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!
Over the past several years, the recorded output of Carl Stone has been turned on its head. In previous decades, Stone perennially toured new work but kept a harboring gulf of time between the live performances and their recorded release. This not only reflected the careful consideration of the pieces and technical innovations that went into the music but also the largely academic-minded audience that was themselves invested in the history and context of the work. The time span of Stone's recorded output in both sheer musical duration and year range was generously expansive. Following multiple historical overviews of Stone's work on Unseen Worlds and a re-connection with a wider audience, the time between Stone's new work in concert and on record has grown shorter and shorter until there is now almost no distance at all. Stone's work has often at its core explored new potential within popular cultural musics, simultaneously unspooling and satisfying a pop craving. On Stolen Car, the forms of Carl Stone's pieces have also become more compact, making for a progressive new stage in Stone's career where he is not only creating out of pop forms but challenging them.
Stolen Car is the gleeful, heart-racing sound of hijack, hotwire, and escape. Stone carries the easy smirk and confidence of a car thief just out of the can, a magician in a new town setting up a game of balls and cups. With each track he reaches under the steering wheel and yanks a fistful of wires. Boom, the engine roars to life, the car speeds off into the sunset, the cups are tipped over, the balls, like the car, are gone.
"These tracks were all made in late 2019 and 2020, much of when I was in pandemic isolation about 5000 miles from my home base of Tokyo. All are made using my favorite programming language MAX. However distinct these two groupings might be they share some common and long-held musical concerns. I seek to explore the inner workings of the music we listen to using techniques of magnification, dissection, granulation,, anagramization, and others. I like to hijack the surface values of commercial music and re-purpose them offer a newer, different meaning, via irony and subversion."
Sound In Silence is happy to announce the return of Panoptique Electrical, presenting his new album Five Pianos.
This is his third album on the label after the highly acclaimed Disappearing Music For Face in 2016 and Quiet Ecology in 2017.
Panoptique Electrical is Jason Sweeney. He predominantly makes ambient compositions, queer sounds and instrumental music on Kaurna Country in so-called Australia. Always was, always will be, Aboriginal land.
Five Pianos is comprised of five long-form meditative compositions, written for recent theatre and installation works, with a total duration of about 40 minutes. The brief with many of these compositions was to create space and quietness but also to thread together a prepared piano sound evocative of weather shifts, radio frequencies, pulsation of electromagnetic vibrations and a resignation to human sadness. Carefully mastered by George Mastrokostas (aka Absent Without Leave), Five Pianos is a wonderful album of ambient piano for immersions, highly recommended for fans of Harold Budd, Sylvain Chauveau, Antonymes, Library Tapes and Akira Kosemura.
Sound In Silence is proud to welcome back Yellow6, presenting his new album Silent Streets And Empty Skies.
Yellow6 is the solo project of Jon Attwood, based in Leicestershire, UK. During the last two decades he has established himself as one of the foremost purveyors in the ambient/post-rock scene, having released his music on labels such as Enraptured, Make Mine Music, Resonant, Cathedral Transmissions, and his own Editions6, amongst many others. Since 1998 he has played many shows in Europe and North America, and has collaborated with many other artists such as Portal, Thisquietarmy, Absent Without Leave, Caught In The Wake Forever, David Newlyn, Charles Atlas, Stafrænn Hákon and many others too.
Silent Streets And Empty Skies is made up of nine calming tracks with a total duration of about 77 minutes. All tracks, recorded at home between April and June 2020 during the lockdown due to coronavirus, were inspired by the lack of traffic and people in the streets, and, being near an airport, the unusual lack of vapour trails in the sky. Living in a large village on the edge of a city, Attwood had a lot of freedom to walk, visit local parks and cycle maintaining plenty of distance from others and appreciating how quiet the streets and empty the skies were at that time. His reaction to lockdown from a creative perspective was some degree of compulsion to make music. Buying a new guitar proved inspiring and sparked a wave of new material, which makes up this album. Yellow6 offers one of his finest works to date, utilizing layers of haunting guitar melodies, loops of ambient textures, minimal beats and droning feedback. Expertly mastered by George Mastrokostas (aka Absent Without Leave), Silent Streets And Empty Skies is a wonderful album of cinematic soundscapes, highly recommended for devotees of artists such as Labradford, Low, Brian McBride and Windy & Carl.
