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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Fresh after a couple of collaborations with noise god Merzbow, this disc shows Henrik Nordvargr Bjorkk (no relation) balancing the words of electronic drone and harsh noise across two long tracks.
Bjorkk, also the mastermind of "black industrial" band Mz.412, is no stranger to working in the darker reaches of the electronic realm. In Oceans Abandoned By Life I Drown... To Live Again As A Servant Of Darkness, therefore, doesn't reflect any stylistic shifts or drastic departures in his approach, but it does opt not to use the stereotypical "evil" imagery associated with some of his other projects. Instead, the disc sits in a lovely Stephen O'Malley designed, Seldon Hunt photographed fold out sleeve that compliments the sound very nicely.
"In Oceans Abandoned By Life I Drown…" begins with almost pure silence before horrid, processed screams cut in, with a queasy, bassy gurgle, shrill sine waves, and almost psychedelic, distorted synth lines. This harsh noise backing stays in place for awhile, never relenting, but also never becoming stagnant, before it all drops off for a passage of stark, black ambience. Of course things won't stay peaceful, and the noise pummeling begins anew, this time resembling previous collaborator Masami Akita's personal blend of junk fuzz screech, but even through the cacophony there is a sense of control and direction, as if Bjorkk is conducting a noise orchestra.
Diametrically opposite of the previous track's opening, "…To Live Again As A Servant of Darkness" opens with the sweet sound of processed feedback and a subtle hint of percussion off in the distance, like some distant spacecraft looming ominously. As before, the noise eventually gives way to a bleak, desolate passage of minimal electronics and mood before coming back with scraping metal, crunchy electronic distortion, and a subtle rhythmic pulse, a combination that will sound intimately familiar to fans of the golden age of Japanese noise. However, the track slows down and mixes in a very bizarre bass synth line before ending on some distant rhythm loops.
In Oceans Abandoned… does not do anything innovative or surprising, but its quality and diversity in sound more than make up for it. As a whole the disc has an almost familiar feel, like one of those discs that has been played many, many times before that just never gets old or boring.
This group's latest album is a slowly evolving narrative of sorts concerning cyclical transcendental matters, as evidenced with song titles like "Beyond Belief (The Wishful Thoughts of a Pain-Free God)," "Surviving the Fanatics," and "Nod If You Were the Last Man Alive." Even when some of the songs take an inevitably gloomy turn, the journey is still intriguing and sufficiently bizarre.
Scot Solida's spacey electronics and guitars contributed by a musician named Har form much of the backbone of the album, with additional support from a few other players. Solida tells the story through a combination of shorter tracks and epics consisting of several disparate sections that are deftly layered so that they flow together naturally. I like this album, but I do wish that Solida would cut loose a little more. From reading the list printed on the jacket of the vast array of equipment used in this recording, I expected it to get pretty wild in places and was surprised with the amount of restraint exercised here. The title track heads in an untamed direction but stops short of the sensory overload I had anticipated. "Modulating Between Faith & Knowledge" also takes a step in that direction with its exploratory electronics, but it peaks early and drifts during its second half. Perhaps the somber subject matter keeps things at an even keel. Even so, the pace is fairly uniform throughout the disc, and I wouldn't have minded more of a dramatic shift or two in places. Nevertheless, it's an intriguing album with impeccable production and well worth the effort of settling in to unravel its mysteries. Read More
This double-disc retrospective compiles this Aylesbury group's vinyl releases dating from 1978 onwards and includes recent material as well. Since there have been so many reissues and collections from this time period hitting the shelves over the last few years, I wasn't sure what to expect from yet another one by a band I hadn't heard of. I Beg To Differ turned out to be quite a pleasant surprise because it positively overflows with catchy material.
While their beginnings are rooted are in the discordance and angularity of late '70s punk, the band never loses sight of melody. Their songwriting becomes more and more pop-oriented in a brief amount of time and culminates in some fantastic songs that could have been hits overseas with a little more luck and exposure. Their early songs are mainly concerned with rhythmic elements, but tracks like "Lake Superior" and "Sugarside" show their songwriting evolving to more fully encompass the rest of the instruments, including the voice. The second disc begins with the masterful "Love Will Blow Up In Your Face" and is followed by a string of great songs like "Letters of the Alphabet," "Tina Weymouth's Smile," and "She Loves Me Like a Brother." They also have a good sense of humor, as evidenced by the track "Mark, What's the Score?," in which they sample Mark E. Smith reading football scores, and the sarcastic "King of the Manchester Baggy Scene." Also included is a song by the band's pre-Disco Students incarnation The Haircuts entitled "Do You Remember L-L-Longwick?" It is clear evidence of their ability to create memorable pop songs early on. They have resumed activity in recent years, so hopefully more people will take advantage of the chance to experience this underrated group. Read More
Having never heard El Gaupo, this band's early incarnation on Dischord, or Always Never Again, their previous album, I had no preconceptions or expectations withA Million Microphones. As a result, I was taken aback at how much I enjoyed these deceptively complex and addictive dance tracks.
