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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As Ellen Fullman can likely attest, one of the downsides to inventing your own instrument with 100-foot-long strings is that it definitely limits the number of possible venues for your performances. Another is that Fullman's Long String Instrument takes roughly five days to install and tune, adding yet another level of amusing inconvenience to the endeavor. Fortunately, an optimal situation surfaced in 2016, as John Chantler's First Edition Festival was given access to Stockholm’s Performing Arts Museum while it was being renovated. Given the limited "pure drone" nature of her instrument, the success of Fullman’s work can be heavily dependent on finding an appropriately sympathetic foil who can add vivid splashes of color and new layers of emotional depth to that rich harmonic backdrop. In that regard, Fullman could not possibly have hoped for a more talented and amenable collaborator than avant garde cello virtuoso Okkyung Lee.
Unsurprisingly, the idea for Fullman's Long String Instrument initially came from her exposure to Alvin Lucier’s Music on a Long Thin Wire in the early ‘80s.At the time, she was a young sculptor, and she set about creating her own version, initially using a bowl of water as a resonator.Like Lucier's instrument, the Long String Instrument was initially only one string, but departed from his work by making it a more tactile and acoustic phenomenon (Lucier's wire was "played" by an oscillator).Over the ensuing three decades, however, Fullman greatly improved upon her original prototype, using wooden resonators that behave like guitar bodies and expanding the number of strings to as many as fifty-six (a maximum dictated by the span of her arms).Fullman plays the instrument by slowly walking between the two sets of strings, dragging her rosin-covered fingers along them to produce sustained and buzzing metallic drones.In essence, it is like a massive tambura and naturally lends itself to creating dense, harmonically vibrant reveries in the vein of Indian Raga.A tambura usually only has four strings, however, so Fullman's invention opens up significantly deeper and more layered vistas of heavy drones and slowly blossoming clouds of accumulating overtones.In short, it is the ideal instrument for drone music, allowing Fullman to achieve both a palpable physicality and a degree of nuance that was previously not possible.
The album is divided into two separate halves of roughly twenty minutes each, but the two sections are essentially variations on the same theme, so their differences are largely academic.It is possible that the original performance was a single long piece that has been edited to fit the vinyl format, but the second half seems to start anew rather than picking up where the first half left off.The foundation of each, of course, is the languorously undulating and buzzing swells of Fullman's vibrating strings.That backdrop can be quite compelling in its own right, as the shifting metallic thrum can be quite sharp at times and produces quite an unpredictable array of harmonics and harmonies as the sustained tones interact and collide.During her more subdued moments, Okkyung Lee produces her own undulating drones that intertwine with Fullman's to achieve a heaving and simmering baseline intensity, but the most striking passages are those in which a fresh cello theme vividly blossoms into sharp relief.It can be a truly dazzling performance at times, as Lee seems to effortlessly conjure a wide array of vibrant sounds from her cello.Naturally, there are plenty of visceral howls, moans, scrapes, and shudders that are essentially the cello equivalent of free-jazz flame-throwing, but Lee thoughtfully times her eruptions to yield a coherent arc of well-earned crescendos rather than a nerve-jangling and exhausting one-dimensional assault of cacophony.In the spaces between her more fiery passages, Lee delves into some rather striking and inventive territory, sometimes mimicking speech; sometimes wresting deep shudders, swoops, and rattles from her instrument; and other times evoking a wildly fluttering bird.She also fluidly cycles through an atypically rich palette of emotions, eschewing anything resembling melancholy to convey a kaleidoscopic swirl of passion, tenderness, sensuality, calm radiance, and something approaching the ecstatic.
This unusual and fitfully fascinating album was quietly released near the end of 2018 on the small New Orleans-based Pinkbox Teleport label. INRA are themselves based in Berlin, yet The Content Consuming Its Form sounds very much like it was partially birthed in a bleak and blighted late-'70s industrial area, favorably recalling the UK’s finest art-damaged dystopian experimentalists of the period. While I probably would (guiltily) enjoy an album that was essentially straight-up Throbbing Gristle worship, INRA merely recapture the intelligence, low-budget futurism, and deep sense of post-modern alienation that defined the milieu of the era. Stylistically, they reanimate the formula with fresh blood in the form of kinetic drumming and nods to the heavier side of the dance music underground. While not every song gets the balance of murky mood and skittering, propulsive rhythms exactly right, the ones that do are a deliciously inventive feast of post-industrial collage done beautifully.
