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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Live Knots, Oren Ambarchi’s first release for PAN, presents two live realizations of "Knots," the epic centrepiece of his Audience of One (Touch, 2012) release. Built on the interplay between Ambarchi's swirling, guitar harmonics and the metronomic pulse and shifting accents of Joe Talia’s DeJohnette-esque drumming, the piece merges the organic push and pull of free improvisation with an overarching compositional framework.
"Tokyo Knots" presents the complete recording of a duo performance of the piece by Ambarchi and Talia recorded at Tokyo's legendary SuperDeluxe in March 2013. The performance builds gently on the foundation of Talia's insistent ride cymbal and the shifting tonal bed of Ambarchi's rich overtone-drenched guitar, eventually going into a free rock free fall of buzzsaw harmonics and crashing drums. From within the maelstrom, Talia picks up a pulsing motorik rhythm that leads the piece back to where it began, with the addition of the shuddering, elastic tones of a hand-played spring reverb unit.
"Krakow Knots," recorded live at Unsound Festival in Krakow in 2013, works with the same basic structure but stretches it out to nearly twice the length and adds strings played by the Sinfonietta Cracovia, led by Eyvind Kang on viola. The strings expand the piece's textural range with lush chordal blocks, uneasy dissonances and occasional Ligeti-esque swarms of micro-activity, the swelling string tones intensifying the ecstatic nature of the piece as it moves towards its mid-point crescendo in which Ambarchi unleashes a particularly malicious continuum of stuttering harmonic fuzz. The strings then enter with a series of swelling chords, announcing the piece’s final movement, and reaffirming the uniqueness of the tonal and compositional language that Ambarchi has patiently developed over the last two decades, in which the influence of post-minimal composers such as Alvin Curran, Gavin Bryars and David Behrman can be felt alongside the inspiration of raw free jazz, harsh noise and academic psychoacoustics. The final moments of the performance pit Talia and Crys Cole's amplified objects and spring reverb textures against a field of gently gliding string glissandi before the audience erupts in much-deserved applause.
Behold is the second collaborative release from Oren Ambarchi and Jim O'Rourke following on from the 2011 release Indeed. Seamlessly blending field recordings, electronics, guitar, drums and other acoustic instruments into a subtle combination of Krautrock, minimalism and classic free flowing electronics.
Side A takes the listener into the Fourth World adventures pioneered by Jon Hassell whilst the flip seems like an unlikely pairing of Krautrock aesthetics and the slow building repetitive structures of The Necks.
This is sharp, focused contemporary music, one where minimalist motifs meet maximalist tendencies. Behold is another landmark recording made by two of the most enthusiastic experimental explorers active today.
Konsul Gnadenwalze is the alter ego of two gifted musicians. On stage they combine energetic live shows with minimalistic visuals. Aside of the performances they are creating their own elaborate Konsul Gnadenwalze universe. A lovely mixture of pseudo-scientific and poetic references. They create dub-wise broken beat abstractions, beautiful and brutal, organic and mechanized at the same time. Each successive listen reveals new depths, pulling you further into the world of Konsul Gnadenwalze. A wired carousel ride with the ancient question of whether we revolve around our environment, or our environment revolves around us.
TL/DR - this is what I do for fun. Don't stress on it.
Six years ago I took stock of the vampires and creeps that populate the 'independent' music industry and figured that there was nothing there for me anymore. The whole thing could blow it out its copious arse.
Thing is, music industry isn't music, which I love and need and would still make if the last person on earth. So that wasn't going to stop.
When we closed shop it signalled a whole bunch of new people in my life. Unlike the last lot they seemed bright and caring and to be really into what we had done. It was great to have new family but after a while it dawned on me that we'd swapped our vampires for undertakers. These new guys throw a hell of a funeral! They like funerals so much they dig up the old bones over and over again.
I love these guys, but they get all anxious if you mention any year past 1980 something and, you know, I ain't dead yet. So I just did my music. The weird thing being that I started to get jealous of my old self.
Man, that guy got all the praise, the smug bastard.
Maybe I should have been working on some grand project that would throw music into the future but I like to listen to strange pop songs and so that's what I have made. For the longest time I didn't think they were worth sharing and then realised that was more pretentious than just putting them out here.
In a industry where every fool claims to be a genius all I am going to say is here's my new tunes. I have reworked them 1000x each and have to stop.