Every element of these songs seems meticulously planned for maximum effect. The variety of instruments both acoustic and electronic that the band uses could have produced tedious results, but instead even the simplest layers serve the music appropriately. The band is very tight, if not downright strict, in places, yet their exactitude works in their favor. The opener "Not the Concept" is engaging from the start, but the band truly starts differentiating themselves from their peers with the two that follow. "The Lake" shifts gears with a fun loping rhythm while a harp adds a lighter touch to "Eagles Fleeing Eyries." "White Light/White Light" is the album's most guitar-heavy song and the closest to a straight rocker. Its placement toward the end of the album manages to reenergize the album all over again. The variety of approaches to singing also keeps the music appealing, and it doesn't hurt that the lyrics are intelligent too, which isn't always the case with music designed for dancing. There's no lack of hooks on these songs, either, which goes a long way toward keeping this recording consistently entertaining. My only regret is that I didn't listen to this album sooner. Read More
Four albums into their career, Liars take yet another artistic sharp turn; a set of relatively conventional rock songs. For listeners used to the contrary experimentalism of their last two records, Liars will be as polarizing as anything the group has done.
Putting aside my misgivings about their regained accessibility, I have to admit that Liars is most immediately enjoyable record the band has put out. Regardless of mercurial nature, I never expected to have one of their melodies stuck in my head. The synth fanfares and falsetto cooing on "Houseclouds" are typical here in the way they worm their way into your skull. Liars have always had a penchant for shouted choruses, and the clean defined vocal production lends itself to shouting along with them too. When vocalist Angus Andrew yells "Come Save Me!" on "Clear Island," he sounds more at home on an arena stage than some Walpurgisnacht bonfire.
In gaining pop accessibly Liars have largely abandoned the menace and secrecy that shrouded their records. The single "Sailing to Byzantium" is positively sedate: breezy syths and chiming electric piano ride over a loping bass and snare groove. The only darkness that colors this track is the kind found inside of a chic cocktail joint. The closer, "Protection," is a wistful ballad on childhood: a tremoloed organ fills the song with an ecclesiastic glow that underpins the sentimental subject matter
There are still some cloak and dagger moments on the album, especially on "Leather Prowler" and "The Dumb in the Rain." The murky guitar strum and monotone singing create a claustrophobia that adds gravity to the more buoyant sections of the album. These songs though, are still only isolated spots to a more polished whole.
Whenever a band changes their sound radically it will enviably anger the purists and any band that sells even marginally well will inevitably have to suffer from accusations of insincerity. Liars are certainly familiar with this kind of scrutiny. I still chuckle at the hostility that They Were Wrong, So We Drowned was greeted with when it was released in 2002. Five years gone, the pendulum has swung the other direction, with accusations of selling out already being foisted about. The argument would be convincing if this record had followed the wave of hype that greeted them at beginning of the decade. They didn't care then about the opinion of trend spotting journalists and fair-weather fans, why should they care now? If Liars excel in anything it is breaking preconceptions of what they as a band should sound like. Whatever the opinion on the actual music might be, they have at least done that.
In the Sasu Ripatti oeuvre, this savagely deep album stands as a hallmark of the producer's virtuosity. Enraptured by his latest album under this moniker, Whistleblower, I take special delight in returning to his long out-of-print Chain Reaction classic and reconnecting with the artist during his rise to infamy.
In the Sasu Ripatti oeuvre, this savagely deep album stands as a hallmark of the producer's virtuosity. Enraptured by his latest album under this moniker, Whistleblower, I take special delight in returning to his long out-of-print Chain Reaction classic and reconnecting with the artist during his rise to infamy.
Back in the day when so-called "glitch" music was touching the lives of so many music geeks and techno snobs, Ripatti found himself a producer in demand.At least, that's what his discography implies.Though not unknown upon of the original release of Multila, the year 2000 transformed him into an underground superstar.In that year alone, Ripatti released four albums under three different pseudonyms, acquiring new converts from various and sometimes overlapping factions of the electronic music scene. He revolutionized soul with the deep, blissed-out microhouse of Luomo's Vocalcity and added nuance to rhythm on Uusitalo's technoid headtrip Vapaa Muurari Live.Furthermore, Ripatti offered two albums as Vladislav Delay, one being this absolutely incredible album, which he has just reissued officially on his own Huume vanity label.
