This week's series of episodes features images from Asheville, NC, which was devastated by Hurricane Helene this past week.
Please consider donating to the various organizations in and around the area.
Episode 714 features music by Pan•American, Maria Somerville, Patrick Cowley, The Gaslamp Killer and Jason Wool, Der Stil, Astrid Sonne, Reymour, Carlos Haayen Y Su Piano Candeloso, Harry Beckett, Tarwater, Mermaid Chunky, and Three Quarter Skies.
Episode 715 has Liquid Liquid, Kim Deal, Severed Heads, Los Agentes Secretos, mHz, Troller, Mark Templeton, Onkonomiyaki Labs, Deadly Headley, Windy and Carl, Sunroof, and claire rousay.
Episode 716 includes Actors, MJ Guider, The Advisory Circle, The Bug, Alessandro Cortini, The Legendary Pink Dots, Chihei Hatakeyama and Shun Ishiwaka, Arborra, Ceremony, Ueno Takashi, Organi, and Saagara.
This long-gestating new release from David Tibet and his shifting orbit of collaborators is an unexpected late-career throwback to the dazzling and immersive epics of Current 93's golden age. In Tibet's parlance, it is common for recordings and performances to be described as "channelings" and that seems especially appropriate for The Light Is Leaving Us All, which at times feels like it effortlessly transcends time and space and dissolves reality to open a fleeting portal into an alternate world swirling with unknowable mystery, unearthly beauty, and ineffable sadness. At its best, this album feels like a motley and wild-eyed caravan of minstrels, actors, and puppeteers unexpectedly appeared in a medieval town to share a vividly haunting, hallucinatory, and deeply eschatological fairy tale that will be the last thing that any of the villagers ever hear.
The Light Is Leaving Us All made its debut as a rapturous multimedia performance in London earlier this fall with Tibet’s impressionistic and achingly sad tale of witches and vanishing light backed by a series of slow-moving films by Davide Pepe.While there were occasion appearances from a mysterious red silhouette (the witches) and allusions to a glowing red barn, the bulk of the imagery was a series of antique sepia-toned portraits of families in which everyone’s eyes were replaced by trails of white that slowly oozed to the edges of the frame.it was a genuinely unsettling series of images that very effectively represents the album's tone of loss mingled with something ambiguously transcendent.Enigmatic ambiguity is a big theme in general, actually.For example, the witches clearly seem to be the tragic, beautiful martyrs of the tale, but it is quite hard to piece together much else from the fragmented narrative, which is purposely elusive, enigmatic, and pregnant with cryptic allusions.Also, the narrative features quite a wonderfully disorienting and colorful swirl of characters and events: in just "The Policeman’s Dead" alone, it is divulged that the policeman, the surgeon, a young girl, and the murderer are all dead (and the moon is drunk).Notably, that is the first real song on the album and it is one of the two (or possibly three) instant classics to be found, as Alasdair Roberts' lovely and hypnotically repeating classical guitar figure steadily accumulates intensity until it resembles some kind of ritualistic medieval procession.The entirety of the album is quite good in general though, as every piece feels like an essential deepening of both the spell and the bittersweet mystery of the narrative.Naturally, Tibet is in peak form lyrically and the band’s temporally dislocated and lovely music is lysergically and disturbingly enhanced by the masterful hand of Andrew Liles, but there are a still few pieces that unavoidably eclipse their surroundings.
The most striking one by a landslide is "A Thousand Witches," as its sadly lilting melody and swaying rhythm provides a gorgeous and devastating backdrop for Tibet’s tender recitation of names and allusions to "two thousand eyes in the carnival sky."Experiencing it live was a borderline religious experience for me and it does not lose much power at all in its recorded form, as it brings all of the sublime details into focus that help make it such a jaw-droppingly beautiful and timeless piece: the strange and lurching percussion, Aloma Ruiz Boada's swooning violin melodies, Reinier van Houdt’s subtly lovely augmentations of the simple chord progression, Michael York's mournfully beautiful flutes and bagpipes, the chorus of chirping birds–every single thread converges to absolutely floor me.It feels almost too pure and perfect to have emerged from our world, but it is far from the first time that Tibet's work has affected me that way and it likely will not be the last.Moments like "A Thousand Witches" are exactly why I have remained an unwaveringly devoted Current 93 fan throughout more than two decades of my evolving taste.The other significant bombshell on the album is "The Postman Is Singing," which has the riff structure of a doom-metal dirge, but inventively dispenses with distortion (mostly) to unleash a slow-building firestorm of militantly jangling clean guitars and an ascending cacophony of darkly blossoming strings and throbbing electronics.It is a truly glorious and infernal racket of squealing and shivering strings by the time it finally winds down.Aside from that, I would be remiss if I did not mention "The Bench and the Fetch," which diverges from the escalating darkness of the album as an unexpected oasis of nakedly pretty and sincere '70s-style folk that perversely suits the album perfectly.
