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Majutsu No Niwa is not a band that strives to be understated. The last release that I heard was the two part Volume V, capturing the classic rock excess in both presentation and sound, but in the most tasteful of ways. Their newest album is not only a disc of new material, but accompanied by a full length DVD collection of performances captured in 2014. Both capture the band’s peerless approach to space and psychedelic rock, with more than a bit of abstract improvisation to keep things unexpected.
On the audio portion, the quintet embrace that big, bombastic rock sound, tinged with just the right amount of psychedelia, that characterized the strongest moments of their previous albums.A song such as the opening "Tokyo Zero Fighter" pairs the extremely taut rhythm section of Louis Inage and Shigeki Morohashi with the looser, occasionally unhinged guitars of Taiga Yamazaki, Wataru Kawai, and vocalist Rinji Fukuoka.The contrast of the tight rhythms with the noisy, raw guitar soloing is a brilliant one.
"Memories of Fire" also focuses on the rhythms, and even featuring the band work in a tiny bit of near country twang.The band takes their time during the song's almost 10 minute duration, with the guitar soloing slowly becoming looser and more disjointed as it moves along.Both "Monju" and "Melting Maitreya" has them at their most pop oriented.Less vintage sounding guitar solos and more emphasis on the drums and bass ends up defining two extremely catchy and memorable songs.Perhaps most telling moment is the cover of the Stooges' "Search and Destroy."It does not go in any unexpected odd directions and remains a faithful, appropriately overdriven and dense performance, and showcases one of their most obvious influences.
While some of their previous material has deviated from the big guitar sound into more folk tinged territories, the two biggest deviations on The Night Before are instead more dissonant, experimental, and brilliant.The first moment is the short, guitar drone heavy "Tropics, Ionized Jungle, Peeping Auroras".At roughly the midpoint of the album, it is a brief, but foreshadowing interlude of psychedelic guitar noise in drumless, vocalless space.
The album's closing title song is the most out there moment though.At almost 21 minutes, the band embraces their penchant for free improvisation.Structured guitar and bass is mixed with shards of guitar noise, slowly being built up into a complex array of sound.Hushed vocals and pounding drums are slowly blended in.I expected the piece to eventually come together into a tighter, conventional rock arrangement but it never does.Instead Majutsu No Niwa choose to keep things loose and dissonant to its conclusion.
The DVD is 67 minutes, culled from three performances and a total of seven songs.Drawing from all different eras of their discography, the visual and audio quality is impressive.As a whole package, The Night Before is exceptionally well executed.The audio material is consistently strong with their previous work, and I especially was happy to hear that the sound they embraced was the one I have always enjoyed from them, being loud, boisterous rock.Both the album and the accompanying DVD are energetic performances that capture the Majutsu No Niwa sound and style brilliantly.
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Although she composes scores meant for others to perform, there are times when Ryoko Akama seems intent on preventing performances of her work. Like when she asks, on Kotoba Koukan’s "con.de.structuring," for two or more collaborators to play three "soundless" sounds at fixed intervals without the help of a clock or a stopwatch, or when she inserts an observation about silent letters into "e.a.c.d." that suggests silence will be as essential to its realization as positive sound. Even with a talented interpreter like Greg Stuart around to meet such challenges, questions are bound to arise in the audience, who might wonder how a sound could ever be soundless or how a piece of music apparently devoted to silence could end up being so concrete and loud. Attentive listening may resolve some of these quandaries, but is as likely to generate new ones. Ambiguity and irresolution appear to be at the heart of the matter, at least in part, and besides, focusing on the conundrums in Akama’s work overlooks its power and impact. Ryoko and Greg’s music works on the body and mind in equal proportion, tempting interpretations and provoking reactions with confrontational sounds and understated twists.
Matthew Revert’s artwork for Kotoba Koukan conveys almost perfectly the quality of the music inside. The simplicity of the design, the complexity of the patterns created by the concentric circles, and the evocation of sound’s physical properties all point to the album’s most potent and immediate attributes. Before the compositional strangeness of "e.a.c.d." can even be guessed, the hefty crunch of its textured electronics and cavernous tones is felt, which together produce the strong impression that Greg and Ryoko have captured the activities of physical objects operating independently in the world. The sound of the piano, the call of birds, and the persistent and rough friction of various surface noises all spotlight the material conditions necessary for that song’s existence, and so emphasize the presence of things, not just their reproduction.
