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Prior to hearing Golden Retriever, the idea of a bass clarinet/modular synthesizer duo would have seemed uniquely terrible to me.  That initial prejudice was not entirely wrong, as Jonathan Sielaff and Matt Carlson can be a rather tough ride during their wilder improvisations, but this 2010 release is pretty spectacular and faultless.  As improbable as such a thing may seem, Golden Retriever have found the magic place where Tangerine Dream, impressionist classical, and free jazz influences can all seamlessly coexist and cohere into something wonderful and new.
Jonathan Sielaff and Matt Carlson crossed paths many times before the formation of Golden Retriever, as they are both very active in Portland, Oregon's thriving improv scene and have played together in a number of different incarnations, the most notable of which is probably Parenthetical Girls.  At some point, they realized that their solo projects were both heading in much the same direction and decided to join forces.  That shared background is enormously important, as both musicians prove themselves to be skilled improvisors and interact with each other quite comfortably and inventively, creating incredibly dense and shifting dronescapes without ever encroaching on each other's space.
Equally noteworthy, of course, is the unique instrumentation. Synthesizers, in general, aren't especially rare, but modular synths are fairly unusual in contexts this melodic.  Aside from providing Matt Carlson with a very "vintage space music" sound (with some able assistance from an Echoplex), his heavily customized set-up also enables him to vibrantly tweak and warp sounds and wave shapes as much as his heart desires. As for Sielaff, I can't think of anyone else that plays a contact-mic'd bass clarinet through an arsenal of pedals.  It's a bizarrely attention-grabbing and complimentary combination of textures.
The bulk of this five-song release is very drone-centric, but it is a much more fluid and melodic strain of drone than most: once Matt and Jonathan have a sufficiently dense bed of loops beneath them, they are both free (and eager) to color and shape the piece's progression with their improvisations.  Sielaff and his clarinet generally take the melodic foreground and he turns out to be a pretty amazing soloist, languidly unfolding surprisingly dark and poignant melodies over Carlson's thick buzzing and burbling.  I don't think this could work at all if anyone in Golden Retriever was less than an amazing musician, as such a template could be extremely limiting and tiresome in less capable hands.  However, Matt and Jonathan both seem to have incredible intuitive understandings of dynamics, harmonies, tension, and pacing: pieces intelligently ebb and flow, queasy dissonances form and dissipate, darkly throbbing arpeggios create a feeling of motion and urgency...these guys don't miss a single trick.  The worst thing that I can possibly say about this is that 42 minutes is a bit overwhelming.  While a few songs stand out as a bit better than the rest ("False Entry" and "Canonic Horizon"), this is basically a singular and virtuosic tour de force from the first note to the last.
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Probably known best for Justin Broadrick's short stint as the band’s drummer, Head of David's brief career produced two of the best noise rock albums ever (LP and Dustbowl), two great EPs (Saveana Mixes and White Elephant) and one mediocre at best industrial pop/rock disc (Seed State). They were at their best here, churning out bleak, murky sounds that emphasize riffs, atmosphere, as well as a touch of pure noise.
I've heard term "industrial" applied to Head of David more than once, and I find it hard to fully embrace.While they certainly had the desolate, post-apocalyptic sensibilities that Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire pioneered, they sonically owed a lot more to Black Sabbath and early Swans, with a twinge of Big Black thrown in for good measure.That, motorcycles, black leather, and a few too many viewings of Easy Rider and Apocalypse Now is really what LP (or CD, depending on the format) is all about.
Other than bassist Dave Cochrane, the members of Head of David were never active outside of this project.Drummer Paul Sharp (Broadrick only played on Dustbowl and Saveana Mixes) and guitarist Eric Jurenovskis have seemingly no credits outside of the band, and vocalist Stephen R. Burroughs only recently appeared on one of the Sunn O))) tribute singles.
In actuality, LP is a bit odd for a traditional "album":The first four tracks are the "Dogbreath" EP, and the final four were culled from a 1986 BBC session.However, the result is a wonderfully consistent album, but admittedly the BBC produced tracks on the second half sound notably cleaner than the muffled, muddy first half.