Mourning Jewelry, the second release from Julie Carpenter’s orchestral outlet, fashions beauty out of grief, even as it takes listeners on a complex journey through darkness and grace, conveying it in not a single lyric. As with the prior release Solifuge, the palette consists of both electronic and acoustic instruments — choir, violin, cello, piano, flute, synth, bells, and this time, more acoustic guitar — that encourages the listener to succumb to grief, at times to feel overwhelmed but to be cathartically guided through and out of the challenging quagmire of emotions.
Mourning (or remembrance) jewelry — around since ancient times and reaching peak popularity during Victorian times — has long served as a way to remember deceased loved ones, heartfelt creations seeking to commemorate loved ones and construct beauty from grief. Like religious relics, these pieces were venerated by the wearers, often embedded with hair, bone, and cremains of the deceased. Mourning Jewelry leads off with "Brooch" as a nod to it. To reinforce the mystical aura, Carpenter has stated the track titles comprise the major arcana of an imaginary tarot deck from an alternate universe, ruled by "The Queen of Crickets." Like other tarot decks, various personalities and archetypes are represented in "The Gates," "The Fault," and "The Fang." And, like the Tarot, interpretations are left open to the listener.
The cover of the album features the Queen of Crickets: a woman dressed in combination of mourning Burlesque fashion (as designed by Carpenter), cradling a giant cricket, framed by a dry and barren landscape, hearkening back to the content within. The folksy Americana banjo of the song "Queen of Crickets" bends with classical imagery, suggesting earlier times, harrowing violin underlining an emptiness that echoes the desert landscape on the cover. Each member is masterful enough to mask traditional instruments as modern and vice versa, tricking the listener’s ear and making it more complicated to identify the source of celestial drone, blurring the contrast between ancient and modern.
Carpenter is a masterful composer, having scored for numerous films and television series. She knows exactly how to blur lines, combining sweeping majesty with haunted melody. And, like a soundtrack, moments of natural sound appear throughout the album that often suggest a moment matched to an imaginary film, as in the rolling thunder in "Plait." Plait is to braid, and like hair, compositional elements are braided together to guide the listener. Just as thunder suggests the dual-edged coming of impending rain — offering both inundation and relief — Less Bells’ many plaited elements provide a welcome crafting of beauty out of grief.
In what will undoubtedly become a trend for artists in the coming months, Susana López’s latest work was conceived, constructed, and finalized during the lockdown. Largely completed early on, during the month of March, López took advantage of that forced isolation to produce this lengthy, rich disc of synthesizers, electronics, and processed voices. Although the sense of claustrophobia and tension are apparent, there is far more to Crónica de un Secuestro than just that.
There is an all-pervading sense of isolation throughout the disc, but not exclusively in that sense of being deprived of human contact.Instead it often feels more like being the proverbial stranger in a strange land:unfamiliar spaces and unknown experiences abound throughout.The bleak ambience throughout "Luz Negra" exemplifies this beautifully:a rhythmic loop and pulsating synth line are of course familiar touchstones when it comes to electronic music, but the way in which López layers and constructs them, as well as the buzzing electronics that appear later on, is anything but conventional.
The vintage tone to the sounds throughout "Thousand Drones to Nubla" conjures an unfamiliar sense of nostalgia that is foreign, but simultaneously inviting.Expansive ambient spaces and rhythmic thumps throughout are comforting in their own way.With a later addition of a guitar-like tone, she builds a wonderfully woozy mood throughout."Ibn Arabi" is constructed from a foundation of sustained drone that is expanded with continually falling electronics and the overt use of field recordings (which appear throughout the album as a whole, but never as explicitly as here.)
