05 March 2023

Duncan Edwards

Albums and Singles

Archangels has an unhurried pace which I find deeply satisfying. John Bence shapes electronics, voice, piano, percussion and orchestration into dense and haunting forms, and although he creates some dynamic and challenging sounds, he never forgets that human ears need melodies and tunes. The spiritual concerns underpinning this creation also make it a good stepping off point to investigate and learn about a variety of concepts which have occupied people throughout human history.

Thrill Jockey

It is no accident that the album begins with a piece entitled "Psalm 34.4," a simple form of which states "I sought the Lord, and he heard me, And delivered me from all my fears." Quite what Bence is getting at here matters more for him than me, because my main concern is that Archangels is a genuinely intriguing and enjoyable album to listen to. Although given his victory over addiction, perhaps the album documents Bence's interest in his spiritual health, or even his gratitude for divine help. In an increasingly secular world, where such matters as diet, finances, physical fitness, and relationships blare incessantly for our attention, Archangels sounds like one man listening to himself and searching for faith.

Where Bence's search has led I am not going to surmise, and nor will I lay out the meaning behind each of the fascinating track names on this album. To give the gist, and hopefully a taste to explore more, let me first refer to "Metratron, Archangel of Kether," where we are plunged into shuddering dynamics and a brooding atmosphere of sacred mystery. This atmosphere then changes by blending a distant siren or children's voices or the squeaking wheel of a wooden cart, with an oddly disturbing marching beat. Metatron or "The Youth'' is the angel who led the people of Israel through the wilderness after their exodus from Egypt. Kether, meaning "crown," being the topmost of the sephirot of the Tree of Life in Kabbalah, lies between Chokhmah and Binah and it sits above Tifere. The definition of Kabbalah varies according to traditions and aims of followers, from its origin in medieval Judaism to its later adaptations in Western esotericism (Christian Kabbalah) and Hermetic Qabalah. Whether the composer is a follower of any or all of these traditions is unclear, but he definitely manages to compose music which does justice to his chosen topic; no easy task.

Throughout the album, Bence adeptly blends his chosen elements majestically and violently, and he uses dissonance and juxtaposition with enough restraint to give space for the music to convey awe, emotion, fear, and mystery. On "Gabriel, Archangel of Yesod," a female voice, appears to signal a joyous event with subtle yet richly ecstatic tones that are entirely appropriate—since Yesod means the foundation upon which God has built the world and Gabriel, herald of visions, is the Archangel who appeared to shepherds to alert them of the birth of Christ. The piano repetition intro to "Michael, Archangel of Hod" works superbly before being joined by sonorous male voices which bring a sense of comfort and peace. Both these tracks are superb but I would like them to have been several minutes longer. Not to focus on any one piece of music, but "Raphael, Archangel of Tiphareth" is quite stunning, with a densely shimmering electronic foundation upon which deeply resonant voices are laid. The moment when the voice cracks slightly is genuinely eerie.

I have read that Archangels was created out of a regime of daily prayer and meditation. Actually it said "ritual" not regime but I'm changing that because the word ritual gets on my nerves if it hints at anything occult. Apparently Bence relied somewhat on Damien Echols's book Angels and Archangels when composing a couple of these tracks, and his approach seems, shall we say, inclusive rather than selective or dismissive. Hopefully it stops short of embracing the occult, which in the minds of it's advocates and followers refers to supernatural beliefs and practices outside the scope of religion and science, I tend to think that nothing falls outside religion and science: be that otherworldly phenomena, magic, mysticism, extra-sensory perception, parapsychology, or whatever. Then again, my idea of a golden dawn involves being thankful for the new day, yogurt and granola, even bacon, coffee, pancakes, and a walk with the dogs. The combined wit and wisdom of Helena Blavatsky, William Wynn Westcott and Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, Paschal Beverly Randolph, Emma Hardinge Britten, Arthur Edward Waite, Aleister Crowley, Dion Fortune, Israel Regardie, Gerald Gardner, and, I don't know, L. Ron Hubbard, plus ayahuasca, crystals, and magick (however you wish to spell it) isn't going to help with that.

John Bence may be banishing his demons, evoking divine assistance, doing both, or something else entirely. Certainly he is going about making some extraordinary music.