I've always felt some kinship between Head of David and Loop, though other than the Justin Broadrick/Robert Hampson connection via Godflesh, I don't think the two projects ever collaborated. Where Loop was more tuned to the psychedelic, spacy elements of the era, Head of David was all about the darker end of the 1960s and early '70s, pretty much defined by the murder at the Rolling Stones concert at Altamont.
This parallel between the two is definitely enhanced by the fact that 1: I first started listening to both artists at around the same period in my life (because of my love for Godflesh and Main) and 2: Both covered Suicide’s "Rocket USA" on their debuts in their own unique way.While Loop's version emphasized the psychedelia:Martin Rev's organ was replaced with Hampson's effects-laden guitar, Head of David focused on the tension and bleakness.With a rhythmic backing of numbing repetition, Burroughs' vocals do an admirable job capturing the alternating calm and frantic outbursts of Alan Vega.
The early Swans influence is most clearly heard on the slower, meandering tracks like "White Bastard" or "Joyride Burning X," both of which plod along at a sluggish pace, but enshrouded by white-hot guitar noise. On the opposite side of the spectrum are pummeling, rapid fire tracks like "Smears" and "I'll Fall At Your Feet," the former especially marrying squalling, high pitched guitars with a deep, distorted bass line and machine gun like drumming.
One of my personal favorites on the album, and in their entire discography, has always been "Shadow Hills California," which is actually catchy, rather than simply brutal and heavy.With its moderate pace and verse/chorus/verse structure, it’s one of their most memorable songs (along with "Dog Day Sunrise" and "Jack Nicholson"), even with the lyrics that are the perfect antithesis of every 1960s feel good summer pop song.
A couple of years ago the original Head of David lineup reformed to play a few shows in Europe, and word was that new material could have been in the pipeline, as well as remastered reissues of their previous work.As of now, this still hasn’t come to pass, but I'm holding out hope that one day remastered, expanded deluxe editions of at least LP and Dustbowl will appear, but until then I'll keep with the discs I have.As far as I'm concerned, it's one of those albums that has contributed to so many genres it's hard to count.Sludge, doom, metal, stoner rock, and the infinite number of permutations of them owe a huge debt to Head of David.
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Mamiffer, the duo of Faith Coloccia and Aaron Turner, have recorded with a slew of artists who work in similarly contrasting fields of noise and music, but this is the first true work with Pacific Northwest neighbor and the world’s loudest school librarian, Daniel Menche. A previous release, "Live" Through Menche featured him reworking Coloccia and Turner's recorded work as a performance, but Crater is the first time they have truly worked together on record. A mix of live instrumentation, processed field recordings, and who knows what (other than the artists), the resulting record is anything but boisterous, explosive noise and instead a careful meditation on both nature and music.
The album's bookending pieces, "Calyx" and "Maar," make for the two most conventionally musical songs on the album.Both feature Turner's guitar and Coloccia's piano playing complimentary melodies, as processing (by I assume the hand of Menche) pushes both into distorted, at times abrasive territory, and then back again.Even though the resulting sound is by no means traditionally beautiful, that hint of chaos is a splendid additional facet to the songs.
The lengthier pieces that make up the core of the record feature significantly less in the way of traditional instrumentation.The dynamic, textural opening to "Husk" is culled from the field recordings with little to no treatment, but retain enough ambiguity to render them largely unidentifiable.Expanding tones of fragmented guitar are layered about, with shifting pitches keeping everything varied.While the piece never becomes overly sinister, there is a distinct heavy tension running through its 14 minute duration.
On "Exuviae," the trio uses a more obvious field recording (that of rushing water) with distant drumming and shimmering, droning expanses of sound.Hints of distortion color what sounds like bowed strings, but the sound stays beautiful, if a bit dark.A nuanced analog sound is heavily featured on "Alluvial", with subtle cracking blended with ghostly tones and chiming church bell-like layers.The piece evolves in to a massive leviathan of shimmering noise and orchestral drama that is as imposing as it is beautiful.
Compared to the rest of the album, "Breccia" shows less evolution and development, but it is in the subtle changes that it is very strong.An opening of what sounds like scraping wood makes for a murky beginning, soon met with a processed wall of guitar noise.Filtered and kept at bay at a reasonable volume level, it is less of an outburst than it is a forceful counterpoint to the ambience.While what sounds like a wall of dissonance is established via guitar and electronics from Turner and Menche, Coloccia adds in an ever so quiet layer of twinkling piano that beautifully ties the entire piece together.