The catch is that the score, which is not included in the liner notes, deals with far less defined entities. It contains such ambiguities as "long" and "like that" and "like a chimney," all arranged along a line that begins at a point marked 0’00" and that ends at 20’00". Situated in an area roughly halfway across that line is the phrase "silent letter is a letter that is not pronounced, yet without it the word makes no sense," with each instance of the titular letters emphasized, suggesting that there is an analogous entity at work in the music, present but silent or otherwise camouflaged.
Repeat listens present multiple candidates: a continuous fundamental tone that may or may not rise as the piece proceeds, the constant hum of electronic instruments, or maybe the various found sounds scattered throughout the piece, like little reminders of the objects behind the noises. The score itself could also be the music's silent ingredient, there but invisible behind Akama and Stuart’s performance choices. Whatever the answer might be in this particular interpretation, it could be different in a hundred others. The idea is not to crack the performance’s code, but to recognize how all the different parts relate, and perhaps to see or feel each sound as one element in a more complex and ultimately indefinable system.
With "con.de.structuring," Ryoko and Greg play with the enigmatic flow of time and call into question its atomistic measurement. The score quotes English writer, painter, and poet John Berger on the subject of visual art and time, and asks for all involved performers to select three "soundless" sounds to be played at precise intervals without the assistance of a timepiece. Invisible or immeasurable elements once again determine some aspect of the music’s performance, and again the musicians focus on sounds that outline spaces or suggest the presence of objects: radio fuzz, sonar pings, geological drones. It is as if, in the absence of ordinary time, Akama and Stuart intuitively sought out other means of measuring the extent of their environment. Instead of the usual relationship, sound becomes the standard for evaluating space and time.
Kotoba Koukan concludes with "border ballad" and "fade in and out procedure." The former sounds like an improvisation on the phenomena of friction and erosion utilizing wood, tape, glass beads, racquetballs, compressed air, sand, and slate. The latter is a matchlock explosion of colors and patterns achieved by the slow introduction and removal of five (presumably) electronic sounds chosen by Greg Stuart, for whom the piece was written. The simple mechanics of addition and subtraction are all he requires to cultivate the album’s most resounding, spacious, and finessed piece. The twittering of different high end signals, the pulse of the song’s throbbing low-end, and the ebb and flow of both form an impressive wall of sound capable of rattling the windows and shaking the floor. Buried beneath that impressive wave of turbulence are small artifacts that imply a physical process is working behind the scenes, like the bowing of a drum head or the vibration of a piece of metal. Whether their origins can be accurately deduced, and whether the meaning behind Akama’s instructions can be accurately interpreted, is ultimately unimportant. Alien or familiar, rational or ineffable, the sounds connect and leave an impression on environment and audience alike.
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Lycia's reappearance after an eight year hiatus with 2013's Quiet Moments was a surprise for me, having heard very little about the legendary Projekt band for quite some time. That album was more than a mere blip, however, as it has been followed up with A Line That Connects, and the return of former band member David Galas. The result is a record that has a richer, more fully fleshed out sound than its predecessor.
Quiet Moments featured Lycia as the core duo of Mike VanPortfleet and Tara Vanflower, with the latter only appearing on two of the 11 songs on the album.Because of that I felt the album had a more sparse, almost solo album quality to it, which is one of the ways this one is set apart from that work.A good parallel is how Swans' My Father was a great record, but The Seer felt like more of a complete, realized work.
The 14 songs of A Line That Connects almost seemed to be grouped into three distinct moods or themes that all connect beautifully to one another.The first third are the slower, more pensive and sad pieces.Right from the immediate opening of "The Fall Back" there is a slow, funeral pacing that slowly propels ghostly vocals and beautifully processed guitar and synthesizer melodies."Monday is Here" has an even more powerful sound with a Peter Hook-esque melodic bassline and Vanflower's vocals taking the focus in the chorus.The intimate mood and pacing work, but thankfully the trio decide to keep things fresh.
