- Creaig Dunton
- Albums and Singles
On A Clearing, Berlin based Sarah Saviet (violin), and Joseph Houston (piano) superbly exemplify how much can be done artistically with very little. Consisting of five pieces of widely varying duration and, as best as I can tell, one take recordings without processing or further treatment, there is a multitude of sounds and textures to be had, emanating from just two instruments.
Both Saviet and Houston, at times, take somewhat unconventional approaches to their instruments, but it is rarely unclear who is making what sounds. The instruments are sonically naked at the opening of "Lines, Spaces," with an intentionally erratic stop/start structure that drew my focus immediately. Utilizing the gaps, and then shifting into a playful call and response segment, the evolving dynamics also make clear the depth and quality of the recording and mastering. As the piece concludes, it shifts into more muted, idiosyncratic performances and closing on elongated tones and notes from both.
- Creaig Dunton
- Albums and Singles
Expanding upon the themes of place and space that has shaped his recent solo works, Mark Solotroff's latest record unsurprisingly features heavy use of his trademark analog synths. What changes, however, is the actual inclusion of sonic spaces: environmental recordings captured from his current hometown of Chicago, as well as travels in Milan and Venice. The intersection of these spatial recordings and electronic instrumentation gives In Search of Total Placelessness a different feel than his other recent works but sits beautifully alongside them.
Rather than specifically focusing on a sense of space, In Search of… features a shift to emphasizing movement and transition, creating a sense of space but one that is short lived, transitioning to a new one rapidly. Balancing short segments (30 seconds to one minute) with longer pieces, with each fading in and out, Solotroff captures that sense of spatial and temporal transition perfectly, with some lingering longer than others, but theme of movement is overt, while still sounding like a coherent album.
- Anthony D'Amico
- Albums and Singles
This second album from this enigmatic Noa Kurzweil project marks a somewhat surprising detour from Voice Actor's sprawling and eclectic debut Sent From My Telephone, as Kurzweil's previous creative foil (ana reme's Levi Lanser) has been replaced by Welsh producer Ol Bryan. The result is a considerably leaner, more stylistically focused, and more experimentally minded release that inventively and sensuously blends deconstructed dub-techno, sound art, and ASMR. Notably, the familiar seductive purr of Kurzweil's voice is also regularly chopped up, processed, decontextualized, and looped into rhythmic elements, melodic hooks, or textural layers.
That's a boldly counterintuitive stylistic choice akin to Scanner's shift away from intercepted phone conversations, as Kurzweil's bewitching voice and charmingly diaristic (and oft-surreal) monologues previously seemed like the project's very essence. I certainly miss those elements a bit, as well as Voice Actor's tendency to regularly blindside me with curveballs like unsettling samples of 9/11 radio chatter and nods to '60s French pop, but Lust (1) is nevertheless an extremely cool & absorbing headphone album in its own right. The closing "Barbara" is probably the zenith, as Kurzweil languorously muses about Barbara Walters' condescending treatment of Dolly Parton before the piece unexpectedly blossoms into a killer outsider/futuristic R&B motif of digitized loops and soul diva samples. The ghostly & seductive "Look Nice" offers still more pop-adjacent bliss, while "Fields" feels like the warmly beautiful dreams of an android with a soul.
Like its predecessor, Lust (1) can occasionally come across as a bit sketchlike, but there is considerably more depth hidden beneath the surface this time around, as beauty and magic are almost always lurking in both the vividly realized details and the hallucinatory ways that Kurzweil's voice subtly transforms and moves through space.
- Anthony D'Amico
- Albums and Singles
This third album from the duo of James Schimpl and Ellis Swan features some of their most sublime work to date, as it feels like the soundtrack to a desolate & dreamlike roadtrip across an America where it is eternally 3am. Stylistically, it sounds like Dead Bandit have distilled the best bits of cinematic post-rock, noir jazz, dub, shoegaze, and surf guitar into an elegantly bleary and oft-gorgeous series of late-night mood pieces. In keeping with that theme, the album’s arc mirrors that of an overnight drive, as the vibe gradually moves from haunted and impressionistic evocations of lonely highways and lurid neon lights towards the faint light of a bruised & beautiful sunrise.