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05 March 2023

Anthony D'Amico

Albums and Singles

This latest enigmatic find from Arizona's eternally far out and fascinating Was Ist Das? label will be an absolute revelation for anyone who misses Natural Snow Buildings as much as I do. Otherworld is apparently the debut release for this project, but any further details beyond that are non-existent other than the fact that these four pieces were recorded by someone named "Joe" in 2022. While the label's description name-checks a few '70s psych heavy-hitters as reference points in addition to Natural Snow Buildings (Third Ear Band and Popul Vuh), those elements manifest themselves much more subtly, as Otherworld is an oft-transcendent plunge into folk horror-inspired cosmic drone sorcery. That all-encompassing devotion to heavyweight drone majesty is also where Myriad Valley departs from Mehdi and Solange's path, as Joe does not let himself get distracted by any songcraft aspirations, opting instead to focus entirely on crafting massive, sustained psychotropic drones that feel like ancient field recordings from some remote mountain cult hellbent on opening an extra-dimensional portal through sheer vibrational magic.

Was ist Das?

The opening "Hanging Crystal Garden" makes for quite a mesmerizing introduction to Myriad Valley, as slow waves of buzzing tanpura lap at the shores of an occult nightmare. The buzzing tanpura drones are a ubiquitous feature throughout the album, as is ritualistic hand percussion (in this case, something like rattling bells), but this particular piece has an especially otherworldly and sinister vibe due to the strangled dissonance of the pipes and the way the notes increasingly bleed together and dissolve into sharp feedback. Notably, "Hanging Crystal Garden" is the album's shortest piece (at eight minutes) despite being the most inspired, but that makes sense given its nerve-jangling intensity. The much longer second piece is considerably calmer and more radiant (at first, anyway), almost calling to mind a restorative early morning yogic meditation to clear the mind of the previous night's cosmic horror, human sacrifice, and demon summoning.

While I do enjoy the piece's "slow-motion sunrise burning through the morning mist" feel, it definitely starts to overstay its welcome a bit, but that lull is thankfully obliterated by an incredibly strong finale of ritualistic processional drums and a mind-melting phantasmagoric feast of flanged-out drone heaviness. The remaining two pieces do not offer many fresh surprises in the wake of that opening one-two punch, but they are similarly enjoyable and the lazily undulating tapestry of strums and buzzes that forms the foundation of the title piece is particularly beautiful. While I imagine some drone heads will will find this album a bit too loose, dissonant, or one-dimensional to fully connect with, I am not one of them, as I very much appreciate Myriad Valley's single-minded and unswerving devotion to sheer buzzing physicality and transcendence through sustained psychotropic drone-age.

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26 February 2023

Anthony D'Amico

Albums and Singles

This quadruple LP boxed set is likely to be an absolute revelation for Laraaji fans, as Numero Group has combined his landmark 1978 debut (Celestial Vibration) with the equivalent of three lost albums recorded around the same time. The albums in question surfaced in 2021 when some acetates from an abandoned storage locker were auctioned off and passed through a flea market and Ebay before being spotted by eagle-eyed college student Jake Fischer, who snapped them up for $114 after recognizing Laraaji's given name (Edward Larry Gordon, the name he was still using at the time of Celestial Vibration's release). Amusingly, even Laraaji himself is a bit mystified by the provenance of these recordings, as the documentation states that they were recorded at a studio in Long Island 200 miles from where the Celestial Vibration sessions took place (ZBS in Fort Edward). While it remains unclear whether the Fort Edward tapes were merely transferred in Long Island or whether these recordings actually originate from a different session altogether in Queens, they are unmistakably Laraaji and they are frequently as good or better than the album that actually got released. Finds like this are exactly why there are Discogs fiends hunting for lost private press New Age music, as the late '70s and early '80s were a golden age for bedroom visionaries who thanklessly explored the cosmos with little hope of ever reaching an audience. Laraaji deserves a particularly special place in that pantheon, as he may have been the most forward-thinking visionary of them all and also took his autoharp to the goddamn streets to expand the consciousness of unwitting strangers.

