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In Silhouette is unmistakably the product of Brian Pyle, who once again returns as Ensemble Economique. Well over a decade ago, Pyle and his merry band of Starving Weirdos popped onto the scene from out of nowhere. Truth be told, that ‘nowhere’ is Humboldt County, California whose grand mythologies about its marijuana industry dwarfs all others. The Weirdos, not averse to method acting through Humboldt’s prized chemistry, stood an unusual chimera in the world of out-rock and avant-garde practitioners. Electronic-Improv, fuck-all auto-didacticism, and monotone psychedelia. Too feral to be AMM, too electronic to be NNCK, too discordant to be :zoviet*france:. As the Weirdos slowed to halt, Pyle’s restless energy insisted that he go on. Hence Ensemble Economique. Over an impressive catalogue of albums, he steadfastly continues down this rabbithole, polishing and refining his craft into a signature polyglot of expressionist collage.
Pyle’s latest opus dials up the cinematic flourishes that have graced many of his earlier recordings, through his sinewed synth-tone undulations, polyphonous ostinato, Wolfgang Voigt pulses, and fractalized cascades of generative serialism. All of this glides through the patterned electronic chiaroscuro atmospheres that are at once ethereal and haunted, dotted with male and female vocals whispering unknowable secrets. This tech-gnosticism flickers with light and shadow through Pyle’s rich production and beckons for the big screen, as Pyle’s work is grandiose in scale, psychologically nuanced, and deeply affecting. In Silhouette is the twelfth Ensemble Economique album.
Out March 31st on Denovali.
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All the Way is a collection of radical re-workings of traditional and jazz standards such as “All the Way,” “You Don't Know What Love Is,” and “The Thrill Is Gone” (made famous by Chet Baker). It also includes a solo piano interpretation of Thelonious Monk's “Round Midnight,” and live voice and piano interpretations of the American traditional “O Death” and the country song, “Pardon Me I've Got Someone to Kill.” The album includes both electric live performances (recorded in Paris, Copenhagen, and East Sussex) and studio recordings made in San Diego, CA.
Live at St. Thomas the Apostle documents Galás’ volcanic May 2016 performance at St. Thomas the Apostle church in Harlem NY, described by the New York Times as "guttural and operatic, baleful and inconsolable, spiritual and earthy, polyglot and wordless, nuanced and unhinged." The concert, produced by Intravenal Sound Operations and Red Bull Music Academy, was composed exclusively of what Galás calls “death songs.”
More information can be found here.
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NYC-based artist Evan Caminiti breathes life into the Dust Editions imprint with the release of Toxic City Music. Caminiti has explored electro-acoustic music since the mid 2000's, the latest transmission being 2015's Meridian. While that album was Caminiti’s first to omit electric guitar, he has now returned to the instrument. Here it is buried it in an electronic mist and melted down, its sonic fabric reshaped.
Toxic City Music was inspired by the psychic and physical toxicity of life in late capitalism. Conceived throughout 2015 and 2016, Caminiti captured the sounds of NYC’s machinery and voices before weaving them into his studio experiments. This collection of song mutations unravels in hazy plumes and serrated edges; concrète sounds mesh with disembodied strings and corrosive electronics on "Joaquin", drones ripple under stuttering rhythms and crude synth detritus throughout "NYC Ego." On "Toxic Tape (Love Canal)," layers of digital degradation smear guitar clusters, dissolving into a dubby devotional-ambient space.
More information can be found here.
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This classic minimal music album is now available again on vinyl for the first time since the '70s.
Primed with a glass of cognac, Charlemagne Palestine sits at the keyboard of a Bösendorfer Imperial grand piano. One foot firmly holds down the sustain pedal while both hands perform an insistent strum-like alternation on the keys. Soon Palestine and his Bösendorfer are enveloped in sound and bathed in a shimmering haze of multi-coloured overtones. For 45 minutes, this rich pulsating music swells and intensifies, filling the air.
