26 March 2017

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Albums and Singles

Patterns Of Consciousness is the powerful second full length album from analog synth composer Caterina Barbieri. Gorgeous high resolution analog textures and algorithmic melodies unfold under Barbieri's careful control, exploring the basic nature of sound and consciousness. These pieces are minimal in arrangement but maximal in presence asserting Barbieri as a unique voice in contemporary electronic music composition. Highly recommended to fans of Alessandro Cortini and Eleh.

Much more information can be found here.

26 March 2017

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Albums and Singles

Palto Flats & WRWTFWW Records are ecstatic to announce the highly-anticipated reissue of Japanese percussionist Midori Takada's sought after and timeless ambient / minimal album Through The Looking Glass, originally released in 1983 by RCA Japan.

Considered a Holy Grail of Japanese music by many, Through The Looking Glass is Midori Takada’s first solo endeavor, a captivating four-song suite capturing her deep quests into traditional African and Asian percussive language and exploring contemplative ambient sounds with an admirably precise use of marimba. The result is alternatively ethereal and vibrant, always precise and mesmerizing, and makes for an atmospheric masterpiece and an unparalleled sonic and spiritual experience.

The fully licensed reissue is available as a single 33rpm LP and a limited 45rpm DLP, both cut directly from the original studio reels (AAA), at Emil Berliner (formerly the in-house recording department of renowned classical record label Deutsche Grammophon) for the 45rpm DLP, and at the equally famous Frankfurter SST Studio for the LP. It is also available in CD format for the first time. All versions come with extensive liner notes.

More information can be found here.

26 March 2017

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Albums and Singles

Joshua's debut album Terminus Drift explores humans' relationship with environment and space, and how this experience is augmenting us as we further embrace a digital age. Our structures of communication, exploration, and discovery are mediated by technological shifts and we exist in simultaneity between our physical environment and emerging cyberspaces with a blended perception of embodiment and orientation within both.

Sirens reverberating through station tunnels, fluctuating harmonics of subway engines, echoing tannoy systems, piercing screams of electromagnetic fields.

The sonic material of this album is composed exclusively of field-recordings captured in transit through Kyoto, Tokyo, and Berlin, in addition to electromagnetic field recordings captured in Glasgow and Edinburgh. By interrogating the sonic properties of our physical environment, Terminus Drift imagines the sonic landscapes of these dualistically navigable 'cyberspaces' we transiently create and move through interacting with our world.

Out now on Subtext.

26 March 2017

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Albums and Singles

...are piano pieces recorded over the period of two years. The tracks are a collection of many hours of rehearsing and improvising alone in front of the piano. These sessions were recorded using a field recorder and then later processed and re-worked in the studio. It´s based largely around deceptively repetitive piano movements. Some of the tracks are very stripped down to their essential elements while others have been given a re-brush, adding new sounds beneath, such as cello and different instruments where it seemed fit. The use of various filters and pedals have been used occasionally to manipulate certain parts of the melodies. The idea behind the album was to let go of all kinds of emotions and just try to create an open minded album that could be both warm and melancholic but at the same time dramatic and dark. The album consists of 14 tracks.

Available now on Oak Editions.

26 March 2017

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Albums and Singles

All That Is Solid Melts Into Air is a collection of new compositions from New York City-based sound artist, performer, and composer Lea Bertucci. As a performer, Bertucci has worked primarily with amplified woodwind instruments, creating enigmatic electro-acoustic interventions of the bass clarinet and saxophone in conjunction with tape collage and electronics. Her latest release on NNA, however, explores her work as a composer, which investigates extended acoustic resonance on classical instruments and their potential to powerfully occupy physical space. The two sides of this cassette contain two different pieces that exist around a common concept – the live performance of extended technique on stringed instruments, and the otherworldly way that the resulting sound exists in the space in which it is created.

Out now on NNA Tapes.

