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 someone who already reviewed Bowery Electric's third album 19 years ago, I can't discuss it now without recognizing the importance of their second album and the differences in the world where each existed. Whereas Beat was very much the right record at the right time, Lushlife, in hindsight, feels like the wrong record at the wrong time. What made the world listen to Beat was its seemingly effortless mastery of sound, structure, and songcraft. The group didn't follow a particular formula between tracks and it never felt as if they were obliged to reach for a hit single. Released originally in late 1996 on Kranky in the USA, it grabbed the attention of Beggars Banquet for a release in Europe followed by two remix 12" singles, a remix album, and worldwide distribution to the follow-up. While they may have not explicitly been tasked with the duty of creating a pop-breakthrough, Lushlife feels at times like Bowery Electric are aiming for it. The songs were certainly more consciously composed, lyrically dense, and the sounds on the whole were much more vibrant and stunning than previously. Martha's vocals are more pronounced and confident, the bass riffs are a thunderous force, the guitars are sublime, and the strings are gorgeous. The dominating backbone of the record is the hip-hop beats, which eventually becomes its weakness.
This is arguably the formal debut album from Portland harpist Sage Fisher, though she previously surfaced with a fine cassette (Orchid Fire) back in 2016. Liminal Garden is on a completely different level than its more homespun predecessor though. If someone had told me fifteen years ago that several of my favorite artists would be harpists in the not too distant future, I would probably have thought they were completely delusional, but the instrument has undergone quite an incredible renaissance since Joanna Newsom's early albums blew up. While it is probably too soon to tell whether the more mysticism-minded Fisher has definitively earned a place in the same illustrious pantheon as Newsom and Mary Lattimore, her inventive use of effects and processing here frequently transcends harpistry altogether and calls to mind some of the most iconoclastic laptop composers of the early twenty-first century (if they lived in a fairy tale-like crystal palace in an enchanted forest). This is a wonderful and unexpected gem.
Sage Fisher is an quite a complex, curious, and inscrutable artist, as her "Druid high priestess" look and her self-description as a "portal opening reverberating witch sister" suggest that her work would share a lot of common ground with some of the more pagan-minded proponents of the largely dispersed and forgotten Freak Folk/New Weird America milieu.That would be just fine by me (as long as the album was good), as I remain a devout Fursaxa enthusiast and likely will be one forever.Fisher, however, takes that foundational sensibility in quite an unexpected direction, combining folk instrumentation, a deep connection with natural world, Hindu philosophy, and a fascination with geometry to yield something altogether her own.In fact, Liminal Garden almost feels perversely futuristic–like the kind of art a mysterious feminist revolutionary would be making in a William Gibson or Blade Runner-esque dystopia.Wielding a battery of pedals, Fisher frequently transforms her harp's tumbling arpeggios into an unrecognizably squirming and snarling electronic abstraction.In fact, on the most experimental pieces, such as the roiling and churning "Labyrinth I" or the chirping and bleeping "Iridesce," it is nearly impossible to discern that a harp was involved at all…at least, not from the sounds.From a compositional perspective, however, Fisher's choice of instrument seems to play an extremely crucial role in the shape her vision takes, as these ten pieces could all be roughly described as variations of gently hallucinatory soundscapes built from rippling lattices of notes.
Fisher sings sometimes as well, an occasion that yields two of the album's most strikingly beautiful pieces: "Grass Grow" and "Mirror."The former resembles kind of a time-stretched and smoky choral work punctuated by dense swells of exotic-sounding backwards melodies."Mirror" is even more gorgeous still, as Fisher unexpectedly sings an actual melody (with words!) amidst a swooning, fluttering, and cooing web of hazy vocal layers.For an artist this devoted to effects, processing, and experimentation, Fisher has a remarkably strong intuition for nuance and clarity, subtly embellishing the piece's simple motif with unpredictable disruptions and fitful glimpses of a glimmering descending harp melody. According to a recent interview with Self-Titled, "Mirror" is the album's most conceptually heavy and personal piece, as Fisher attempted to evoke the feeling of "being devoured by a gaze…looking in the mirror and seeing someone you weren’t expecting to see looking back."While I suppose that rightfully makes "Mirror" a strong contender for the album's centerpiece, it was actually the languorously lovely "Junglespell" that initially won me over to the album, as it unexpectedly blossoms into a passage of visceral, churning catharsis that recalls prime Tim Hecker.That is not something I would expect to encounter on an album by a harpist at all, yet Fisher makes it feel convincingly earned and authoritative.The following "Castleshell" pulls off a similarly inventive twist, as its pretty descending melody gradually becomes engulfed by layers of backwards countermelodies as it inexorably builds towards an increasingly heaving and vividly chaotic climax.