For a record that was created by, as Menche puts it, friends just hanging out, recording and then eating pizza, Crater has a massive number of layers, both sonically and in mood as well, that belie its humble origin.Moods shift from gawking at beautiful soundscapes to disquieting, imposing monsters of heaviness lurking in the shadows.But never does Crater drag, and there is not a dull moment to be had as these three amazing artists perform together brilliantly.
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These two recent collaborations featuring Taylor Deupree capture two distinct extremes in his approach to creating music. Perpetual, his collaboration with legendary pianist Ryuichi Sakamoto and the duo of Illuha is a four-piece ensemble using piano, guitar, modular synthesizer, and other conventional instruments to create a delicate, complex and almost living composition. Twine, an in-studio performance with Marcus Fischer is a much simpler affair, with the two manipulating tape loops in real time, recorded live with just room microphones capturing the performance. One may be a larger production and the other an intimate performance, but both are superb documents of Deupree's (and the other performers') sense of small scale, but infinitely detailed and varied music.
Perpetual is presented as a three movement composition that progresses adeptly from soft melodies and tones into a wider reaching feel of dissonance, then back to spacious, open, and beautiful music.The first movement has the quartet generating delicate, warm layers from their stringed and synthetic instruments.Fragments of voice, and a bit of electronic buzzing offset the carefully interplaying frequencies, resulting in a lush, tone-heavy arrangement of sound.
The second part still features Sakamoto's distinctive piano, but his playing focuses on the lowest notes and the recording perfectly capturing the metallic, vibrating dissonance of the strings.This hint of chaos sets the stage for the remainder of the piece.Odd noises and unexpectedly bleak music box sounds appear, withe the artists blending organic and electronic sources extremely well.Deupree's modular synthesizer performance introduces just the right amount of chirps and noisy scrapes to give the piece an appropriately hollow, slightly bleak feel.The final movement is a natural progression from the previous, where the artists begin with clattering sounds, but they bring the sound back to the opening via pure guitar and piano sounds, creating a spacious, yet delicate sound.
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The comparatively stripped down arrangements Deupree and Marcus Fischer create on Twine result in compositions that are not quite as varied or diverse, but unsurprisingly they pull refined beauty from the two lengths of magnetic tape they manipulate.Some of the compositions are largely defined by the imperfections and idiosyncrasies of the recording medium they work with rather than what is pre-recorded."Bell" would seem to be based on recordings of, well, bells, but the specifically discernible sounds are all buried under the noise of tape.What may be a simple series of repeated tones become something much more captivating as they work in crackling and distortion in addition to the sounds from the manipulated tape.On "Draw" the duo utilize the wavering, inconsistent tones that can be culled from analog equipment to excellent effect.
"Buoy" is another example where the two put a greater emphasis on the sound of the equipment more than the existing recordings.With a bit of buzz and some metallic knocking (which I just assume is the mechanics of the tape players they are using), soft notes contrast the equipment's jagged looseness and imperfections very well."Sailmaker" too has Deupree and Fischer just barely flirting with melody; instead the slowed down sounds and mechanical noises becoming the focus of the piece.It is only on "Telegraph" and "Wake" where the recorded source material seems to be the focus of the compositions.The former sounds again like the two manipulating loops of bells and chimes, but the focus is placed more on these gentle sounds as opposed to manipulating the delivery system."Wake" closes the album, and there seems to be clearer sounds of guitar or other stringed instruments coming through the mix, with lots of open space and incidental sounds within the loops.There is not a lot of raw material utilized in the piece, but the duo generate amazing sounds and moods from that basic formula.
Taylor Deupree has done an amazing job at curating the 12k label since its inception, presenting music that may not always be similar to his, but always reflects his ear for rich compositions created from the most hushed of sounds.Whenever he does release his own work, however, the result is never a disappointment and just a reiteration of his expertise at this style of composition.These two albums may differ in their methods and composition techniques, but that common thread between them, Deupree himself, is what makes for two beautiful, understated compositions that do so much with the barest of sonic ingredients.