The mood shift happens distinctly about two thirds of the way through "An Awakening," from a somber to a heavier one.The first few minutes sounds like a recorded thunderstorm meshed with passages of guitar and synthesizer, eventually accented with drums and female vocals.The final minute, however, is dramatic and near-metal sounding heavy guitar riffs, bringing in a completely unexpected but welcome bit of intensity and force.
The following segment of the record has a more brisk pace but not necessarily a lighter mood."The Rain" is a stomping piece of near synth pop, with a fast tempo but dark and dramatic vocals, really emphasizing the gothic elements of the Lycia sound.Big, heavy guitars dominate "Bright Like Stars" and mixed with the brilliant distorted bassline and shifting male/female vocals, it is a memorable and dynamic piece.
The concluding songs of the album return to the dirgy pace of the beginning, but from a more experimental and diverse sound than the melody focused approach that opened the record.On "A Ghost Ascends" the trio lurches with a distinct darkness, using a chugging riff as their propellant, shifting between atmospheric and heavy ambience.Ides of Gemini vocalist Sera Timms makes an appearance on "Hiraeth", a piece that has the same chiming, slow melodic sound of the beginning of the record, but a more atmospheric, spacious sensibility to it.
At 14 songs and nearly 70 minutes, A Line That Connects is a heavy record.The shifting dynamics keep the album from getting into any ruts, but the bleakness and overall moody atmosphere at times can be a bit overwhelming.While Quiet Moments was a great record, this one has a more complete feel that harkens back to the band’s rich heritage, as well as the whole nexus of gothic-inspired subgenres that reigned strongly in the 1990s but too quickly disappeared.It is a distinctly contemporary album, but one that beautifully brings a healthy bit of nostalgia to make a beautiful, haunting record.
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Celer, "How Could You Believe Me When I Said I Loved You When You Know I've Been A Liar All My Life"
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Will Thomas Long has made some changes to the Celer sound in recent releases, such as the subtle rhythmic structure of Voyeur, or the unending meditative repetition of Jima. How Could…, in that context, feels like a call back to the traditional sound he pioneered, laden with light wisps of sound, and pieces that evolve slowly but beautifully, never forcefully commanding attention yet never drifting off into the background.
White Paddy Mountain/Two Acorns
Loops play a significant role on this album as well, but in less of a static context and more as a foundation that the pieces are built upon.The source material is rather basic:electric piano and flute, but what appears on How Could… is the result of decay.The instrumental loops were extracted from cassette tapes that had been exposed to the sun and warped vinyl test pressings, resulting in a sound that is as hot and arid as the Western US desert landscapes that inspired the album.
"Bleeds and Swell Blends" resembles the ghosts of digital chimes, drifting light and weightless through space.There is a delicate and gentle sensibility to the piece that is quite peaceful, yet has a haunting quality to it."These Dreams, How Portentously Gloomy" is a more than apt title for the following composition.Digital piano tones shine through a glistening passage of sound that would make perfect film score music, floating slowly and eventually taking on a more somber, introspective mood in its second half.
The source of "Natural Deflections" is less clear, because the sound resembles that of bowed strings, but what Long actually began with is not at all explicit.It has an even more buoyant quality to it, sparse but consisting of a strong collection of beautiful tonal drifts.The closing piece "Acrimonious, Like Fiddles" at first is built upon slightly more dissonant sounds, ones that sound clearly like they began as flute recordings.The loops are shorter so the pacing a bit more dynamic, but the mood is sadder compared to the other pieces.Towards its conclusion, the more dissonant elements are reeled in to emphasize the purer, clean tones.
How Could… is released on the three major formats, and not only was the mastering done to best present the sound on tape, CD and record, the cassette version features alternate versions of "Bleeds and Swell Blends" and "Acrimonious, Like Fiddles".The differences are subtle, but perceptible.The former seems to have a wider stereo spread, with a greater separation of channels."Acrimonious" has a thinner sonic spectrum to it, befitting the sound of a sun-damaged tape that sourced the piece.