I once heard a yoga instructor liken culture to nutrition, explaining that what your mind ingests determines the quality of your words and thoughts.That might not sound especially profound on its face, but it stuck with me and recently popped into my head when I was reading about the esoteric inspiration behind some Richard Skelton albums: artists with deeply restless minds and unusual, far-reaching interests tend to make some of the most fascinating and unique art.Liminal Garden triggered the same thought, as I was struck by how many interesting and divergent directions Fisher was able to take with an instrument that I always felt was fairly limiting.In hindsight, I now grasp that a harp is only limiting if the player's influences are primarily other harpists.Fisher seems blissfully unaware of such perceived constraints herself, as her instrument is merely a tool for realizing a much more expansive and ambitious vision teeming with Cambodian ruins, mazes, seashells, tropical plants, Hindu mythology, and significant moments from her personal life.Of course, realizing that inspiration lurks everywhere is just one piece of the puzzle, as the execution of one's vision is every bit as important as the vision itself.Fortunately, Fisher completely nails it with Liminal Garden.Some credit is probably due to Rafael Anton Irisarri's mastering work, as these pieces feel vividly and vibrantly alive, but Fisher gave him one hell of an album to work with: I can find something to love about nearly every song here.Part of me admittedly wishes the album was a little longer, as it seems to go by too quickly, but that is a fool's wish.  Liminal Garden is already a focused and near-perfect statement that seems to only get better each time I listen to it.No sane person would tamper with that.
As someone who already reviewed Bowery Electric's third album 19 years ago, I can't discuss it now without recognizing the importance of their second album and the differences in the world where each existed. Whereas Beat was very much the right record at the right time, Lushlife, in hindsight, feels like the wrong record at the wrong time. What made the world listen to Beat was its seemingly effortless mastery of sound, structure, and songcraft. The group didn't follow a particular formula between tracks and it never felt as if they were obliged to reach for a hit single. Released originally in late 1996 on Kranky in the USA, it grabbed the attention of Beggars Banquet for a release in Europe followed by two remix 12" singles, a remix album, and worldwide distribution to the follow-up. While they may have not explicitly been tasked with the duty of creating a pop-breakthrough, Lushlife feels at times like Bowery Electric are aiming for it. The songs were certainly more consciously composed, lyrically dense, and the sounds on the whole were much more vibrant and stunning than previously. Martha's vocals are more pronounced and confident, the bass riffs are a thunderous force, the guitars are sublime, and the strings are gorgeous. The dominating backbone of the record is the hip-hop beats, which eventually becomes its weakness.
The socioeconomic climate of 1996 and 1997 was exceptionally beneficial for innovative arts and entertainment as the dot com boom was fueling both economic growth and increased worldwide connectivity. This was perfect for musicians who weren't able to find a voice through typical mainstream media or distribution through established channels, which were stubborn at the time to adapt. Morale was on the upswing, young people were optimistic, and independent music was reaching more listeners in more remote places. Post-rock was a recognized movement (or non-movement), divisions between styles were blurring, music festivals became more diverse, and listeners tastes were expanding. Beat was championed in the independent music press, Bowery Electric toured extensively, recorded a Peel Session, and, in the wake of the success, Martha Schwendener and Lawrence Chandler built a studio in Brooklyn and began work on Lushlife.
The first half—or side one of the record—is remarkably dark for an opening, with songs like "Floating World," the title track, the creepy "Psalms of Survival," and instrumental side closer "Soul City," all of which are mid-paced, sonically rich, and set in minor keys. Much like the cover suggests, it is like a breathtaking soundtrack to a lonely journey through a well-lit but empty city in the wee hours of the night.
The second half—or side two—is where the album loses me, however. Here is where the beats become distractive. After over three years from release of Beat, I wasn't ready to hear the overused "Funky Drummer" sample throughout "Saved" or the Eric B & Rakim loop (the one which made up every Milli Vanilli hit single along with countless others) on the closer "Passages." "Freedom Fighter," the album's single, used Jay-Z's beats, samples from Kraftwerk, and guitar from Nick Drake, who was widely played at the time, thanks to the popularity of the VW commercial (he sold more records in 1999 in the weeks following that commercial's debut than he did in his entire lifetime). It is worth noting this was no intention of the group to capitalize on this, as the album was complete before the commercial aired yet came out in the wake of its popularity.
