- Anthony D'Amico
- Albums and Singles
This album has been a long time coming, as Blackshaw has mostly been on an extended hiatus from performing and recording since 2016, as the eternal instability and financial stresses of life as a musician nudged him towards a life in the food scene instead. Eventually, however, his creative urges began stirring once more and he announced his return to music in 2019, but his plans took some serious hits from the pandemic, the deaths of a close friend and a beloved dog, and a broken shoulder along the way. Thankfully, he persevered regardless and Unraveling In Your Hands marks the first new James Blackshaw album since 2015’s Summoning Suns and it is a damn good one too. In fact, Blackshaw almost makes it seem like no time has passed at all, as these three pieces are as compositionally ambitious, virtuosic, and deliciously compelling as ever. While the centerpiece here is ostensibly the nearly 27-minute tour de force of the title piece, it is actually a shorter collaboration with multi-instrumentalist Charlotte Glasson that steals the show for me.
In darkly amusing fashion, Blackshaw notes that the title piece was literally written “as a kind of endurance test,” as he pushed himself to his physical limit in the wake of his shoulder injury, as it temporarily seemed possible that he would never be able to play guitar again. I would not necessarily describe it as an endurance test on the listening end, but it does remind me a bit of the 1948 film The Red Shoes in which a ballerina acquires a cursed pair of shoes that enable her to dance brilliantly but also supernaturally force her to dance herself to death. As far as I know, Blackshaw himself is still alive and well, but “Unraveling In Your Hands” blows right past simply weaving a few gorgeous passages together and unfolds as an endlessly rippling and shapeshifting beast that simultaneously feels both freeform and incredibly intricate and complex. Impressively, Blackshaw recorded the whole thing in a single unedited take, which is presumably why it feels so vibrant and spontaneous. He mentions that some “flubs and hesitations” unavoidably crept into the piece, but I’ll be damned if I can find any significant missteps and probably wouldn't have cared much if I did. The overall effect is akin to Blackshaw having a guitar showdown with the devil at the proverbial crossroads, but continuing to play like a man possessed for another twenty minutes after resoundingly clowning his infernal adversary.
- Anthony D'Amico
- Albums and Singles
This latest album from Rafael Anton Irisarri was partially inspired by an overheard malaprop in Italy years ago in which someone at a restaurant mistranslated The American Dream as “The American Myth.” That unintentionally damning phrase naturally resonated with Irisarri, who hails from Puerto Rico, and it came back to him in 2020 when he was researching brutalist architecture and Potemkin villages (a portable façade built to create the illusion of a real town). It is not terribly hard to see how Potemkin villages are a perfect readymade metaphor for the illusory promises of The American Dream, of course, but making an anticolonial power ambient album that channels that revelation in an interesting and unique way is quite a bit harder. Irisarri ingeniously solved that problem by mirroring the “cyclical nature of our tumultuous political history” with roiling storms of distortion and hiss, which he envisions as a series of tempests and receding tides that leave behind only “dust, delusion, and memory.” Some pieces admittedly pull off that trick better than others, but the best moments beautifully evoke something akin to a glimpses of a flickering mirage through a raging sandstorm.
The opening “Broken Intensification” provides a fairly representative introduction to Irisarri’s FAÇADISMS vision, as it rolls in as a steadily intensifying roar of bass rumble and hazy guitar noise that feels like it is fading in and out of focus. I imagine it sounds a lot like listening to an ambient album from the window seat of an ascending rocket, as the extreme volume of the fiery liftoff would unavoidably overpower every other sound. The piece does not evolve much beyond that, which I initially found frustrating, as there is no shortage of greyscale ambient albums in the world and they are generally not my favorite thing. That said, that aesthetic makes perfect sense thematically, as the American empire is itself an all-consuming destructive roar that is ultimately hollow, so I guess Irisarri nailed that bit rather admirably. Once I grasped that, the album made a lot more sense to me, as I stopped looking for moments of submerged beauty and started focusing on the obliterating elemental power of Irisarri’s noise storms and it definitely seems like that is where he focused most of his attention. Consequently, the ideal way to experience this album is to crank it up loud or throw on some headphones and feel the full visceral power of Irisarri’s seething hurricanes of hiss and distortion.