26 March 2017

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Albums and Singles

Composed and recorded over a year between his home in New York City, and on residency in Stockholm, Tangier and Venice. Jeff Burch’s followup to 2015’s S/T, summons a once familiar spirit; one caught inside the single note and the endless reverberations of the Fluxus streets. He sounds out endless violin and cello wail and draws long interstellar synthesizer vowels, pushing them up against a clangor of bells, dizzying organ-fed Leslie, glassy bows of cymbal and gong. With the push of the capitalist hour, it is a series of works which unfurls against the weight and sound of our nefarious empires and the toil and sweat of our vast cities… one made with an ear pointed sharply toward the east.

In four parts; for electronics, organ, percussion, strings and woodwind. Cover artwork by Carol Bove, mastered by Chris Griffin (Pauline Oliveros, Eliane Radigue, La Monte Young).

"The vestigial spirits of Tony Conrad and Alice Coltrane seem to ooze from the music’s percolating pores. Gong-like reverberations punctuate an endlessly roiling cauldron of strings, electronics, and percussion… a fine follow-up to his debut.”  – Textura

Available now on The Spring Press.

26 March 2017

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Albums and Singles

This is the debut release from the duo of Loscil's Scott Morgan and classically trained cellist Mark Bridges.  The pair met while at a residency in Alberta, then convened for two weeks of winter recording in renovated schoolhouse in Wyoming.  Consequently, High Plains is quite an apt name for this project, succinctly capturing both the windswept isolation of the region and the project's deeply melancholy aesthetic.  Being unfamiliar with Bridges, I expected High Plains to be a rather Loscil-esque endeavor, but the only truly significant similarity is that this album continues the bleak trajectory of Monument Builders: Cinderland mostly feels like a neo-classical soundtrack to an art film or perhaps like a stark and drone-damaged homage to Dirty Three.

Kranky

Notably, Cinderland is not the first time Bridges and Morgan recorded together, as Bridges was featured on Loscil's adventurously experimental Adrift release, which was a 2015 app that offered "endless" ambient pieces inspired by ghost ships.  This time around, however, Bridges gets equal billing and deservedly so–in fact, he often seems like the guiding force behind Cinderland, though that is probably just because he is the one playing all of the actual melodies.  Scott Morgan's contributions are a bit more subtle and abstract, though no less important.  While the more Loscil-esque elements are unwaveringly relegated to a background role, Morgan's somber piano arpeggios and swelling synth chords very much set the prevailing mood.  Also, Cinderland proceeds at a glacially Loscil-esque pace and additionally features Morgan's distinctively dub-informed production style.  "The Blood That Ran the Rapids" is a representative example of the High Plains aesthetic at its best, as a hollow percussion groove slowly carries an elegiac chord progression besieged by washed of tape hiss and eruptions of echoing and gnarled studio flourishes.  The meat of the piece, however, is an achingly beautiful and ghostly cello melody embellished with all kinds of bleary after-images.  Bridges has an impressive knack for conjuring up strong and haunting melodies.  Curiously, however, there are not many other pieces on the album that stand out, as Cinderland primarily feels like a series of brief atmospheric vignettes of forlorn brooding and vague dread.  Bridges and Morgan certainly do a fine job at that and the pieces are mostly short enough to avoid overstaying their welcome, but the monochromatic mood and lack of more substantial fare make this a difficult album to get enthusiastic about.

There is one wonderful exception to that trend, however:  "A White Truck."  Built upon a darkly unfolding, slow-motion two-chord progression and some lovely guitar shimmer, the piece is elevated above the rest of the album by Bridges' prolonged and sinister-sounding upward slides.  Then the piece unexpected explodes into a harsh crescendo of snarling, distorted chords that completely rips the gloomy reverie of the previous pieces apart.  Much like "Blood," however, it feels like it is over all too soon. Thankfully, the strong closer "Song for a Last Night" is a bit longer, standing as another (albeit more subtle) highlight.  While Bridges' emotionally resonant and languorous cello melody is as melancholy as always, Morgan's backdrop of a single wobbly and repeating chord lets in a bit more light than usual, as does the evocative layer of field recordings of birds and flowing water.  As a composition, it is not necessarily stronger than the rest of the album, but the slight shift in mood makes a huge difference.  The addition of field recordings is especially significant, as Cinderland is an album that feels extremely tied to a specific time and place.  Most of the time, that time and place feels like the claustrophobic interior of a remote cabin, so stepping out of that simmering discomfort feels both dramatic and liberating.  It makes me wish the duo had used a lot more field recordings, but I suspect they deliberately saved them for "Last Night" to end with a poignant and striking finale.

