- Anthony D'Amico
- Albums and Singles
In 1965, John Cage "composed" a piece for Alvin Lucier that debuted at Brandeis University's then-new Rose Art Museum (Lucier was employed as Brandeis's chorus director at the time). The score for the piece was characteristically Cage-ian, as it was essentially just "correspondence and notes regarding the preparation of magnetic tape" and left plenty of room for chance and spontaneity to play significant roles. While Cage settled upon a total of 88 loops to mirror the number of keys on a piano, the contents and length of those loops were left very open-ended (as was the duration of the piece itself, as its beginning and ending were determined by the arrival and departure of the audience). There was also an element of mischief to the piece as well, as Cage's original vision included loops as long as 45 feet that stretched over a fountain and also included instructions for what to do when some of the loops inevitably broke mid-performance. Unsurprisingly, performances of "Rozart Mix" are quite rare for those reasons, but Aaron Dilloway was recently lucky enough to land the time and resources necessary to perform his own personalized interpretation and there is literally no one on earth who could be better suited for such an endeavor.
This album's origins date back to 2020, as Dilloway was contacted by the John Cage Trust and Acra, NY's Wave Farm about staging a fresh performance of the piece. The following year, Dilloway spent "a wonderful and intense week" at Bard College researching Cage's notes and materials, then performed a 6-hour version at the Trust with the assistance of Rose Actor-Engel, Twig Harper, C. Lavender, Quintron, Robert Turman, and John Wiese. According to Dilloway, the performance involved "12 individually amplified reel to reel tape machines, placed around multiple floors of a house, playing 88 tape loops spliced together by 5 to 175 splices" and "created an overwhelming and joyous environment of cacophonous sound." Amusingly, that performance just leapt to the top of my ever-expanding list of "missed concert" regrets, as I used to live a mere 10 minutes from Bard College. Alas. On the bright side, the durational constraints of vinyl have distilled that performance to a mere 16 minutes of surrealist magic that I can now experience at home. It is certainly less immersive and hypnotic than a 6-hour dose would be, but the new brevity imbues the piece with the "all killer, no filler" feel of a great noise set, so I am definitely not complaining.
- Anthony D'Amico
- Albums and Singles
This unique quartet unusually originated as a collaboration between two French photographers, as Frédéric D. Oberland and Grégory Dargent performed some improvised duo concerts a few years back to accompany screenings and exhibits in Cairo, Beirut, and elsewhere. The duo was then expanded into a quartet to include Lebanese bassist Tony Elieh and darbuka player Wassim Halal and a three-day "improvised sound bacchanalia" ensued. The foursome describe themselves as a "post-anything quartet featuring multi-instrumentalists from the Mediterranean inland Sea" and share an ambitious vision of "new folklore for a devastated planet" and "tangos danced on the glowing ashes of our days." In less colorfully poetic terms, SIHR is a visceral and freewheeling collision of Arabic percussion, snatches of Middle Eastern melodies, timeless folk instrumentation, and ambitiously weird/mangled/abused synth sounds. In fact, literally everyone other than Halal plays a synth of some kind, which makes for a deeply strange collision of traditional music and outré electronics. While SIHR only fully transcends its improvisatory roots on the more melodic and sax-driven "YouGotALight," the album as a whole is an oft-fascinating outlier and this quartet truly never resembles any other improv ensemble that I have encountered.
The opening "Oui-Ja'aa" is a fairly representative plunge into this foursome's bizarre collision of disparate aesthetics, as Halal's clattering percussion builds into a hypnotic groove while a maniacally insistent synth figure wanders and trills all over the place. It eventually becomes a bit more melodic in the second half, but the endlessly propulsive and shapeshifting groove is the highlight by a landslide, as it sounds like it could be a live recording of Can on a particular great and adventurous night. Aside from that, "Oui-Ja'aa" also sounds at times like Catherine Christer Hennix has just ridden a war elephant into a Middle Eastern street fair. The following "Enuma Ellis" cools things down a bit, however, resembling something between a strain of droning oud-driven desert rock and a ritualistic street procession gnawed by pulsing swells of howling distorted electric guitar (Oberland's handiwork, I imagine). "YouGotALight" then further reduces the intensity to a sublime simmer, as Oberland's alto sax sensuously weaves a melody across a subdued landscape of quivering and rippling minor key arpeggios, dubwise percussion, melodic bass, and spasms of electric guitar. The final minute is especially wonderful, as a melodic crescendo unexpectedly drifts in. Frankly, it sounds like the best song that Barn Owl never recorded.