Choosing to stick with the original mastering job by Moritz Von Oswald, whose aforementioned Chain Reaction imprint first released this gem, Ripatti has given us a second chance to own and enjoy Multila as it was originally intended, inadvertently opposing the musicological revisionism we've all grown so accustomed to.From the rippling subspace ambience that initiates album opener "Ranta," it's hard for me not to recall when these sounds were still so unusual and ultramodern.Though certainly neither the first nor the only artist piecing together riddles of these abstract spaces between dub and techno, Ripatti explored and achieved a fantastic balance between process-driven sound design and inspirational accessibility in his initial work.No track better embodies that sonic dichotomy than the breathtaking "Huone," an aural epic of Homeric proportions.Not exactly a dance track by authoritarian standards, this 22 minute odyssey suppresses its untiring 4/4 beat foundation by varying degrees throughout, creating an unhinged type of post-traumatic techno.
Instead of depending on the overt crackling static and digital hiccups that made clicks and cuts contemporaries like Pole and Oval so popular, Ripatti dug deeper and discovered sounds whose origins are unknown and recondite."Viite" sizzles and churns amidst its phantasmagorical climate, while the subsequent "Karha" plays like a gloriously recovered hymn drowned in tape damage—the latter in particular stands now in harsh contrast against the bright, clearer style that defines Whistleblower.The delicate coda "Nesso" signifies a luminous end to this venture, its radiant trebly textures slicing through the bass heavy atmosphere.Needless to say at this point, Multila is a fundamental document of modern electronic music that was well worth reissuing.Let's hope that this marks the beginning of a more comprehensive reissue program of Ripatti's catalog.
The fifth album from this Chicago trio manages to create its own unique take on so-called psychedelic rock by clearly showing some influences that will give newcomers a familiar point to grab hold of while still taking them somewhere entirely new.
"Parts Are Lost," the midpoint of His/Hers is where some of these influences show through the clearest—an ambience not far removed from the first Velvet Underground album and the buried, gentle vocals and stripped-down guitar work of Perfect Prescription-era Spacemen 3—yet it stands on its own with its jazz type structural composition. Spreading out in either direction, the influences become more blurred and the sound more experimental. "Forced March" is amped-up with clipping guitar riffs that chug along at a glacial pace. The shoegaze blur continues until about half way through when someone cuts the power, yet the band plays on until the end, the track entering like a lion and ending like a lamb.
"Moss Man" is built around a basic guitar twang and a truckload of reverb. Extremely Spartan instrumentation-wise in its opening, it soon gains in intensity and ends with a blowout that would make any shoegaze band of the early 1990s proud. The remaining tracks stray closer to the calmer, mellow end of the spectrum: quiet and slow, yet never easily ignored.
Folky psych-rock is one of the "it" genres right now, and Zelienople manage to go beyond the simple acts of using acoustic guitars and heavy effects and create something that stands on its own. The intentionally slow pace exemplifies the concept that simplicity in sound is not a factor of how little an artist can do, but how much can be done with a smaller palette, and in this case it proves to be quite a bit. It is an album that definitely rewards the attentive listener.
Over the last few years, Berlin's beloved have been intensely busy. Much of their time has been spent working concurrently on various projects, releasing around a dozen studio albums over the last five years. During this latest phase of the ongoing supporter project they set themselves a goal of producing an album over the course of a year, one song a month as a gift to those who were helping to fund their forthcoming album, Alles Wieder Offen. With three "bonus" tracks thanks to the phase lasting a few months longer than intended, the 15 Jewels are quite unlike Neubauten's entire back catalogue. Even the frequently challenging releases of the Musterhaus project do not prepare me for the sheer freedom expressed by the band.
The songs were all written using the same template: Blixa Bargeld would compose the lyrics from dreams he had recorded in his diary (which vary in content from the plain strange to the utterly paranoid) and the music would be improvised based on the Dave system. The Dave system is similar to Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies cards: each of the cards features a word or phrase that encapsulates a particular mood, technique, or concept from the world of Neubauten (compiled by Bargeld while listening through the band's archives). Every band member takes a number of cards and uses the phrases written on them to find a role within the song. Despite using the same basic premise for each song, each song is vastly different to the others. Each song is its own world, a microcosm complete unto itself and replete with its own character and particular instruments. Surprisingly, despite each song being created in complete isolation from the others, the 15 tracks hang together wonderfully as an album.
Breaking free from their usual routine, they embrace instruments and rhythms that have not normally been part of their canon; the electronic approach to both the nightmarish "I Kissed Glenn Gould" and the bizarre "Vicki" is completely at odds with anything Neubauten have produced previously. There is also an international vibe to the album (much like the Tabula Rasa triptych) with lyrics ranging from the usual German to Chinese, Hungarian, Greek and English. "Jeder Satz mit ihr hallt nach" shares its name with an improvisation from their 1997 tour (and released on the Gemini download only live album) but is musically unconnected, there is an almost lounge feel to this new song which is a million miles from the original.