Unfortunately, the timing wasn't working in the group's favor, as the album was released on February 28th of 2000, less than 2 weeks before the stock market crash on March 11th. While it may seem unrelated to the success of this album, the ripple effects couldn't be ignored. The crash brought the dot com boom to a screeching halt. Morale began on a downtrend and so did incomes: less money was floating around for arts and entertainment. The music industry was exceptionally vulnerable: as technology and connectivity continued to advance, the popularity of filesharing increased, and the major label industry lashed out at consumers. Stuck in the middle were the independent labels and stores which began to suffer, and within a very short while, the major record store chain, as we knew it, was extinct. After a European and South American tour, the duo returned to the US for a few performances but soon called it quits.
Lushlife is a good record but it doesn't make a lot of lists two decades later. I have listened to the record so many times in the last 20 years that writing about it is difficult, as my mind has changed so many times about the record. It still has fantastic songs which have stood up very well but I find my attention wandering halfway in. Plenty of care went into the reissue and the result is quite pleasing. The clarity and range of the sounds on the record are fantastic and the packaging is very faithful to the original UK-only LP. Furthermore, it is also now available at a reasonable price and no longer "collector prices." I would personally love to hear a version of the album stripped of side B's hip-hop samples or to hear the demos surface but am no longer holding my breath after all this time.
Sound In Silence is happy to announce the return of Amp, presenting their new album Entangled Time.
Amp is the electronic/post-rock duo of Richard F. Walker (aka Richard Amp) and Karine Charff, based in London, UK. Amp's lineup has changed many times over the years, since their formation in 1992 by Walker, after his collaboration with David Pearce (Flying Saucer Attack) on The Secret Garden and the Distance projects. During the last years Amp have centered around Charff and Walker, while in the past the duo has been joined by a succession of collaborators, including Matt Elliott (The Third Eye Foundation, This Immortal Coil, Hood, Flying Saucer Attack, Movietone), Matt Jones (Crescent, Movietone), Guy Cooper (The Secret Garden), Gareth Mitchell (Philosopher's Stone, The Secret Garden), Ray Dickaty (Moonshake, Spiritualized), Robert Hampson (Loop, Main), Marc Challans (Fraud), Donald Ross Skinner (Baba Looey, collaborator of Julian Cope), Dave Mercer (Light), Jon Hamilton (Part Chimp, Drumm Chimp, Ligament), Kevin Bass (Moonshake, Snowpony) and many others.
To date Amp have released several highly acclaimed albums, EPs and singles on labels such as Kranky, Darla, Wurlitzer Jukebox, Space Age Recordings, Enraptured, Very Friendly, Ochre Records, Blue Flea, RROOPP, their own Ampbase and many others, while Walker has also released solo records as Richard Amp and Amp Studio.
Entangled Time is Amp's first full-length album of brand new material since their Outposts album back in 2011. Featuring five new compositions, with a total duration of about 44 minutes, and emerging out of the extended recording sessions for a new studio album, this concise album presented itself, serving as a soundtrack or pointer to the ongoing work in the studio.
Amp perfectly blend together soothing ambient, dreamy post-rock, slow moving electronica and fragile shoegaze, while the sound palette of Entangled Time includes drifting textures of resonant synths, tranquil pads, shimmering waves of heavily effected guitars, seductive vocals, deep bass, glitchy electronic beats and hypnotic loops of hazy drones, resulting in one of their most interesting works to date. Entangled Time is a mesmerizing album that will appeal to anyone moved by the music of artists such as Bowery Electric, Lovesliescrushing, Windy & Carl and Fennesz.
"Another brilliant posthumous album by Letha Rodman Melchior. Letha's music, as her visual art, was a great collaged pile of extreme strangeness, with seemingly irreconcilable objects butting heads in ways that end up making great sense.
I met Letha a long time ago, when she was in Cell, but I had not much idea of her work beyond that until she had moved to North Carolina and I started hearing her health was bad. Siltbreeze put out an amazing album called Handbook for Mortals, and it was essential listening. Letha managed to create very very warped music without making it off-putting. Although her sonics were whacked as hell, they were created with such a warm and gooey center that even people who'd usually shy away from such things, would ask what was playing when we floated the album through the store's stereo system.
Siltbreeze followed up with the ungodly brilliant, Shimmering Ghost, after cancer claimed another genius, and we were stunned when Dan Melchior offered us the chance to do this LP.
Letha Rodman Melchior was a truly singular artist. And it is with great pride that Feeding Tube presents another chapter of her largely undocumented saga."
"Spaces is a series of compositions based on recordings in museums. Each work builds on a binaural recording of the environmental sounds a museum and each has been processed based on different concepts. The approach for processing and adding of electronic sounds was inspired by an artwork that was hanging in the museum space. So space and artwork form a unity.