Both guitarist Adam Ben-Nun and drummer Philipp Rhensius were involved in various noise/drone/experimental projects before they began collaborating as INRA, but it is Rhensius's broader passions that propel the duo’s work into something unique.For one, he is a writer, and the physical releases of The Content Consuming Its Form combines the album with a brief book.I do not have that book, but the impressionistic poetry that I have seen from the pair displays an appealingly sardonic and subtly scathing sensibility ("a tired painter with 703 Facebook friends was doomed to fail with the Greek idea that love is expressed through illusions and compassion").The album's lyrics fall within similarly elliptical and aphoristic territory, though they are frequently obscured by effects and feel like a textural element rather than a focus.Much like identifying himself as a poet, Rhensius's passion for club music is similarly something that could have been a catastrophically bad idea if poorly executed.It actually works quite beautifully though: the pair have an intuitive genius for using Jungle-esque drumming and muscular bass lines as mere tools to add well-placed splashes of color and visceral heft to their crackling and hallucinatory collages.That choice of focus is important.While it may not sound like a big deal on paper, it is an absolutely crucial detail in separating "evocative soundscapes enlivened by cool percussion flourishes" from "atypically murky dance album that will sound dated almost immediately."To their credit, INRA consistently and decisively avoid the latter fate.The strongest example of that perfect balance is "I Don't Have Feet," in which a miasma of machine-like hums, distorted voices, and abused guitar sounds is unexpectedly joined by a thick, rolling bass line that immediately imbues everything with a muscular physicality and welcome sense of forward motion.
My other favorite piece is the title track, which opens with a distorted, semi-robotic voice speaking over a burbling backdrop of flanged tribal tom-toms.It all feels very cruddy and lo-fi, which is a nice touch: it would be so easy to sound convincingly like an actual robot with the technology available today, but choosing instead to sound more like "Hamburger Lady" gives the piece a pervading sense of ruin and sadness.That sense does not persist for long, however, as Rhensius's drums suddenly spring vividly to life and the piece coheres into a wonderfully clattering and bass-heavy groove.Elsewhere, "She is Like the Silence in Ingmar Bergman Movies" goes in the opposite direction, weaving a dreamlike spell of hazily ghostlike ambience, submerged snatches of distracted vocal melodies, and enigmatic crackles and scrapes.As it progresses, the piece becomes steadily more phantasmagoric and haunting, as buried melodies start to emerge, textures fray and sizzle, and the vocals sound like they are being dragged into a black hole.The album is rounded out by three more pieces: an ominous reverie of echoing, disembodied voices ("5 Likes After 7 Minutes") and the two percussion-heavy bookends ("The Last Summer Before Web 2.0" and "Free Power Snacks in the Co-Working Space").All are admittedly quite good in their own way, but INRA are at their best when they blur the lines between those two separate poles of their vision.
While I certainly dig INRA's aesthetic, the true beauty of The Content Consumes Its Form lies in the details and the execution, as the duo largely avoid any false notes or heavy-handed gestures that might dispel their vivid vignettes of industrial decay, disconnectedness, and lysergic Holy Mountain-esque menace.I am especially impressed with Ben-Nun's guitar work, as he deftly sidesteps any conventional touches and instead uses the instrument almost like a paintbrush, crafting enigmatic and subtly textured scenes from a palette of blurred chords, scrapes, and strangled noises.I have since investigated INRA's debut (Suburbs of Utopia) and the difference between the two albums seems to be primarily one of focus: all the elements of The Content Consuming Its Form were in place from the beginning, but it took Ben-Nun and Rhensius a couple of year to master carving away any clutter or lulls that blunted their impact.Aside from that, this album shows a real talent for dynamics, expertly balancing the ravaged and sickly with the vivid and the visceral.If Throbbing Gristle can be said to be logical product of late '70s socioeconomic disillusionment and hopelessness colliding with affordable electronics and the revolutionary spirit of punk and post-punk, INRA can be said to be the logical product of their own time. The sense of disconnection and existential malaise remains, but there is now a numbing cultural oversaturation, and any genuine sense of revolution has been replaced by endless nostalgia cycles.Consequently, there is nothing here that anyone would find transgressive or civilization-wrecking, but it would feel wrong if there was, as INRA have taken their inspirations and artfully shaped them into a compelling reflection of their own late-capitalism point in history.
