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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"Joachim Nordwall marks 20 years of his iDEAL label with The Black Book, a blinding sweep of original material from JASSS, Stephen O'Malley, Ramleh, Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, Carlos Giffoni & Prurient, Ectoplasm Girls, JH1.FS3, JS Aurelius, Autumns, John Duncan, and many more.
The story of iDEAL starts out in London 1998, when Nordwall was living the hardscrabble life: working in an underwear shop near Liverpool Street station; living in a filthy Bayswater apartment; scoring industrial records from the Music and Video Exchange; getting drunk in cheap pubs, and dreaming of starting a new record label and platform. He called it iDEAL, and 180 releases, 20 years later, it has become an invaluable node for non-standard, wayward expressions of modern electronic noise in all its mutable variation.
iDEAL's success and longevity may well be down to the way that Nordwall treated it as a social and artistic home, offering a place where mutually exclusive styles could bed down away from the mainstream or the genre police, and feed into a much larger, work-in-progress definition of fringe music. The Black Book extends, in the spirit of the label, an idealized compilation of disparate possibilities connected by a sense of musical mystery and chaotic energy.
To focus on just a few highlights, the ever unpredictable JASSS makes a notable inclusion with the serene vignette of LP opener, "Parental Youth," while Jim O'Rourke unfurls 17 minutes of gloaming post-industrial drone with "In Regards." Label friend Jonathan Uliel Saldanha contributes the tense, searching horns of "Siren Frontier," and Ectoplasm Girls cook up the grim, thrumming electronics of "Neuropean." John Duncan parses the airwaves to find the curdling organism of "Shortwave6," and Frederikke Hoffmeier (Puce Mary) and Jesse Sanes seduce with the narcotic drone-pop of "At The Bottom Of The Night" as JH1.FS3, alongside a powerful rhythmic oddity from Stephen O'Malley, a stark death rattle from Trepaneringsritualen as Týr × Reið × Vend with "nd þau né átto, óð þau né hfðo," and Norn Iron's Autumns "Lose It" on a mucky acid 'floor swill."
For over three decades now, the Fossil Aerosol Mining Project has patiently sifted through the damaged remains and bygone refuse from the late 20th century pop culture of America. Mining the snippets of audio found from abandoned drive-in theaters, mangled VHS tapes, and discarded cassettes, Fossil Aerosol studiously pieces together empathic, haunted abstractions of their original source material. their cryptic sound collages address the continued ramifications of the inherent paranoia from the cold war dissonance of stark morality and nuclear apocalypse.
The Recounting of Night Time begins and ends with the scratchy melodies from a well-worn violin. echoes and their amplifications from this instrument gradually subsume the original amidst cascades of tape manipulations and time-delay techniques. This motif repeats through the album with profound emotional torpor through Fossil Aerosol's hypnotic cycles of foggy ambience and back-masked rhythmic events that intertwine with varispeed-pitched dilations of melancholy melody. It makes for a beautifully corroded smear of sound, recalling the works of William Basinski and Fossil Aerosol's occasional collaborators :zoviet*france:
Fossil Aerosol addresses the album this way:
The Recounting of Night Time was composed and mixed in October of 2014. The source material focuses principally on a certain piece of German gothic cinema made during the late 1970s. This material was culled from both VHS audio tracks, as well a "field recording" made at a poorly-attended screening of the film in a decaying theater in St. Louis, Missouri sometime during the mid-1980s. Evidence of video control track glitches are present, while the scent of the acutely mildewed theater is recollected and implied."
A special edition of the CD, limited to only 18 copies, will also be available via Helen Scarsdale, and also from Afterdays Media. This edition consists of shrink-wrapped CDs overpainted in chalkboard resurfacing paint, erased chalk, acrylic, and a hand-lettered Bandcamp download code for an additional 18+ minute track.
Black To Comm is the solo project of German sound artist Marc Richter. Through his output both as an artist and through his eclectic Dekorder label, Richter has established himself as a singular voice of new music. Operating at the fringes of drone and ambient genres, his music is darkly magical and deeply atmospheric, underpinned by a signature surrealism. A relentless sonic explorer, Richter approaches the studio as his instrument, using sampling, analogue production and digital manipulation to offer an almost infinite choice of tones and textures. Audio fragments are liberated from their original context and sculpted into surprising new shapes, creating work that transcends time or genre. Seven Horses For Seven Kings sees Richter reaching out again into the limitless field of sound, summoning forth his darkest and most visceral work to date.
