- Anthony D'Amico
- Albums and Singles
This is the second full-length that Carla Dal Forno has released since returning to her native Australia and those sunnier environs continue to have a welcome warming effect on her songwriting. She has also grown considerably more eclectic and inspired in both her instrumentation and her assimilation of fresh influences over the last few years while her songwriting talents have sharpened significantly, as this “album of quiet upheaval” is a hook-packed, intimate, and refreshingly sincere collection of would-be indie pop hits about heartache, yearning, desire, and every other deep human emotion that matters. In that regard, Confession is a significant leap forward, but Dal Forno is otherwise still the same bass-wielding post-punk chanteuse as ever.
Amusingly, I noticed the other day that Dal Forno self-described her early Berlin work as “lone kosmische misanthropy,” which is quite a far cry from her current stripped-down and bass-driven Young Marble Giants-style indie pop vision. The interesting bit is that Dal Forno’s radical stylistic transformation happened without her making any major foundational changes to the essence of her sound: ten years after “Fast Moving Cars,” she is still essentially making bedroom pop magic from little more than a bass, a drum machine, and some honest and introspective musings about life, heartache, and relationships. The only thing that truly changed is that she gradually cleared away all the murk, gloom, reverb, and rigidity to let in some welcome light, space, warmth, fun, and leftfield inspiration. In short, she focused entirely on being real, human, and direct and jettisoned everything that diluted or blunted those aspects. There is one semi-throwback to Dal Forno’s Blackest Ever Black past, however, as the rubbery slow-motion stomp of “Nighttime” feels like it should have been THE shadowy, bloodless Berlin party anthem of 2016.
- Anthony D'Amico
- Albums and Singles
As evidenced by the many intimate and autobiographical passages about self-doubt, numbness, and creative frustration it contains, this latest album from James was “forged from the fire of internal struggles.” Fortunately, all that inner turmoil ultimately resulted in an absolutely killer album that feels like a massive artistic breakthrough, so I guess it was all worth it (though James herself may strongly feel otherwise). The catalyst for James’ reinvention unexpectedly came from her work producing Anysia Kym’s Confession EP, which “gave her the experience of a more 'pop' setting and the tools and insight to work her instrumentals into more conventional shapes.” The ingenious bit is that James’ new embrace of pop-inspired song structures provides an accessible shape to some very ambitious, radical, and non-pop enhancements in her production techniques and beat crafting skills. The final piece of the puzzle is that James tagged in a host of eclectic guest vocalists who seemed to know exactly what was needed to transform her stuttering, blurred, and shapeshifting instrumental tracks into sensuous, hook-packed left-field pop magic.
The most unexpected of the many guest vocal performances is unquestionably Low’s Alan Sparhawk, who urges everyone to make love (rather than war) over a backdrop of gently rolling rock drums and bleary electric piano. To his credit, Sparhawk makes a surprisingly credible soul vocalist in this unfamiliar context, but “Peak Again” is definitely an outlier for a whole host of reasons. On the considerably more outré side of the spectrum is the Miho Hatori-featuring “Flatline,” as Hatari sensuously sings in both Japanese and English over pitch-bent synth chords and a skittering, convulsive, and glitch-ravaged groove. The straight-up hip-hop of “Ending Us All” is another wild detour, as Le3 bLACK raps over lo-fi smeary synths and some killer live drumming from Fyn Dobson. Elsewhere, Anysia Kym takes the mic for the album’s hottest would-be single, as “Score” is a perfect marriage of intimately underproduced vocals, jazzy electric piano chords, gently trippy flutes, and squelchy futuristic percussion. Tirzah contributes a simmering and seductive gem as well, as “Habits and Patterns,” beautifully blends hushed and melancholy heartache with invasively destabilizing and jackhammering loop spasms.