Numero Group

The story of how former Baptist/Apollo Theater comedian/cult film actor/Marvin Gaye collaborator/street musician/West Village folk scenester Ed "Flash" Gordon eventually transformed into Laraaji is far too lengthy for me to do it any justice here, but one especially significant event was that Gordon became very interested in Eastern spirituality after his role in Putney Swope stirred up doubts about the righteousness of the path he was on. A "paranormal sound-hearing experience" and a fateful decision to trade his guitar in for an autoharp at a pawnshop soon followed, as well as the similarly fateful purchase of a contact pickup and some effects pedals. While the autoharp was an entirely new instrument for Gordon, he dove wholeheartedly into exploring open tunings and effects and quickly arrived at a new sound he dubbed "Celestial Vibration." Having reached that point, I suspect Laraaji would have been totally content to play in parks, dance/yoga studios, and holistic centers around his community forever, as getting a record deal probably does not seem all that important once you have already figured out how to channel celestial vibrations. Exterior forces intervened, however, and Gordon met a lawyer named Stuart White who was absolutely enthralled with his music and eager to start up an independent record label (SWN). That resulted in the release of Celestial Vibration (now regarded as a classic), but not many people noticed and the label soon folded. Thankfully, Laraaji met another motivated fan soon after (Brian Eno) and the two eventually collaborated on 1980's Ambient 3 (Day Of Radiance). I am tempted to say that the rest is history, but Laraaji's work only started getting regularly anthologized and reissued in the last decade.

Given the volume of material and the sprawling, improvisatory nature of the performances (each piece spans an entire side of vinyl), Segue To Infinity defies any easy generalizations, but Celestial Vibration's "Bethlehem" provides the best condensed tour of the Laraaji aesthetic that one could reasonably expect. The heart of Laraaji's "Celestial Vibration" vision, of course, are the dreamily shimmering waves that radiate outward from his chord sweeps. In fact, I half-expected that this collection would mostly be four hours of that (which would have been fine). Instead, however, those admittedly gorgeous New Age/ambient passages are regularly interspersed with forays into wilder, more avant-garde territory. In just "Bethlehem" alone, for example, there is a section that sounds like John Cage violently attacking a prepared piano's innards (as well as another interlude that feels like Steve Reich on a tropical vacation). Elsewhere, there are passages that almost feel like free jazz, some kind of Ellen Fullman creation, wind chimes, water dripping onto a pan, or a psychotropic jaw harp hoedown (the final minutes of "Pervading"). The one consistent theme seems to be that nearly every sound that Laraaji produces feels resonant or visceral in all the right ways. Beyond that, the other big revelation is the strength of the six previously unheard pieces. In fact, I suspect Celestial Vibration would still be considered a classic even if it had been replaced in its entirety with any of the other pieces here (none were intended for release, by the way, as studio banter is included). Hell, Celestial Vibration might even have become more of a classic if "Koto" or any of the "Kalimba" pieces had made the cut. This feels like it could have been a goddamn greatest hits retrospective. And maybe it is, albeit only accidentally. Given that this is a characteristically lavish Numero Group set with all the usual accouterments (photos, insightful liner notes, etc.), I expect every serious Laraaji fan is already snapping up the vinyl, but the digital version would probably be an excellent entry point for the curious. While I already enjoyed Laraaji beforehand and recognized him as the most unique and fascinating figure to emerge from the New Age underground, I definitely needed Segue To Infinity to show me that I was still not appreciating him nearly enough.

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26 February 2023

Anthony D'Amico

Albums and Singles

This latest opus from INA GRM's François J. Bonnet is loosely inspired by René Daumal's unfinished philosophical novel Mount Analogue (1952), which recounts an imagined expedition in which explorers hunt for a mountain that can "only be perceived by the application of obscure knowledge." It has been a few decades since I last read Mount Analogue or watched the film it partially inspired (Jodorowsky's Holy Mountain) so my memory of both is blurry at best, yet that did not impair my appreciation for the album, as Bonnet characteristically channeled the theme in his own inventive and compelling way. The gist is that familiar sounds and structures become increasingly rare as the album unfolds, but Bonnet had a deeper philosophical agenda as well, as Shifted in Dreams is a meditation on how our current world is in a "blurred and uncertain state where the reality of signs loses its consistency while, paradoxically, the reality of senses and impressions becomes imperative, obvious." Bonnet is clearly not a fan of that situation, unsurprisingly, and refers to it as "the reality of demons." Putting aside the death of meaning and general existential horror of our times, however, the dissolving of the familiar is wonderfully fertile creative ground for a Kassel Jaeger album, as Bonnet is exceptionally good at layered and evocative sound design. This is a beautifully crafted headphone album (but probably only for those armed with the obscure knowledge of how to listen deeply).

