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Two episodes for one week (as we might not have an episode next week).
Episode 812 features new tunes from Loraine James, Shovel Dance Collective, J. D. Slater, YL Hooi, Forster, and Loula Yorke, plus tunes from the vault by Cecil Taylor Unit, Tenniscoats, Brian Eno & J. Peter Schwalm, and Allison Graves.
Episode 813 has new music by Liars, Modern Apartments, Cities Aviv, nueen (feat. Loraine James), imagine music, Nailah Hunter, Cello Octet Amsterdam feat. Kara-Lis Coverdale, plus older music by Solex, Electric Weasel Ensemble, and This Heat.
Dog in a marketplace in Colombia photo by Fabien.
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This sixth album from English slow-motion guitar magician Dean McPhee is something of a major creative leap forward, as he has newly expanded his arsenal of gear to now include a “powerful 18-inch subwoofer” and a wooden snare percussion pedal. While such a modest expansion would likely be a complete non-event for most artists, it is a massive development for McPhee, as his overdub-free real-time minimalism is now enhanced with an impressively solid approximation of a Jamaican dub-style rhythm section. In short, Dean McPhee is now a proper one-man band. Unsurprisingly, that enhanced palette unlocks a whole new world of rhythmic and dynamic possibilities that McPhee puts to especially inspired use in the titular side-long closing epic yet this whole release is remarkably strong, as it feels like a great single backed with a fine pair of languorously psychedelic zone-outs.
The opening “Indica Fields” captures McPhee at his most lean and focused, as he manages to condense all of his usual epic tropes into a mere 5 minutes of simmering slow-motion folk/desert blues. Aside from the winding and circular melodic hook at its heart, “Indica Fields” is most notable for the echoing decay of the wooden snare and its looping bass line, which is the first of the album’s many nods to McPhee’s dub inspirations. For me, however, the crucial difference between a great Dean McPhee piece and a merely good Dean McPhee piece is whether or not I am blindsided by some kind of showstopping transition or dazzling effects pedal showcase. As it turns out, “Indica Fields” boasts two such passages, as one solo feels like a skyful of streaking comets, while another beautifully segues from backwards melodies to shimmering washes of rippling arpeggios.
This collaboration between four Michigan-based underground music lifers is something of a dream supergroup for me, as it brings together my favorite ambient/space rock duo with one of my favorite songwriters (Fred Thomas of Saturday Looks Good To Me). Sadly, Fred is off the clock as a songwriter for this one, but the consolation prize is that this is my first exposure to his Optigan Conservatory bandmate Frank Rotondo, who is the leader of the long-running Detroit-area free music ensemble Laughing Gas. The result of this long-gestating union of old friends is a series of drone-based improvisations that were later fleshed out and enhanced with overdubs and edits. Stylistically, it lands quite close to the twinkling and shimmering guitar bliss of classic Windy & Carl (which is perfectly fine by me), but there are also some fresh and compelling innovations that leave me hoping that this album is the beginning of something more rather than just a mere one-off.
The opening “Conductor” makes for a representative if teasingly brief introduction to the pleasures that follow, as a slowly flanging synth drone is gradually fleshed out with sustained harmonium tones and a pleasantly disjointed and disorienting calliope-like motif. That last bit is the part that most sets this quartet apart from most other purveyors of spacy psychedelic drones, but there are also some cool tingling frequencies that are more felt than heard.
This latest full-length from the Stockholm-based Lewis is billed as a “a deceptive recording with veiled melodies and clandestine bangers,” which feels more or less apt to me. Stylistically, Opening feels more like an eclectic grab bag of commissions, sketches, and cool ideas than it does a focused and fully formed statement like Ingrid or Thankful, but her collaborative albums are frequently collections of similarly short, spontaneous-sounding pieces and those tend to be every bit as rewarding as her more composed longform work and that remains true here as well. Aside from its comparative brevity and eclecticism, Opening’s other defining trait seems to be a fondness from playfully manipulating and looping orchestral samples, which makes it one of her more nakedly melodic and less noise-gnawed releases (though there are still plenty of beautifully frayed and blown-out textures to be found among these brief and sublime vignettes).