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This latest album is astonishing even by the high standards I would have held Michael Begg to. Combining the normally distinct worlds of theology and thermodynamics, World Fair is a formidable work that rewards careful listening and engagement with the material. The heavy and daring philosophical musings are lifted by the stunning music created by Begg and his friends (including the return of Deryk Thomas to make Human Greed a duo once more). Altogether, they have made manifest an album of rare power that feels like it has years of epiphanies buried within it.
Following an extended instrumental prelude with all the usual hallmarks of Human Greed (rich textures and aching drones), a voice suddenly emerges from the gloom on "Waiting in a Car." Nicole Boitos (probably best known to Brainwashed readers as the artist responsible for the lamb on the cover of Human Greed’s previous album, Fortress Longing, and The Body Lovers among many other great works) reads the text that lives at the center of World Fair and sets its thesis out: the meeting of thermodynamics and divinity or at least treating thermodynamics as something that a person could have spiritual faith in. Boitos recites the words with a tempered delivery, both reverential and humane. Here, Begg nails his colors to the mast in what he is attempting to do; to approach the world of physics through the lens of theology.
Throughout the album, the thermodynamic concept of entropy (the tendency towards thermodynamic equilibrium; generally meaning towards a disordered state) and the related idea of heat death (the proposed final outcome of thermodynamics where the entropy of the universe reaches its absolute maximum). On the surface, these theories seem as far fetched as anything in theology and on the surface the language of physics lends itself to comparisons and metaphors with the singularity of the Big Bang becoming representative of many creation stories ("In the beginning was the Word," the idea that the word "Om" is the original vibration from which all else came, etc.) and the fiery images brought to mind from the phrase "Heat death" are all apocalyptic. Even the general understanding of entropy as a process away from the organization laid out at the beginning of the universe can easily be morphed into concepts of higher states, divine harmony and temptation towards destruction. Therefore, the text that appears again and again can be seen as much as a prayer as anything. On World Fair, Christ becomes Chrysler (the history of the motor car is fully entwined with the development of thermodynamics) and physics and metaphysics blur.
To underline the thermodivinic themes of the album, Begg sets a foot in the past as well as the present, drawing as much on Thomas Tallis and John Taverner and early Georgian chant as he does on contemporary musical techniques and styles. This feeds deeper into the metaphor at the heart of the album. Begg’s assimilation of these early musics in the same way energy is transferred from one form to another (even the word "metaphor" itself carries thermodynamic baggage, coming from the Greek meaning "to transfer"). These feelings explored by those long dead cannot be destroyed, they just take on new forms (and maybe the same can be said for the feelings that first gave rise to religion becoming transferred to a scientific understanding of the universe).
As the rich and melancholic elegance of the music of the 1500s resonates profoundly through World Fair, its effect is intensified by the sounds of church bells and birds coming together to create a calming sense of nature, acting as a medium to explore a time before the city as a dominating force existed.To take this further, one of the album’s most poignant moments comes during "From Olden Disks" via a recording of a man with a thick southern United States accent talking about walking out to the woods to experience the purest feeling of peace. His genuine awe at the restorative potential of being alone in nature is truly moving. This well-trodden metaphor of nature as salve for the soul becomes magnified as World Fair goes on, the cataclysmic finale of heat death instead becomes more faithful to its proper, mathematical meaning as everything reaches a state of equilibrium and quantum nirvana is achieved.
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I have been following Vessel since 2012's Order of Noise album, as Seb Gainsborough always seemed like one of the most consistently compelling and distinctive forces in Bristol’s Livity Sound/Young Echo scene.  Somehow, however, his albums always fell just short of being something I could get truly excited about.  Punish, Honey admittedly continues that trend in some ways, but it is a huge evolution in others, as Gainsborough has largely untangled himself from current underground dance trends and embraced some very unhinged, adventurous, and heavy new textures.