- Anthony D'Amico
- Albums and Singles
This latest full-length from guitar visionary Sarah Lipstate is a bit of an inspired outlier, as she has expanded Noveller’s usual guitar-centric palette to include a baby grand piano, percussion instruments, and an impressively Lynchian guest vocal performance from her occasional bandmate Iggy Pop. I suspect that such evolution was inevitable, however, as Lipstate now has a new studio and has been landing some relatively high-profile soundtrack work since moving from Brooklyn to LA in 2020. Naturally, the demands of commissioned work would certainly influence her working methods and inspire some new techniques and textures. In another way, however, I Am The Weather can be seen as a return to Lipstate’s roots as well, as she spent years learning classical piano before she reinvented herself as a self-taught guitarist at age 17. As is often the case with bold creative evolutions, there are admittedly a few growing pains and missteps lurking among these nine pieces, but the bigger story is that such moments are interspersed with a few of the most beautiful pieces that Lipstate has ever recorded.
The most immediately striking piece on the album is unsurprisingly the lead single “The Girl Who Was Death,” as Iggy Pop’s unsettling and gravel-voiced monologue unfolds over a shapeshifting and increasingly howling, fragmented, and nightmarish backdrop. While this is the first time that the two artists have worked together on a Noveller piece, their collaborative relationship first began back in 2019 with a spoken word performance of Dylan Thomas’s "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night" that landed on Pop’s Free album. Unsurprisingly, there is a cool riff at the heart of the piece and Pop has some great lines, but the more impressive achievement is that “The Girl Who Was Death” feels plucked from an imagined/non-existent episode of Twin Peaks. While it is undeniably cool and attention-grabbing, that outlier is a bit too brief and Iggy Pop-centered to quite capture Lipstate at the full height of her powers. Fortunately, there is quite an impressive run of mid-album pieces that swing the balance in the other direction.
- Creaig Dunton
- Albums and Singles
Previously a digital-only release as part of Francisco López's Two-Headed Snake series of collaborations, this split release between him and equally legendary composer Éric La Casa features the two working independently, but from shared source material. What exactly that source material is never becomes entirely clear, but it gives a consistency between two very different, amazing works.
The source material specified is just 11 years of "objects and spaces," so any clear identification beyond what occasionally sounds like field recordings is pretty much impossible. Certain characteristics of sound appear clearly throughout both artists' compositions but utilized in noticeably different ways.
- Anthony D'Amico
- Albums and Singles
This latest album from Sublime Frequencies co-founder and Cairo-based expat Alan Bishop’s long-running and eclectic solo project is a bit of a pleasant surprise, as he enlisted an absolute murderers’ row of talented collaborators to record a collection of mostly original new instrumental pieces. Notably, the album is billed as “drifting closer” to late-period Sun City Girls albums like Funeral Mariachi, but that kinship is mostly true in a general sense rather than a stylistic one, as Malarial Dream is unusually lean on covers and often feels like the work of a formidable full band. It also mirrors Funeral Mariachi in its comparative listenability, as both Bishop’s solo career and Sun City Girls have their share of prickly indulgences and eccentricities. Obviously, Bishop remains the same idiosyncratic chaos element as always, but Malarial Dream places him at the center of a collection of Middle Eastern-inspired desert-psych jams recorded with an incredible international cast of killer improvisors.
Abduction
The album opens with the short and punchy “Rock N’ Roll,” which is evidently one of the album’s two “obscure covers,” as Bishop’s Dwarfs of East Agouza bandmate Sam Shalabi is credited as the composer. He also happens to be the one rockin’ the oud in the thorny and droning central riff, but the album’s strongest moments tend to be the less muscular and rock-inspired pieces that follow. In “The Multiple Hallucinations of an Assassin - Part 2,” for example, Bishop and Huda Asfour trade acoustic guitar and lap harp motifs over a pleasantly rolling percussion rhythm and a gently flanging synth drone. Amusingly, Part 2 bears little resemblance at all to the version that appeared on Sun City Girls’ Bright Surroundings, anyone who has been feverishly waiting three decades for its sequel to appear will likely experience some rough cognitive dissonance.