- Anthony D'Amico
- Albums and Singles
I’ve been enjoying the musical union of Zachary (Magpie) Corsa and Denny Wilkerson Corsa since they first surfaced as Lost Trail during the height of the DIY tape label golden age that blossomed around 2010, but the couple’s vision unexpectedly ascended to a even higher plane when they moved to Memphis, TN and reinvented themselves as Nonconnah. Since then, their run of releases has been quite incredible, as I’ve been properly blown away by at least one Nonconnah album every year since 2021. This latest one (their first for the recently resurrected Absolutely Kosher label) happily keeps most of the familiar Nonconnah themes intact (plenty of guests, complexly layered shoegaze-inspired soundscapes, an “anything goes” approach to weaving together disparate passages and motifs, meaningful use of spoken word samples, etc.), but it is also marks a significant departure in other ways. Given that, it took me a bit longer to warm to this one than previous instant classics like Don't Go Down To Lonesome Holler & Songs For And About Ghosts, but I got there eventually and now find this album to be one of the more fascinating releases in the couple’s lengthy discography.
The album fittingly opens with a child cheerfully recounting an angelic visitation in which they were informed that their entire whole family is going to heaven very soon, which cues up a characteristically roiling sea of guitar noise and twinkling synths. That is, of course, textbook Nonconnah territory and few artists can match their skill at crafting texturally rich “wall of sound” dronefests of celestial bliss. Unsurprisingly, such churning oceans of guitar noise nirvana (along with twinkling synths) are the most prominent recurring theme throughout Nonconnah vs. the Spring of Deception, but the album has an unusual structure in which the “songs” are somewhat brief and tend to cycle through multiple motifs within just a three- or four-minute span. That approach is most prominent in “We Were Free Here Once But No Longer,” as it ecstatically opens with a rush of overlapping melodies spiraling endlessly heavenward in a swirl of whooshing and warping psychedelia before the bottom drops out to reveal a surreal interlude of detuned mindfuckery and classical guitar runs before dissolving into a blearily hallucinatory outro of warbling distressed tape dreaminess.
- Anthony D'Amico
- Albums and Singles
This is Kevin Martin’s first solo instrumental release as The Bug, which is a bit surprising given that he has been devoted to dread-soaked industrial dub mutations for roughly three decades now. These particular dread-soaked mutations were originally released as a series of five EPs of self-described “floor weapons” on Martin’s own Pressure label. I cannot argue with the “floor weapons” claim, as Machine is essentially an unbroken run of slow-motion bangers and seismic bass throbs, but the unifying aesthetic of those bangers is the more interesting bit, as Martin envisioned a new strain of “ice cold and dystopian” futuristic dub. That may seem like an eyebrow-raising claim, given that Martin is no stranger at all to futuristic/dystopian/mechanized menace, but I was legitimately caught off guard by how much the absence of any recognizably human element would transform my listening experience in both obvious and less obvious ways.
The twelve pieces collected on Machine are presented in chronological order based upon their original release date, but the album only includes roughly half of the complete “Machine” series. That, of course, means that Martin’s curatorial vision played a significant role in shaping the album’s trajectory. As the album unfolds, however, I can easily hear how Martin’s overarching vision evolved and expanded with each new installment, though it is still reasonable to describe Machine as “variations on a theme” with the theme being pummeling slow-motion machine rhythms, sludgy and seismic deep bass, a healthy dose of snarling and smoldering noise, and absolutely nothing else except the occasional wobbly and reverberating chord.
- Creaig Dunton
- Albums and Singles
Allegedly recorded back in 2003, then resurrected and reworked last year for the 30th anniversary of Libythth,Uvwxyz is a strange record from an even stranger project. With a heavy misuse of sampled instruments and random sounds, what could be pure chaos somehow is anything but. Libythth somehow solidifies sputtering samples and found clips into memorable songs and miraculously congeal the most random of sounds into something catchy and memorable.
"Blixa" is a great piece to dissect: Libythth takes what sounds like a microsample of voice and a rigid drum machine and mixes in siren bursts with cut up weather forecasts. Wobbly guitar gives a melodic anchor that everything is built on top of, before at the end going full techno throb in structure. Structurally techno, yes, but sonically it is anything but. "Festa" is another, somewhat explainable one: Libythth blends chiming guitars into janky breakbeats, then introduces some pseudo-metal guitar riffs transition into a calypso-influenced beat and overall murky mix.