Vessel's impressive transformation from techno to the fringe-y outer limits is amply apparent within the very first minute of Punish, Honey, as the brief "Febrile" launches into a snare roll that sounds like an actual, untreated drum kit before exploding into full-on jackhammer industrial chaos.  Gainsborough tones down the violence with the first "real" song ("Red Sex"), but compensates with an inspired juxtaposition of machine noise rhythms; a slinky, lurching tom-tom beat; and a very warped-sounding synth hook.  To his eternal credit, Seb somehow finds a way to make his synth sound even more spectacularly wrong for a mid-song interlude.  The overall effect resembles a weirdly anthemic take on Love’s Secret Domain-era Coil or something that would be played at a strip club in a sci-fi dystopia.  While, "Red Sex" is not particularly representative of the rest of the album stylistically, it is nevertheless a strong and clear statement of intent: Gainsborough seems both actively intent on subverting expectations and utterly indifferent to the possible alienation of his previous fan-base.  The gauntlet has been thrown down: Punish, Honey is absolutely not going to be just another techno album in any conventional sense.
The rest of the album is spent ingeniously twisting Vessel's core sound into unexpected new forms.  For example, "Drowned in Water and Light" marries deep bass throb with melancholy groaning strings and a harsh metallic shimmer to create something resembling a ritualistic funeral march. ""Euoi," on the other hand, sounds like blown-out, overdriven, and fractured minimalism set to a stumbling, slow-motion groove.  Another stand-out is "Anima," which initially sounds like rolling, thumping twist on Suicide before its simple, thick synth motif is gradually subsumed by layers and layers of counter-melodies and electronics.  Bizarrely, it transforms into fairly straightforward '90s industrial dance at one point, before transforming yet again into something that sounds like an English folk dance played backwards through a pile-up of studio effects.  Perhaps the finest moments on the album, however, belong to "Black Leaves and Fallen Branches," which reprises the "ritualistic funeral march" aesthetic of "Drowned," but beautifully echoes the main melody with textures that sound distant, surreal, and extra-dimensional.  It certainly has some lulls, but its high points are singularly, gloriously fucked in all the right ways.
For all its brilliance, "Black Leaves and Fallen Branches" is also a piece that highlights the only real flaw with Punish, Honey: Seb's talents as a composer currently lag a bit behind his other gifts.  Despite its audacious and wonderfully crazy ideas, wild sounds, and beautifully realized textures and arrangements, this album is curiously lacking in great songs to show for it: there are plenty of momentum-sapping lulls between highlights and nearly every song feels more like a vamp based upon a single great motif than a composition with serious depth.  That said, Punish, Honey nevertheless wildly exceeded my expectations in nearly every other way, as I never would have expected Seb to turn out anything quite as singular and forward-thinking as this.  I would not exactly say that I was blown out of my chair when I first put this album on, but my eyes definitely widened immediately and had to check to make sure that I was actually listening to a Vessel album (I was).  It may not be quite perfect, but Punish, Honey is a massive, attention-grabbing leap forward for Gainsborough.
 
 
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Artist: Burial Hex / Iron Fist Of The Sun
Title: Actaeon / Grown Under English Ice
Catalogue No: CSR153LP
Barcode: 8 2356650652 2
Format: LP
Genre: Power Electronics / Death Industrial
Shipping: Now
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Superb trans-Atlantic Power Electronics / Death Industrial face-off between Wisconsin's Burial Hex and Birmingham's Iron Fist Of The Sun. Burial Hex presents 2 "pre-industrial" conceptual compositions. Aside from one synth at the end of the first track, this music was all made with acoustic sounds. Intense Power Electronics, but without using amplification or electronically generated sounds. Just like how many industrial artists have flirted with depicting sounds and atmospheres from the first and second World Wars, these pieces were composed imaging atmospheres closer to the American Civil War era. IFOTS's 4 tracks were recorded at Crushing Obelisk, Birmingham, England. Dedicated to betrayers of family / faith / country. 40 minutes. Ltd x 500 copies.
Tracks: 1. The Coming Of War | 2. Act Aeon | 3. This Man WIll Glow / Two Circles Of Salt | 4. Hessianmud | 5. The 5th Wife | 6. Grown Under Ice
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Nearly a decade has passed since Kompakt's Total 3—the zeitgeist-defining compilation that turned me, and scores of longtime fans, onto the Cologne label in its heyday—hit the shelves. Some things never change: the latest entry in the Total series is a reliable-as-always tour through the state of Kompakt circa 2011.