I also have to warn you I have had time to set up some puzzles and hidden things to find!
Western Songs marks the first time Nathan Amundson is releasing music under his own name. This record is his first for Silentes, and features two side-long late night instrumental guitar jams evoking the vast, arid landscape surrounding his home state of Colorado.
Rick Bishop picked up a new guitar in Switzerland, and by the time he got to Tangier, these songs fell out! Of the moment and in and out of time, the Tangier Sessions demonstrate how far a guitar can carry a man who knows how to ride one.
Soul Jazz Records' new "Punk 45" album charts the rise of underground punk in the midwest city of Cleveland, Ohio, which for many people is the true birthplace of punk music in the mid-1970s.
Featuring a fantastic collection of punk 45 singles from Cleveland groups including Pere Ubu, Electric Eels, The Pagans, Rockets From The Tomb, Mirrors, X–X and more.
The album comes complete with extensive text written by Jon Savage as well as exclusive photos and original record artwork. CD comes with large booklet and thick slipcase. Vinyl edition is on deluxe gatefold double-vinyl complete with with free download code.
The album follows on from Soul Jazz Records' earlier Punk 45 albums about USA and British punk (Kill The Hippies! Kill Yourself! and There Is No Such Thing As Society), pre-punk (Sick On You! One Way Spit!) as well as the deluxe cover art book Punk 45.
Extermination Nights in the Sixth City coincides with the release of as a second album about Ohio’s early punk scene, Burn, Rubber City, Burn! – featuring the music scene of nearby Akron.
Lee Bartow, the de facto head of Theologian (and previously Navicon Torture Technologies) has never shied away from creating intense music. The newest release, the two disc, two and a half hour plus Pain of the Saints is daunting in both its sound and its epic length. With regular members Matt Slagel and Fade Kainer, Theologian includes a variety of collaborators on this set, resulting in a complex, sprawling bit of sinister noise.
One aspect of Bartow’s work as Theologian distinct from his time as NTT is a greater sense of composition and structure, and amidst the darker, chaotic moments of this record lie some conventional melodies and rhythms.He blends distorted rhythms in the layers of aggressive noise on "Of Foulness and Faithfulness," channeling the earliest forms of industrial before blowing things out with harshness. The churning low end and martial rhythms of "Redemption is an Impossibility" at first are in league with the early 1990s Tesco sound, before Theologian shifts things at the last minutes into a rhythmic EBM sound that sound like an excellent tribute to Skinny Puppy circa 1987.
Much of these two discs lie in some realm between ambient film score and harsh noise, fitting into neither category too easily."Iron Pierces Flesh and Bone Alike" has Theologian leading off with sweeping, film score like synths and buckets of reverb, shifting into a harsher conclusion with a bit of percussion thrown in.On "With Eternal Derision", the open ambient electronics get paired with a dentist drill blast of electronic noise, which stays grounded in dissonance, made more intense by the heavily processed vocals.
The most effective pieces are, for me, the ones that see the project channeling the religious/blasphemy themes of the album most overtly.On "Piss and Jism," Bartow and company bury a dour melody under an overdriven grind, like the profaning of holy music."Their Gelded and Rapacious Hearts" also effectively functions as a mixture of light, almost reverent music with dark, distorted noises and sinister sounds.The set closer, "Self-Flagellation as Faith" (featuring Barren Harvest’s Jessica Way on guest vocals) presents her heavily processed voice and live percussion.The first segment, led by Way, has a more liturgical feel, while the latter half, with Bartow's vocals, goes entirely demonic.
Even at this massive duration, there are few moments that feel like filler or unnecessary.Some of the pieces, such as "Gravity" or "Suppuration" are more than competent synth heavy noise works, but when compared to the more innovative and unique moments throughout the set, they are less captivating.
Pain of the Saints is gripping for almost all of its long duration, and it definitely makes for an intense record.Again, Theologian is one of the projects that disprove that myth that all noise music is just distortion pedals and screaming.It is a rich and devastating record that works brilliantly, with Theologian mixing a variety of textures and moods, though the latter are mostly variations on dark.Coupled with a strong sense of composition on the part of the artists, it makes for a brutal, yet wonderful work.