- Anthony D'Amico
- Albums and Singles
This first meeting between NYC-based composer/conceptual artist Branciforte and Belgian jazz pianist Dumoulin is an impressively ambitious and mindbending “musical dialogue” recorded over the span of two days. Both artists played separate Fender Rhodes electric pianos with their “own array of processing and effects” while Branciforte further spiced up their interaction with “a custom live editing system designed to process both musicians' outputs in real time.” The physical album is similarly unusual, as Branciforte describes it as a “multi-disc object” that divides these eight pieces into four 3” CDs that can be played in varying sequences (along with one normal-sized disc that contains the full 70-minute album in its entirety). I can certainly understand why Branciforte decided to go big with the packaging, as ITERAE is an absolutely mesmerizing and landmark release that beautifully blurs the lines between classic Oval-style glitchery, psychotropic Bitches Brew-style dark magic, and the lingering otherworldly dissonances of a great Morton Feldman piece.
As Branciforte describes it, ITERAE’s “eight modular sections hover between form and abstraction, precise sonic architecture and dream-like flow,” but a more reductionist and concise term like “ambient-adjacent” would probably suffice as well, as there are a lot of flickering and dreamlike drones at that heart of this release. That said, these pieces are considerably more harmonically complex and subtly dissonant than actual ambient music.
- Anthony D'Amico
- Albums and Singles
This long-running solo project from Posh Isolation co-founder Christian Stadsgaard has gradually evolved from its modest minimal techno beginnings into a vision that inventively blurs the lines between harsh noise, ambient, and contemporary classical. While he has certainly kept one foot firmly rooted in the noise scene with collaborative releases with Merzbow, Evil Moisture, and Government Alpha, the overall arc of the project has mostly been towards striking the perfect balance between beauty and violence. His most notable success in that regard before now was probably the static-gnawed ambiance of 2024’s The Night Has Passed Already, but The Vanity Project feels like another big creative breakthrough, as the more beautiful elements have a more timeless/sacred feel this time around that puts some significant distance between Stadsgaard and his peers in the contemporary ambient milieu. Also, both Merzbow and Government Alpha turn up to help ensure that Vanity Productions’ sharper edges remain every bit as visceral and snarling as ever.
The opening “Hoarfrost” provides an especially haunting and sublime introduction to the album, as a brief haze of whines and brittle piano fragments unexpectedly blossoms into lush organ drones that subtly warble and shimmer in pleasantly trippy ways. It gets even better from there, however, as a looping two-note “dial tone” melody fades in to provide a haunting, unconventional, and short-lived melodic hook before the piece evolves into a killer final stretch that sounds like a warmly beautiful organ mass with a seething and enigmatic undercurrent of tape loop noise squall.
- Creaig Dunton
- Albums and Singles
Constructed from field recordings and found sounds and mutated into collages further refined via live performances, Andrew Anderson’s latest album is a final construction of these elements that have gone through multiple stages of processing and abstraction. Although most (but not all) of the building blocks that make up Thresholds have been modified into something completely different, it is the times in which these identifiable sounds bleed through that make the record even more unsettling but continually engaging.
The field recording elements of Anderson’s work are apparent from the very opening of "Until My Blood Contains All" with squealing brakes cutting through open spaces, all surrounded by rain drenched in reverb. He blends in reversed shimmers, with the various sounds drifting between what sounds like environment, and what sounds like music. The overall looping structure enforces the latter, and a clear intensity increases throughout. Again, as a balance, Anderson joins fuzzy, crunching noise with some stretched, almost musical sounds slipping through. The piece clearly transitions from being environmentally focused to a structured, musical one. A gentle melody is extended under sputtering, collapsing sounds and fuzz drenched broken radio layers.