Characteristically, I tend to find the darker pieces more alluring, but even the lesser pieces meander along in a pleasant fashion before unleashing some kind of wonderfully hallucinatory guitar trick or other inspired motif (i.e. the wounded, blearily howling solo in “Up To Your Waist” or the heaving & shuddering flanged ambiance of “Amer Picon”). The strongest piece is arguably “Glass,” as its slow, sensuous bass throb and vibrato-soaked guitar make it a lock as my go-to choice if I ever find myself DJing a strip club in Twin Peaks. Elsewhere, the bass-driven “Pink” features both a killer hollow-sounding guitar motif and a propulsive groove that feels like a depressive take on “Billie Jean.” On the more ambient side, the rippling, feedback-soaked dreamscape of “Milk” is yet another sublime stunner. If the album has a weakness, it is only that it sometimes feels more like a collection of great moments than a collection of great songs, but it is damn near impossible to imagine any room for improvement when Dead Bandit strike a perfect balance of dubby, bass-heavy grooves and shoegaze-damaged guitar wizardry.
- Anthony D'Amico
- Albums and Singles
Newly remastered and reissued (first time on vinyl), Monolake’s third album was largely a Robert Henke solo album, as co-founder Gerhard Behles had recently left the fold to focus on more software-related concerns. Notably, Behles & Henke were two-thirds of the team that created Ableton Live, which first became commercially available the same year that Gravity was released (2001). Given that Monolake’s debut Hongkong had already been an instant dub-techno classic on the iconic Chain Reaction label (metal box and all), Henke was essentially living at the cutting edge of both technology & electronic music at this stage of his career. Appropriately, he managed to effortlessly transcend most of the tropes of his dub-techno peers with this release, expertly steering the project into something that managed to be playful, exacting, futuristic, and deeply evocative all at once.
Field/Imbalance
Notably, Henke’s studio at this time was on the 9th floor of a building overlooking Berlin, which definitely seems to have inspired the “rainswept city at night” impressionism, though Gravity’s sense of voyeuristic detachment feels more akin to a lonely train ride home at 3am through a shifting landscape of blurred neon lights and darkly looming buildings. Hallucinatory nocturnal vibes aside, Henke is a goddamn sorcerer at sound design and production, so the wonderfully vivid and vibrant sounds and textures here enhance his insomniac vision beautifully.
The heart of the album is unquestionably the murderers’ row of “Ice,” “Frost, and “Static.” In “Ice,” Henke sensuously combines uneasy ambient drift, panning whispered voices, the stilted funkiness of an Afrobeat lick, and a wonderfully hissing, popping, and rolling beat to evoke the sensation of a dreamlike night drive through an empty city. “Static,” on the other hand, is a bit closer to classic Chain Reaction terrain, but Henke enhances the formula with a muscular, lurching beat and dynamically varying chord washes that feel like slow-motion waves crashing on a rocky shore. That said, “Frost” is the album’s clear masterpiece for me, as Henke unleashes a rolling and propulsive industrial rhythm that mesmerizingly bounces, tumbles, rolls, and pans around spatially in a bleary haze of eerie ambiance. This album is pure headphone nirvana.
- Anthony D'Amico
- Albums and Singles
This compilation is mostly one for serious Tim Hecker heads and completists only, as it collects an array of unreleased pieces and alternate versions from his recent soundtrack work for television and film (La Tour, Luzifer, The North Water, and Brandon Cronenberg's killer Infinity Pool). Since Infinity Pool already got its own album, it only appears here for a sibilant and synthy extended variation of “Joyride,” but Shards also packs a trio of solidly upper-tier pieces unavailable elsewhere and an array of intriguingly uncharacteristic stylistic elements. Some stylistic departures work better than others, but the most damning thing I can say about the weaker pieces is that they either sound like lost interludes from a previous album or the beginnings of a future masterpiece that has not yet been shaped into its final, ideal form.
The album opens strong, as the haunting and hallucinatory “Heaven Will Come“ feels like an elegiac blurring together of Hecker’s Virgins and Anoyo eras: glassy, darkly angelic synths smear, dissolve, and strain heavenward over groaning chord swells. The album's biggest surprise comes next, as “Morning (Piano Version)” resembles a wistful Harold Budd-led jazz trio before a swell of haunting strings slowly morphs into a buzzing, gnarly crescendo that sounds like an incoming fax from a demon who does not really keep up with modern technological advances.