When Strumming Music first appeared on the adventurous French label Shandar during the mid-1970s, it seemed a straightforward matter to place Charlemagne Palestine in the so-called Minimalist company of La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass, whose work also featured in the Shandar catalogue. Palestine too used a deliberately restricted range of materials and a repetitive technique, but as he has often pointed out in more recent times the opulent fullness of his music would more accurately be described as Maximalist.
Strumming Music, recorded in Palestine’s own loft in Manhattan, has no written score. In an age of recorded sound he still feels no need for traditional notation. The surging energy of this particular recording stands comparison with the improvising of jazz visionaries who impressed and inspired him while living in New York, as a young man. But, as Palestine himself has made clear, primarily he brings to music-making the sensibility of an artist rather than a musician.
Although the technique of the piece has roots in Palestine’s daily practice, when a teenager, of playing the carillon at a church, hammering sonorous chimes from a rack of tuned bells, it also draws on his later work as a body artist, staging vigorously muscular, physically demanding and often reckless performances. In addition, Strumming Music can be heard as a sculptural tour de force, while its textures connect with the colour moods, plastic rhythms and tactile space of Mark Rothko’s Abstract Expressionist canvases.
At the time when Philip Glass, Steve Reich and Terry Riley were becoming well-respected and widely heard composers, welcomed in concert halls and opera houses around the world, Charlemagne Palestine actually stopped making music altogether. He relocated to Europe and devoted his creative energies to the making of stuffed animal sculptures including the mighty God Bear, three-headed and six metres high. His involvement with music was revived and renewed during the 1990s, when younger generations of musicians and listeners, attuned to immersive noise and sensual sounds, were rediscovering Strumming Music and recognising that Palestine had blazed an idiosyncratic trail into their emerging world.
Since then he has returned enthusiastically to musical performance and his formerly meager discography has steadily grown. Still Strumming Music remains the essential index of Palestine’s singular creative vision. Fundamentally this fascinating piece is a collaboration between an artist and an instrument. Palestine had first encountered the Bösendorfer Imperial back in 1969. He had already been playing church organs for several years, relishing their power and presence. Now he had found a piano that satisfied his need for sonic depth and weight. "The Bösendorfer at its best is a very noisy, thick molasses piano," he has remarked. Charlemagne Palestine embraced its clinging sonorousness, its clangorous resonance and out of that embrace came the voluptuous sonic fabric of Strumming Music.
“My rhythms are sexual, not machine-like.” Charlemagne Palestine, in 2013.
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As we embark on a new year more characterized by fear and uncertainty than hope and optimism, a chronic shortage of dissent can be detected in the artistic community amidst a harrowing socio-political climate. Yet the Salford-based collective Gnod have wasted little time in kicking against the doom and disquiet with everything at their disposal.
"It seems like we are heading towards even more unsettling times in the near future than we are in at present." reckons Chris Haslam of Gnod. "2016 is just the beginning of what I see as the establishment’s systematic destruction of liberalism and equality as a reaction to the general public’s loss of faith in their system."
Charged by this outlook, Gnod's new album, Just Say No To The Psycho Right-Wing Capitalist Fascist Industrial Death Machine represents a hitherto uncharted level of antagonism and adversarial force for the band - an artistic statement as righteous, fervent and direct as its title. which far from being an echo of an anarcho spirit of yore, denotes a record firmly entrenched in the psychic terrain of 2017.
"On the surface it could almost seem like there's no political art movement out there to oppose what's happening, but there is - we know there is”'adds the band's Paddy Shine. "Maybe that movement is struggling to find its voice as a cohesive whole right now but that will change. It has to change."
Fueled by their militant drive and unyielding ardour, Just Say No… refracts Gnod's harsh and repetitive riff-driven rancour through a psychotropic haze of dubbed-out abstraction, with Paddy’s incendiary vocal delivery to the fore.
Just Say No… sounds like a record only Gnod could make - a band fiercely independent, never comfortable in one place artistically for any duration of time, always with their co-ordinates set on uncharted territory and the next challenge ahead, and delivering a monument of ire and iconoclasm.
Releases March 31, 2017 on Rocket.
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Ecstatic's stunning split release between Maurizio Bianchi, godfather of the Italian industrial noise scene, and Abul Mogard, the much loved and hyperstitious synthesist, conjures a spellbinding testament to the transcendent and transportive energies of electronic music.