- Anthony D'Amico
- Albums and Singles
This is the first time that Oberland (Oiseaux-Tempête) and Moumneh (Jerusalem In My Heart) have recorded together as a duo, but the two politically minded artists are long-time friends who have been collaborating in various forms for years. The pair initially began working on pieces together in Montreal back in the summer of 2023, but the project got understandably derailed by the Palestinian genocide, which left Moumneh with “a complete artistic block and the inability to articulate what people are living through.” In the summer of 2024, Oberland invited his friend to Paris in the hopes of reawakening his creative spirit and the two worked around the clock to shape a new vision together. Notably, Oberland often “took the lead” in steering the album, which was a bit of a pattern-breaking role-reversal for Moumneh (who co-runs the Hotel2Tango studio with members of Godspeed You! Black Emperor in addition to his central role in JIMH). The resultant album is quite a freewheeling creative explosion that pushes each artist into compelling and unexpected new terrain.
The most surprising pieces are definitely the first two, as Moumneh’s lead vocals are digitally harmonized in a way that arguably resembles a melancholy robot. While I tend to loathe anything resembling auto-tuned vocals, that bold decision actually serves both pieces quite well, as their melodic vocal hooks provide a nice counterbalance to their more dirge-y/doom-y elements (roiling tremolo-picked guitars, slow-motion drums, distorted bass). Notably, both two pieces are arguably also the most stylistically indebted to Oberland’s Oiseaux-Tempête work, but “Dagger Eyes” in particular blows up that template with a killer mutating synth motif and a structure that blossoms into something resembling futuristic synth-driven Arabic emo. Elsewhere, “The Serpent” is a completely different left-field bombshell, as a buzzing bass throb propels a driving techno groove that unrelentingly snowballs in intensity beneath Moumneh’s digitized and chant-like vocal laments.
- Anthony D'Amico
- Albums and Singles
This latest opus from the Brooklyn-based composer/puppeteer is the second part of a planned trilogy that began with 2023’s Tin Iso and the Dawn. Notably, that last album absolutely floored me and was easily one of my favorite releases of the year, so my expectations for this next installment were quite high indeed. Happily, Osni the Flare is yet another stunner, but it feels like a bit more like a score to a larger work than it does a stand-alone album. That makes sense, as it is exactly that, yet the same was true of its predecessor as well—the music and visual elements just seem to be more intimately intertwined this time around. That is perfectly fine by me, as Allen’s concise self-description of their art as “building a world with music & puppets” is a literal (if understated) fact that wildly undersells the sheer magic and wonder of this expanding mythology brought to life through a virtuosic ballet of music, marionettes, and light.
It is fair to say that I am not normally the target demographic for either puppetry or self-created mythologies unless they are coming from an endearingly unhinged outsider art direction. However, I am eternally drawn towards artists with a bold and singular vision like a moth to a dragon’s ember and Allen certainly fits the bill in that regard. Unsurprisingly, the execution of that vision is yet another crucial consideration, as everyone knows someone who can make the most mundane anecdote seem absolutely mesmerizing and someone else who can make even the most dramatic events seem punishingly dull. Allen is very much one of the former rare souls who can seemingly make anything seem beautiful and poetic. Moreover, telling this particular story has consumed the last decade of Allen's life and it absolutely shows. This project feels like both a life’s work and a genuine labor of love painstakingly chiseled to perfection. In fact, I was genuinely amazed that this album only took three years to make given that Allen played every instrument while simultaneously crafting the hauntingly surreal puppet world that the album inhabits (and there was plenty of sound design involved as well).
- Creaig Dunton
- Albums and Singles
Looking over his discography, Conclusio marks the first solo work from Asmus Tietchens since 2022’s Schatten Ohne Licht, which is quite a significant stretch for him. He has been consistent with his collaborations, but solo material has been less frequent in recent years. Compared to the previous album, Conclusio is less sparse in its construction, and instead is rather dense, focused, and quite intense, while consistently displaying Tietchens’s careful crafting of sound.
One consistent thing on the 12 individual pieces that make up the album, all of which are traditional song length, is Tietchens's employment of drastic shifts in volume and dynamics, with occasionally shocking results.