The album’s aforementioned would-be masterpiece follows, as “Monotone 3” cycles through several different motifs like a medley held together only by a fitfully fluttering woodwind motif. I am not a fan, but if Hecker had stuck with the gorgeously rippling zither/harp-like opening theme and swapped out the woodwinds for snarling saxophone flamethrowing, I would probably be writing about how that song blew me out of my goddamn chair right now instead. Elsewhere, the closing “Sunset Key Melt” is the album’s zenith, as its gently and blearily tumbling hiss-veiled melody sounds like the flickering mirage of a delicate Andrew Chalk piece being slowly enveloped by a gnawing swell of roiling distortion. When it fully blossoms, it evokes nothing less than a feedback-streaked sky of shimmering hallucinatory birds slowly fluttering above a burning city.
- Anthony D'Amico
- Albums and Singles
This first Thrill Jockey opus from Berlin's resident shapeshifting guitar visionary is a mindblowing creative leap forward, as otherworldly tunings, American Primitive-style steel-string guitar, autotuned pop, futuristic psychedelia, field recordings, and spasmodic electronics all collide in a one-of-a-kind headphone album supernova. While Reidy’s more vocal- and pop-minded impulses have previously surfaced fleetingly on World in World and elsewhere, melodic vocal hooks are the beating heart of Ghost/Spirit in an unpredictably kaleidoscopic and mesmerizing whole.
Normally, the artificiality of autotuned vocals rubs me the wrong way, but the digital soul of these fractal reveries is perfectly counterbalanced by the alien harmonies and twanging, cathartic physicality of Reidy’s guitar playing. In fact, I am reminded of how Joanna Newsom’s masterpiece Ys was radically transformed by Van Dyke Park’s bold orchestral arrangements, but Reidy is improbably behind every side of the wild stylistic clashes here (albeit with some help from cellist Judith Hamann, Emptyset’s James Ginzburg, and others). When everything comes together just right, as it does on pieces like “Satellite” and “Maybe,” it feels like Reidy’s dissolving and dreamlike postmodern blues are an indestructible island of zen within a delirious mindfuck of unpredictably collapsing and accelerating electronics and convulsive broken beats.
- Anthony D'Amico
- Albums and Singles
This latest opus from San Francisco avant-guitar visionary Bill Orcutt is a charming and improbable outlier in his strange and wonderful discography, as it feels like a remarkably sincere homage to easy listening, the golden age of Hollywood, and schmaltz in general. As Tom Carter observes in the album’s description, the pervasive orchestral sweetening of the mid-20th century is far from beloved to most contemporary ears (particularly among jazz fans), but the title’s provocative Ornette Coleman-style statement of intent is largely an irony-free one, as Orcutt gamely improvises along with a shifting fantasia of angelic choirs, rippling harps, and swooning string swells. While all of the usual hallmarks of Orcutt’s distinctive playing (scrabbling flurries of notes, cathartic bends, viscerally abused strings) are present and remain as delightful as ever, most of the melodic heavy lifting is done by the looped samples. Freed from the burden of carrying the central melody with his guitar, Orcutt’s playing feels uniquely loose, tender, and spacious, resulting in an unexpectedly heartwarming and endearingly soulful major key blues album that is every bit as strong as the more explosive and idiosyncratic work that he is usually known for.
It is tempting to view this album as Orcutt’s inversion of the softening and sweetening “jazz-strings virus,” as Carter’s analysis focuses primarily on that element (though he does also mention “the oily underbelly of the American songbook”). The reality of How To Rescue Things is a bit more complex, however, as the first third of the album sounds a hell of a lot more like Orcutt is jamming along to a pre-irony (and pre-bebop) Christmas movie from the 1930s or 1940s and none of the appropriated loops are particularly recognizable from the The Great American Songbook (though I am hardly an expert on that subject). There is definitely an inversion happening, of course, but it feels like a sincere and tender one: Orcutt is essentially taking toothlessly sentimental melodic motifs and “fixing” them with a healthy injection of soul, slicing intensity, and vibrant spontaneity. In fact, this album amusingly reminds me of Prince’s performances on Muppets Tonight: an iconic and innovative artist improbably dropped into a family-friendly and ostensibly ridiculous situation and somehow emerging looking as cool as ever. In this case, however, the Muppets are swapped out for choirs of angels and harp-wielding cherubs, but Orcutt proves to be equally game at embracing his environment in good faith and making the crazy collision of aesthetics work beautifully. Moreover, he manages to make it feel both easy and natural, which makes a lot of sense in hindsight: if you are not jaded to an absolutely joyless degree, there is plenty of legitimate heartstring-tugging beauty and magic to be gleaned from a beatific celestial chorus if you know how to do it right.