There are other moments in which the isolation has a more sinister, less inviting color to it, however.The buzzing sawtooth synth and drifting tones of the title piece make for a dense, swirling bit of heavy ambience.The density and rhythmic rattling cast the overall sound in a darker, bleaker mood.As perhaps the most stripped down composition here, "Huldra" is largely a roar of filtered and surging electronics with a distant, continuous heartbeat like throb adding a hint of creepiness.
It is on the album’s final piece, "The Last Wave," that López's work bares the most distinct trappings of quarantine and isolation.Falling just short of 20 minutes long, there are a multitude of intentionally sparse and repetitive passages that slowly expand.I would never say the piece is boring at any point, but López simulates that relentless sense of ennui that so many of us have been experiencing over the past six months.To this she adds infrequent, but undeniably forceful passages of deep and oppressive electronics that may break up the monotony, but also convey tension and dread beautifully.
I imagine there will be a lot of "quarantine" albums to be had this year, but Susana López's work does not seem as if it is forcing that theme in any way.The sparse structures and unconventional production feel isolating, but in almost an open, exploratory way.Other than the conclusion, Crónica de un Secuestro works more as the sound of an artist using her time forced indoors to create something unique and beautiful, but concluding on more of a downer note that really solidifies that, no matter how productively we try to use our time during all of this, fear and dread are never far behind.
Bob Mould’s career stems from a raw rock aesthetic full of fury, but he has never limited himself to it, as can be attested to as recently as his 2019 album Sunshine Rock, awash in joyful power pop melodies. Cue up 2020 and almost on a complete turnaround, he fully unleashes on Blue Hearts, holding nothing back of the raw emotions that many of us have been experiencing. Utilizing a power trio format that is his earmark, Mould has crafted a raging slab of mobilizing brilliance that is both a reactive and proactive rallying cry for our future, dialing in to anger, disbelief and disorientation that transcend the current headlines, filtered through Mould’s own storied past.
Mould gets the mildest track out of the way immediately with "Heart on My Sleeve," but lyrically, he clearly sets the stage for the ride to come with this track: "The West Coast is covered in ash and flames / Keep denying the winds of climate change," seething with disgust at the current administration fostering a culture of climate change denial. "The rising tide of a broken government…don’t know who to believe, don’t know what to believe anymore." Unlike the first track, the rest of the album is melodically a frontal blast to the heart, fury turned to maximum and no critical topic left untouched. Apart from the aforementioned climate change, Mould addresses the future we are leaving for the "Next Generation," the decay of free speech, the reintroduction of anti-LGBTQ policies, lambasting the current narcissistic U.S. administration, pseudo-Christianity, aging in a time of crisis...phew. If that is not enough, Mould questions how one can not only maintain one’s humanity through it all, but continue to grow.
There is much raw anger throughout the album, but Blue Hearts also finds Mould opening up about his personal life as well, as he does on "When You Left," a heartfelt and vulnerable look at a past relationship. "Little Pieces" is a naked assessment of overcoming the challenges of aging. "The last few years have been so frustrating, I lose little pieces of myself each day. The lines get deeper on my face each season, say I don’t care as I weather away." "Everything to You" offers optimism in spite of our failings ("We get there somehow with not much know-how") and "Leather Dreams" is a provocative and honest look at his sexual preferences.
Lead single "American Crisis" was originally written for Sunshine Rock but left off for stylistic reasons. Blue Hearts was an album written around it. "Wake up every day to see a nation in flames, we click and we tweet and we spread these tales of blame. It’s another American crisis, keeps me wide awake at night." The key word here is "another." Mould lived through the 1980s as a young, gay man touring in an America that was chillingly mute on the AIDS crisis. "Silence = Death" was true then, just as it is now, and Mould reminds us that we are experiencing a tragically parallel chain of events in continuing to treat so many tragedies with denial and inaction.