The opening “Ta Min Hand” is the first and the best of the album’s many clandestine bangers, as it quickly evolves from the sounds of hissing rain and dripping subterranean ambiance into a downright rapturous ascending melody of sensuously smeared and swooping sax with fitfully sharp and distorted edges. Eventually, instability triumphs and the melody breaks free of its obsessively looping structure to leave behind a jazzy sax solo in a blown-out and echoing miasma of noise.
Billed as this Los Angeles-based composer’s “most ambitious work to date,” this overwhelming triple LP collection brings together five solo pipe organ compositions, a choral suite, a collection of “interludes” for microtonal ensembles, and a new longform chamber piece. Notably, Davachi recently completed a doctoral study in timbre, phenomenology, and critical organology and The Will of Tongues very clearly feels like the fruit of all those years of research, which is another way of saying “this is extremely challenging music.” The emphasis is primarily upon “compositional concepts and methods that have preoccupied Davachi over the past decade” and that list covers “iteration, tuning theory, textural and timbral variation, extended duration, vertical harmony, intervallic affect, and canonic structure.” In short, this is one for the deepest of deep listeners, as Davachi brought in a sprawling and eclectic cast of guests ranging from avant-garde luminaries like Eyvind Kang to a microtonal brass ensemble to a Renaissance flute consort for a durational yet time-dissolving deep dive into the minutiae of timbre and harmony.
In one of my favorite sketches from Tom Scharpling’s The Best Show (“The Music Scholar”), the endlessly hilarious Jon Wurster calls in pretending to be a jaded and relentlessly namedropping record store owner who proceeds to dismiss absolutely every good band ever. After casually trashing everyone from The Beatles to Big Star, he gradually reveals that his taste has become so sophisticated that he can now only listen to field recordings of complete silence recorded by one specific artist.
Despite being a fairly devout Bill Orcutt fan for the last decade or so, I never followed his Fake Estates imprint too closely until recently, as it seemed to exclusively be a destination for his most mischievous, obtuse, and unapologetically indulgent ideas. Over the last few years, however, the imprint has blossomed into the home for an increasingly audacious and endearingly demented series of software experiments and batshit crazy conceptual releases that bear almost zero resemblance to his more celebrated guitar releases yet feel every bit as essential.
Fake Estates
While A Mechanical Joey remains my clear favorite among his Fake Estates forays, The Four Louies (2024) stands as an equally bananas example of Orcutt's cracked vision, as he gleefully mashed up two very different primitive, iconic, and polarizing pieces of music: the Kingsmen’s slurred and incomprehensible frat party anthem "Louie Louie" and the punishingly repetitive chord deconstruction of Steve Reich’s "Four Organs." Admittedly, I could not get into the relentless plunderphonic repetition of The Four Louies at the time of its release much, but Orcutt has ingeniously managed to breathe new life into the piece with this raucous performance from last March, as his star-studded live band improbably transformed the simplest riff of all time into raw, roaring, and ecstatic drone freak-out.
This second installment of Kevin Martin’s Ladybug series pairs the Brussels-based producer with Tokyo-based torch singer Masumi Yamamoto. While this single was my first exposure to her work, Martin has been a fan of her Friday Night Plans project since at least 2023, as he proclaimed her Visitors to be his favorite album of the year in Boomkat’s annual artist list extravaganza. Given that Martin himself is again the driving force behind the music and the production, Ladybug 2 understandably shares a lot of stylistic similarities with the previous Dis Fig installment (haunted vocals, spartan instrumentation, long ghost trails of hissing decay, and big post-industrial vibes), but the trip-hoppier aspects land closer to Portishead than Massive Attack this time around. Or, as the album description more colorfully puts it, "a dream journey from Twin Peaks to Kingston, Jamaica, via Bristol."
The single this time around is entitled "Miss U" and it roughly sounds like a stripped-down Portishead performing in a cavernous industrial space. Aside from the fact that Portishead are one of Bristol’s many iconic trip-hop pioneers, however, the resemblance mostly comes down to just the sound of Masumi’s voice and a pervasive vibe of ghostly slow-motion heartache. Pressure’s perceived Twin Peaks element likely comes from Masumi as well, as her solo work can sometimes resemble a bleary and nocturnal Julee Cruise-style chanteuse time-stretched and blurred into ambient dub. With Martin at the controls, however, the musical palette is reduced to just a slow-motion kick drum stomp, a clap, a high hat, deep sub-bass, and a pair of frayed and stormy dub chords. In theory, the existence of those chords makes Ladybug 2 a bit more musically expansive than its predecessor, but in practice it feels similarly stark because the bass line is much less central.