Sadly, the few wonderful pieces on Cinderland have the unintended side effect of calling attention to how much better the album could have been.  Part of my lukewarm reception is due to my highly subjective and unshakable personal apathy towards anything that resembles a decontextualized soundtrack, but the monochromatic gloom of Cinderland is still objectively a tough sell, as is the incidental/vignette-like nature of most of these pieces.  This album has the tense and restless feel of two people going slowly mad from cabin fever (but never actually snapping, which probably would have made for a far more intriguing affair).  That said, Bridges and Morgan seem to have a real chemistry, even if it is colored heavily by their surroundings.  I hope that this is not a one-off endeavor and that the two can someday work together in a less bleak and isolated setting, as there is a lot of potential here that I would like to hear realized in more accessible form.  Grumbling aside, Cinderland does seem to have succeeded at exactly what High Plains set out to do, so it is not the execution that I have a problem with so much as the fundamental vision: this album sounds exactly like a landscape reduced to cinders.  While I am not personally in the market for such a feast of stark melancholy, those of a different disposition will find plenty of that to embrace here.

Samples:

• The Blood That Ran The Rapids
• A White Truck
• Hypoxia

 

 

26 March 2017

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Albums and Singles

Room40's excavation campaign of Norman Westberg’s wonderfully hypnotic and self-released solo guitar work continues with this 2014 tribute to the Westberg family dog. Notably, this release was already reissued once before (as an extremely limited vinyl edition by Hallow Ground), but this new incarnation is both remastered and expanded.  More notable still, Jasper Sits Out was the first of Westberg's homemade releases that Lawrence English ever heard, making it the album that inadvertently dragged this quietly beautiful facet of his artistry into the light.  As such, I half-expected Jasper to be a towering culmination of the entire reissue campaign, but it is more or less on the same level as all the consistently fine preceding releases (aside from one truly dazzling piece).

Room40

The original version of Jasper was comprised of two epic 20-minute compositions, the title piece and "Homeset Trunc."  The opening "Jasper" is very much textbook Westberg, beginning as kind of a warm and insistently pulsing haze before cleaner tones appear to weave a shifting, jangling, and ringing melodic foreground.  The magic of the piece lies in how seamlessly and organically Westberg plays with that central motif, building an undulating pointillist fog with calmly insistent forward momentum.  In doing so, he achieves two desirable feats at once: creating a dreamlike and hypnotic throb while ceaselessly crafting an unpredictable and complex web of evolving harmonies and micro-rhythms.  It is amusing and perverse that someone associated with the crushing juggernaut of Swans may be even more gifted in the arts of nuance, restraint, and patience.  Yet another trait that separates Westberg from like-minded solo guitarists is that his laser-focused control even extends to the compositional arc of his pieces.  When an artist is performing alone with just some looping pedals, the tendency is almost always to keep all the plates spinning until all of the necessary elements are in place for the crescendo, then elegantly fade away.  "Jasper" admirably bucks that trend by resolving into a final repeating chord.  It may not be electrifying or dramatic, but it is undeniably effective and satisfying.

The atypically industrial "Homeset Trunc" is quite a bit different, boasting a steadily throbbing and churning machine-like rhythm.  Naturally, Westberg exploits that strong percussive undercurrent as an opportunity to plunge deeper into abstraction than usual.  At first, he keeps things rather subdued and modest, but after several minutes the bottom drops out and the piece grows dramatically more hallucinatory.  As the deeper tones plunge and warp, Westberg weaves a rippling web of arpeggios that gradually becomes a dense and swirling cloud of twinkling, pulsing, and undulating layers.  Needless to say it is quite beautiful, but the best part is that the heavenly ocean of shimmer is periodically disrupted by surges of ugly vibrato and pitch-shifts to add a welcome element of menace and fragility.  I can honestly say that I never heard anything quite like it from another guitarist and I cannot even begin to unravel the mechanics of how it was assembled or performed: it is truly a tour de force.  Although it takes a while to catch fire, the pay-off is mesmerizing enough to make it a solid candidate for my favorite Westberg piece to date.  Given that, the newly added "A Particular Tuesday" has quite a tough act to follow, but it proves to be a fine coda despite my unreasonably high expectations.  It is admittedly a bit less distinctive and more overtly improvisatory than the rest of the album, but it compensates by being more melodic and instantly gratifying.  It kind of sounds like a languorous and glimmering ten-minute interlude during a Slowdive live set designed to give the rhythm section a break, but it gradually fades away rather than erupting into a song.