As with Total compilations past, Kompakt (and minimal techno) fans are likely to find Total 12 hit-or-miss to some degree. This time around, though, the ratio is much improved due to Kompakt's decision to scale back the collection to half its usual length—the first time it hasn't spanned two bloated CDs since Total 5. That means there are fewer tunes to chew on, but the quality control is much better. There is but one dud to my ears: Matias Aguayo's cloying "I Don't Smoke," in which two characters volley a pointless question back and forth over an unremarkable house track: "Rebolledo, do you have a cigarette?" ... "No, I don't smoke, I don't smoke." Good to know, guys.
Luckily, Aguayo's uncharacteristic flop is the outlier. The lion's share of Total 12 is solid, with highlights to be found at various turns. One of those is Belgian producer Kolombo's "Waiting For," which kicks off the compilation with a disco-influenced rhythm, accented by shimmery keyboards and a lyric which reads poorly on paper, but is secretly fit for New Order circa 1987: "Is this love worth waiting for / something special, something pure?" After a pair of remixes, Superpitcher's "White Lightning" ups the ante—as his first new material since his stellar 2010 LP, Kilimanjaro, it has more thrust and throb than anything on that full-length. Gui Boratto adds a thick, distorted slice of techno with "The Drill," far grittier than 2007's sublime Chromophobia, and an effective teaser for III, his upcoming full-length for Kompakt. There are two tracks from Kompakt figurehead Michael Mayer—one solo, one GusGus remix—and both are worth hearing.
There are a couple gems hidden deeper into the unsurprising 80-minute runtime, including a fantastic cut from the Modernist, Jörg Burger's alter ego of sorts. "Remodernist" boasts Total 12's most immediate, danceable hook; it is a fine contrast to Burger's classic '90s trance release with Mike Ink, Las Vegas. Elsewhere, parallels abound: Coma's "Playground Altona" is a near-Xerox of the shuffling rhythms and oscillations of LCD Soundsystem's "45:33"/"Someone Great," while Wolfgang Voigt's "Frieden" plays like a minimal techno update on the Durutti Column's "Otis," 30 years down the line. (Both are enjoyable nonetheless.) Total 12 closes with a track from a new Burger/Voigt project, Mohn: the dark, evocative "Tiefental," which runs thick with low-end drone and trance-heavy rhythms. Naturally, it sounds unlike anything from Total 3, and it makes for a colorful exclamation point—and a fourth-quarter highlight—on Total 12.
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New Orleans duo, Geisterfahrer, expand their previous palate by appearing to reduce it. On Stained Lunar they still eschew computers but also use clearer production, silence, and darker lyrics. The result is a separation of instruments and voices which better emphasize an ethno-catatonic, hypnotic, pagan sensibility.
 
Geisterfahrer’s 2009 release Telegraph was hailed by Backporch Revolution as arguably the label’s most beautiful release, ever. That claim was worthy, although it overlooked the fine Moog Modulations EP by Electrical Spectacle. It also introduced a hilarious criteria considering that the label is responsible for unleashing the prolific, spontaneous, sonic gambles of Potpie, not to mention the essentially unlistenable, noise-spoof, tourist-trap, art-terrorism of Uptown Cajun Allstars.
In any event, Stained Lunar easily surpasses the pleasing but perhaps too densely-packed drone, thud and wail of Telegraph and gives a glimpse of the potential of Geisterfahrer. The two members, B. Aubrey and Shae Freeman, use accordion, acoustic guitar, autoharp, banjo, bombard, bs202, bulbul tarang, cello, clarinet, concert bass, conch, dilruba, drums, electric bass & guitar, mouth bow, ocean harp, percussion, saw, singing bowls, shenai, ukelin, viola, and voices. The alternating innocent and creepy voices added to my enjoyment. Some of this album is dark, mystical, space-folk which sounds like lost excerpts from the Wicker Man soundtrack. Geisterfahrer have ditched the more predictable aspects of their music in favor of delicate instrumental passages and less ambiguous vocals. Their music is now less-cluttered, more coherent and, at times, verging on the song-like.
The whole album can be heard at the label website.