The only significant way that The Light Is Leaving Us All falls a bit short of past career-defining masterworks like All The Pretty Horses or Black Ships Ate The Sky is the slightly reduced frequency of absolutely revelatory individual songs.As a complete artistic statement, however, it is hard to imagine this album being any more absorbing or cumulatively powerful, as it perfectly unfolds like a darkly entrancing folktale that seethes and swirls with so much mystery, depth, poetry, and hidden meaning that I feel like I have barely scratched the surface of its emotional and philosophical core.Moreoever, Current 93's work has always found multiple ways to ambush me with something unexpectedly striking or emotionally resonant.For the most part, the melodies themselves are instantly graspable and tend to establish my early favorite moments, but appreciating the full depth of the lyrics or the intricacies of the arrangements is another story altogether that ensures that I will find secret new pleasures for months to come.I definitely do not expect to tire of this album anytime soon.I suspect I will never unravel exactly what Tibet was trying to say with this album, as it is so willfully enigmatic and open-ended, but it would be a reductive mistake to read the album as a timely and fable-like elegy for the end of the world, even if it would be a completely fitting one.Perhaps it is merely the elegy for a particularly dark chapter (the one starring us), as Tibet makes it quite clear that all of the lost light will ultimately fill the night sky and that the birds never stop sweetly singing.
Originally only available on cassette during dal Forno's summer tour, this EP of six eclectic covers is now available digitally. As anyone who has heard her occasional NTS Radio DJ appearances can attest, dal Forno has delightfully wide-ranging taste and definitely appreciates a great hook when she hears it, so it is not at all surprising that there are some extremely deep cuts here (The Kiwi Animal) mingled with a few names that actually have spent time at the top of the pop charts (Lana del Ray and The B-52s). While the latter's early "Give Me Back My Man" undergoes quite an impressive transformation, Carla is generally quite reverent with her source material, taking a handful of great songs and simply paring them down to their stark and intimate essence.
Self-Released
I generally shy away from tour-only releases these days, as I eventually realized (much later than I should have) that they are almost never very good and are mostly just noteworthy for their scarcity.Consequently, I did not start salivating over Top of the Pops when "Summertime Sadness" surfaced as a teaser, though it is certainly a likably ghostly and skeletal channeling of Lana del Ray.An all-covers EP just seemed like kind of a fun, throw-away release strictly for superfans, which is rarely a category I find myself in.However, I probably should have learned something from Marisa Nadler's cover albums, which sneakily include some of her finest work, as similar feat occurs with Pops.Obviously, Nadler and dal Forno are quite different artists, but they share one extremely significant trait: both have a very distinctive and instantly recognizable style.As such, any cover song that passes through that transformative filter stops feeling like a cover and feels very much like something new.In dal Forno's case, that signature style is a half-sultry/half-spectral minimalism built from just her voice, a simple bass line, and a scratchy, ramshackle drum machine beat.Occasionally, she will also throw in some wobbly, understated synthesizer, but it is generally a deceptively simple and incredibly effective aesthetic.The music is just substantial enough to provide a sense of momentum, but nothing is forceful or busy enough to ever steal the focus from the vocals.Top of the Pops feels a lot like finding a worn and forgotten mixtape and happily discovering that all the parts that truly matter still manage to break through the hiss and flutter.
With "Give Me Back My Man," dal Forno transcends her source material so thoroughly that it is more like a great new original song than a mere cover.In fact, it is probably one of my favorite songs that she has recorded to date, so it was definitely a wise decision to give this EP a more widespread reach.One fresh classic would have been enough to make me delighted about this modest release, but there is not a single weak or even middling song to be found.While the song choices are all unwaveringly cool and the arrangements are frequently inspired, Top of the Pops succeeds on a deeper level as well, as dal Forno manages to playfully indulge her more fun and hook-loving side without sacrificing much of her intensity or depth.While some of the lyrics are admittedly more flirty, breezy, and sexy than usual, the right singer can bring new and previously hidden shades of meaning and soul to just about anything and dal Forno has found a way to make even The B-52s seem enigmatic and introspective with this release.