Aside from noting that the bonus track is not quite on the same level as the original album, the only real critiques than can be leveled at Jasper Sits Out are about what it is not rather than what it is.  Given that Westberg performed the entire album himself with a guitar, there are some very fundamental dynamic, textural, and compositional limitations: for the most part, Jasper Sits Out unavoidably sounds like a solo guitar album.  That is perfectly fine by me, of course–when Westberg is in his usual form, as he is on the title piece, he is easily one of the most beguiling and distinctive solo guitarists active today.  At his best, however, he transcends the self-imposed constraints of his craft to plunge into sublime and rarefied territory all his own.  He is at that level with "Homeset Trunc," reaffirming yet again my belief that Westberg is secretly one of the strongest minimalist composers of his generation.

• Jasper Sits Out
• Homeset Trunc
• A Particular Tuesday

 

17 March 2017

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Albums and Singles

And Right Lines Limit and Close All Bodies is Richard Skelton's third full album as The Inward Circles, following 2015's Belated Movements and 2013's. And Right Lines continues his exploration of the materiality of sound and the natural processes of weathering, attrition and decay. The source material for these recordings remains largely the same as his Sustain-Release albums of a decade ago - small stringed instruments, found objects, field recordings - but the compositional process itself couldn't be more different. Whereas the recordings under his own name, or as A Broken Consort, were largely concerned with preserving the clarity of acoustic sound, his work as The Inward Circles is devoted to burial, obfuscation and mythologisation. There is a desire to obliterate, to destroy, and to discover anew. Each sonic artefact is subject to repeated distortions of pitch and timbre, and, as a result, is transformed beyond recognition. Any traces of acoustic sound that remain are little more than ghosts, as the whole recording is suffused with electricity, a kind of telluric current, an overwhelming chthonic energy.

Out in April 2017 on Corbel Stone Press.

17 March 2017

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Albums and Singles

Forget was recorded during a period of epic productivity for Xiu Xiu. While writing Forget, they released the lauded Plays the Music of Twin Peaks, collaborated with Mitski on a song for an upcoming John Cameron Mitchell film, composed music for art installations by Danh Vo, recorded an album with Merzbow and scored an experimental reworking of the Mozart opera, "The Magic Flute." All of this frantic, external activity lead to a softly damaged dreaminess and broadened intent that has not been heard before in other Xiu Xiu works.

The album was produced by John Congleton (Blondie, Sigur Ros), Greg Saunier of Deerhoof and Xiu Xiu's own Angela Seo. It features guest appearances by fabled minimalist composer Charlemagne Palestine, LA Banjee Ball superstar commentator Enyce Smith, Swans guitar virtuoso Kristof Hahn and legendary drag artist and personal hero of Xiu Xiu, Vaginal Davis.

Standout track, "Wondering" is one of the catchiest boogie pop gems in the Xiu Xiu catalog, but like much of Forget, it still bears an underlying tension that manifests differently in each piece. From the haunted guitar duet of "Petite," the hilariously fraught lyrics of "Get Up," the advanced industrial boxing match of "Jenny GoGo," or the experimental goth explosion of "Faith, Torn Apart," all the songs in their own way build to a roiling boil of a fate in vanishing.

The calligraphy on the cover translates literally to "we forget." It bows to the universality of everything and everyone's inevitable decline and foggy disappearance. Regarding the album title, Xiu Xiu singer Jamie Stewart said, "To forget uncontrollably embraces the duality of human frailty. It is a rebirth in blanked out renewal but it also drowns and mutilates our attempt to hold on to what is dear." Forget is both the palliative fade out of a traumatic past but also the trampling pain of a beautiful one's decay.

Out now on Polyvinyl.