"Grouper's Liz Harris has today (February 8) released an album under a new moniker, Nivhek. After its own death / Walking in a spiral towards the house is out now on Yellow Electric.
Recorded using Mellotron, guitar, field recordings, tapes, and broken FX pedals, the album was developed during two residencies Harris spent in Azores, Portugal and Murmansk, Russia, as well as at her home in Astoria, Oregon."
Chasms was formed in 2011 by Jess Labrador and Shannon Madden. Following 2016's On the Legs of Love Purified and the recent "Divine Illusion" single, The Mirage pushes the band's ethereal sound into the murky depths of dub. Marking a sonic shift for the project, The Mirage finds the duo trading in chaotic bursts of noise for understated minimalism that's still characteristically melancholic and potent with emotion. Labrador's drum production is as deft as ever with an expanded range of electronic samples and tape-delay-induced polyrhythms. Layered with Madden's persistently dubby bass, Labrador's sparse guitar and gliding soprano float above a labyrinth of hypnotic sequences. These dub-laced dirges signify growth within the band, heard in their command of repetition, space, and effects to build a pervasive mood that's often utterly heartbreaking.
The duo’s second LP for the Felte label, The Mirage was conceived following major upheaval in the pair’s lives, including the loss of Madden's brother and a number of the band's friends in Oakland’s Ghost Ship warehouse fire in 2016. Compounded with the dissolution of a marriage, and leaving San Francisco after more than a decade to relocate to Los Angeles, the album is an exploration of grief and the multi-faceted heartbreak that follows such events. What we think we see, what we think we know to be true, how we think life will turn out, the plans we make – all reduced to an illusion when someone you expected to be alive tomorrow is gone, when plans fail, when the mask is removed, and you are left simply to be.
Mixed by Josh Eustis (Telefon Tel Aviv) and mastered by Rafael Anton Irisarri, The Mirage tells candid narratives of a heavy heart but does not wallow in despair. At times, the album even offers danceable moments as in the entrancing, textural "Every Heaven in Between" with its restless techno and house-inspired four-on-the-floor beat. Sliding guitar chords and a smoky bass line wade between rhythmic pulsing and a booming kick in the narcotic "Shadow." A transformative assemblage of songs, The Mirage is a powerful reflection on the events that shatter and shape our lives.
Akira Rabelais’ years-in-the-making new album CXVI features collaborations with Harold Budd, Ben Frost, Biosphere, Kassel Jaeger and Stephan Mathieu, among others. It unfurls a quietly breathtaking, dreamlike sequence of events where early music meets a prism of shoegaze, ASMR, classical and textural sound design - huge recommemdation if yr into Felicia Atkinson, the GRM, Morton Feldman, Stephan Mathieu, Deathprod, Harold Budd...
Set to be received as Rabelais' magnum opus, CXVI finds the Hollywood-based composer challenging his usual working methods, pushing himself to refresh binds with longterm collaborators such as Harold Budd and Stephan Mathieu and forge new relationships with like-minded craftsmen such as Geir Jenssen (Biosphere), while also finding a new vocal muse in Karen Vogt of Heligoland, and also coaxing the recorded debuts of his friend Mélanie Skribiane, and filmmaker/photographer Bogdan D. Smith. The result of their time-lapsed endeavours is a record of divine subtlety and poignant patience, rendered with a mirage-like appeal.
Opener "Which Alters When It Alteration Finds," beautifully segues from a prickly bouquet of keys and lovebite-distortion penned with Ben Frost to a reverberant, spine-freezing piano coda from Harold Budd, before "Which Alters When It Alteration Finds" smokily gives way to the sylvan shadowplay of the album's masterful centerpiece, "Star to Every Wandring Worth's Unknown," where Mélanie Skribiane reads from Max Ernst's "la femme 100 têtes" against an exquisite veil of strings and keys realized by Akira with the GRM’s Kassel Jaeger a.k.a. François Bonnet.