Seven Horses For Seven Kings was completed during a particularly prolific period for Richter. Working on a broad range of commissions since his last album - from writing for film and theatre works to composing for art installations, apps and sleep music - generated a flurry of new ideas and influences. Site-specific residencies in particular let Richter shift his focus from melody and song architecture to more abstract sound art. Extensive touring would equally come to inform a key shift in Richter's music, simulating the raw, unpredictable energy of live performances on record. Rather than ironing out mistakes in samples or his own playing, he exploits or even forces such imperfections. While rhythm has been largely absent from previous Black To Comm releases, here the music seems totally bound to it, from the fractured techno breaks of "Fly on You," to the pounding war drums of "Rameses II" and pulsing Mellotron sounds of “Angel Investor." The album's breath-taking pace drives Richter's music to new levels of intensity.
Richter's creative practice is informed as much by careful, attentive listening as it is studio experimentation. Pieces often begin life as a single sound that catches his ear, be it a record from his extensive collection, or something in the natural environment. Samples and instrumentation are sometimes presented authentically, a deliberate reference to an era, place or player, and at other times are twisted beyond recognition. Samples from contemporary artists like Nils Frahm are bent and compounded with fragments of early recorded music and medieval song. Richter blurs the lines between organic instrumentation and digital production to the extent that the two become inseparable. Being able to separate sound from context gives Richter complete command of the emotional impact of his music, imbuing pieces with meaning or stripping it back as he sees fit.
While Richter questions whether instrumental music needs to have deeper meaning beyond its sonic qualities, he accepts that the wider world inevitably bleeds into his art. Reflecting the violence and unreality of modern life, Seven Horses For Seven Kings is unashamedly dark, undeniably angry. But rather than be consumed by such emotions, Richter employs them as ecstatic release. Through his mastery of sound, he achieves transcendence through noise, beauty through intensity.
Meg Baird and Mary Lattimore’s collective work—as solo artists, band members, and collaborators—could fill a small record collection. Despite this productivity, these two long-time friends have never recorded an entire album focused exclusively on their unique talents. Ghost Forests mysteriously, thrillingly fills that void.
Independently, Baird and Lattimore have each cultivated highly individual and idiosyncratic tools of expression. Baird's timeless and soaring voice, guitar, and drums have underpinned pastoral and folk rock explorations as a soloist and in band settings with Espers and Heron Oblivion. Lattimore's albums of enigmatic, spectral experimental harp sounds move and unfold like films and nature itself. The list of artists that have called upon their voices, talents, and visions to enrich their own work is expansive—a virtual pocket encyclopedia of contemporary indie and experimental musicians.
Over the course of Ghost Forests' six collaborative compositions we hear deeply sympathetic conversations between the two artists. With access to a deep pool of shared influences, these two friends assembled a collection of sounds conjured from harp, guitar (both acoustic and electric), synths, the human voice, and a shared poetic language. Baird and Lattimore's subjects range from the sound of light on water, seismic geopolitical anxiety, the smog-exploded sunsets of Don Dudley's paintings, and vertigo from their respective relocations to San Francisco and Los Angeles from their once-shared home in Philadelphia.
The synthesis of their vision welcomes listeners who might have been familiar with only one of the performers' solo oeuvres. It also speaks to long-time fans both artists who have long wondered what this dream collaboration might yield.
Steve Gunn has long known Baird and Lattimore and worked with both on his own albums. He says "Meg Baird and Mary Lattimore are two musicians that I greatly admire. Ghost Forests is an ace meld of their abilities; Meg's guitar and voice, and Mary's harp lead each other (and us) into further regions of the strata. With each song you can hear this remarkable kinship. I'm thankful for this soundtrack."