- Anthony D'Amico
- Albums and Singles
This second full-length from composer Joy Guidry came as quite a revelation, as I was definitely not expecting to have my head blown off by a gospel-inspired jazz album by a bassoonist this year (or really any year, if I am being honest). There were some subtle clues beforehand, however, as Guidry got serious about practicing radical acceptance in the wake of the Radical Acceptance album and decided to celebrate the power of community in a big way with its follow up. As alluded to by the title, religion is a big part of that community, as Guidry grew up deeply immersed in gospel during her childhood in Texas, but Joy also found a welcoming place in other communities as a trans avant-garde jazz artist and Amen captures the ecstatic nexus where all of the important people and influences in Guidry's life collide. To paraphrase an old saying, it takes a village to make an album this wonderful and joyous, but a talented ensemble needs a band leader with a bold vision in order to reach its full potential and that is a role in which Guidry truly excels. Of course, there are also some lovely solo bassoon pieces throughout the album, but they are unavoidably eclipsed by the deliriously rapturous highs of killer ensemble pieces like "Angels" and "Members Don't Get Weary."
This album is accurately described as "a major step up" in Guidry's "ability to fully realize and embody a sound and concept." That evolution is most striking with the "rousing, rafter-splitting spiritual jazz and gospel" side of Joy's artistry, but those seismic gospel supernovas are interspersed with pieces in a more "ambient" vein, which gives the album an unusual yet surprisingly effective dynamic trajectory. In keeping with the theme of "effective dynamic trajectory," the album's first few pieces are devoted to more quiet and meditative solo performances. I am quite fond of the second piece in particular ("It's Okay To Let Me Go"), as its smeared and bleary textures weave a sublime and gently hallucinatory strain of ambient best described as a tropical space jazz reverie. That reverie comes to an explosive end, however, as Guidry samples a fiery speech from Pastor E. Dewey Smith before plunging into the first of the album's wild centerpieces, "Members Don't Get Weary," which feels more like an ecstatic eruption of elemental force than it does a song. I believe Jillian Grace handles the lead vocals and she gamely belts out the repurposed spiritual like her fucking life depends on it over a roiling backdrop that resembles a New Orleans-style big band trying their hand at volcanic free jazz. While I am extremely hesitant to compare anyone to Nina Simone, I will say that if I had attended a Simone gig and it concluded with anything like "Members Don't Get Weary," I would have staggered out of the venue feeling like I had just experienced the greatest performance of my life. Admittedly, that hypothetical outcome probably would have happened even without anything like "Members Don't Get Weary" happening, but that does not make it any less of a Simone-worthy supernova.
There is not much that could reasonably follow such a piece, so Guidry wisely cools things down with another shimmering and tranquil dreamscape ("Day By Day") before unleashing the next bombshell tour de force. At first, "Angels" is a wonderfully swinging and soulful call-and-response a capella piece, but it then unexpectedly transforms into a bluesy twist on Bill Evans-style piano jazz before the vocalists make a rousing return for a final act that feels like some kind of rapturous jazz parade. I did not think anything could top the white-hot intensity of "Members Don't Get Weary," but "Angels" impressively manages that improbable feat by adding a strong groove and one hell of a hook to the mix. If this is what marching to heaven would be like, I may need to strongly reconsider my faithlessness.
Notably, the album ends with a piece named "Revelations 7:16-17," which provides thematically appropriate symmetry with the opening "Psalm 138:7." As Pastor Dewey presciently noted elsewhere on the album, we pick and choose the scriptures we want to use and I am personally choosing to believe that the album opens with a nod to community ("though I walk in the midst of trouble, you preserve my life") and ends with an announcement that I have just finished listening to quite an incredible and life-affirming album ("never again will they hunger; never again will they thirst"). In my case, my hunger and thirst were satiated almost entirely by "Members Don't Get Weary" and "Angels," but fans of ECM-style jazz will likely find this album to be an even more substantial feast than I did.