- Creaig Dunton
- Albums and Singles
Alex Keller's newest album's title, as well as many of the individual song names, are direct references to the CIA's notorious mind control MKUltra project, with thematic linkage due to Keller's use of electromagnetic sounds and interference, which was also part of those experiments. While this would almost be indicative of a harsh noise endurance test, Sleep room is quite the opposite. It may be a bit raw at times, but Keller's singular approach has a massively impressive depth and complexity to it, both stimulating curiosity as to what the sounds actually are and aesthetically engaging at the same time.
Keller's employment of electromagnetic transducers takes the form of pieces extracted from other technological sources, such as old modems, network servers, LED lightbulbs, and even a bug zapper and stun gun. Manipulated in real time, rather than just processing existing recordings, means that Keller is able to truly treat these as instruments, rather than just sound sources that act as fodder for effects pedals and plug-ins.
- Creaig Dunton
- Albums and Singles
David Jackman proceeds through the latest two entries in Die Stadt's current subscription series of his new work with some sense of continuity with recent works as well as the first two installments of the series (Darcknes and Quietude, both as Organum Electronics). However, and perhaps most clearly indicated by the different moniker he is using, the two discs emphasize different facets of Jackman's art, while still representing linked parts of a long-form project.
As Organum Electronics, Noughwhere is the more forceful of the pair. Obviously utilizing electronic instrumentation throughout, Jackman begins with an organ-like sustained tone, but soon incorporates more abrasive electronic sounds. Throughout the 56-minute-long piece, the tones are often overshadowed by his use of the resonating electronic noise, which makes this the more challenging of the two albums. He does use one clearly non-electronic element throughout: the massive tolling bell that has been featured in much of his recent work. Even that, however, receives some level of sonic manipulation, with him intensifying the sound into something even heavier than its natural qualities.
- Anthony D'Amico
- Albums and Singles
As far as I can tell, this is probably Diamanda Galás' tenth live album to date and it documents a pair of 2017 performances in Chicago and Seattle (Galás' previous live album, At Saint Thomas the Apostle Harlem, dates from the previous year). For the uninitiated, that probably sounds like an excessive number of live albums, but the improvisatory nature of Diamanda's art ensures that every single live performance is a truly singular event. Of course, actually experiencing Diamanda Galás live (an essential experience) is not quite the same as hearing a recording of the performance, much like watching a professionally shot video of a burning house is not quite the same as actually being inside one. That said, it is still a wild and compelling experience nonetheless and the lines between studio albums and live albums are increasingly academic given her volcanic spontaneity and preference for single-take recordings. The similarities to jazz do not end there, however, as Diamanda Galás in Concert is devoted to radical piano-and-voice interpretations of an eclectic and fascinating array of unconventional standards.
- Anthony D'Amico
- Albums and Singles
This latest album from Vicki Bennett, her first since 2018, is a characteristically dizzying and multilayered collage fantasia drawn from her currently touring AV performance "The Library of Babel." Fittingly, the album title has a dual meaning (either "abundance" or "copy"), but the deeper conceptual vein lies in the AV performance's title nod to a Jorge Luis Borges short story. In that story, "isolated librarians" struggle to "find meaningful texts amidst an overwhelming number of nonsensical or irrelevant books." Naturally, that nicely mirrors our own existential struggle to make sense of life while drowning in vast amounts of information, which Bennett colorfully portrays as "a journey through cinema and sound where the actors are set adrift from their story, left with pure experience." Fans of Bennett's previous work will find a lot of familiar samples, melodies, and themes set adrift from previous songs as well, as COPIA feels like a fever dream tour of the project's discography distilled into one memorably unhinged plunge down the psychedelic rabbit hole. Such self-cannibalism is very much in character for the project, of course, but a few of COPIA's fresh variations on a theme rank among Bennett's most mesmerizing work.