Like much of Celer's work, How Could… has a distinctly sparse and introspective sound to it.Changes are slow, and are largely the result of loops that are tweaked and processed over time.The source of the base recordings here adds an extra bit of complexity, because that expansive, sun bleached sound shines through from those damaged tapes and records.
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On his first full length album since 2013's An Occasion For Death, Andy Grant (The Vomit Arsonist) has crafted a record that clearly shows his influences, but bears his own distinct mark and sound. An extremely aggressive album, it is also an exercise in restraint, resulting in a set of songs that lurch more than assault, but is jam packed with evil and violence that festers dangerously close to the surface.
Much of Only Red was inspired by Grant's tour last year with genre innovators Brighter Death Now, who have made an entire career of presenting extremely sinister and violent noise in a barely restrained, structured capacity.That is the influence that he most clearly employs on this album.The feeling of something horrible happening just below the superficial, held back only through weakening repression and fighting to get out.
Opener "Choice" exemplifies this approach.With an ambience that sounds like reverberations within the concrete and steel of a parking garage, he builds the sound up from a loop, adding tension and dissonance with each passage.Finally, pummeling and crunchy rhythms appear, mixed with heavily processed vocals that are extremely aggressive, yet mixed extremely low."Only Red" comes from a similar scraping, grinding space, with the slow jackhammer beats and screamed voices conveying an undeniable sense of frustration and an urgent need to be heard.
On "It Just Is," Grant employs similar techniques, but at first in a more open, spacious context.The percussive blasts and screamed vocals appear later on, and contrast the less oppressive opening extremely well."I'm Not Fine" slows the rhythms down and buries them in distortion to give the whole piece a distinct fuzzy crunch, occasionally stopping to allow what sounds like a carefully controlled passage of feedback to move to the forefront.
While the mood may not vary greatly from song to song, the structures and compositional methods do."Nothing Matters," a reworking of Hank Williams' "It Just Don't Matter Now," is a sustained roar, heavier on the chugging noise and explosive bursts of sound.With the vocals added, it is an undeniably menacing, vicious piece of music."Unwelcome Peace" has Grant instead opting for a more uncomfortable mood, allowing bits of what sounds like cello to loom amongst strange, menacing noises.
One of the strongest features of Only Red is just how well Grant is at employing the expected sounds of noise and power electronics into a different structure, one with a greater depth and complexity rather than just being pure dissonance.That, coupled with the palpable sense of frustration and anger (but not in the stereotypically destructive framework) that he generates, gives an added depth to an extremely strong record.
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I tend to enjoy just about everything Luke Younger releases, but he has always been a bit of a tough guy to pin down stylistically, as he has recently seemed equally at home with abstract sound art, heavy noise, and his own unique strain of corroded, post-industrial exotica.  With Olympic Mess, he remains as compelling and eclectic as ever, but seems to have gotten significantly better at crafting a listenable and varied album that flows rather than overwhelms.  Also, he has a few welcome new tricks up his sleeve.  A few longtime fans might be disappointed that Mess leans more heavily upon shades of techno, drone, and ambient than dense, multilayered brutality, but I find Younger's quieter, more nuanced side to be quite an appealing one.
According to Younger, Olympic Mess was partially inspired by an interest in the hypnotic qualities of "loop-based industrial music, dub techno, and Balearic disco."  A former noise artist being seduced by beats is certainly not anything new, but that influence manifests itself in rather unusual and well-concealed ways throughout the album.  The "industrial" influence is not particularly hard to spot, however, as the warped and clattering introduction of "Don’t Lick The Jacket" quickly gives way to 8-minutes of heavy locked-groove throb and "abandoned factory" atmosphere ("I Exist In A Fog").  That strain is surprisingly short-lived, however: despite being one of the album's clear centerpieces, the dark and heavy "Fog" is actually a bit of an aberration.