Elemente is a dynamic and hypnotic record, not at all reliant upon listener knowledge of the three incarnations of K/C/Qluster nor of the relentless creativity of Hans-Joachim Roedelius. The trio play a range of analogue synths and tracks are coherently sequenced into a whole album: two elements which combine to give a richness, depth and balance to their expression.
In March 2017 I attended a solo performance by Han-Joachim Roedelius in a Knoxville church. He played piano and electronics for an hour or so. The audience was clearly a reverent group who knew why they were there. When the music ended, there were a few seconds of silence and those of us close enough saw and heard him weep. After a blistering standing ovation he was in fine form, mingling for a long time with fans and even suggesting "ein selfie?" A few days later I heard that his other US dates had been cancelled for health reasons. He must be feeling better, as this seventh album as Qluster from the eighty-four year old Roedelius (with Onnen Bock and Arming Metz) is a thrilling and poignant marvel, crafted with daring, unpretentious gusto.
As with their earliest recordings, Qluster adjourned to improvise in the remote hamlet of SchoÃànberg, before chamfering the sessions down to these eight tracks and adding only sparse additional elements to the tracks "Zeno", "Tatum" and "Xymelan". Of the aforementioned analogue instruments - ARP 2600 - is used to particularly fabulous effect on "Zeno", and Farfisa organ beautifully underscores a Fender Rhodes piano melody on "Symbia. Several pieces rest on either slow or faster beats with "Tatum" having a slightly more heated and abrasive texture than the others.
I have to speculate that "Zeno" is (well) named for the Greek philosopher (c. 490-430 BC) author of certain paradoxes, including one which supports Parmenides' notion that (contrary to the evidence of our senses) change does not exist and thus motion is nothing but an illusion. There is no need for speculation about the importance of Roedelius whether in the three incarnations of K/C/Qluster, or with Conrad Schnitzler, Dieter Moebius, Michael Rother, Bowie, Eno, Conny Plank and others, and Elemente lives up to his creative history.
My dreamy nature is rewarded by "Weite" and "Infinitum" - two stunning tracks. Depending on one’s own imagination, "Weite" may suggest floating in an echo chamber, wandering to the top of a hill surrounded by clouds, or time-traveling back to a childhood moment when a parent helped with kite flying as waves rolled along a sunny beach. The last piece, "Infinitum" maybe creates the atmosphere of an eternal trip into endless space, a journey which Hans-Joachim Roedelius may arguably be closer to making than some of us, but no time soon I trust.
As Murderous Vision, Ohio's Stephen Petrus has been one of the pioneers in the US death industrial/power electronics scene for over two decades now. It is a stylistic variation that has largely managed to avoid many of the pitfalls of its European counterpart ("provocative" political ambiguity, rampant misogyny, etc.) but retained the more creative, occasionally occult-tinged, depressive darkness. On Voided Landscapes, he continues this trend with a bit more environmental influence, both overt and subtle. Darkness Descends is a compilation for a festival Petrus curated this past summer in Cleveland and, while produced for the festival itself, stands strongly apart as a compilation of artists that have defined the style.
It is hinted at in the title, but one of the defining features of Voided Landscapes is the way Petrus captures the sense of not just urban decay, but its impact on the surrounding rural areas of Cleveland.Deep in the Rust Belt of the United States, the sound of industrial rot and polluted nature seeps into all nine of these songs.This is not new territory for Petrus:his 2010 film City/Ruins covered this topic, as well as the local artists inspired by their surroundings.Here it is very apparent though:right from the low end rumble and bleak piano sounds of "Purity Burns" there is a sense of spacious darkness and even what sounds like field recordings of ducks takes on a dour vibe.
The grinding noise that opens "Voided" sets the stage for a similar piece, which soon becomes a clattering space within a swampy, oppressive sense of ambience that is just oozing with despair.There is variation throughout the album of course, but the bleakness is largely unrelenting."Corrosive Materials" continues from the aforementioned "Voided" and concludes the disc, but adds in a bit of snappy rhythms and distortion to give an added dimension."Moss and Bones" and "Concussion" also feature Petrus working with more rhythmic elements, mostly within a framework of treated loops and noise, however.