Ghost Forests' musical conversations are intimate, fluid, effortless and spontaneous. They're filled with the euphoria of creation and, at times, they articulate hard truths and tangled emotions with an ease only trusted friends can manage. The songs alternate between extended ethereal instrumental excursions, gauzy and dreamy pop, blown-out "Bull of the Woods" heavy haze, and modern reimaginations of epic traditional balladry—all while touching on the strange and otherworldly places between these stations.
With Ghost Forests, Baird and Lattimore have given us all a timeless gift that generously rewards immersion and deep investigation. It is our collective good fortune as listeners that we are able to eavesdrop on their conversation through these songs. It is also a wonder to hear two unique artists interact to such beautifully original ends.
Having become mutual admirers of each others work; English of Cortini's Sonno and Cortini of English's Wilderness Of Mirrors, the pair were very pleased to receive an invitation to collaborate together.
Following a number of months exchanging compositional ideas and materials, Cortini and English met several days ahead of the Berlin Atonal festival and commenced an intense period of rehearsal and arrangement. The resulting piece, Immediate Horizon, traces their shared interests in harmony and texture. It is a work that meditates on saturation and the ruptures that occur when harmonic elements are stacked. Immediate Horizon's five pieces swell and burst in a perpetual sense of pulse.
This LP is a live recording, made at the premiere of the piece, held at Kraftwerk in Berlin.
available 8th February 2019 Vinyl, CD, Digital, Streaming
COSEY FANNI TUTTI announces the release of her second solo album, TUTTI, released by Conspiracy International on 8th February 2019.
TUTTI is comprised of eight soundscapes: an audio self portrait comprising of manipulated sound recordings from Cosey’s life, music and art: “It’s the only album I’ve made that is an all encompassing statement expressing the totality of my being. A sense of the past in relation to the present and everything in between.”
Available on Blue Vinyl or Gatefold CD the physical releases feature silver blockfoil embossed covers and the vinyl release include printed inner sleeve and download code.
Frederikke Hoffmeier has been a prominent and distinctive voice in the harsh noise scene for the last several years, releasing a steady stream of viscerally throbbing nightmares primarily on Denmark's Posh Isolation label. With this latest release, however, Hoffmeier makes her debut for PAN. More significantly, The Drought also marks a significant leap forward in Hoffmeier's artistry, as a recent residency at MONOM in Berlin completely transformed the way she thought about both space and evoking a strong sense of place. The result of those revelations is something that transcends Puce Mary's noise roots to arrive at a place that is considerably more unique, sensuous, and intimate, though no less disturbing. Hoffmeier is still an absolutely brilliant purveyor of violent, jagged squalls of noise, but she is now quite a bit better at focusing those eruptions for maximum impact.
The album opens with the queasily squirming and shuddering instrumental "Dissolve," which beautifully sets the tone for everything to come, as it feels like an undulating nightmare of twisting, grinding metal and existential horror.It is an especially effective showcase for one of the most compelling aspects of Hoffmeier's artistry: her passion for collecting unusual field recordings and her talent for manipulating them into something uncomfortably otherworldly and unrecognizable.While she certainly makes use of many of the same textures and tools common in the noise scene, such elements rarely do any of the heavy lifting on The Drought.The only relatively consistent nod to familiarity is Hoffmeier's fondness for sinuously throbbing low-frequency drones, which lends an oozing and gelatinous sense of menace mingled with dark sexuality to many of the album's pieces.If that sounds a bit disturbing and perverse, that is because it is, which fits quite (un)comfortably with one of the primary themes of The Drought: body horror ("I pull a hair out of my mouth, but that is not a hair, and that is not my mouth")."The Transformation" is the definitive statement in that vein, as Hoffmeier's calm monologue about liquefying (among other things) is every bit as haunting and skin-crawlingly weird as Jonathan Glazer's Under The Skin.That piece in particular highlights another wonderfully creepy and unnerving feature of The Drought: all of the vocal pieces feel like a hushed, trance-like confessional in the eye of a snarling and churning maelstrom.