Another minor surprise is that Olympic Mess is almost entirely beat-less, as Luke largely dispensed with dub techno’s thump and just mostly kept the shifting synthesizer pulse, giving many of these pieces a subtly disorienting, warped, and time-stretched feel.  Also, Helm still sounds like Helm, so an otherwise normal foray into dub techno like "Fluid Cloak" easily avoids feeling derivative by sounding like it is being played in a club filled with giant otherworldly crickets.  In fact, finding innovative ways to mangle techno into unrecognizability seems to be the primary theme of the album, as Younger returns to the form several more times with fresh variations.  "Sky Wax," for example, sounds slowed and drugged into hallucinatory abstraction, while the warm, skipping pulse of "The Evening In Reverse" falls apart midway, sounding simultaneously desolate and like it is being slowly chewed by something.  "Sky Wax" also boasts a straightforward groove of sorts, yet it sounds weirdly distant and hollow and is beset with strangled feedback.  Nothing is ever straight-forward with Helm.
The most compelling pieces, of course, are the ones that sound like nothing else on the album.  The most memorable is by far the alternately surreal and amusing "Strawberry Chapstick."  With no accompaniment other than a distant throb, a hushed voice shares what initially sounds like a voyeuristic window into an unsettling confession, but the speaker never actually divulges anything more frightening than a passion for bluegrass music.  The title piece also caught me off-guard, as it is both consistently melodic and rhythmic, content just to unspool a pleasingly burbling, lurching, and off-kilter theme for its entire duration.  Yet another stand-out is the album’s epic, the 12-minute "Outerzone 2015," resembling a warm drone piece that has been pushed into the background to make way for a curious fantasia of field recordings (dripping water, echoing and flanging metallic clattering, etc.).  Eventually a thumping four-on-the floor house beat emerges, but it sounds too distant and too subterranean to resemble anything normally found near a dancefloor.  Much later, it all gives way to an uncharacteristically lush oasis of dreamy drone before transforming yet again into a beautiful coda of woozy shimmer, bow scrapes, and backwards strums.
It is always difficult to ascribe any sort of evolution to Helm, as Luke’s discography has largely been a series of lateral moves rather than a linear path towards a clear vision, but Olympic Mess nevertheless boasts some significant fundamental changes to Helm’s aesthetic.  Aside from being much more melodic and playful than usual, Mess is dramatically less dense and "busy" than past Helm releases.  As far as I am concerned, those are neither welcome nor unwelcome changes (Younger actually excels at vibrant, multilayered density), but they certainly make his music more accessible and open up a lot of fertile new ground for future albums (you can only do so much with noise and texture alone).  Also, Luke has gotten much better at finishing his songs before they overstay their welcome.  If this album has a flaw, it is merely that the individual songs do not quite scale the frightening or innovative heights of Helm’s previous triumphs.  As an album, however, Olympic Mess is both extremely satisfying and marekedly different from everything that came before it, which easily secures it a place among Helm’s most essential releases.
 
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Francisco López came onto my radar beginning during his most prolific period, largely the mid-1990s to the present day. Even though his career began earlier, his 1980s period is often forgotten due to these earliest works published in extremely small numbers that have faded into obscurity. This new compilation, however, presents previously unreleased material from his earliest cassette recordings. Within the context of his expansive body of work, what is most striking is how established his aesthetic and style was, even at such a young age.
López’s approach to composition was already heavily ingrained in his work from the beginning and was largely born out of necessity.This becomes apparent within the first listen. Unable to afford conventional instruments at this time, his first works were the result of experimenting with cheap cassette recorders and players, which is the method that these untitled pieces were created with.Within these he creates complex studies of sound, working with a sparse palette of source material but utilizing and exploring them with an unparalleled depth and intensity.
The actual techniques remain ambiguous, but parts sound as if they were based upon amplifying and looping the imperfections of analog media.The first features heavy sub bass wavering, like a slightly off center tape reel, and a hum that may be fragments of a tape motor running, with the volume maximized and then reduced.Francisco continues on to incorporate what could be some white noise or static interference to produce a more expansive sound with significant amounts of variation and shifting dynamics.
López works with more textural elements on the third composition, largely the errant click or bit of grinding noise that is isolated and utilized as a recurring element rather than the passing glitch of a damaged bit of tape.This use of subtle textures and open spaces is not at all too dissimilar to his modern day work, just somewhat less pristine in presentation due to the analog, rather than digital source of sounds and his tools of manipulation.Knowing the low fidelity methods used to create these compositions is one of this album's strongest assets.