Shelter Press

In keeping with the central theme of dissolving familiarity, the opening title piece is the most conventionally musical stretch of the album, resembling a warm but melancholy organ mass. There is admittedly a lot of tape hiss and murk obscuring the sound of the organ, but that is probably as close to the recognizable physical world as this album ever gets and that situation does not last long at all (the piece plunges down a rabbit hole of mindfuckery after a few minutes). The general vibe is best described as "I am in a numbing fog of painkillers in a cathedral during an air raid, but everything is in slow motion and also made of crystal." While those crystalline sounds remain a regular occurrence for the duration of the album (Bonnet got his hands on a Cristal Baschet), just about everything else is an elusive and shape-shifting fog of field recordings, asynchronous loops, analog synth, processed guitar, and studio wizardry.

The album's centerpiece is "Dissipation of Light," which feels like a floating world of gently pulsing, flickering, and dissolving melodies that steadily becomes more haunted and tense before unexpectedly blossoming into a cosmic fantasia. That piece also kicks off a great mid-abum run, as the following "Gullintoppa" and "Sôlên I" are highlights as well. The former combines slow, lovely chord swells with texturally vivid field recordings to evoke the feeling of a sun-dappled autumn reverie in a park while more unsettling and ominous sounds increasingly gnaw away in the periphery. "Sôlên I," on the other hand, unexpectedly transforms from deep exhalations and electronic drips into a buzzing, chirping, and psychotropic synth dronescape. Again, however, all is not right with the world, as it also sounds like there is an orchestral nightmare blearily howling from a nearby void and maybe even another slow-motion air strike as well (one of the sounds lies somewhere between "streaking fighter jet" and "blurred and softened air raid siren"). As for the remaining pieces, they call to mind everything from a chopped & screwed improvisation on a broken calliope ("Barca Solare") to a hapless brass band frozen in suspended animation ("Allée des Brouillards"). That is not an experience that many other albums can promise, but the real magic of this album lies in its vivid, exacting, and inventive execution. Given Bonnet's central role in contemporary sound art, the fact that he has a real gift for crafting richly immersive sound worlds is hardly breaking news, but Shifted in Dreams is unquestionably one of his more inspired statements.

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26 February 2023

Creaig Dunton

Albums and Singles

Written and recorded immediately following 2021's Even if it Takes a Lifetime, Chicago's Anatomy of Habit's newest album is sonically similar, however it does not sound like the second half of a double album. Instead, Black Openings is a stand-alone work that features the same sense of consistency but overall sees the band further refining and expanding their sound, and in this case returning to the bleakness that pervaded their earlier works so brilliantly.

self-released

Listening to Black Openings, I realized that the closest band similar to Anatomy of Habit was the short-lived God, helmed by Kevin Martin.  Both are "supergroups" (in the sense that they featured members from various bands from different, yet complimentary genres) and both balanced intensity and complexity perfectly.  The most significant distinction here is that while both bands draw heavily from various shades of rock, avant garde, electronic, and noise music, AoH forego the jazz component and delve more into electronic music.  The driving force behind AoH's sound is defacto band leader and vocalist Mark Solotroff (Bloodyminded, Intrinsic Action, and a multitude of other projects): his commanding voice is always identifiable and makes for a commanding presence in all three of the album's songs.

No time is wasted in the epic 18-minute-long opener "Black Openings," where Anatomy of Habit—a band that's no stranger to epic length material—locks into the album's distinctive sound. Alex Latus's layered guitar and heavy bass from multi-instrumentalist Sam Wagster form the foundation as Skyler Rowe's drums and Isidro Reyes's percussion creeps in.  Once all the elements are established, it is AoH at their most post-punk sounding, with clear influences of Killing Joke and Joy Division to their sound.  Latus' guitars get heavier as Solotroff's distinctive vocals arrive.  Over the lengthy duration the band eventually disperses into a more spacious electronic soundscape before coming back together even more intensely, with especially aggressive vocals, leading to an appropriately dramatic climax.