Although appearing to starkly contrast on the surface, both artists' work patently shares a lust for the suggestive abstraction of raw current and its pareidolia-like capacity to generate rich and uncanny emotional responses from the end user.
On the a-side, Maurizio Bianchi serves the obfuscated, coruscating atmosphere of "Nervous Hydra," a 17-minute piece of sunken, desiccated harmonic structures and warped greyscale tones rinsed with ET radio signals and distant percussion that recall the sound of embers landing on tinfoil or snow. It evokes the experience of being caught in a quietly raging whiteout with only a dying fire for company, or equally a sense of subaquatic, amniotic serenity prior to being evacuated into a much colder world.
In that piece’s tempestuous wake, Abul Mogard brings a sense of soothing, glacial calm with "All This Has Passed Forever" on the b-side. For 16 blissed minutes, Mogard spells out a nostalgic fantasy in creamy strokes of Farfisa organ and Serge modular recorded at EMS studios, Stockholm, and later combined with field recordings to elicit a wistfully widescreen paean to his days on the workshop floor accompanied by the harmonious drones and cacophony of heavy machinery.
Out now on Ecstatic.
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Folk unit originated in the Swedish underground Enhet för Fri Musik -- featuring members of Sewer Election, Ättestupa, Neutral, Makthaverskan, and Blod - continually re-inventing what music is about through free improvisation and lengthy folk meanderings.
Embedded in the ever exciting Swedish underground scene Enhet För Fri Musik continues the quest for innovation numerous legendary Swedish bands started during the '70s, Pärson Sound, Trad Gras Och Stenar, Arbete Och Fritid. Taking the ideas of communal music craft and experimentation, on this album the group comes to a unique combination of Jandek-like atonal guitar, organ, tape effects, field recordings, saxophone and Sofie Herner's amazing loner voice running over it. Adding another inspiring document to the world of open-minded music.
Releases March 21, 2017 on Aguirre.
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If there has been a running theme throughout Jon Mueller’s career, it would be his exploration of the intersection between sound and spirituality. He has tackled both largely in abstract interpretations: he is a multi-instrumentalist, and has delved into themes and imagery from a multitude of religions and spiritual practices throughout his career as an artist. dHrAaNwDn (Hand Drawn) is perhaps among the most fully realized examples of his passions, however. A stunning double record set, the audio is culled from six hours of improvised percussion performances recorded live in the Shaker Meeting House of Albany, New York, exemplifying not only Mueller’s adeptness at performing, but his ear for recording and capturing environments as well.
The Shakers are a distinct sect of Christianity that began in the 18th century of England and soon moved into the United States.Their emphasis on religion as a tangible experience (something to be physically experienced), their ascetic, anti-materialistic and celibate lifestyle largely kept them as a small group throughout, and to this day there are only considered to be two active members of the religion.The building in which Mueller recorded was constructed during the Era of Manifestations, a peak point in the Shaker religion in which "spirit gifts", often taking the form of art, were given between members.An intentional design of these Meeting Houses was for them to be large structures that magnified the singing and dancing elements of the Shaker faith.In some ways this building resembles a gymnasium but with a more specific construction, and with its historical structure and design, it made for the perfect venue for Mueller to record in.
The four side-long pieces that comprise dHrAaNwDn are, superficially, very simple.They are recordings of Muller playing four drums live within the space.There were no overdubs made, and very little in the way of processing or effects, in fact the only obvious example is the opening moments of the second part, in which the rhythms are filtered to a hollow, intentionally thin sound.Beyond that, all of the color and timbre of these rhythms is shaped by the recording environment itself.A deep rumble opens the first piece, with a barreling, bassy galloping rhythm.The sound is massive and thunderous, and Mueller’s playing transitions frequently, emphasizing the physicality of his performance.There almost seems to be melodies that emerge, largely psycho-acoustic effects from the resonance and echo of the walls of the Meeting House.