The third release from musician and DJ Melissa Guion was recorded largely in her home, with only limited studio time, and is truly a step forward from her earlier releases. Where 2018’s Precious Systems had heavy emphasis on ethereal moodiness, Sour Cherry Bell delivers a bigger punch, one that is more forceful and up-front — raw power. The release is filled with dark synthesizers and demanding drum machines, balanced by airy, angelic vocals and atmospheric soundscapes for a moody and dreamy effect that suggests movement: mental, emotional, and physical. This quickly became a 2020 album of the year for me.
Layered with cascading sounds, awash with reverb and modulated vocals, Guion crafts emotionally charged soundscapes that come from a place of heartfelt experience. The music reinforces a sense of open space, both of expansive landscapes, as well as the clubs and dance floors that used to be active pre-pandemic.
Looking forward post-pandemic, if I were to pick this album off the shelves, I would expect written notes from DJs to span a wide gamut, beginning with "The Steelyard:" ‘cold, dreamy, heavy, persistent drum machine.’ But reading further, the notes ‘moody, dreamy, ethereal -- let’s get lost!’ written elegantly next to "FM Secure" suggest this is not music exclusive to the dancefloor. Inky scrawlings next to "Sourbell" read ‘crushingly emotive vocals, driving beat’ while below, scribbled next to closing track "Petrechoria" reads ‘somber, sparse, dark, dearmy.’
My first listen to "Quiet Time" suggested a feeling of ocean waves crashing to the shore, pulling back in retreat, then returning to crash on the beach again. The track starts off with a throbbing and metallic synth beat into an entirely pulsating rhythm akin to powerful waves, pulling back and softening about halfway and allowing Guion’s airy vocals to be lost in the mix — only to have the music shift about halfway and return forcefully with a vengeance, reinforcing a forceful return. Hurricanes are a common occurrence in New Orleans, and Guion has noted that the song reflects the eye of the hurricane, the retreat of the onslaught and the destruction that comes after. Both interpretations offer the sense of movement that may be expected from this album.
New Orleans is known for many things, but not for a burgeoning scene of electronic music. There are a couple electronic names that come to mind: Telefon Tel Aviv being the most well-known, and the less well-known (but personal favorite of mine) Marker, who tours as part of her live band. Sour Cherry Bell is worthy of recognition, and with such a strong showing may prove to change New Orleans' standing in that genre. This is a welcome release for 2020, and I can’t wait to see what else MJ Guider has in store.
I suspect the success of "An Unexpected Visit" lies at least partially in the...ahem...unexpected visit from Sanders' voice, which adds a compelling additional layer to Pilkington and York's squirming and quivering synth melodies.Sometimes, however, the duo’s synth themes are unusual enough to stand on their own as something special and unique.I am especially fond of the burbling and lilting "A Boy Called Conjuror," which arguably resembles a woozy, time-stretched calliope intertwined with a winding pipe melody and floating, dreamlike flutes.Moreover, it strikes an evocative balance between "unsettling" and "pretty," resembling a surreal blurring together of "slow-motion folk dance" and "carnival that conceals a dark secret."Elsewhere, "Possessors of the Orb" is another highlight, as its gently fluttering ambient idyll gradually builds into an impressive crescendo of majestic-sounding bagpipes and gnarled electronics.The epic title piece is yet another second-tier highlight, slowly building from a languorous reverie of slow-moving drones into a haunting juggernaut of eerie pipes and heaving masses of dense synth tones.The album's bookends, on the other hand, feel more like an intro and an outro rather than fully formed pieces in their own right, but the opening "Come! Vehicles of Light" does contain some heavenly moments of transcendent inspiration (especially its initial theme, which calls to mind a gently swaying dreamscape of shimmering crystal chimes).
