs by the compiler Charles Brooks)
Black Truffle is honoured to present the first vinyl reissue of the classic debut album from AMM, AMMMusic. Coinciding with the 50th anniversary of its recording in 1966, this reissue makes one of the cornerstones of the experimental music tradition available again in its original form, replete with Keith Rowe’s beautiful pop art cover and the terse aphorisms by the group that served as its original liner notes. A testament to the interaction between the experimental avant-garde and the countercultural underground, the album was originally released on Elektra, recorded by Jac Holzman (the label’s founder, responsible for signing The Doors, Love, and The Stooges) and produced by DNA, a group that included Pink Floyd‘s first manager Peter Jenner. (Pink Floyd paid tribute to AMM’s influence on their improvisational sensibility with the track ‘Flaming’ on their debut album, named after the piece that occupies AMMMusic’s first side, ‘Later During a Flaming Riviera Sunset’).
Remastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M Berlin and presented in an exact replica sleeve of the original 1966 release by Stephen O’Malley.
"Blinding 3rd volume of wave obscurities sourced from hard or impossible-to-find tapes originally issued in the early-mid ‘80s! Color Tapes again reveal a hitherto unheard slice of British garage cold wave recordings ranging from certifiable dancefloor aces to synth escape pods and integers between.
We’re spoilt for highlights, taking in Duke Of Disrespect’s taut, jabbing electro stunner "You Tell Lies (Banging Away)" alongside the Hypnobeat-style drive of Disintegrators’ "Oscillations" and the cold, emotional pull of Silicon Valley’s abstract instrumental "Holborn Station 3 am, 3rd January 1982" on the front, whilst the other sparks up killer dancefloor material in the razor sharp 808s and synth voices of "Club Paris" by Beserk In A Hayfield (big stars of the first 2 volumes), and the roiling analogue psychedelia of Stereo Machines & Kinesis.
No mistake; this is bona fide essential business for fans of early wave music."
"Kerridge returns to Downwards in 2016 with the custom-built electronics of Fatal Light Attraction following last year’s incursions on his own Contort label.
The project premiered at Berlin’s Atonal 2015 edition, featuring Kerridge working alongside Andrej Boleslavsky & Maria Júdová to create an intense, kinetic shadowplay synched as an illusive counterpart to the music and performance.
As Kerridge's 3rd long player, it marks a more fluid, or effluent, refinement of his sound, blurring the boundaries between organic audio sources and custom-constructed synths to flooding the senses with waves of bristling, oxidising industrial tones and coruscating texturhythm seemingly intent on separating flesh from bone.
It’s evil stuff, all seven tracks of it, forming a closed feedback system of guttural, choking frequencies and cardiac arrhythymatics."
Like photographs, field recordings suggest unaltered reality. Suggests, not captures, because as in photography, there are artists who use field recordings for more than reproducing objective phenomena, if objectivity is even possible in the first place. Whether there’s an answer to that question, it at least points in the direction of impressionism and perspective, not just in visual productions, but in audible ones too. Whatever the medium, the artist brings more than a machine or a technique to the proceedings. Keeping with the comparison to photography, decisions about where to shoot and at what time, about exposure, and about dodging and burning all have parallels in field recording. They’re imprecise parallels, but they are clearly illustrated in the abstract shapes and bruised-blue colors of Michael Trommer’s Night Swimmer.
On his website, Michael Trommer describes himself as a sound artist focused on "psychogeographical explorations." Both halves of that psychogeographic descriptor are well evidenced on Night Swimmer, but the geographic component is worth sussing out first. Night Swimmer was recorded in 2013 at Southern Georgian Bay in Ontario, Canada, the 5,800 square mile bay of Lake Huron sometimes referred to as the sixth Great Lake. Home of the Anishinaabeg, Wendat, and Tionontati people, it is now also dotted with small Canadian cities and towns, like Lion’s Head, Owen Sound, and Wiarton, and is traversed by both commercial and private ships, including the MS Chi-Cheemaun, which connects the northern portion of Highway 6 with its southern portion. Due to the dramatic combination of exposed granite and tall white pines, and because one of its members owned land there, the Canadian Group of Seven often painted Georgian Bay, and today it attracts tourists interested in its beaches, islands, and pronounced peaks. Though far from isolated, had Trommer desired it, he could have represented the area in its state as a national park, not untouched by humans, but sometimes relieved of them.
