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.

Listen here.

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.

Listen here.

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.

Listen here.

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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05 February 2023

Anthony D'Amico

Albums and Singles

Given Celer’s incredibly voluminous discography, releasing any kind of comprehensive retrospective would be one hell of a quixotic and cost-prohibitive endeavor, but this collection does the next best thing. Weighing in at 14 discs spanning 10 albums, this boxed set celebrates an especially significant and prolific era in the project’s evolution: the self-released albums that Will Long and the late Danielle Baquet-Long (Chubby Wolf) recorded as a duo before the latter’s passing in 2009. Not all of them, mind you, but this collection seems to at least cover the ones that matter most. Given that Celer is based in Japan and Bandcamp was still in its formative stages back then, I suspect very few people were hip enough to pounce on the duo’s early CD-Rs at the time of their original release, but the world definitely began to take notice soon after, as I remember Celer albums being a very hot commodity sometime around 2008/2009 when they started getting widely re-released. Unsurprisingly, there are some remastered fan favorites from that era included here, such as Continents and Cantus Libres, but I have grown so accustomed to Long’s current elegantly minimalist dream-drone aesthetic that I was legitimately surprised by the wider palette of moods and atmospheres explored at the project’s inception. Naturally, the gorgeously warm ambient dreamscapes that Celer has long been synonymous with are still the main draw here, but they are not the only draw, as I found it very illuminating to revisit the less-remembered noirish and sci-fi-inspired sides of the duo’s exploratory beginnings.

Two Acorns

This collection is only being released as a limited edition physical boxed set, which makes a lot of sense for a couple of big reasons. The mundane one is that all of these albums are already readily available in remastered form, so this retrospective is very much for the project’s more devoted fans. The more poetic and heartfelt reason is that this boxed set is essentially a memorial to the Dani era and music was merely one facet of the duo’s artistic vision. Obviously, the music is the biggest and most relevant reason for Celer’s continued appeal, but the project has always been something of a multimedia love story/travel diary as well, as the accompanying images and texts often provided important context, clues, and deeper shades of meaning. In fact, I sincerely doubt that Celer would have made such a deep impression if Will and Dani had not found a way to make ambient/drone music feel like something personal and intimate (a feat very few others have achieved). Consequently, making this a collection a physical object with all of Dani’s poems and photos intact seems like the only proper way to celebrate the duo’s shared story. That said, nearly all of the texts, images, and song titles do tend to be teasingly enigmatic. In fact, they almost act like an inversion of the film/film score relationship, as they color my perception of the music without providing much actual information beyond a sense of place and an impressionist glimpse of how Will and Dani were feeling about both life and each other at the time. While I would probably love a Will Long memoir or travel diary, the decision to portray that period instead as an elusive, elliptical, and mysterious collection of dreamlike sounds, images, and words is admittedly the more alluring and Celer-esque path to take. Words and unambiguous meanings are cool and all, but struggling to express the ineffable is a beautiful and noble way to spend an artistic career.

As often happens with William Basinski’s similarly minimal work, it is easy to (wrongly) dismiss a lot of Celer’s work as a few simple loops endlessly repeating, but it seems more like a near-religious obsession with reaching towards the sublime to me. In fact, my favorite Celer pieces tend to be exactly those in which a single blurred and frayed melodic fragment is simply allowed to endlessly loop into infinity (or at least for 20 minutes or so). Obviously, progression and evolution have their place, yet distilling something beautiful to its absolute essence and straining towards the transcendent offers a more rare and exquisite pleasure than what I generally expect to get out of albums. When I hear a truly great Celer piece, I am reminded of the film at the heart of Infinite Jest that is so lethally compelling that no one can stop watching once it starts. In Celer’s case, there is instead a gift for crafting loops so gorgeous that I am perfectly content to let them hypnotically unfold forever without any transformation. When everything about a piece is already perfect, there is no valid reason to break that spell other than the inherent durational limits of physical media.