The two shorter (relatively speaking) songs that make up the second half of the album are more polarized in mood, with "Formal Consequences" representing the band's lighter sound, and "Breathing Through Bones" the heavier.  Even though "Formal Consequences" opens with martial dirge elements, Rowe's vibraphone hints in a different direction, with the layers of synth and acoustic guitar solidifying this shift.  Even Solotroff's vocals are more traditionally sung, and while things eventually transition to a heavy metal chug combined with junk percussion, the bleakness is held a bit more at bay here.  Not so much on "Breathing Through Bones," where dour guitar and clanking metal are met with slow, commanding vocals.  The piece builds dramatically throughout, with layered synths and the band at their heaviest before ending with a pummeling conclusion.

While I thought Even if it Takes a Lifetime hinted at lighter, less oppressive moods by the end of the record, that would not seem to be the case on Black Openings.  Instead, the band is back to their relentless intensity, but one with enough beauty and nuance within the darkness to give it an excellent sense of depth.  It is one of those records that is viscerally intense, but with a dazzling array of detail within its intensely dark shadows.

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26 February 2023

Duncan Edwards

Albums and Singles

Here is a stunning history of Peruvian sound poems from 1972-2021. The album concentrates on material which has been recorded and edited, and yet showcases the compositional technique and sound organization across the spectrum of the discipline. It's an important and refreshing collection of 22 inherently absurd musical pieces, accompanied by seriously good liner notes.

Buh

Sound poetry can arguably be traced to oral poetry traditions, but I'm more inclined to believe it emerged from the Dadaist reaction to the horrific carnage of World War One, specifically through Richard Huelsenbeck and Tristan Tzara. Certainly it progressed through the 20th century parallel with the evolution of recording and editing technology. As mentioned, The Verbal Matter covers all the evolving styles, including montage, verbal dexterity, algorithms and computational parameters, and the use of AI.

The Verbal Matter has myriad brilliant examples of montage technique, juxtaposition and simultaneity, to really ignite one's imagination. The childlike innocence of Mario Montalbetti's "Music For Quince Grullas Tied On Their Paws" is a lovely start, with children's voices, piano, and upright bass, creating a spirit of playful innocence. Quite a contrast to Carlos Estela's "Unco Erpo,'' which is more like hearing snatches of a phone call as you lay barely conscious in the dirt of a local gangster's remote pig farm awaiting your fate. I love every track on this record, but am particularly taken with the hallucinatory one-two punch of a pair of tracks. Florentino Diaz Ahumada's "Wind Poem," a weaving, teasing piece of music, sent me off on a mental journey: sitting at a cafe in a walled medieval city during a festival of death or fertility, listening to the ghost of an ex-spy, and suddenly realizing the coffee has been spiked. It is a master stroke to follow that with the sublime jolt of Luisa Fernando Linda's "State of Emergency (Commonplace)," a mindblowing piece of bizarre blurred vocal echoes, bookended by sirens. Having said that, "Pop es cia'' by Giancarlo Huapaya and Omar Córdovar is perhaps the wildest piece, with voices competing for attention through a fog of magnetic hum, and electronic bleeps whirring as crazily as high-speed Conet number stations bouncing off one of Michael Collins's fillings on the dark side of the moon.

Vocal performance skill is represented here by several phonetic and concrete conceptual works, none more astounding than Omar Aramayo's "Tribute to Marcela Castro," parts of which genuinely sound as if he's gorging himself on acidic radioactive dust seeping from the froth-corrupted lungs of a diseased monk or achieving an ecstatic state by choking down a dish of raw frogs. On "Sensual Reading Architecture: Persistent Music," Enrique Verástegui uses an algorithmic framework in which to produce the insanely sonorous equivalent of a monk required to endlessly repeat modal yodeling of an eye chart. Artificial intelligence is used to create a couple of pieces, including the fantastic space age tones of Francisco Mariotti's "Dada Manifesto 1918 Reordered 1985," which sounds remarkably how I imagine a suitably shell shocked version of Robert the Robot from Fireball XL5 might sound, and the brief final manic "Hypercommunication" from Luis Alvarado. Alvarado, founder of Buh Records, has compiled this fine collection and contributed essential listening notes.

Tragically, in 2022/23, Peru is ruled by a dictatorship where security forces massacre those who dare to protest. An absurd situation and not at all refreshing. Naturally people try to carry on living and working. Respect to Buh for doing just that and producing one of the best albums of 2022, or indeed any year.