The 3rd part of the album only becomes more sparse and isolationist, as Karen Vogt's plainsong gives way to the tremulous, icy timbres of Akira's processed guitar strokes, originally written for Cedrick Corliolis' Tokyo Platform soundtrack, before the final side of "If Error and Upon Me Proved" finds Akira pushing Geir Jenssen’s (Biosphere) synths into the red, emphasizing a romantic soreness that turns into crushing noise, before Bogdan Smith's whispered vocal melts into an ancient, arcane air inscribed to 78rpm vinyl by Stephan Mathieu and then sweetened, re-incorporated by Akira as the album's stunning closing passage.
Riddled with bedevilling detail and utterly timeless in its scope, CXVI is a disorientating opus you’ll want to undergo over and again, for our money one of the great quiet albums of recent years.
Nihiloxica's highly anticipated new EP featuring 4 new tracks of Bugandan percussive experimentation. Comprised of four percussionists, one kit drummer combined with an analog synth player. Recorded live in single takes at Boutiq Studios in Kampala, Uganda between October- December 2018.
The CDr contains a 46 minute track ("The π Key") which will not be available for download. This item is released in an edition of 25.
3.) The π Key - Deluxe Edition
WOODEN KEY + ANTIQUE 6" RECORD HOUSED IN SIGNED AND NUMBERED BESPOKE COVER + CDR + 23 TRACK DOWNLOAD
Each individual CDR is unique to each order as it contains the 46 minute track ("The π Key") plus the two tracks from the 6" record included in your package. This item is released in an edition of 23.
The Geometry of Social Deprivation is constructed from samples and manipulated sounds garnered from twenty-three 6" shellac records from the 1920's.
Each track contains a blend of loops and sampled fragments constructed from one record using the sound found on both the A and B sides. Each track is created from a different record. No additional instrumentation has been added.
This sometimes soft and ambient but challenging and abstract 8-hour suite of crackling, dusty and forgotten sounds of yesteryear has been designed to be played as a functional piece of music, to while away the hours as you go about your daily routine... a faint drone in the background or a suffocating, all encompassing sonic assault. Equally it can be utilized as an aid to spend your evenings "researching" a field of your choosing.
Sound In Silence is happy to announce the addition of Tim Linghaus to its roster of artists, presenting his new album entitled About B. (Memory Sketches B-Sides Recordings).
Tim Linghaus is a musician and composer based in Cuxhaven, Germany, who creates his compositions blurring the lines between modern classical and ambient soundscapes. Since 2016 he has released an EP in 2016 on Moderna Records and an album in 2018 on Schole and 1631 Recordings.
About B. (Memory Sketches B-Sides Recordings) is a wonderful collection of thirteen new unreleased tracks in conjunction with four reworked versions of tracks from his highly acclaimed debut album which was released last year. It is in line with his debut album as all tracks were recorded around the period of the Memory Sketches sessions, trying to preserve particular personal memories in form of music. The album’s instrumentation is centered on wistful piano lines, warm synth arpeggios and layers of swirling drones, enhanced by cello, violin and saxophone performances by Sebastian Selke of CEEYS, Jean-Marie Bø and Tobias Leon Haecker, while field recordings and other sounds, like vinyl crackles and subtle electronics, perfectly fill the background atmospherics. Mastered by George Mastrokostas (aka Absent Without Leave), giving an intimate warmth to its sounds, About B. (Memory Sketches B-Sides Recordings) is an album full of gorgeous textures and stunning atmospheres, highly recommended for fans of Nils Frahm, Ólafur Arnalds and Max Richter.
Sound In Silence is proud to welcome The Gentleman Losers to its family, presenting their new album Make We Here Our Camp Of Winter.