This amusingly titled new series of maxi-singles is devoted to collaborations between heavyweight dub auteur Kevin Martin and a resolving cast of like-minded female artists. Naturally, the first installment is devoted to Martin’s recurring collaborator Dis Fig (Felicia Chen), as the two previously worked together on 2020’s excellent In Blue album (Hyperdub) as well as the 2025 single "Silent." Self-described as a "hallucinatory heat haze," this "tale of post-break-up trauma" is very different from any of the duo’s previous pairings, as Dis Fig’s dark and spectral twist on soulful pop songcraft becomes the canvas for a series of bass-heavy, blown-out, and static-ravaged dirge-dub mutations.
In some ways, the actual single ("Vanishing") is more of a conventional pop song than anything on In Blue, as it is just over three minutes long and features both a sensuous bass throb and a melodic chorus hook. In most other ways, however, it heads very much in the opposite direction, as it is quite a cold and minimal piece and one of its most prominent traits is that the crawling groove seems to be dragging a squall of moaning, hissing, and echoing nightmares in its wake. In fact, it arguably resembles an undead Massive Attack performing in a haunted underground parking garage, which is an aesthetic that I would generally prefer over hearing an actual Massive Attack song these days. In characteristic The Bug fashion, it is also pared to the fucking bone, as the actual music is essentially just a cool bass line, Dis Fig’s voice, a high hat, a kickdrum, and a snare, but it becomes even more spartan than that in the four variations that follow. The throbbing bass and the static-gnawed ghost trail of delay, however, remain very much the stars of the show.
This quietly mesmerizing and unconventional Australian artist has had quite a unique trajectory, as she first began releasing music as Honey Stretton in London back in 2016 and her debut single ("The Thrill of Loneliness") was a massive hit by indie standards. She followed that success with an EP (Wail) later that same year but soon vanished from public life and moved back to rural Australia to tend the animals on her late grandmother’s farm. While she was alone on the farm, however, she recorded a host of new songs on a nylon string guitar and some borrowed gear while enduring one of the most catastrophic bushfire seasons in Australian history and the rampaging COVID outbreak. Eventually, one of her friends persuaded her to release those new songs and they ultimately became 2023’s Soon album, which resulted in an opening slot on a Mount Eerie tour, international critical acclaim, and a reissue on Phil Elverum’s P.W. Elverum & Sun label. This follow up dissolves her lovely and intimate songs much deeper into ambient abstraction, as it feels like a series of hypnagogic tropical mirages and beachside field recordings mingled with flickering and elusive glimpses of beautifully hymn-like songs.
P.W. Elverum & Sun/Brierfield Flood Press/Lima Limo
Tiarn (which means "landholder) was similarly self-recorded in isolation, as Stretton relocated to the small coastal village of Tabourie Lake, where she reconnected to her community by joining a regional choir, observed the migration of whales, and went for regular "blue hour" swims in the South Pacific. All of those elements proved to be significant inspirations, as did a trove of family home movies filmed in Tokyo back in the early ‘90s before Hana’s birth. In particular, Stretton was fascinated by a clip that depicted "distant mountains, and Stretton’s young family looking over the valley in the soft static of one Japanese summer evening" and "a simpler, more connected time." Armed with a few acoustic instruments and a previously unused synth that her family had purchased during their Tokyo years, Stretton "began recording music directly to that footage - letting the images dictate the melody" and weaving in "voices, insects, weather, movement, and the ambient sounds of the valley." In essence, this album is a lovingly crafted and impressionistic soundtrack to a hazy and dreamlike VHS dispatch from the blissful time just before her own conception.