- Anthony D'Amico
- Albums and Singles
This Swiss percussionist has been quietly carving out a very cool and unique niche for himself over the last decade, as he continually finds unusual conceptual scenarios to combine with his virtuosic playing. I greatly enjoyed 2021's aptly titled Locked Grooves, but had not yet delved too deeply into his earlier work, so I had missed the first installment of Hidden Tracks: 2017's Basel – Genève. For that album, Sartorius brought his drumsticks along for a 10-day, 270km hike along Switzerland's Jura Ridgeway Trail and recorded improvised beats on whatever intriguing sound sources he encountered (trees, empty silos, corn stalks, etc.). On this latest installment, his journey is now vertical, as Sartorius kept a similar beat diary as he climbed from the Italian village of Domodossola "to the peak of Weissmies (4017m above sea level) in the Swiss Valais." In theory, that upped the game considerably constraint-wise, as Sartorius gradually leaves behind both humanity and trees in his ascent, but that comparative dearth of available sound sources was no match for his resourceful inventiveness.
- Creaig Dunton
- Albums and Singles
This is an
odd collaboration in multiple ways. Andrew Quitter (Suburbia Melting, Regosphere) and Jonathan Canady (Deathpile, Dead World) is not the noise excursion I would have expected based on the artists involved. Instead, it is more of a deconstructed sludgy rock/metal album, with production as influenced by noise as it is cinematic sound design.
- Anthony D'Amico
- Albums and Singles
I am always eager to hear anything new from the reliably weird and inventive Klara Lewis, but the unpredictability of her collaborative releases is especially pronounced. Notably, Salt Water is the first of those collaborations in which I was not previously familiar with her creative foil. It also seems like quite a leftfield pairing on paper, given that Yuki Tsujii is best known as the guitarist for a hard-to-categorize Japanese rock band based in London (Bo Ningen). Fortunately, everything made sense once I learned that Tsujii is now based in Stockholm (Lewis is Swedish) and that he had previously collaborated with both Faust and Keiji Haino (his primal, convulsive playing here would be right at home on an album by the latter). Also of note: Lewis is described as a "loop finder" in the album's description, which feels like an extremely apt description of her role on Salt Water. Unsurprisingly, the loops that she found are extremely cool, resulting in an album that often sounds like scrabbling guitar noise assaulting an eclectic array of '60s exotica, classical, and film score samples.
- Anthony D'Amico
- Albums and Singles
This is the vinyl debut from American Primitive-inspired French guitarist Raoul Eden, but it previously surfaced as a self-released CD back in 2023 (a previous “incarnation,” if you will). That makes the chronology of Eden’s evolution a little blurry, as his other album (Anima, released on Scissor Tail) was recorded that same year. In any case, Incarnation is an absolute tour de force, as Eden tries his damndest to fill the void left by Jack Rose’s passing and gamely spices up his “primitive psychedelic blues” vision by incorporating Indian, Arabic, Turkish, Moroccan, and Taureg influences. Obviously, the solo steel string guitarist tradition of looking to the East for cool ideas goes back to at least Robbie Basho, but Eden executes that assimilation quite beautifully (and unusually seamlessly). In fact, Eden executes just about everything beautifully and that is the bit that elevates Incarnation into something quite striking and singular, as he brings an ecstatic intensity to almost every single one of these six pieces, resulting in a strain of fingerstyle guitar that often gloriously feels like a runaway train leaving a rain of sparks in its wake.
- Anthony D'Amico
- Albums and Singles
This latest full-length from Australian composer Madeleine Cocolas is billed as a companion piece to 2022’s acclaimed Spectral, as the two albums have something of a conceptual yin/yang relationship: Spectral was devoted to “evoking memories and emotions,” while Bodies “is about being present in your body.” The title also has a dual meaning this time around, as Cocolas sought to explore “similarities between bodies of water and human bodies” and “blur the boundaries between them.” As is the case with most conceptual inspirations behind instrumental albums, it is hard to say how much of that actually comes through in the music, but it makes for interesting contextual background and it seems to have triggered a significant creative evolution, as Madeleine makes beautiful use of manipulated field recordings. That element alone is enough to set her apart from other ambient/drone artists in the Room40 milieu, but I was also struck by her talents for sound design and virtuosic ability to interweave countless moving parts in dynamically compelling ways. At its best, Bodies feels like a minor deep listening/headphone masterpiece.