Closely related to Hoffmeier's preternatural calm is her unusually masterful control of mood and dynamics, as these nine pieces feel like they were precision-engineered to slowly unfold as a dark dream of seething dread punctuated by well-timed blasts of laser-focused violence.I never get the feeling that any part of The Drought is dictated by an unpredictable mass of pedals and cables, yet the elemental power of the more intense passages sacrifices nothing in sense of spontaneity.That supremely elegant mastery of tension and release, as well as Hoffmeier's knack for surgical slashes of primal ferocity are what make The Drought such an excellent noise album.However, there are a few other facets to her artistry that deserve attention far beyond the reaches of that insular scene.For all their grinding and gnarled texture, there is a very human and soulful center to some of these pieces, as well as some unexpected glimpses of otherworldly beauty and poetry amidst the ruin.The most striking example of the latter is "Red Desert," a meditative and quietly devastating piece that cribs some of the most beautiful lines from Antonioni's 1964 film of the same name ("I can’t look at the sea for long or I lose interest in what’s happening on land").Most of the other flashes of unexpected beauty are a bit less overt, though they can be similarly striking.For example, the simmering horror of "The Transformation" harbors an absolutely sublime passage of tenderly warbling feedback.The climactic eruption of a chirping feedback loop in "A Feast Before The Drought" is similarly great.Notably, both passages work so well precisely because Hoffmeier's recent epiphanies about space provide her more inspired sounds adequate room to breathe and flourish.
To my ears, it is the vocal-centric pieces "Red Desert" and "The Transformation" that steal the show on The Drought, but both feel like well-placed set pieces in a wall-to-wall masterpiece rather than isolated flashes of inspiration.I was legitimately blindsided by how immersive, listenable, inventive, and thoughtfully constructed this album is as an artistic statement: the cumulative power is quite impressive and not a single passage or theme ever overstays its welcome or gets diluted by unnecessary clutter.Hoffmeier's greatest sorcery here lies in the details, as The Drought is alive with vivid, vibrant and unusual textures and hidden depth.I suspect that is a gift she has always had, but her compositional talents have now reached a level where she is able to bring those elements of her work into sharper focus and it makes quite a profound difference.Hoffmeier not only conjures up a dazzling nightmare of grinding, jagged metal and wriggling, unearthly cosmic horror–she manages to make it a place that I have no desire to leave.This an absolute tour de force and one of my favorite albums of the year.
Originally only available on cassette during dal Forno's summer tour, this EP of six eclectic covers is now available digitally. As anyone who has heard her occasional NTS Radio DJ appearances can attest, dal Forno has delightfully wide-ranging taste and definitely appreciates a great hook when she hears it, so it is not at all surprising that there are some extremely deep cuts here (The Kiwi Animal) mingled with a few names that actually have spent time at the top of the pop charts (Lana del Ray and The B-52s). While the latter's early "Give Me Back My Man" undergoes quite an impressive transformation, Carla is generally quite reverent with her source material, taking a handful of great songs and simply paring them down to their stark and intimate essence.
Self-Released
I generally shy away from tour-only releases these days, as I eventually realized (much later than I should have) that they are almost never very good and are mostly just noteworthy for their scarcity.Consequently, I did not start salivating over Top of the Pops when "Summertime Sadness" surfaced as a teaser, though it is certainly a likably ghostly and skeletal channeling of Lana del Ray.An all-covers EP just seemed like kind of a fun, throw-away release strictly for superfans, which is rarely a category I find myself in.However, I probably should have learned something from Marisa Nadler's cover albums, which sneakily include some of her finest work, as similar feat occurs with Pops.Obviously, Nadler and dal Forno are quite different artists, but they share one extremely significant trait: both have a very distinctive and instantly recognizable style.As such, any cover song that passes through that transformative filter stops feeling like a cover and feels very much like something new.In dal Forno's case, that signature style is a half-sultry/half-spectral minimalism built from just her voice, a simple bass line, and a scratchy, ramshackle drum machine beat.Occasionally, she will also throw in some wobbly, understated synthesizer, but it is generally a deceptively simple and incredibly effective aesthetic.The music is just substantial enough to provide a sense of momentum, but nothing is forceful or busy enough to ever steal the focus from the vocals.Top of the Pops feels a lot like finding a worn and forgotten mixtape and happily discovering that all the parts that truly matter still manage to break through the hiss and flutter.