The Gentleman Losers is the experimental musical group of brothers Samu and Ville Kuukka, based in Helsinki, Finland. Since their formation in 2004, they have released three albums and one EP on labels such as Büro, City Centre Offices, Grainy Records and Standard Form. All their releases have gained high worldwide praises and placements on several year-end lists. They have contributed their music to various compilations, including an original track for Duskscape Not Seen compilation on Nothings66 label, along with the likes of Helios and Stafrænn Hákon, amongst many others and a feature on Nils Frahm’s LateNightTales compilation album. They have also written some commissioned music, including a film score, done remixes for the likes of Bibio, Epic45, Will Samson and others, and released an EP with their synth pop side-project Lessons, along with singer Patrick Sudarski, on Sinnbus label.
Make We Here Our Camp Of Winter is The Gentleman Losers’ fourth full-length album, featuring eight new compositions, most part of which was written during the summer of 2018 at a cabin by a lake in southern Finland. All in all, this is a much more spontaneous record than their earlier ones. After being stuck with the previous album for many years, the Kuukka brothers wanted to make a simple, quiet album this time around. It was all much unplanned, but as the songs were nearing completion, it was clear that there was a coherent whole there, a feeling. They felt that this album has a sense of introversion to it, a feeling of winter approaching, and of holing up to wait for the seasons to change. Make We Here Our Camp Of Winter is a sublime album that intelligently mixes elements of ambient, lo-fi, electronica and post-rock. Recorded using both vintage analogue equipment and modern production techniques and with a sound palette that blends layers of haunting guitar melodies, slowly picked lap steel guitar, warm analogue synths, subtle bass lines, minimal beats and spoken word, it’s an emotive album that showcases the trademark sound of The Gentleman Losers at its best.
Sound In Silence is happy to announce the addition of Umber to its roster of artists, presenting his new album This Earth To Another.
Umber is the solo project of multi-instrumentalist Alex Steward, based in Leicestershire, UK. For about a decade, he has been producing his sublime music, inspired by his life in the heart of the English countryside, having done several wonderful releases, either on labels such as Oxide Tones and Hawk Moon Records, or self-released, including an album, an EP, a single and a split EP with Drops (aka Liam J Hennessy). He has also released a remix album, including remixes by Stray Theories, Row Boat, Gavin Miller and Circadian Eyes, amongst others, while he has also done remixes for worriedaboutsatan and Ghosting Season, and has collaborated with artists such as Tom Honey (Good Weather for an Airstrike) and Sophie Green (Her Name Is Calla).
This Earth To Another is Umber’s second full-length album, five years since his debut came out. Utilizing both electric and acoustic instrumentation, including dreamy electric guitar melodies, nostalgic acoustic guitar arpeggios, soothing synth layers, glacial drones, gentle beats and subtle electronics, Umber creates an album full of shimmering ambient textures and ethereal soundscapes, with hints of atmospheric post-rock and slow moving electronica. With the finishing touch on its evocative sound applied by the carefully done mastering of George Mastrokostas (aka Absent Without Leave), This Earth To Another radiates a deep majestic warmth that will appeal to anyone moved by the music of artists such as Helios, Hammock and Epic45.
I am hesitant to state that Private Parts is one of the most unique and weirdly beautiful albums of the 20th century, as that will likely sound like overheated hyperbole to anyone who has not heard it. Nevertheless, it is exactly that. Originally released back in 1978 and newly reissued, Ashley's hushed and intimate second album was unlike anything that came before it and no one else has since come anywhere close to replicating its precarious magic. That includes Ashley himself, as he revisited and expanded upon this album's themes with his ambitious television opera Perfect Lives, an ‘80s avant-garde landmark that has comparatively aged quite poorly. The elegantly simple piano-and-voice palette goes a long way towards making Private Parts feel timeless, but not nearly as much as the fact that it does not even sound like it was recorded on earth. Rather, it evokes the feeling of sitting next to an incredibly interesting, enigmatic, and gregarious man in heaven's waiting room.