The final two, lengthy pieces are perhaps most in line with his modern work that examines sounds that barely rise above absolute silence, and neither would have been out of place on his Presque Tout (Quiet Pieces 1993-2013) collection from 2014.The fifth piece drifts from a hum resonating down a long hallway into a rumbling, subterranean churn.At times it resembles what I imagine the deepest part of the ocean would sound like, eventually shifting to such low frequencies to be almost imperceptible by human hearing.This blends in nicely to the final piece, which is also built around nearly invisible low-end noises.Here it is almost a rhythmic pulsing that becomes lower and lower in pitch until ending with practically nothingness.
Even with his means of composition limited to such rudimentary tools over 30 years ago, Francisco López began his career in sound out rather fully formed and realized.These early works may be structurally more basic than what he has become most known for, but for such a young artist with basic tools, he managed to begin the sound that he has refined with each subsequent release.Considering how much of a pioneer he has been in this genre, it is fascinating that even his most tentative works remain strong nearly three and a half decades after their creation.López's work has always resonated with me because it requires such focused and dedicated attention, keeping me engaged in everything I have heard from him.Knowing the conditions under which this material was recorded gave me an additional layer of appreciation, and also a greater curiosity as to how he created it.For that reason alone 1980-82 stands out amidst the best of his most recent work.
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First ever VHF release by the 21-years-running Ashtray Navigations, bringing one more core piece of the UK freakout underground back to the mothership. With a discography that boggles even the most ardent Discogs user and an on-point WTF graphic sensibility, Ash Nav fits perfectly into the extremely fertile and prolific scene that has produced titans like Vibracathedral Orchestra and Sunroof!. On this generous 100 minute package, Phil Todd and Melanie O'Dubshlaine essay a kind of guitar and electronics exotica, with burbling rhythms, Heldon-like laser guitar leads, field recordings, synth racket, etc – the totally fun take on Les Baxter’s all-time classic "Quiet Village" (here wittily retitled “Quite Village”) is a good example of the explorer spirit at work here. Considering the amount of unhinged psychedelic fuzzwah lead damage laid out across this thing, it’s arguably the most effusive guitar heroics record of the genre, hopefully inspiring a new generation of young rockers out there to get on the bus.
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Return of the mighty "classic" lineup of the VCO with their first new music in many years. Here the quintet of Michael Flower, Neil Campbell, Bridget Hayden, Adam Davenport, and Julian Bradley (joined by raconteur John Godbert) feature in a set of upbeat tracks that put the group's radical instrumental strategies into a package of full-on rock action.
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ARTIST ERIK GRISWOLD
TITLE PAIN AVOIDANCE MACHINE
LABEL ROOM40
CAT # RM468
FORMAT CD/DIGITAL
RELEASE 14 AUG 2015
SOUNDCLOUD
VIDEO
STORE LINK
Erik Griswold - Pale Yellow Frontier from ROOM40 on Vimeo.
“In late 2014, feeling stifled by the negativity of the Australian political discourse, the narcissistic excess of social media, and facing a long summer of migraine-inducing heat, I turned to the prepared piano as a refuge.
I was coming out of an intense two-year period of composing for every conceivable instrumental combination, and not sure where to go next. I felt the need to get back to basics, and create something essential, elemental. These pieces are meditations, each with its own mood, but constructed in a similar way. The piano is the pain avoidance machine.” - Erik Griswold
Erik Griswold, the American born, Australian based composer is a master of the pre- pared piano. Over the past two decades he has forged a deeply personal approach to transforming the piano from a tonal hammered instrument into a device that transgresses acoustic music traditions. Uniting robotic rhythms of almost electronic timbre, uncharacteristic evocative melody and metallic murmurs, he transforms the piano with a restless and rigorous curiosity.
Pain Avoidance Machine, his first solo for Room40 in half a decade is an intimate set of miniatures. You are invited inside the piano, exposed to the instruments raw materiality. Griswold offers an invitation to explore the prepared piano’s sound world in detail that reveals an entirely new dimension. Mechanistic motifs and rhythms are layered one atop another to create fragile musical collages.
Like a broken pianola, the subtle nuances of the prepared piano have an off-kilter quality, full of unexpected resonances, buzzes, and percussive strikes.
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