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26 February 2023

Duncan Edwards

Albums and Singles

The wordless devotional singing and giddy organ accompaniment of Delphine Dora's Hymnes Apophatiques led me to explore the Morc catalog. Therein I developed an audio crush on Bingo Trappers (who were composing an ode to Mimi Parker a decade ago), discovered Lowered's heartbreaking Music For Empty Rooms, arrived better late than never to an appreciation of the drone folk of both Pifkin and Roxane Métayer, but firstly dived into the sweetly sinister debut album from Luster.

Morc

The group create uncluttered yet foreboding and mournful atmospheres from their distinctive singing and bass, cello, drums, flute, guitar, harmonium, and violin playing. I must confess that I often second guess the running order of album tracks and so it was, initially, with the eight songs on Luster, and in particular the opener "All is Dark Inside" with a funereal pace and shockingly simple rhymes ("serious" with "mysterious") which struck me as better moved to the final place, if not discarded altogether since the actual closing song "Out of Time" works so well.

Anyway, I am glad to be wrong because "All is Dark Inside" provides a solid thumping contrast to the rest of this album. This is vital, because as soon as track two, "L'idéal," kicks in—with harmonium swirling, bass line prominent yet delicate, and vocals balancing dread and purity—I cease caring about running orders or indeed about anything much at all. From that point I just bathe my head in the dreamy indie-tronic atmosphere.

It is cool that "Archeologist" starts with a catchy guitar loop and ethereal call and response vocals: imagine the folk tune "Scarborough Faye" as an alternate template for the snippet of Mike Oldfield's twinkling music which surfaces during The Exorcist. To then have a cello echo and answer phrases works superbly and proves beyond any doubt, if any were remaining, that the cello is the instrument closest to the human voice.

Similarly, the flute measures and guitar repetition on "Espace, éther" perfectly balance the eerie and hypnotic incantation with a sparse, deliberate, indietronic pulse similar to the slower paced parts of Land Observations' album The Grand Tour, ("Ode to Viennese Streets" for example). The standard stays high throughout Luster with "Crepéscle" and "Angst," resembling crystal clear spell chants heard from three fields away, when a fever dream has you unable to decipher your mother's words from three feet away. Plain old repetition is the key to "I Fall" managing, like the best archaic nursery rhymes, to sound both childlike and threatening. As aforementioned, "Out of Time" is a brilliant end track—maybe the standout—upping the passion, or blood, in the voices, perfectly paced, with mesmerized lyrics circling like buzzards.

Apparently Luster are supposed to have been creating a record for ten years, putting aside the members' other projects (the stark doom drone of Annelies Monseré, the stumbling lofi garage beats of Joe Speedboat, and—since I've never heard them—whatever Mote sounds like). I'm glad they got around to it eventually. Genre descriptors are not always helpful but terms such as chamber folk and hypnodrone are maybe apt, but there is something rather pleasing here which defies easy description and is all the better for it. I'm sure it's not easy to make intriguing music which also sounds clear and simple. Luster has achieved that, while combining a dark edge, skilled composition, and a deceptively light touch realism that illustrates well the spirit of Morc.

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12 February 2023

Anthony D'Amico

Albums and Singles

This stellar collaboration springs from a conversation that Scott Morgan and Lawrence English once had about especially "rich sources" for electronic music composition. Unsurprisingly, that discussion led to the inspiration behind much of English's recent solo work: a 19th century pipe organ housed at the Old Museum in his native Brisbane. Colours Of Air is often quite different from English's drone-inspired solo fare, however, as he and Morgan sifted "the swells and drones of the organ for every shivering shade of radiance" and found "flickering infinities in ancient configurations of wind, brass, stone, and dust." In less poetic terms, that means that these eight color-themed pieces "reduce and expand" English's pipe organ recordings into a hallucinatory fantasia enhanced by Morgan's talents for elegantly textured sound design and submerged, slow-motion dub techno pulses. Obviously, promising-sounding collaborations between electronic music luminaries are a dime a dozen, but this is one of the rare ones that feels like an inspired departure from expected terrain and something greater than the sum of its parts. While I suspect my perception is at least partially colored by the album description and the timeless majesty and religious nature of old pipe organs, the best moments of this album beautifully evoke what I would imagine light filtering through stained glass would sound like if I had been blessed with synesthesia.