Needless to say, there are plenty of Celer pieces both new and old that achieve that illusion of an infinite, endlessly billowing heaven and those are usually the pieces that I am thinking of when I describe something as “Celer-esque.” However, spending an entire weekend absorbing this 14-disc retrospective has reminded me that there has been considerably more variety and experimentation with this project than I remembered. For example, this boxed set covers at most only two years of recordings and just from a compositional standpoint alone, there are albums comprised entirely of short pieces, albums comprised entirely of longform pieces, a single album-length track (Para’s “Leave Us Alone To Be Together”), and a collection of 22 brief loops intended to be played in a newly shuffled sequence every time (Voodoo Crowds).

There is quite a lot of stylistic variety as well, albeit exclusively within the realm of ambient drone. The pieces from Sunlir (first released in May 2006) in particular are especially varied and unique. For example, the opening “Spelunking The Arteries Of Our Ancestors” feels mostly like the Celer I know and love, yet also features an oscillating and sci-fi-damaged industrial thrum in its depths that provides an unfamiliar edge of psychotropic unease. Soon after, “How Long To Hold Up A Breathless Face” approximates a fragment of an orchestral film noir score that has been frozen in quivering suspended animation. Not long after, “Espy The Horizon, Miss The Long Road” seems to reprise that trick with a brooding and epic-sounding fantasy score. Elsewhere, “Whimsical At The Cretaceous Extinction” is probably the biggest Sunlir-era revelation, as it feels like a steadily intensifying cosmic shudder of futuristic menace. There are some dark surprises lurking on the other disks as well, however (albeit less frequently). For example, “Archival Footage of Only The Lost And Forgotten” from Scols resembles a time-stretched nightmare orchestra, while Continents’ hallucinatory “Fast Forwarding Sleep” evoked the “haunted ballroom” magic of The Caretaker years before most people had even noticed that The Caretaker existed. The phantasmal horror of “Brackish Nagas Too Low In The River” was yet another bombshell for me, evoking a supernatural howl of anguish that would have made a fine (if harrowing) score for 2001 or Solaris.

While I tend to gravitate towards the one-offs, outliers, and “roads less traveled” on this collection due to my reasonably strong familiarity with Celer’s usual oeuvre, I suspect complete familiarity with Celer’s discography is an unattainable state. In fact, I would be surprised if even Will Long remembered everything collected here. For example, I probably have somewhere around two dozen arguably well-chosen Celer albums in my collection (weighted heavily towards this era, no less), yet there were still plenty of classic pieces that I had not encountered before Selected Self-releases entered my life. There were also plenty of seemingly familiar pieces that made a deeper impression on me now that I have revisited them more than a decade after their original release. I have no idea how much of that shift is due to my evolving taste, the magic of remastering, or because I simply did not listen closely enough the first time around, but it feels like I just unearthed a fresh treasure trove of hits regardless. In particular, I was enraptured by the smeared, hissing, and buzzing magic of Scols’ “Municipally, I Let It Slip,” much of Cantus Libres, some of Continents and Neon, “Sans Heavens, Hand In Hand,” and a handful of quivering feedback-gnawed pieces like Sadha’s “The Once Emptiness Of Our Hearts,” but that is by no means a comprehensive list.

My conservative estimate is that there are at least three or four hours of prime/classic Celer highlights to be found here, which is extremely damn impressive for a retrospective encompassing just two years of a project that has nearly spanned two decades. Obviously, Will Long conjured this boxed set into existence primarily for Dani and Celer’s most ardent fans (only a hundred copies were made), yet this is the sort of retrospective that deserves to ripple outwards to turn new and casual fans onto some underheard gems from the early days. Obviously, there have been a healthy amount of stellar Celer releases in more recent years as well, but Selected Self-releases is a necessary reminder that Will and Dani were onto something wonderful and distinctive right from the start.

The individual albums can be heard here.