As a composer and mastering engineer I am extremely sensitive to the sounds around me. But I’m also a keen visitor of museums and while there I always listen to what the museum sounds like. Museums are spaces where people encounter works of art and are given the opportunity to contemplate on this experience. Some do this silently while others keep chatting their route and only vaguely take in what is presented. There’s a lot going on and each museum has its own sonic character.
I have started collecting sounds in 2008. Snippets from these recordings have been part of many works in the years that followed. In 2015 however I decided to construct a complete sound work revolving around the sounds that I recorded. That has become A=F=L=O=A=T. This track was part of my annual musical gift to friends and colleagues and received positive feedback. Then, begin 2017, I decided to make a next move and see if other recordings could be evolved into real compositions. Gradually the concept formed, by composing, experimenting, returning to museums and study the artworks and actually the whole sonic environment of the museum.
Listening to a museum makes you aware of the spatiality of a museum. The, sometimes, huge halls where art is presented also seem to make space in my mind. And so I thought that space would be a good metaphor for the first dimension that I want to express. The second dimension is the work of art itself, which is a silent object. It just hangs there. But it represents a whole universe of thoughts and ideas that the observer can take in and tumble around and around in his mind. My own observations I have translated into the electronic layers on top of the binaural recordings.
The music on the CDs has been laid out as spacious as possible, leading to long almost silent intermissions between the tracks. In the hope of a listener with a wide-open mind-set."
FEAN started as a musical artist-in-residence project in a little church in the Frysian village Katlyk. The group consists of Jan Kleefstra, Romke Kleefstra, Mariska Baars and Rutger Zuydervelt (Machinefabriek), who also form the quartet Piiptsjilling. For FEAN they are accompanied by Belgian guests Annelies Monseré, Sylvain Chauveau and Joachim Badenhorst.
The FEAN project gets its inspiration from the ecological decay of peatland in the Dutch province Friesland and in other parts of Europe. Agriculture and peat extraction are threatening the landscape severely and with long term consequences. This forms the underlying thought for the improvised recording sessions, which were overseen by Jan Switters.
Although the Piiptsjilling members are obviously used to performing and recording together, adding the three Belgian guests (who hadn't played together before) added an extra dimension to the group's dynamic, resulting in a concentrated yet playful series of improvisations, that were later mixed and edited for the FEAN album.
Pacific City Sound Visions greets wonder again, this fall, to bring you a third vinyl release from the late '80s/early '90s European experimental/industrial scene. After Vox Populi!'s "Half Dead Ganja Music" and Frank Dommert's "Kiefermusic," we have a hand-picked compilation by the Hamburg artist MAAT.
MAAT is a solo project by Dörte Marth, who created two secretly powerful and underappreciated records in 1993. They were released on two labels (Dragnet, Dom Elchklang) run by Achim P. Li Khan, the co-founder of H.N.A.S.
MAAT'S musical palette is at once, strikingly, a more dark and brooding occult version of Anima and Limpe Fuchs. One can hear classical music references much like Coil's Unnatural History, but played further, blurring the shadowy lines between sampling and virtuoso playing. MAAT'S dark and glisteningly illustrated use of electronic drums, Pan-Asian arrangements, and classical styles, invent a private world where she uncovers and projects forth, a new and ancient female energy. It's almost as if she is orchestrating her palette and shooting it through star-clusters beneath the world. Probably Typhonian Highlife and 4th World Magazine's greatest influence.
"I first met Lionel Marchetti in Australia during the Liquid Architecture Festival in 2010. Decibel were touring our Alvin Lucier program, and Lionel was on the same bill performing a live performance set manipulating electro-acoustic materials with dancer Yoko Higashi. I was so taken with Lionel's performances and the resulting music, that I asked him if he would write a piece for Decibel.
I didn’t realize that he hadn’t done something like this before. The first work was "Première étude (les ombres)," communicated as a text score, and premiered in 2012. I was asked by Lionel to make some recordings of ocarinas, harmonicas, and folk instruments – and I sent these to him for the creation of a 'partition concrète d'accompagnement'– a fixed media part that is featured in the live performance. For this piece, the part comes from speakers beside each performer, and a bass amplifier beneath the piano. Like his own performances I had seen the year before, the work was naturally performative – with unique speaker and performer configurations, interesting and odd additional instruments. It was such a rich work, a remarkable combination of electronic, spatial, acoustic and textural music. The performers use the partition concrete as a score.