It is fitting that I already mentioned Joy Division, as Peter Hook once saved an Ike Yard show at the Ukrainian National Home by stepping in as a replacement soundman (the venue's own soundman was completely ruining the simmering subtlety of their sound).According to Stuart Argabright, the soundman had made it clear that he hated their band, yet I can easily imagine that achieving Ike Yard's aesthetic of thick bass, buried vocals, hallucinatory guitar and synth textures, and austere, dub-inspired drumming in a live setting would be an exasperating challenge for anyone (particularly for someone unfamiliar with the band's vision).Without the right balance of clarity, space, and visceral bass rumble, it is not hard to imagine Ike Yard's unconventional songs falling completely flat, as they are more of a thoughtful, precarious architecture of complementary textures than anything that would pass for conventional music (melodies and hooks were very much anathema to the Ike Yard vision).Predictably, bassist Kenny Compton was already the star of the show even at this early stage, as his propulsive riffing is the bedrock of everything on Night After Night, though Argabright's unusual, minimalist percussion played quite a significant role in shaping these songs too.That is especially true on the opening title piece, which is essentially just a driving bass line, a thumping kick drum groove, and a deadpan monologue from Argabright.That said, the contributions of guitarist Michael Diekmann and Fred Szymanski (synth) are considerably more prominent on this EP than they are the full-length.Admittedly, neither quite brings a unique voice to the opening salvo, but their playing gets significantly more compelling as the EP unfolds.
Obviously, I cannot fault Ike Yard for evolving into a considerably more distinctive and minimalist entity by the time they recorded their album for Factory, but it is worth noting that Night After Night's "Sense of Male" could easily have been the inspiration for a similarly great alternate direction.In it, the focus is shifted away from Compton's bass line and onto snarls of guitar noise and eruptions of warped, siren-like synths.As such, it feels significantly more colorful and explosive than the seething, monochromatic fare to come, though Argabright's austere, off-kilter percussion remains as unconventional as ever.Similarly stellar is "Motiv," which marries a thick, biting bass groove with burbling synth tones that call to mind a hallucinatory jungle scene.Admittedly, "Motiv" lacks vocals, so it perhaps does not qualify as a fully formed song, but it is nevertheless an extremely appealing vamp.Argabright returns to the microphone for a strong closer though, as "Cherish" combines his bloodless, elliptical vocals with an insistent bass groove, slashes of guitar noise, and a chirping tour de force of unusual synth flourishes.That makes for a collision of aesthetics not commonly found elsewhere, approximating some sort of deep, fragmented psychedelia equally informed by industrial music and Jamaican dub.While I am not sure it quite scales the same impressive heights as the earlier "Sense of Male," "Cherish" is an illustrative example of Ike Yard was such a singular entity: they were obviously listening to much cooler music than most of their peers and had an uncanny knack for assimilating disparate influences in appealing new ways.I suspect they probably had some very cool non-musical inspirations as well, given how dramatically and quickly they evolved.
Obviously, plenty of merely good or somewhat unusual releases are hailed as newly crucial "lost classics" these days, but Night After Night is the rare exception that has arguably earned such high praise.There is an asterix though, as this EP went largely unheard upon its release, then was rendered nearly irrelevant by the full-length that followed.If Night After Night had had been better distributed and reached more ears in the US and UK during that brief window, I suspect most post-punk fans would have been playing it in heavy rotation along with their Gang of Four, Cabaret Voltaire, and Joy Division records, as it features a strong batch of songs and the band's stark, brutalist, and post-apocalyptic broken funk was (and is) unique and visceral.Night-era Ike Yard were still a bit ahead of their time, of course, but they nevertheless sounded more or less like a good post-punk band comfortably within the bounds of the zeitgeist (perhaps akin to a menacing, subversive mirror-world version of A Certain Ratio).It is hard to imagine how Ike Yard's career might have unfolded if they had stayed on that track, but the exceptional thing about Ike Yard is that they almost immediately jumped onto an even more fascinating and almost post-human vision with their LP, leaving Night After Night in a strange no-man's land in which it suddenly resembled the Peel Sessions for a better album by a better band rather than a great, stand-alone debut in its own right.It deserved a better fate than that.At least it will now find itself in heavy rotation in my life four decades later as a somewhat Pyrrhic example of delayed cosmic justice.Obviously, if I could only have one Ike Yard album, it would still be the self-titled LP, but it is damn nice to now be able to alternate that with its almost-as-good predecessor.