With "Give Me Back My Man," dal Forno transcends her source material so thoroughly that it is more like a great new original song than a mere cover.In fact, it is probably one of my favorite songs that she has recorded to date, so it was definitely a wise decision to give this EP a more widespread reach.One fresh classic would have been enough to make me delighted about this modest release, but there is not a single weak or even middling song to be found.While the song choices are all unwaveringly cool and the arrangements are frequently inspired, Top of the Pops succeeds on a deeper level as well, as dal Forno manages to playfully indulge her more fun and hook-loving side without sacrificing much of her intensity or depth.While some of the lyrics are admittedly more flirty, breezy, and sexy than usual, the right singer can bring new and previously hidden shades of meaning and soul to just about anything and dal Forno has found a way to make even The B-52s seem enigmatic and introspective with this release.
This long-gestating new release from David Tibet and his shifting orbit of collaborators is an unexpected late-career throwback to the dazzling and immersive epics of Current 93's golden age. In Tibet's parlance, it is common for recordings and performances to be described as "channelings" and that seems especially appropriate for The Light Is Leaving Us All, which at times feels like it effortlessly transcends time and space and dissolves reality to open a fleeting portal into an alternate world swirling with unknowable mystery, unearthly beauty, and ineffable sadness. At its best, this album feels like a motley and wild-eyed caravan of minstrels, actors, and puppeteers unexpectedly appeared in a medieval town to share a vividly haunting, hallucinatory, and deeply eschatological fairy tale that will be the last thing that any of the villagers ever hear.
The Light Is Leaving Us All made its debut as a rapturous multimedia performance in London earlier this fall with Tibet’s impressionistic and achingly sad tale of witches and vanishing light backed by a series of slow-moving films by Davide Pepe.While there were occasion appearances from a mysterious red silhouette (the witches) and allusions to a glowing red barn, the bulk of the imagery was a series of antique sepia-toned portraits of families in which everyone’s eyes were replaced by trails of white that slowly oozed to the edges of the frame.it was a genuinely unsettling series of images that very effectively represents the album's tone of loss mingled with something ambiguously transcendent.Enigmatic ambiguity is a big theme in general, actually.For example, the witches clearly seem to be the tragic, beautiful martyrs of the tale, but it is quite hard to piece together much else from the fragmented narrative, which is purposely elusive, enigmatic, and pregnant with cryptic allusions.Also, the narrative features quite a wonderfully disorienting and colorful swirl of characters and events: in just "The Policeman’s Dead" alone, it is divulged that the policeman, the surgeon, a young girl, and the murderer are all dead (and the moon is drunk).Notably, that is the first real song on the album and it is one of the two (or possibly three) instant classics to be found, as Alasdair Roberts' lovely and hypnotically repeating classical guitar figure steadily accumulates intensity until it resembles some kind of ritualistic medieval procession.The entirety of the album is quite good in general though, as every piece feels like an essential deepening of both the spell and the bittersweet mystery of the narrative.Naturally, Tibet is in peak form lyrically and the band’s temporally dislocated and lovely music is lysergically and disturbingly enhanced by the masterful hand of Andrew Liles, but there are a still few pieces that unavoidably eclipse their surroundings.
The most striking one by a landslide is "A Thousand Witches," as its sadly lilting melody and swaying rhythm provides a gorgeous and devastating backdrop for Tibet’s tender recitation of names and allusions to "two thousand eyes in the carnival sky."Experiencing it live was a borderline religious experience for me and it does not lose much power at all in its recorded form, as it brings all of the sublime details into focus that help make it such a jaw-droppingly beautiful and timeless piece: the strange and lurching percussion, Aloma Ruiz Boada's swooning violin melodies, Reinier van Houdt’s subtly lovely augmentations of the simple chord progression, Michael York's mournfully beautiful flutes and bagpipes, the chorus of chirping birds–every single thread converges to absolutely floor me.It feels almost too pure and perfect to have emerged from our world, but it is far from the first time that Tibet's work has affected me that way and it likely will not be the last.Moments like "A Thousand Witches" are exactly why I have remained an unwaveringly devoted Current 93 fan throughout more than two decades of my evolving taste.The other significant bombshell on the album is "The Postman Is Singing," which has the riff structure of a doom-metal dirge, but inventively dispenses with distortion (mostly) to unleash a slow-building firestorm of militantly jangling clean guitars and an ascending cacophony of darkly blossoming strings and throbbing electronics.It is a truly glorious and infernal racket of squealing and shivering strings by the time it finally winds down.Aside from that, I would be remiss if I did not mention "The Bench and the Fetch," which diverges from the escalating darkness of the album as an unexpected oasis of nakedly pretty and sincere '70s-style folk that perversely suits the album perfectly.