kranky

The opening "Cyan" is the album's masterpiece, as it slowly builds from the "suspended animation" feel of a single looping organ chord into a slow-motion loscil-style dub techno piece with a gorgeously warm, alive, and shimmering ball of light at its heart. While the remaining pieces admittedly feel a bit less supernatural and transcendent than that initial statement, "Cyan" is nevertheless an ideal illustration of the "rich source" notion that guides the album: the piece is basically just a few chords and a simple bass pattern, but Morgan and English do one hell of a job at luxuriating in the glimmering details of those chords. That is not the duo's only trick, however, as the rest of the album features a number of compelling variations on their sacred-sounding minimalist deconstructions. For example, "Aqua" gradually evolves from a seesawing bed of melancholy yet dreamily aquatic-sounding chords into a smeared, Noveller-esque melody that evokes the haze of a comet slowly streaking through the cold night sky over a mountain range.

Elsewhere, the coldly throbbing and futuristic "Magenta" feels plucked from a sci-fi nightmare, as its machine-like and insistent pulse provide the stark backdrop for plunging tones that evoke burning wreckage falling from the sky in extreme slow-motion. It feels like it would be the perfect score to a Lessons In Darkness-style documentary devoted to the smoldering landscapes of ruin and burning metal portrayed in the dystopian future of the Terminator films, so aspiring documentarians should definitely keep that in mind when our artificial intelligence inevitably turns on us and reduces our cities to cinders. "Black" is yet another highlight, as its deceptively straightforward drone foundation acts as the shore for heavy, slow-motion waves of quivering psychotropic magic. I suspect there may be some gems lurking among the remaining four pieces as well, but it will probably take a bit more deep listening before I am attuned enough to their time-stretched wavelength to realize what I have been missing, as it definitely took me a few listens before the sublime sorcery of "Black" fully revealed itself. While those other pieces may be eluding my desire for instant gratification at the moment, the ones that I have connected with thus far easily rival the past glories of either artist. I suspect I have only begun to penetrate the full depths of this immersive, inventive, and emotionally rich union.

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12 February 2023

Anthony D'Amico

Albums and Singles

This latest cassette/digital release from composer/Just Intonation enthusiast Duane Pitre has its origins in a piece written for the brass ensemble Zinc & Copper a few years back (“Pons”), as he stumbled upon an intriguing process while “experimenting with microtonal electronics.” While those experiments did not ultimately make it into the final piece, they later surfaced as one element within 2021’s Omniscient Voices. That was just a fraction of the material recorded using that process, however, as Pitre had repeated it several dozen times and found himself with a considerable backlog of compelling material that was not an ideal fit for Omniscient Voices. Naturally, that led to the release of Varolii Patterns, which collects six of those process experiments that Pitre deemed strong enough to stand on their own both individually and as an album-length statement. The result is a unique and hypnotic suite of Just Intonation synth pieces that make magic from shifting patterns that “slip in and out of rhythmic focus.”

Important

As every artist knows, finding fresh ways to escape familiar patterns is a constant struggle and there have been countless ingenious strategies devised to subvert creative stagnation since John Cage famously blew everyone’s minds in the 1950s by embracing the I Ching as his guiding force. I have no idea what Pitre’s own process entailed beyond using an eight-voice synth tuned to Just Intonation, but the end product certainly feels more like a living organic entity than a series of compositions. Naturally, the tuning alone ensures that Varolii Patterns is brimming with unfamiliar and otherworldly harmonies, but the rhythm of the shifting patterns is unusual and unfamiliar as well, approximating the shifting, erratic rhythm of ocean waves rather than the rigid time signature of composed music. To my ears, the haunting “Varolii Pattern 10-1” is the most mesmerizing of the album’s variations on a theme, as a steady pulse smears into an undulating and hallucinatory haze of strange dissonances and oscillations. Moreover, it rarely sounds like Pitre is ever doing something as mundane as simply playing notes and chords–it instead feels like an interwoven tapestry of moaning, whimpering, dissolving, and smearing sounds resembling the ambient sounds of an extradimensional aviary where the normal physics of sound no longer apply.