Cardinal Fuzz and Feeding Tube Records are delighted to be able to bring to you the much anticipated vinyl pressing of Dark Country Magic from this wonderful Maine trio (Quinnisa making her first intentional effort with "Moo Hoo" on this release).
Caleb Mukerin and Colleen Kinsella have been key personages of the Portland sonic underground as members of the cosmically-shifting Cerberus Shoals and the folkily psychedelic Fire on Fire before forming the more personal and hermetic Big Blood back in 2006. The band's multi-phasic discography has thus far reminded people of everything from the Comus to Portishead to Julee Cruise at different moments, yet none of these thumbnails comes close to capturing the intimacy and directness of their recordings where they take things to a higher plane of personal expression.
In Dark Country Magic haunting effects and experimental sounds combine with wailing fuzzed-up garage folk anthems and twisted poetic freak-folk as lyrical layers peel away endlessly, tiny amps weep in pain, crude percussion booms thunderous, and ragged, beautiful hooks unfurl straight out of the void. On "Coming Home Pt.3" Kinsella’s quivering bewitching vocals ask you to succumb to the hauntingly melancholic drift while acoustics strum quietly up front before Dark Country Magic's playful closer "Moo-Hoo," where Quinnisa performs a children’s story. The combination is head spinning and gloriously original, but will be immediately identifiable as Big Blood by anyone who knows the band's music.
Since 2016, I maintained there would be the advent of a new mantra: "Make Music Great Again." Sometimes the reference became more specific, replaced with Punk or Deathrock depending on my mood, but the message remained the same: the impetus for music with a message would be opened. We’ve seen legends returning to take advantage of the era to release new work, so there was a mix of both surprise and lack thereof when, completely unannounced, legendary punk band X dropped ALPHABETLAND, their first studio release in 27 years (and the first with their original line-up in the past 35 years) to coincide with the 40th anniversary of their classic 1980 debut Los Angeles. A fresh blast from the past that looks to the future, X come racing out of the gate with the same ferociousness and insistent melody of any of their classics.
It is worth checking out the cover of ALPHABETLAND, a work from L.A. artist Wayne White titled Curdled American Dream. The most prominent visual is the brightly painted title, primary colors in large block letters, with a large X underneath. This may well be the only thing a casual viewer sees. A closer look reveals the brightly colored title is worn, with an underlying scene showing a run-down rural house in the background. The house sits near an overgrown yard filled with broken boats and wagons that lie near an idyllic pond, while to the side, men prepare to fish, and a small gathering of people can be seen on the home’s porch. The grandiosity of the letters proclaim the positivity of the "American Dream," but closer investigation reveals the dream in decline, with X as the messenger.
The band is said to have written most of the tracks in the 18 months leading up to its release, but the messages here are timeless. Probably the most poignant of all tracks is "Water and Wine" which gets to the meat of the matter: "The divine that defines us / The evil that divides us / There’s a heaven & a hell / And there’s a live to tell / Who has to wait at the end of the line / Who gets water & who gets wine." ALPHABETLAND touches on some powerful topics throughout, starting out with the title track that seems to address gentrification and the dangerous changes that come with it. X deliver smart punk lyrics for tough topics: the quest for individual American liberty regardless of the consequences; powerlessness in the face of authority; squelching of the freedom to protest; the influence of media; support for the "Me Too" movement.
Not entirely political, X also takes the time to be nostalgic, taking time to reflect on their past as in "Star Chambered." Closing track "All the Time in the World" has a sense of finality about it, a heartfelt track that has X looking back on friends and family who have gone before, and touches on why the band still does what they do:
"And why do we still care enough about Or even too much To make words In the hope that someone in the future will hear History is just one lost language after another, After another And when they’re all taken together We still can’t decipher the past Or decode the future We’re just lost without a map
We are dust It’s true And to dust we shall return Me and you But it was fun while it lasted
All the time in the world Turns out Not to be that much"