- Anthony D'Amico
- Albums and Singles
Back in 2018, the Opalio brothers released The Sky With Broken Arms, an album which was partially inspired by the surface noise on a bunch of Roberto's records that had been mysteriously ravaged by oxidation. On its newly released sequel, the sounds of crackling vinyl dutifully make their return, but that feature is now a bit eclipsed by a different and new twist, as Maurizio plays recognizable electric guitar and dabbles in more earthly melodies and scales than he usually does. Whether that constitutes a softening or an enhancement of the MCIAA ethos is in the ear of the beholder, I suppose, but I personally enjoy the grounding contrast between the earthly and the otherworldly and I am not actually sure that the Opalios could meaningfully go further into the outer limits than they already have (though I do expect to be proven very wrong in that regard by some future release). In any case, The Sky With Broken Arms Vol. II is still a characteristically excellent psychotropic deep-space mindfuck and its two longform pieces are instant MCIAA classics (and if there was ever a MCIAA album that could draw in the more adventurous fans of space rock/psych bands like Flying Saucer Attack, this is probably it).
Elliptical Noise/Aukam Records
The opening "Empty Spaces Of Swirling Awareness" is the first of the album's two excellent extended plunges into outsider psychedelia heaven, though its modest beginning deceptively provides no hint of what is to come. To my ears, it sounds like Maurizio sat down to perform a meditative ambient guitar reverie based on a simple, delicate melody of chiming single notes over a lazily oscillating drone. Unfortunately, however, someone accidentally left an interdimensional portal open nearby, so when he played back the tape, he discovered that he had actually been performing a duet with a submerged-sounding maelstrom of squirming, squelching, and gibbering entropy. In more concrete terms, that probably means that Roberto was going wild with the duo's unique arsenal of self-built alientronics, which in this case approximate an incompletely dubbed-over tape of a turntablist played at the wrong speed and filtered through an aggressively misused vibrato pedal. Eventually, Maurizio's guitar heads into more discordant territory as well, which results in a shapeshifting mindbomb that alternately resembles a squall of honking and seasick seagulls, a psychotic breakdown in a toy store at Christmastime, and a candy colored descent into a viscous altered state populated by flickering and sputtering phantoms. In short, it is prime MCIAA territory. The brief interlude that follows is lovely too, as backwards melodies and chiming arpeggios tumble over each other as a crackling subterranean rumble undulates and churns below.
- Anthony D'Amico
- Albums and Singles
This latest solo album from Swedish composer Klara Lewis is billed as “a heartfelt tribute to her friend, mentor and former label boss, Peter Rehberg” and a “precise homage” to his “methodology and spirit.” Notably, Editions Mego released Lewis’s debut album Ett in 2014 when she was only 21 years old and her vision has undergone some rather dramatic evolutions since then. For example, one of my favorite aspects of Ett was Klara's near-complete avoidance of conventional melodies or instrumentation. While that stance has certainly softened over the ensuing decade, Lewis is still every bit as adventurous and unpredictable in 2024 as she was back then–her songs just happen to have stronger melodic hooks now. In keeping with that “anything goes” spirit, Thankful is fascinating miscellany that delves into everything from solo ukulele performances, unhinged techno mutations, Disintegration Loops-style slow-motion melody obliteration, and an achingly gorgeous elegy. Unsurprisingly, all are wonderful, which makes Thankful yet another characteristically excellent Klara Lewis album.
The centerpiece of the album is the opening title piece, which is a 20-minute loop-based opus inspired by Rehberg’s early laptop masterpiece “Track 3” (from 1999’s Get Out). The aforementioned similarity to Basinski is admittedly a rather superficial one, as “Thankful” is essentially a melancholy string loop that gradually becomes more and more distorted and corroded as the piece unfolds. In spirit, however, it is clear that Lewis is coming from a very different place altogether, as the transformation undergone by “Thankful” is considerably more elemental and violent than anything I would expect from Basinski. As with the Pita piece that directly inspired it, Lewis’s piece steadily becomes a snarling, blown-out maelstrom that shares more common ground with a fucking volcano than with any melodic tape loop experiment. In fact, a river of lava is a perfect analogy for the piece, as it is objectively beautiful while leaving a scorched ruin in its wake.