In the pantheon of a major 20th century composers, Robert Ashley (along with possibly Alvin Lucier) stands out as a glaring and bewildering anomaly, as if he was an alien dropped to earth rather than someone who had devoted their life to diligently learning and mastering the intricacies of music.That said, there are some key details from Ashley's early life that help explain how he wound up taking the direction that he did with Private Parts.For one, after studying music in NYC and doing some time in the army, he took a job at the University of Michigan’s Speech Research Laboratory and took to it so well that he was offered a chance to pursue a doctorate in the field (he was not a student at the time).Later, still in his home state of Michigan, Ashley and Gordon Mumma became involved in a multimedia art group that organized regular performances in a loft dubbed Space Theater.During this phase (1957 -1964), both Mumma and Ashley became very interested in building and modifying synthesizers and electronics.Curiously, there is not any evidence of that on Private Parts, as the underlying music feels purposely generic (to great effect).However, it is likely that Ashley began seriously thinking about how to blur disciplines and transcend the existing boundaries of music around that time, as the radical projects that immediately followed (the ONCE festival and Sonic Arts Union) very much made a point of challenging expectations and gleefully subverting rules and boundaries.Private Parts was recording soon after the dissolution of Sonic Arts Union, but Ashley managed to cram in one last significant window of absorbing strange and disparate influences, as he moved to San Francisco and took director jobs at both the Tape Music Center and the fabled Mills College Center for Contemporary Music.
If it resembles anything, Private Parts feels most like a Raymond Carver short story, albeit a very "meta" and abstractly poetic adaptation of one.At its core, the two halves ("The Park" and "The Backyard") seem to be the imagined interior monologues of a recently divorced or separated couple.In "The Park," a lonely man living in a hotel room recounts a visit to a park in increasingly fragmented and circular fashion.On the flipside, a woman standing in her parent's backyard experiences a similarly flickering and elusive stream-of-consciousness that unpredictably plays with numbers, muses about Giordano Bruno, and contemplates the constellations (among other things).As an aside, Ashley may have been uniquely gifted as an explorer of the mind's mysteries, as he had mild Tourette's Syndrome and later released an entire album based on his experiments with "involuntary speech."
Aside from the actual words being spoken, however, the two pieces are nearly interchangeable: Ashley delivers his elliptical, deadpan monologues with a soothing drawl over a radiant synth shimmer.He is joined by "Blue" Gene Tyranny on piano and Krishna Bhatt on tablas, but there is nothing about the pieces that feels "composed" at all.Rather, their lazily twinkling and burbling improvisations feel like they are there primarily to provide texture and a "natural" sounding veneer of life and spontaneity.Both are purposely low in the mix though, which makes it seem like they are either drifting in from another room or through the veil of consciousness.It is a weirdly appropriate backdrop, sounding vaguely like background music in a spa, achieving a wonderfully dreamlike and unreal sense of place for the real show: Ashley's twin narratives.Structurally, the album is a work of true genius, achieving an elegant symmetry by showing two sides of the situation in a teasingly semi-linear arc that regularly digresses into philosophical asides, mundane details, non sequiturs, fleeting acknowledgments of deep existential pain, and apparent stage directions for the memories.Also, crucially, Ashley's monologues can be unexpectedly and perversely amusing (my favorite lines are "he is expected to positive and helpful about breakfast" and "the sculptor has made the horse look stupid").
Aside from the inventive structure and the absorbing and elusive narrative arc, Private Parts also benefits from an uncanny lightness of touch that makes its bizarre tableaux feel effortless and natural. In lesser hands, an album in this vein would almost certainly descend into New Age toothlessness or wallow in the maudlin nature of its premise.Neither ever happens here–Ashley’s sensibility is too subtly clever, pleasurably disorienting, and deliciously ungraspable.There is a deep sense of regret and heartache to the album, to be sure, yet all of the darkest emotions remain simmering just beneath the surface: the monologues playfully dance around revealing too much and endlessly stumble and fixate on individual moments of cryptic importance and meaning.As such, the album manages to be a poignant meditation on the human condition, the emptiness of modern life, and the precariousness of happiness, as well as an enticingly incomplete puzzle and tabula rasa.It is possible that Private Parts is one of the most tenderly, insightfully human albums ever recorded, but it equally possible that Ashley intuitively painted an evocative and unfinished picture that left enough empty space for listeners to subconsciously project their own buried dreams, desires, and recriminations onto its ambiguous tale of lost love.More likely, it is both.In short, Private Parts is a visionary masterpiece from start to finish.The world is full of truly great albums, but this one is unique among them as an improbably perfect and comforting riddle that I can dive into a thousand times without ever feeling like I have solved anything.