Instead he opens the record with children playing in the water. One of them asks, "What am I going to do? Drift to shore?" To which another responds, with some excitement at the suggestion, "No, you’ll drift out to sea." Trommer continues to focus on the children for awhile. Other sounds both sharp and vague float by: the lapping of water against a boat, paper shuffling, Trommer’s breathing. Beneath these a deep, almost seismic tone rumbles, like the sound of music heard through a wall. Insects fade into the mix, then voices that seem to be artificially warped or time stretched, and then there’s a sudden electrical buzz, like a quick cut to a sizzling transformer, and the children disappear. All that’s left are the insects and that muddy, indistinct tone.
It resurfaces later on the same track as a pulsing bass figure and then again on "Night Swimmer 2D," where it becomes more or less obvious that Trommer is dunking his microphone into the bay. The resulting whir and thrum is both a kind of literal representation and a blurred image of the sounds above and below the surface of the water. It also brings an ominous mood to the music, especially as it is included in close proximity to electrical signals and sudden cuts for which there is little or no context. The lack of human sounds in the latter part of "Night Swimmer" further amplifies the stillness and enigma of the composition, and therefore of the surrounding area, and the deep, seemingly synthetic rhythms at the song’s conclusion serve as keen reminders of the breadth of the region. Where the expanse can’t be captured literally, Trommer recreates it poetically.
"Night Paddler" dives further into that stillness. The boats and voices discernible early on in the piece eventually recede into a cavernous space dominated by the echoing call of a solitary bird, a sound as beautiful and as lonely as any melodic figure you can name. After a short time, Michael inserts the sound of a popping flask lid. Water (or Canadian whiskey) can be heard rushing down his throat. There is no crackling fire, no indication whatsoever that this was all recorded at night, but it can be felt. The small sound of crickets, the odd rush of wind, the long, uninterrupted bird calls, they all scream blue and purple and silver light on black sky.
Trommer tips his hand at the end with "Night Swimmer 2D," a kind of pronounced re-imagining of everything before it, shot through with more noticeable post-production, loops, jump cuts, and denser sound fields. It casts some light on the techniques used throughout the album and it emphasizes the psychological half of Michael’s psychogeographic pursuit. Unable to see or hear or smell the places where these recordings take place, everything is transferred to an inner cinematic eye, which fills in the blanks and brings the personal to the purported solid ground of reality.
Quietly released between two major Mamiffer releases: last year's Crater with Daniel Menche and the upcoming The World Unseen, this limited cassette solo release from Faith Coloccia, under the name of M√°ra hopefully will not get lost in the shuffle. Surfacing is a sparse, intimate tape that showcases some of her contributions to the more dramatic Mamiffer sound and deserves just as many accolades as her better known "primary" project.
Clocking in at around 18 minutes, Surfacing is a short collection of seven songs, most of which focus on Coloccia's voice and piano, with a tasteful amount of electronics and processing scattered throughout.These elements often appear on Mamiffer records, but here, isolated, their impact is even more significant.Recorded to a four track and a hand-held tape recorder, she strips her music down to the barest of essentials, which stand beautifully in their simplicity.
The opening "The Gift of Life" and closing "Healing for the Wounded" have Coloccia working from a similar melodic theme, and while the arrangements are intentionally sparse, the details shine through in the unassuming austerity.Both pieces feature her vocals layered in such a way that juxtaposes delicateness and power, and the former’s ambient ending is brilliantly continued in the latter’s introductory moments.
Her ethereal voice acts as the centerpiece of "Saint'Elia a Piansi," multitracked wonderfully and accompanied by a simple piano passage, woven together into a song that seems all too short.Both "Nothing of Everything" and "Love and Infinity" have melodies that are a bit on the lower register end of the piano, and coupled with Coloccia's reverberated vocals there is a more spectral feel to them, the latter especially punctuating her lighter vocals with some more bass heavy piano notes.
The two more electronic tinged pieces have a distinctly different feel to them, but still one that resonates with Coloccia's singular sound."Warmth, Shelter, Oblivion" features her vocals up front and clear over a swirling, lush arrangement of processed tones and echoing voice, weaving a dark and bleak tale."Flask of Hermes" is for the most part an instrumental piece that stands out as the most oddly dissonant on an otherwise gentle release.Low fidelity recorded piano and an incidental radio broadcast are mixed together in a noise-tinged haze that, while by far the least beautiful moment on the tape, still results in a brilliantly strange centerpiece and excels with its unexpectedness.
I have always been a big fan of Faith Coloccia's untreated vocals and piano work that have been scattered throughout her projects for years, so being able to hear them standing here on their own, recorded with an intimate closeness that brings out the strong and soft timbres of her voice perfectly.The songs never feel incomplete throughout, but the overall brevity of Surfacing is its only shortcoming.