Combining two previous tape releases, with a special edition including a third remix CD, the enigmatic German project defy any sort of classification or clear genre identification. The trio of Christian Dräger, Eric Bauer and Nils Lehnhäuser pull bits of ambient, jazz and drone together without ever fully locking into one style.  The pieces here drastically range from conventional structures to unadulterated, foundation shaking pure bass tones.
Most of the pieces that make up this compilation flow almost painfully slow.At times, the three piece (drums, keyboards and bass, as best as I can tell) work together in some sort of clinical deconstruction of the jazz trio ensemble.Rather than the smooth tones and soft rhythms usually associated with the genre, here they are isolated and amplified into pure dissonance."I" from the first disc lets the bass notes reverberate seemingly for eternity, resulting in a violent, vibrating swell of noise.
The band avoids the drums on pieces such as "III," allowing for the individual notes be expanded and sustained as heavily as possible.Disc two's "Dove Gray" has some percussion, but so infrequent that it is hardly able to considered a rhythm, but an accent within an ambient/post-industrial type expanse.The bass is isolated simply into walls of sound on "Pewter Gray Metallic," heavy on the low end but organizationally extremely sparse.
When the three players lock into a more conventional structure, such as the jazzy "I" and "II" from disc 1, or the slowly shuffling "Classic Cream," they create a sound best described as a lounge version of Sunn O))) or Earth’s 2000-era releases.This may seem like a cheesy gimmick, but it is anything but.Rather than corny, it has a disquieting, disturbing feel.The instrumentation is familiar, but played with such a deliberate slowness, it just sounds "wrong" in the best possible way.
A limited run of the double disc set includes a third disc of remixes by OKR.The Spartan elements of Laube's original work are extracted and used to construct extremely different works out of them.The first piece takes the tones and minimal sounds that featured heavily on the first disc and bathes them in layers of reverb, with OKR filling in the mix and giving a light ambient drift sensibility.The second piece piles the layers on more into a dramatic film score type piece, while the third picks up the pace and builds a melodic sequence and synth pads out of the stark tones.
Laube’s sound is one that is extremely familiar and recognizable, but performed and recorded in such a way to be anything but comfortable.It is not exactly dark music, but disquieting and just enough out of place to be unsettling.It is that uniqueness and dissimilarity to anything else that makes it a gripping and occasionally perplexing album.
Soul Jazz Records' new "Punk 45" album Burn, Rubber City Burn charts the rise of the music scene in the mid-west city of Akron, Ohio at a time when the city and the rubber industry it was associated with was in deep decline.
Featuring a fantastic collection of Akron groups including Devo, The Bizarros, Rubber City Rebels, Jane Aire, Chi-Pig, The Waitresses and more.
The album comes complete with extensive text as well as exclusive photos and original record artwork. CD comes with large booklet and thick slipcase. Vinyl edition is on deluxe gatefold double-vinyl with free download code.
The album follows on from Soul Jazz Records' earlier Punk 45 albums about USA and British punk (Kill The Hippies! Kill Yourself! and There Is No Such Thing As Society) as well as the cover art book Punk 45.
Burn, Rubber City Burn! coincides with the release of as a second album about Ohio's early punk scene, Extermination Nights in the Sixth City – featuring the music scene of nearby Cleveland.
The Summoner comes 4 years since the last Kreng album Grimoire and 3 years since the massive retrospective box set Works for Abattoir Férme 2007-2011. A lot has happened in between, and this new recording can be seen as quite the departure from the aforementioned.
His most personal album to date, The Summoner is based around the 5 stages of mourning and is made after a year of losing several close friends. Hard enough material to work on, he decided to add a 6th stage, entitled "The Summoning" to be able to arrive at the finalé, "Acceptance."
Conjuring up the spirit of György Ligeti, the first half of the album is made up entirely of 12 string players being directed to play around, make noisy clusters and crescendos, moving you between "Denial," "Anger," "Bargaining" and "Depression." In fact, The Summoner is the first Kreng album NOT made by hordes of samples. Music to really dig deep into.
Following into the second part of the album, twists and turns are taken and it's hard to know where exactly you are. The Summoning's haunting organs and smoke-filled chambers lead you in to an earth- shaking wall of guitars, drums and bass courtesy of Belgian doom band Amenra. Leaving you in a state of shock, the album closes in an incredibly heartfelt and quiet way with the fittingly named "Acceptance."