While I would stop short of calling anything on this album remotely conventional, some of the other pieces do feel a bit less alien. For example, it is possible to imagine the ghost of Pitre’s originally planned brass composition in “Varolii Pattern 11-1,” but it also feels like it may have been composed for a tuba ensemble submerged in something nightmarishly gelatinous. The following “Varolii Pattern 12-1” is the closest thing to familiar terrain, as it feels a lot like warm, gently pulsing ambient drift (albeit ambient drift with unusual harmonies). Elsewhere, “Varolii Pattern 8-11” fitfully locks into a heaving, throbbing groove of sorts that sounds like a techno remix of Phillip Glass that has been stretched, slowed, and smeared into unrecognizability. That is certainly a neat trick, but the closing two pieces are even stronger. In “Varolii Pattern 10-2,” an erratically repeating brass-like pulse creates alien harmonies and changing rhythmic patterns as it interacts with the organically shifting swells of the undercurrent. “Varolii Pattern 4-2,” on the other hand, sounds like a cross between a curdled trumpet solo trapped in a loop and a pitch-shifted chorus of phantasmagoric whales, but that mindfuckery somehow remains semi-firmly grounded in sustained drones. Every single one of these pieces is fascinating if one listens close enough though, albeit with the caveat that Pitre’s harmonies may be a hard sell for more dissonance-averse ears. Aside from that, the sole caveat is the overall similarity of the pieces, but I find Varolii Patterns more akin to witnessing a magician improbably pull off six very cool tricks in a row despite some challenging self-imposed constraints. While I suppose this is intended as a minor release in the grand scheme of Pitre’s oeuvre, it is at least the second of his releases to feel like some sort of revelatory bombshell to me (Feel Free being the other that springs to mind). I now need to revisit Omniscient Voices immediately, as I have the sneaking suspicion that I may have slept on yet another audacious harmonic achievement.

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12 February 2023

Duncan Edwards

Albums and Singles

This is the second offering from Wormhook, and it is a fine blend of cathartic inner voices with something akin to ancient incantations from the great beyond, augmented, but not swamped, by hand-chamfered electronics and fragile guitar. Umpteen lyrical references to clouds, nature, stones, rain, and heaven, cannot obscure that Wormhook's radical psalmody is far from the tangled common or garden variety of free folk hedgerow bustle, approaching instead the trance-state wisdom of a delirious time-traveling street corner prophet deciphering Sumerian inscriptions to an audience of none.

Akashic

Which is not to say that the record is anything less than rather holy and crystal clear. Wormhook may sound at times as if they are channeling the spirit of a Beckett character, joyfully and defiantly hauling themselves through wet leaves by their elbows, but they never sound as if they are channeling the confessional voice from author Adam Thorpe's unforgettable chapter "Stitches" - only decipherable every thirty or so readings after a midwinter nap, four glasses of sherry and a game of naked Twister. Indeed, the lyric sheet enclosed with the vinyl version of Workaday Strangeness is hardly needed. Unless, like me, you simply can't believe that double glazing is mentioned not once but twice (in separate songs) and to good effect.

The feel of the album is unique—as much rain-washed urban outsider crying space dust into the neon-tinged gloom as spectral presence singing sacred 12th century hymnal—but here and there I hear, mostly in Wormhook's anguished and alluring voice, some accidental echoes of the plaintive warmth with which Sandro Perri sang on his Tiny Mirrors record, and Jacob Olausson wailed on Moonlight Farm. The album needs to be heard in its entirety, on repeat. Paradoxically, I could highlight any track for praise, but will limit this to mentioning "Shiver," as it sounds like it might be the apparition of a disappeared cantor haunting the night shift of a factory assembly line. Another key piece is "Folk From The Vaults of A Death Cult D&B Version," which could hardly be more beautiful if it were a magic carpet woven from the unpicked woolen sweaters of a choir of octogenarian virgins praying for forgiveness in the ruins of a wave-battered stone chapel, on the coast of a newly discovered island halfway between Devold and Fair Isle.

The album also reminds me of the medieval poem Pearl in that it similarly benefits from offering up almost-but-not-quite understandings, and an exotic mysterious quality which will not easily be dissolved. I applaud that Wormhook has plunged into deep creative waters, determined to "swymme the remnaunt, thagh I ther swalte"—to swim across, or die trying.

Wormhook is Martin Steuck. They are a Glasgow artist into a broad range of different but connected creative mediums. The physical album has their hand painted labels and there's an optional 24 page book of their paper cuts. Workaday Strangeness is reportedly born of a therapeutic necessity, and this is made plain from the track "Disappear" and other allusions to ancient pain, rain, demons, disease, and modern disconnect. Yet what emerges is a defiantly poetic anti-manifesto pleading, nay fighting, for solidarity, joyful inclusion, and mutual survival.

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