- Anthony D'Amico
- Albums and Singles
Madeline Johnston’s fourth solo album as Midwife borrows its title from The Carter Family’s timeless and transcendent classic about leaving one’s worldly cares behind. The title presumably has some aspirational meaning, as the darker side of life is an eternal theme for Midwife, but it is also a nod to both Johnston’s life on the highway as a traveling musician (with a dying tour van) and to the many other road warriors that came before her. In keeping with that “road album” theme, Johnston also name-checks “outlaws” and “the psyche of America’s underbelly” as big influences and notes that most of the album was written almost entirely from the back of tour vans. That claim rings true, as this entire album feels unusually intimate, nocturnal, and stripped down and most songs are centered upon little more than Johnston’s voice and a few simple chords or arpeggios. In fact, almost every song on No Depression could literally be played on an unamplified electric guitar in the back of a van. Impressively, that stark minimalism suits these songs extremely well, as there are enough great lines and killer hooks here to make it clear that Johnston does not need much more than six strings and her voice to craft a memorable and emotionally heavy song. This is the Midwife vision distilled to its absolute essence.
Last year, I read Thurston Moore’s Sonic Life and there was a small bit in it about wanting to write a song called “Rock n Roll For President” that made me wince. I bring that up because No Depression’s opening song is entitled “Rock N Roll Never Forgets” and Johnston manages to miraculously sing lines like “if rock n roll is a dream, please don’t wake me” or "rock n roll will never die" without sounding irony-poisoned or ridiculous. As it turns out, execution is everything, as some people (Jason Molina, for example) can sing practically anything and make it sound profound and Johnston is blessed with that same gift herself. Consequently, “Rock N Roll Never Forgets” is a minor masterpiece of slow-burning magic and reads like a hissing, hypnagogic, and endearingly sincere love poem to the power and beauty of music. Yet another impressive feat is the stark simplicity of the music, as Johnston nicely embodies the old line about the essence of country music being “three chords and the truth.”
- Anthony D'Amico
- Albums and Singles
This latest album from English violinist/avant-folk visionary Laura Cannell is billed as “an offering of contemporary minimalism to a 12th century composer, a thank you to a lost uncle and a way to process an anxiety disorder.” Cannell was first turned onto Benedictine abbess/polymath Hildegard von Bingen back in the late ‘90s when her uncle played her Sequentia’s Canticles of Ecstasy album and the iconoclastic German nun’s compositions have been an alternating source of comfort and inspiration ever since. In keeping with the "inspiration" theme, The Rituals of Hildegard Reimagined is essentially a great new Laura Cannell album rather than anything resembling a conventional homage. As Cannell describes it, she broke down and reconstructed selected Hildegard pieces and interspersed them with her own work. She also set aside both her violin and her usual working methods, as these pieces were improvised and recorded in single takes using a simple palette of bass recorder, 12-string medieval harp (“tuned in unequal temperament”), and a delay pedal. As it turns out, that is all Cannell needed to cast quite a wonderfully hallucinatory, haunting, and timeless spell. It’s frankly a shame that Hildegard herself isn’t around to hear it, as this album would be an ideal soundtrack for anyone looking to have otherworldly religious visions.
Notably, this is not the first major Laura Cannell release to center upon her recorder playing, as that honor belongs to 2022’s Antiphony of the Trees. On that album, Cannell used a small arsenal of recorders to transform transcribed birdsongs into minimalist chamber music. Rituals is a radically different album for a whole host of reasons (spontaneity, inspiration, a medieval harp, etc.), but the most striking one for me is how masterfully Cannell makes use of her delay pedal this time around. On the opening “The Cosmic Spheres of Being Human,” for example, a tumbling and serpentine melody leaves behind a wake of fluttering and flickering afterimages that call to mind something between “hallucinatory snakecharmer” and “chopped and screwed classical impressionism.” There is also a second layer in which a slow mournful melody drifts through the landscape of dissolving loops, but it occasionally breaks into additional tendrils of looping melody or subtly gnarled feedback as well.
- Creaig Dunton
- Reviews
Being a duo consisting of JR Robinson (Wrekmeister Harmonies) and Mark Solotroff (Anatomy of Habit, Bloodyminded), it is not at all surprising that the debut from The Mercury Impulse is heavily rooted in the world of synths and electronics. Across eight songs, however, the sound cannot be so easily summarized. The result is a rich blend of light and dark, fluctuating from noise to melody effortlessly, often within a single composition.
Robinson and Solotroff began collaborating in Chicago over a decade ago, most notably with Solotroff playing in a large ensemble form of Wrekmeister Harmonies, but the two never recorded much beyond that. These opportunities being limited even further when Robinson relocated to New York. It was only at the beginning of this year that work began in earnest, stemming from unfinished recordings the two had shared in the years before in a long-distance collaboration.