- Anthony D'Amico
- Albums and Singles
This delightful end-of-year surprise is the culmination of a decade-long project in which Colleen Kinsella and Caleb Mulkerin devoted themselves to building (and learning to play) their own homemade electronic instruments. In keeping with the homespun/primitive electronics nature of the project, the duo largely avoided using the internet as a resource and instead consulted books and other instrument builders for guidance and inspiration (though some exceptions were admittedly made). That purist approach extends to the recordings as well, as the duo constrained themselves to only Kinsella's voice and their self-built instruments for every song except for one very catchy exception ("For Real," which features some synth from guest Chris Livengood). Unsurprisingly, the end result of that approach is a bit of a significant stylistic detour for the band, blurring together the wonky, eclectic charm of Silver Apples with an impressionist strain of siren song psychedelia.
There is a video on Big Blood's Youtube channel of Mulkerin performing an early version of "Came To Life" that provides a lot of insight into the scope and tone of this project, as it shows him patiently manipulating a wall of lights, dials, and wires to shape the piece's insistently driving mutant motorik groove. Then, he briefly disappears from the frame and returns wearing some kind of repurposed marching band helmet fitted with dials that trigger streaking, spacey bloops as he moves around the room. The video conveys two very important things: 1) technology-wise, the duo's self-built instruments have probably shot them back in time to the late '60s, and 2) there was definitely an element of kitschy fun to the project.
- Creaig Dunton
- Albums and Singles
The penultimate editions in Die Stadt’s Organum Electronics/David Jackman Subscription Series (with subscriptions still available, including a bonus disc) both draw from similar sonic elements as the previous releases have, which makes sense given this series of albums are all part of a singular work. Even working with a limited palette of sounds, Jackman rearranges and reconstructs them in a multitude of ways, covering everything from gentle tonal passages to jarring noise.
Flames of Fire, which consists of a single 47-minute piece titled "Flames of Fire & Stars of Lighte the Sun Ariseth" opens with a metallic hum that vaguely resembles the vibrations of a sitar elongated and sustained into infinity. Unlike the work he has done as Organum Electronics in this series, the sense is clearly organic. He retains some electronic elements of course. A serpentine slithering tone that consistently flows—swelling and drifting into the lower end of the frequency spectrum—gives this piece a different feel than the ones that preceded it. The focus shifts to the tones, and he brings in the vibrating gong sounds that have featured in most of his recent work. Comparably though, the structure is a bit more static, and the changes are slower, although a bit of a noisy undercurrent appears towards the final quarter of the disc.
- Creaig Dunton
- Albums and Singles
A bit less than a year since his last album, This is Broken, Matt Weston presents a double album in his idiosyncratic style that draws from a seemingly infinite number of styles and genres. He still solidifies it into a coherent whole, however. Communism has Appeared on the Scene draws heavily from geographic spaces and their effects on sound, most apparent through his greater implementation of field recording elements. With that said, it is another excellent, hyper-kinetic outburst of sounds that are at times confusing and disorienting but always make sense in the end.
The passing of cars and a steady beep appear early on the album in "Isolate Maul Kill," giving some sense of a geographic reference point that is supplemented with rhythmic digital glitches. Weston takes the music in darker directions at times, with cinematic outbursts cutting through aggressively, before eventually reforming into an almost brass or horn type timbre. Overall, the structurally is nicely erratic—jerking between digital noises and shrill tones—all the while featuring a deep, hollow undercurrent below. The short "Burials to Understanding" follows, where he blends high speed chase music fragments with digital glitching, metal clattering, and unfurling magnetic tape, ending in a mass of multi-layered wobbling tones.