Speaking of noise, it is never far in these nine songs."Radiate" is pure vintage power electronics, with swirling distortion, squelching electronics, and a harsh vocal performance from Petrus that is processed into oblivion."Sifting Ash' is similarly distorted, but less aggressive.Built upon a far off synthesizer drone, loops and textures are added in to give a strong sense of texture, and even a bit of autoharp from Pauline Lombardo offsets the chaos.
Darkness Descends, curated by Petrus, was intended to accompany the festival of the same name, but works on its own as a compilation of like minded friends and artists that share a similar vision, and aesthetic. Murderous Vision opens the set with a wonderfully rhythmic piece, littered with prominent samples, metallic banging, and overdriven voices.Gnawed's "The Harrowing Dark" and The Vomit Arsonist's "Dispirited" fit in quite well, with both artists presenting massive, foundation shaking rumbles and destroyed vocal performances.
"Ultimatum" from Compactor is similar in intent, but the approach is somewhat different.There is a tighter sense of structure and with its pummeling thuds and loop-heavy structure, the piece nicely builds and evolves through its dissonant textures.Theologian's "I Shed Your Corpse" is one of the high points on here, as is Steel Hook Prostheses's "Orbitoclast".The former is a pairing of melodic electronics with pounding rhythms and vocals that, while processed, end up not entirely devoid of their humanity.SHP's contribution is wobbling pseudo-melodies and dissonant noise, but shaped into a piece that is dramatic and majestic in its gloom, with an exceptional sense of depth overall.
Both Stephen Petrus's newest work as Murderous Vision and his compilation project Darkness Descends may be somewhat monochromatic in their moods, but Voided Landscapes and the nine other artists who contribute to the compilation show that there are multiple shades of that brown/gray grime that covers the death industrial scene.There is a sense of depth and variation to this desperation that is perversely enjoyable, and highly recommended for anyone who likes their music dark, dissonant, but also nuanced and well developed.
In four lengthy segments, each inhabiting its own side of vinyl, Brooklyn based Bob Bellerue presents a record that draws from his multitude of styles, from carefully constructed drones and outbursts of harsh noise, to less traveled territories, such as subtle melodies. Combined with experimental strategies learned from Bellerue’s work as a sound technician and Music of Liberation becomes a fascinating work in the canon of experimental sound and music, exceptional from both its composition as well as the production.
The material that comprises this set was all recorded on a single day in Portugal, utilizing a combination of the expected (pedals, contact mic, amps) and less expected (shruti box, harmonica), but most of this is utilized in ways that render them almost unidentifiable in the swirling mass of sound.Beyond this, Bellerue re-recorded the material using the natural ambience of the Issue Project Room in Brooklyn to give an added sense of space and architectural depth to the already complex sound.
This album was in progress when legendary artist Z’EV passed and, as a friend and collaborator, Bellerue dedicated this work to him.This influence is clearly on display in the third segment of the album.Amidst an industrial metallic grind and wall of shrill feedback, rattling gongs and pounding metal is apparent, seemingly a direct nod to Z’EV’s work.This chugging, rhythmic metal sound eventually dissipates to a wall of distortion and electronics:a purely vintage harsh noise sound that, also, is a fitting tribute to Bellerue’s late friend.
There are precious few other moments where the instrumentation is obvious.In the opening bits of the first segment, what sounds like a bass guitar can be heard, generating a wobbling, distorted passage, but it is soon subsumed in a wall of harsh, buzzing crunch.Eventually the entirety of the piece is shaped into a churning mass of noise, the structure and dynamics continuing to shift and evolve until it takes on the sound of slowly bobbing waves.The fourth side of the set features another similar pairing of grinding harshness with distorted, yet shimmering tones.Imbued with a sense of menacing, subdued aggression, the buzzsaw noise and almost melodic droning passages swell and retreat, bouncing between chaos and order making for an exceptional mix.
The second piece takes the mood from malignant to mournful but keeps things just as complex.Buzzing layers are punctuated with piercing, sharp ones, not unlike the feedback equivalent of the Psycho soundtrack.A mix of meandering and stabbing noises continues throughout as Bellerue builds the piece up, and then strips it back down.The sadness that pervades the piece never relents though; eventually evolving into a slowly shambling dynamic that goes into a massive wall of sub-bass before concluding in empty, hollow dimensions.
The melodicism may be subtle, but it is a sensibility that pervades most of Music of Liberation.It is there, but nicely couched in spiky shards of electronics, and further obscured with Bob Bellerue’s production wizardry.It is that subtlety, enmeshed in a detailed and nuanced world of distorted chaos, which gives this album an excellent sense of depth and complexity.The multitude of not just sounds, but also moods that Bellerue is able to convey within this abstract framework is a testament not only to his brilliance as a technician, but also as a composer.