I visited Lionel in Lyon, France in 2014, recording flute improvisations in his studio. He used these as a basis for "Une série de reflets," again communicating via text instructions and each performer having their own dedicated speaker to interact with. "Pour un enfant qui dort," which again requested flute sounds that were this time part of the live performance as well as the partition concrète, was also written around that time. The next work saw a more 'compositional' collaboration - "The Earth defeats me" began as a graphically scored work written by me and recorded by Decibel in the studio. That recording was used to make the partition concrète which is now an embedded as part of the animated score file, thanks to the software we had developed to do so.
These works exist as live performances, but also as singular concrète works, when heard without the instruments. Working with Lionel has been remarkable: he has a singular way of thinking about sound and its relationship to works and images. Music concrete is a lifestyle for him, it is a way of thinking, communicating and being. These pieces enable the acoustic instruments to be part of that – extending the ideas in the partition concrete, using them structurally and texturally, as well as being part of them.
When I first met Lionel, I didn’t realize he was in Australia because it was originally planned he would be travelling with French composer Éliane Radigue, performing some of her electroacoustic works, as her preferred diffuser. I would commission a work for Decibel from Élaine ("Occam Hexa II") in 2014 and it was during that process I realized the link between them. Decibel performed Lionel and Eliane's music together – it is music that concerns itself with the incredible power of sound, but from the most delicate and dream like perspective."
"As I’ve tried to understand what is happening now without judgement––a collapse of systems, boundaries, and symbols that crumble faster with each forcible attempt to reinstate them––I am finding equal failure in streamlined, singular methodologies for both comprehension and composition. Outside, reason and rationale wane in heft and clarity. Representation in a world that refuses fact is uncertain and deceptive. Time is complicated by the failure of the linear. Inside, what we see is not what we hear, what we hear is not what we think, what we think is not what we feel, and so on.
The dread incited by this precarity is difficult to interpret without announcing failure: the anxiety of watching our own hourglass is palpable and demanding. I feel existence in this moment has required a move away from my own humanity in order to simply live in it, live through it, live with it while refusing to release the idea of environmental recovery. It is to request your humanity to unwillingly shift, to mutate toward something sharply resilient and relentless. The sounds on this record embody this sense of mutant consciousness. It is, for me, a representation of a vigorous sprint towards complexity, towards the interdependencies that serve as stop-gaps, towards freaky, slippery, compounded stacks of reality.
The title, A Parallel Array of Horses, is derived from a geologic phenomenon in which a block of a specific type of rock has been completely separated by mineral veins from its counterpart within another body of rock, and then stacked upon multiples of others like it. Sounds on this record are both recorded and produced: the album opens with recordings of a Mojave wind storm and closes with the world’s largest colony of Mexican free-tailed bats departing their cave to roam the summer night air of Southeast Texas. Both scenes are landscapes of precarity, politically or meteorologically or otherwise. Interspersed are a variety of electronic instruments and processes, and compositional techniques that are variously clear-cut or intentionally buried by digital processing. Tracks three and four are composed entirely with my own voice––my own body as the original playback mechanism for experiencing the world, but manipulated, elaborated upon, and layered to express a more complex interpretation of that subjective reality.
Through listening, I find myself able to retrace my steps back to a sense of decentered, porous presence––the present is still here, with all of its shifts and confusion and valuable interdependencies. No matter is created or destroyed, only new forms arise."
Thanks again to everyone who participated in the Recount of the 1999 Annual Brainwashed Readers Poll.
The original vote which took place at the end of 1999 was clearly less expansive and inclusive, however the new top picks aren't drastically different than the original vote for the most part. Numerous releases which have now charted weren't even on the radar of most readers at the time while other releases have noticeably dropped in popularity due to changing times and changing opinions.
No more polls until the end of 2019.
Album of the Year
Coil, ""Musick to Play in the Dark volume 1"" (Chalice)
Nurse With Wound, ""An Awkward Pause"" (United Dairies)
Labradford, ""E Luxo So"" (Kranky)
The Angels of Light, ""New Mother"" (Young God)
Low, ""Secret Name"" (Kranky)
Coil, ""Astral Disaster"" (Acme/Prescription)
Trans Am, ""Futureworld"" (Thrill Jockey)
Pan Sonic, ""A"" (Mute)
Mogwai, ""Come on Die Young"" (Chemikal Underground)
Add N to (X), ""Avant Hard"" (Mute)
Stars Of The Lid, ""Avec Laudenum"" (Sub Rosa)
Sigur Rós, ""Ágætis Byrjun"" (Smekkleysa)
Current 93 / Michael Cashmore / Christoph Heemann, ""Untitled"" (Durtro)
Jim O'Rourke, ""Eureka"" (Drag City)
Dome, ""Yclept"" (WMO)
Al Jabr (Richard H. Kirk), ""One Million and Three"" (Alphaphone)