The only significant way that The Light Is Leaving Us All falls a bit short of past career-defining masterworks like All The Pretty Horses or Black Ships Ate The Sky is the slightly reduced frequency of absolutely revelatory individual songs.As a complete artistic statement, however, it is hard to imagine this album being any more absorbing or cumulatively powerful, as it perfectly unfolds like a darkly entrancing folktale that seethes and swirls with so much mystery, depth, poetry, and hidden meaning that I feel like I have barely scratched the surface of its emotional and philosophical core.Moreoever, Current 93's work has always found multiple ways to ambush me with something unexpectedly striking or emotionally resonant.For the most part, the melodies themselves are instantly graspable and tend to establish my early favorite moments, but appreciating the full depth of the lyrics or the intricacies of the arrangements is another story altogether that ensures that I will find secret new pleasures for months to come.I definitely do not expect to tire of this album anytime soon.I suspect I will never unravel exactly what Tibet was trying to say with this album, as it is so willfully enigmatic and open-ended, but it would be a reductive mistake to read the album as a timely and fable-like elegy for the end of the world, even if it would be a completely fitting one.Perhaps it is merely the elegy for a particularly dark chapter (the one starring us), as Tibet makes it quite clear that all of the lost light will ultimately fill the night sky and that the birds never stop sweetly singing.
Elemente is a dynamic and hypnotic record, not at all reliant upon listener knowledge of the three incarnations of K/C/Qluster nor of the relentless creativity of Hans-Joachim Roedelius. The trio play a range of analogue synths and tracks are coherently sequenced into a whole album: two elements which combine to give a richness, depth and balance to their expression.
In March 2017 I attended a solo performance by Han-Joachim Roedelius in a Knoxville church. He played piano and electronics for an hour or so. The audience was clearly a reverent group who knew why they were there. When the music ended, there were a few seconds of silence and those of us close enough saw and heard him weep. After a blistering standing ovation he was in fine form, mingling for a long time with fans and even suggesting "ein selfie?" A few days later I heard that his other US dates had been cancelled for health reasons. He must be feeling better, as this seventh album as Qluster from the eighty-four year old Roedelius (with Onnen Bock and Arming Metz) is a thrilling and poignant marvel, crafted with daring, unpretentious gusto.
As with their earliest recordings, Qluster adjourned to improvise in the remote hamlet of SchoÃànberg, before chamfering the sessions down to these eight tracks and adding only sparse additional elements to the tracks "Zeno", "Tatum" and "Xymelan". Of the aforementioned analogue instruments - ARP 2600 - is used to particularly fabulous effect on "Zeno", and Farfisa organ beautifully underscores a Fender Rhodes piano melody on "Symbia. Several pieces rest on either slow or faster beats with "Tatum" having a slightly more heated and abrasive texture than the others.
I have to speculate that "Zeno" is (well) named for the Greek philosopher (c. 490-430 BC) author of certain paradoxes, including one which supports Parmenides' notion that (contrary to the evidence of our senses) change does not exist and thus motion is nothing but an illusion. There is no need for speculation about the importance of Roedelius whether in the three incarnations of K/C/Qluster, or with Conrad Schnitzler, Dieter Moebius, Michael Rother, Bowie, Eno, Conny Plank and others, and Elemente lives up to his creative history.
My dreamy nature is rewarded by "Weite" and "Infinitum" - two stunning tracks. Depending on one’s own imagination, "Weite" may suggest floating in an echo chamber, wandering to the top of a hill surrounded by clouds, or time-traveling back to a childhood moment when a parent helped with kite flying as waves rolled along a sunny beach. The last piece, "Infinitum" maybe creates the atmosphere of an eternal trip into endless space, a journey which Hans-Joachim Roedelius may arguably be closer to making than some of us, but no time soon I trust.