The second part may begin with some gentle ringing bells, but soon it is a leviathan of booming, singular beats that forcefully cut through the mix.Here his playing is especially dynamic, shifting from thinner midrange sounds to complex, nuanced polyrhythms that echo brilliantly within the space.The third segment has a massive, parking garage like reverberation to it, with Mueller accentuating the piece with some extremely hard kick drums that feel like a kick to the chest, and never relenting until the piece devolves into an almost tonal blur of sound.
The final part of the album is at first more tone-heavy, with the drumming initially less sustained and more tribal in nature.The echoes and reverbs again create pseudo-melodies from the drums, and the patterns shift, perhaps the most dynamic and varied of the entire work.Towards the conclusion of first call and response styles between two of the drums, and then it concludes with some improbably hard beats for the closing moments.
Much like his last album Tongues the overall production and sound design of dHrAaNwDn is astounding and much credit has to be given to Fred Weaver, who recorded and engineered this album, and the mixing assistance by Shane Hochstetler. Mueller’s recording session culminated with a public performance later that bright, sunny afternoon that I was thankfully able to attend (a luxurious deluxe edition of this record features that performance on cassette).While any sound reproduction medium would be unable to fully capture the full sound of the Meeting House and physical nature of Mueller’s playing, this album gets pretty damn close.The thought of four album sides of solo drumming may not seem like everyone’s cup of tea (and it may not be), but the conceptual themes and nature of these recordings makes them so much more than it seems on the surface.Muller recently stated that he questions if the music for him may be secondary to the experience playing and hearing gives, but in this case, the album stands extremely strongly on its own, regardless of when or where it is being heard.
Note:To honor the artist's request of keeping this music out of the digital domain, no samples are being provided.However, elements of the album can be heard in this preview video.
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Kevin Tomkins and Paul Taylor’s legendary Sutcliffe Jugend project has alternated between periods of being extremely prolific, followed by utter silence ever since its inception. Their first albums as SJ appeared in 1982, one of which was the legendary 10 tape We Spit On Their Graves, then no new material for 14 years. The pattern has repeated ever since, though admittedly not to the same extremity. S L A V E S, a six CD release, capped off a busy 2016, preceded by three other full length albums. Sprawling is an appropriate term, but it is very well developed, varied, and also makes clear that Tomkins and Taylor have no intent of staying in that narrow box most associate with the project.
SJ are one of those "old guard" power electronics projects that have been always associated with the genre, as well as its clichés.Of those early bands (and I am thinking of Whitehouse, Ramleh, Consumer Electronics, etc.), SJ were always the largest purveyors of the psycho-sexual violence aspect of the scene.Unlike many of their followers, it was always something they did very well, but it was also very much a polarizing facet of their work.
Neither that, nor the project's penchant for brutal walls of harsh noise are prominent on S L A V E S, however.While there are undoubtedly harsh moments to be heard across these six discs, usually in the form of distorted guitar squall or processed electronics, the duo always place them tastefully within the other elements.Sonically it is perhaps most akin to 2012's Blue Rabbit, without the paraphillac violent lyrical content, and a smattering of Tomkins and Taylor’s solo projects, which have been in general more freeform and experimental.Given that most of this set is based on studio improvisations (culled from sessions dating back to 2012, that freeform approach shines through.
S L A V E S is conceived as the soundtrack to a non-existent theatre project, with each disc representing a different movement, and the sounds on the album roughly corresponding with that.For example, the most traditionally SJ sounding material is largely present on the first disc, Theatre of Cruelty.The opening piece "With a Cold Heart" leads off with strings and grandiose gothic drama, it sets the mood for the remainder of the disc, punctuated with processed guitar and piano.The subsequent "Woe Betide" is the only moment where Tomkins’ vocals are obvious, in the form of a disconnected randomized mantra of "Description/Destruction/Instruction/Inscription" as pulsating guitars surround.Much of the background is noise, but in a less than harsh approach to come across more as ugly rather than violent.