It is not all new musical vistas and textures. "Die Ebenen Werden Nicht Vermischt" is typical of Neubauten's most recent output. However, it does stick out amongst the more adventurous songs on the album. Its extended length (approaching 7 minutes compared to the 1.5-3 minutes that the others last) and rhythmic structure would have made it fit perfectly on 2005's Grundstueck album. Other songs contain some elements of familiarity but shoehorned in with an unusual approach. "Magyar Energia" is a mishmash of familiar techniques and instrumentation with unconventional delivery, especially the joyous anti-nuclear power football terrace chant towards the end.
Jewels may not run as smoothly as their previous albums as there is no obvious underlying concept to thread the songs together. Despite this, it is a fantastic album, especially considering it is meant as token of thanks to those who have provided financial support to record and release the band's forthcoming album. Hopefully these songs will make it into the band's live repertoire and more importantly get a release outside the supporters' project. For now, they are only available to subscribers to neubauten.org as both mp3 and uncompressed downloads. However, considering this album is the appetiser to the main course, it is well worth the price of admission while the oppertunity lasts.
It's important to note Menche is an experimenter of sound, not an academic. Here, he takes this opportunity to deconstruct the sounds made by conventional instruments and use them to create something far removed from the original source.
Rather than focus on theories of audio construction and such frivolities, Menche would rather just take a sound source, play with it, and see what he can make it do. While this could be tedious and pointless for the average person to produce, Menche displays a natural talent for this work, and though he never makes specific reference to one, his works consistently show an ear for structure and composition that ensure a coherent piece rather than just a collection of random sounds that go nowhere.
On the three untitled tracks that make up Wolf's Milk, he chooses to use a specific instrument on each: organ, gong, and trumpet. The first track of organ recordings opens with a distant, but notable bass pulse that slowly increases in strength, like a car blasting bass heavy hip-hop in the distance. This pulse merges with other low tones into a solid, but quiet roar. It sounds like a contradiction, but there is a dense, prominent wall of sound that isn't very loud, but notable. Slowly, more traditional organ tones enter the mix: long sustained passages that are reminiscent of some of Hermann Nitsch's symphonic work. About midway though the track's duration, the sound begins to show some grime and dirt, the processing gets more intense, until building to a crescendo of stuttering, buzzsaw distorted passages that would definitely qualify as "harsh," before ending in a stream of subtle alien textures.
Using a gong, Menche can be expected to create a track with a more rhythmic backing, and the percussive tones that open the second track reflect this, though they sound more like a heavily processed synth sequence rather than a percussion instrument. Again, the actual gong tones become more notable as the track progresses. The final track of trumpet treatments focuses initially on the high register notes of the instrument, bouncing from channel to channel like an overly amplified housefly. The track eventually develops into an extremely thick mix, full of rich low and rumbles to counteract the ear shredding high pitched ones.
Wolf's Milk makes for a captivating listen, but the three tracks all seem to follow the same structural formula: heavily processed subtle openings, then some obvious untreated instrument sounds, then processed into harsh noise, then ending on ambience. As a whole it doesn't detract from the experience, but hearing Menche try some different frameworks for his tracks would definitely be a plus. It's a great disc but mixing things up structurally next time would be even better.
The international collaboration between electronics mangler Rutger Zuydervelt (aka Machinefabriek) and cellist Aaron Martin makes for an ominous, foreboding piece that would make for an excellent Hitchcock movie soundtrack.
Using only the sound of Martin's cello and recorded water sounds, Zuydervelt feeds the source material through a battery of effects and signal processing, but still leaves enough of the instrument's natural sound in the mix, which only adds to the suspenseful tension created by the two long tracks on this disc. "Cello Recycling" opens ominously enough: the hum of alien machinery looming off in the distance somewhere and all sub bass hum and occasional rhythmic clicks is submerged in reverb. As the track progresses, the untreated sound of Martin's cello rises in the mix, the heavy organ like sustain of the strings thick like fog in the air. The climax is a full on roar of fuzz and distortion that would make any noise artist proud.
"Cello Drowning" remains a more subtle overall work, building upon the metallic echo of processed water drips, shaped into an almost rhythmic backing track aided by the more pronounced sound of the cello. While this track doesn't reach the harsh noise conclusion of "Cello Recycling," the subtlety works even better, leading to more pronounced sense of dread throughout, culminating in a swell of intensity at the end of the disc.
Originally commissioned for an art gallery, Type has seen fit to make this work more widely available, and as a crossover between the post-classical, the ambient, and the experimental worlds, it succeeds on all levels.