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As most listeners turn to low-quality downloads, online streaming, iPod earbuds, and cheap computer speakers, a handful of record labels seem to truly care about the sound quality of their new releases. Kranky is a label that cares, and A Winged Victory for the Sullen, in particular, lives up to its legend. Adam Wiltzie and Dustin O'Halloran recorded the album primarily in Berlin on a couple incredibly fancy, 9-foot grand pianos in large acoustic spaces; added strings and horns; mixed the record in a 17th century villa in Italy; and processed the songs all analogue, straight to magnetic tape. It sounds incredible.
Back in 2008, on the heels of Stars of the Lid's masterwork, And Their Refinement of the Decline, my wife and I saw Adam Wiltzie and Brian McBride in concert in their hometown of Austin. The guys played at the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, a beloved (and slightly bizarre) movie theater that serves microbrews and a full dinner menu to accompany classic and contemporary films, horror and sci-fi film festivals, quote-alongs, sing-alongs, and the inimitable Air Sex World Championships.
At first, I was unsure the booking was a good fit for Stars of the Lid's hushed, drifting music. When the show commenced, though, it was obvious the Drafthouse was chosen for at least two reasons. First, its acoustics: the Stars' lush, ambient dream/drone-scapes are nothing if not epic, widescreen, cinematic—in other words, a natural fit for a theater setting. Second, its visuals: regular collaborator Luke Savisky provided a variety of abstract projections that complemented the music for those who stayed awake.
All of which is to say that Adam Wiltzie has learned a thing or two from playing in cinematic settings. His newest project, a collaborative effort with American pianist and composer Dustin O'Halloran, is like hearing Stars of the Lid in Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound. It plays as a magnificent, fully realized album, in the same way that fellow Stars member Brian McBride let loose his creative reins on The Effective Disconnect last year. Both projects are a step back from the more austere, immersive nature of And Their Refinement of the Decline—though A Winged Victory for the Sullen seems less definitive by contrast, the trade-off is in its brevity, melodicism and accessibility.
The natural parallel to A Winged Victory is Wiltzie's other major work without McBride—2004's The Dead Texan, a collaborative album and visual project with filmmaker Christina Vantzou. In hindsight, Wiltzie's work under that title seems unfocused—sure, it utilizes a diverse palette of strings, piano, and thick smears of ambient guitar, but it never quite captures a sound the way Stars of the Lid often do. With that project, he had Vantzou—a visual artist, not a musician—as his collaborator, and her influence on the music seemed unclear. By contrast, O'Halloran provides a great deal of structure to A Winged Victory; his piano reflects off Wiltzie's sighing drones the same way the moon's glow reflects off the ground after a light rain. O'Halloran's modern classical playing provides melody and structure, a fresh counterpoint to Wiltzie's recognizable style.
There are other guests, and instruments, that accent the record. Notably, Icelandic cellist Hildur Gudnadottir and violinist Peter Broderick both contribute, adding a plaintive coda to "Steep Hills of Vicodin Tears," and orchestral flourishes here and there. (O'Halloran, Broderick and Wiltzie also collaborated on O'Halloran's solo album, Lumiere, released earlier this year on Max Richter's 130701 imprint—well worth seeking out.) Mostly, A Winged Victory belongs to Wiltzie and O'Halloran, though; it is their baby. Wiltzie's deep washes of blurred guitar drone and O'Halloran's restrained, resonant piano are emotive, breathtaking, beautiful and moving—like Wiltzie's strongest work in Stars of the Lid.
Perhaps my favorite thing about A Winged Victory for the Sullen, though, is that I haven't found a better album all year to listen to in a quiet, reflective state, with a glass of red wine, using a quality pair of headphones. The only other album that comes close this year is Tim Hecker's phenomenal Ravedeath, 1972, also released on—surprise!—Kranky.
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As most listeners turn to low-quality downloads, online streaming, iPod earbuds, and cheap computer speakers, a handful of record labels seem to truly care about the sound quality of their new releases. Kranky is a label that cares, and A Winged Victory for the Sullen, in particular, lives up to its legend. Adam Wiltzie and Dustin O'Halloran recorded the album primarily in Berlin on a couple incredibly fancy, 9-foot grand pianos in large acoustic spaces; added strings and horns; mixed the record in a 17th century villa in Italy; and processed the songs all analogue, straight to magnetic tape. It sounds incredible.