Theatre of Tragedy (Disc 5) is also one of the more dissonant discs, with a different mood."Her Blood in My Veins" has Taylor and Tomkins leaning into harsher noise territory with its careful feedback and sustained drone, but never to the extent of their previous works.While "Found in Dark Minds" is mostly gentle guitar and string accents, the two blend in their trademark guitar squall tastefully in the background.The scattershot shards of noise heard on "A Life Yet Lived" mixed with what may be heavily processed voice drifts more into conventionally dark ambient, and the closer "Crushed Until Breathless" has a surprising warmth despite its title and pervading bleakness.
The other discs follow similar patterns, but the mood seems less consistent throughout.For example, the broken musical structure and synth heavy sound of "Evolving Sores" on Theatre of the Absurd is not that far removed from vintage Dome, while "Pipe Machine Crooner" on the same album is rumbling and rhythmic static, with added shards of noise, resulting in a skeletal, almost clinically clean approach to power electronics.Then on Theatre of Innocence, "The Golden Age of Innocence (Part 4)" is all heavy thuds and wet, harsh electronics, while the previous part is gentle bowed strings and a lush, almost nautical buoyancy.
At nearly six hours of material, Sutcliffe Jugend's S L A V E S is a lot to take in, even considering it is not as riddled with the harshness and violence (sonically or lyrically) of much of their other work.However, its diversity, and focus on improvisation is its greatest strengths.I found this unpredictable variation a major asset, and what places it amongst their strongest works in their 35 year career.While I do think trying to take it all in on one marathon listening session would be a bit masochistic, approaching it as conceptually intended (as a lengthy work with distinct segments) made it a unique and fascinating suite of sounds.
samples:
 
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Jacob Long’s newest recordings under the Earthen Sea moniker deepen his compelling synthesis of shadowy rhythms and opaque atmospherics, drawing on the most potent qualities of melancholic ambient and dub techno. An Act Of Love follows 2015’s Ink, released via Ital’s Lovers Rock imprint, and was inspired by internal tribulations and the experience of exploring an empty nocturnal metropolis. Careful waves of tones drift and decay; beats materialize and pulse across twilit landscapes; a noir mood reigns.
Given Long’s background as bassist for revelatory tribal-punk trio Mi Ami, An Act Of Love showcases a musician in the midst of transcendent redefinition, crafting an immersive language of texture and motion.
From Jacob Long:
"This record was made over the course of the most emotionally difficult and stressful year in my life thus far. As such, it is both a reflection of that experience and also something that gave me space to begin working through issues to see a way forward, to a better place both psychically and physically.
An idea that was also central to my thoughts while creating the album was the concept and reality of being out in the city at night, wandering around a large urban area after dark – the contrast of empty streets but with life still going on all around, and the openness and possibilities that can bring. This music I was making was an attempt to capture that feeling."
Out now on Kranky.
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High Plains is the duo of Scott Morgan and Mark Bridges. Morgan, based in the Canadian Pacific Northwest, is predominantly known for his drifting, textured soundscapes released under the pseudonym loscil. Bridges is an accomplished, classically trained cellist residing in Madison, Wisconsin. The two met in Banff, Alberta while they were simultaneously there on residencies at the Banff Centre for the Arts in 2014.
They first collaborated when Bridges contributed cello parts to Morgan’s generative music app ADRIFT, recorded in Seattle in 2015.
In early 2016, the duo embarked on a collaborative set of compositions in the oxygen-thin air of Wyoming, spending two weeks holed up in a refurbished school house in the town of Saratoga, where this album was recorded. Inspired by Schubert’s "Die Winterreise" and the rolling landscapes of their surroundings, the collaboration culminated in a collection of recordings that evoke a shadowy, introspective and dizzying winter journey. Cinderland takes cues from classical, electronic and cinematic musical traditions but is mostly a product of the rugged, mythic landscape; vast and sprawling with a wild, uncertain edge.
The recording was made with a portable studio and all sounds were sourced on site, most notably from Bridges' cello, the resident Steinway D piano, and field recordings collected from the local soundscape.
The results are a site-specific, wide scope view of the high valley terrain the duo worked in, a mix of analog and digital, neoclassical and modern electronic sounds, a complemental series of tracks to become absorbed in, a truly deep listening experience.
Our March 10th, 2017 on Kranky.
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