This is the first major release by this Belgian composer under his given name, as Jolan normally records as ‘t Geruis. He did previously self-release a digital album (#7) as himself back in 2024, but that was followed by another 't Geruis release. Consequently, I am not sure if this counts as a name change or if Jolan has some kind of personal stylistic delineation that determines which name feels right for which albums, but Sublime Lenteur ("The Amazing Slowness") still sounds a hell of a lot like ‘t Geruis to me. While that is a perfectly welcome state of affairs, this album does have its own distinctive character which may possibly be related to its inclusion in Lost Tribe Sound’s seasonal mood-driven "Moss & Melee" series. Then again, maybe not. Mystery abounds. In any case, this is an impressively strong album, as Jolan’s usual bleary and smudged ambient vision is beautifully enhanced with hypnotically looping melodies on degraded tapes that place his work a bit closer to minimalist auteurs like Celer and William Basinski than usual. The shadowy and dreamlike moods, however, are still distinctly Jolan’s own.
According to Jolan, this album first began to take shape in October 2024 during "long and solitary walks in the woods" through fog, snow, and rain. Frequently, he would return from those walks feeling inspired and he soon noticed that his music began to feel like a "direct translation" of the thoughts and impressions that emerged while immersing himself in nature, seasonal transformation, and solitude. To be fair, he could have plausibly said that exact same thing about any of his previous albums, yet Sublime Lenteur does feel like an improved and enhanced distillation of the simplicity and meditative, quiet beauty of earlier ‘t Geruis albums. In fact, the opening "Ressac I" probably represents my Platonic ideal for great ambient music, as it is essentially just a sensuously looping chord swell that eternally dissolves into a reverberating fragment of melody. While that may sound quite simple on its face, Jolan’s artistry lies in the way the entire piece feels flickering, frayed, and unstable, which makes the loop feel mesmerizingly cyclic yet eternally changing. Instead of sounding like a mere well-crafted loop, "Ressac I" instead feels like a precarious and ephemeral bit of heaven that I wish would extend into infinity.
This latest opus from INA GRM director François Bonnet’s Kassel Jaeger alias is a characteristically enigmatic and conceptual affair, as its Latin title means "under the thing, under the substance, under the matter." However, it apparently also doubles as a reference to a chapter in Victor Hugo’s 1866 novel Toilers of the Sea which recounts a man’s struggle for survival in the aftermath of a shipwreck. While the deeper significance of the latter association admittedly eludes me, it was clearly an inspiration for Bonnet, as the album’s arc gradually evolves from more cavernous, subterranean sounds towards the ambiance of a deserted island. Unsurprisingly, the journey between those two points is a beguiling and hallucinatory rabbit hole of shadowy mystery, as Bonnet’s talent for conjuring vivid, immersive, and otherworldly soundscapes has few peers in the realm of production and sound design and his visions are always unique and imaginative.
I have been a fairly devoted fan of Kassel Jaeger’s eerie and abstract dreamscapes for a while now, but it took me a bit longer than usual to warm to this one, as its early moments have the feel of a noise-gnawed dark ambient album recorded in the Paris Catacombs. Thankfully, Bonnet soon transcends those gloomy beginnings, but they are certainly a thematically appropriate place to start, as he describes his vision for this album as "the concrete beneath the concrete...the immanence of sounds…their becoming…a driving force, like a tide."
With a debut EP and four albums released since their inception 15 years ago, Chicago supergroup Anatomy of Habit have not stopped evolving and mutating, and Paired Sentinels demonstrates this continued evolution in occasionally drastic ways. Fronted by Mark Solotroff (Bloodyminded, Intrinsic Action, The Fortieth Day) on vocals and synths, the five-piece band’s meshing of almost all forms of "heavy" music continues to take a turn to almost conventional music forms, but never at the cost of their intensity.
That word, "intensity" has been an appropriate descriptor for AoH's work since their debut LP in 2011. Given the noise/power electronics/hardcore adjacent personnel, that comes as no surprise. Besides Solotroff, the band features Isidro Reyes (a member of all three of the aforementioned Solotroff projects) on metal percussion, guitarist Alex Latus (Still), Sam Wagster (Mute Duo) on bass guitar and lap steel, and drummer Skyler Rowe (Mute Duo, Still). For all the pummeling heaviness, a greater amount of subtly and nuance started to creep in on 2021’s Even if it Takes a Lifetime and 2023’s Black Openings, which becomes even more notable here.