The Heather Leigh that recorded 2015's excellent I Abused Animal seems to have split into two separate artists this year: one who plays wild experimental guitar in a duo with Peter Brötzmann and another who is something of an outsider art-pop vocal diva. This is the latter Leigh. Ostensibly "a record of late-night Americana and heavy femininity," Throne is quite a bold and radical departure from expected territory, often resembling a bizarre and hallucinatory collision of Lou Reed and Kate Bush. That is only the tip of a very strange and intimate iceberg, however, as Leigh also has a curious approach to structure and a bent for confessional subject matter. For the most part, Leigh manages to make this experiment work, as Throne is a memorably unique album, but it only truly catches fire when her guitar playing bursts into the foreground.
The opening "Prelude to Goddess" does not waste any time in throwing down the gauntlet with Leigh's curious new vision, as it lyrically lies somewhere between a lust-filled teenage diary entry and Velvet Underground-esque street-level reportage.That makes for quite a disorienting stew of uneasily co-existing elements, as lines like "the way you dance makes me cream" and "I love your leopard jeans so much" are swooningly delivered over a sublime backdrop of slowly pulsing and chiming guitar.The following "Lena" takes that eroticism into considerably darker and more uncomfortable territory, with lyrics about lifting up her skirt and being "the kind of girl that never forgets what your daddy did."It would be an understatement to say that Leigh's approach to Americana is an idiosyncratic one, but Leigh's tales of sex, longing, heartache, drunken dancing, and troubling family dynamics undeniably fit well within the timeless country and blues continuum, even if she updates the language and the context a bit.Her unconventional use of slide guitar fits the bill as well.I suppose that makes Throne a deeply experimental and post-modern blues album of sorts, yet Leigh's vocal delivery and approach to song structure render it almost unrecognizable as such, as she sounds far more like an atypically throaty and libidinal classical vocalist than like Bessie Smith and she willfully eludes almost anything resembling a conventional verse, chorus, or hot-blooded rhythm in favor of a languorous and dreamlike amorphousness.There are some repeating refrains of sorts, but they seem to blossom forth organically rather than pivoting on a chord change or adhering to a structured trajectory.
While the first half of the album definitely delves into the more daring and nakedly intimate subject matter, the strongest pieces come a bit later.On "Scorpio and Androzani," for example, Leigh's tender and understated vocals fit a bit more seamlessly with her woozy slide guitar accompaniment.The difference is subtle, but it feels more like a complete song than a vocal piece that also happens to have to guitar in the background.Even better still is "Soft Seasons," which is built around a viscerally howling guitar melody and a feeble, broken-backed drum machine groove.Even when the melody disappears to make room for the vocals, the strangled and moaning guitar tone often remains, which provides an appropriately primal foundation for Leigh's swooping and wailing vocals.Much like the rest of the album, however, it can feel bizarrely anachronistic, as it features rhyming couplets like "Hypnotized by fame, bitten by fire.Won't you say my name?It's my only desire."That subject matter (fame is hard!) seems far more at home at home in classic rock and contemporary hip-hop fare than it does on an avant-garde guitarist’s album, which makes me feel like there is also a bizarre invented persona element to this album akin to Haley Fohr's Jackie Lynn project.I truly have no idea where personal/confessional ends and artifice begins with this album.
That said, just about everything about Throne is bizarre and wrong-footing, which makes it quite a challenging listen from start to finish.On the one hand, the most immediately gratifying pieces tend to be either the more straightforward ones or those that feel like a continuation of I Abused Animal, such as "Soft Seasons" or the alternately rippling and fiery centerpiece "Gold Teeth."For me, the latter pieces are definitely the best ones on the album.On the other hand, I very much appreciate that Leigh took quite a gamble with this album rather than just making I Abused Animal 2, particularly since she is revered primarily as an inventive instrumentalist rather than as a songwriter.I also appreciate what a truly bizarre album this is.It is abundantly clear that Leigh put a lot of time and thought into crafting a coherent and unique vision: regardless of its flaws and quirks, Throne is unquestionably a strong and confident artistic statement unlike anything else that I have heard.I just do not know quite what to make of it.Perhaps it is simply not for me though.I am not sure who such an album would deeply resonate with, but my guess would probably be someone like David Lynch.He would no doubt be delighted by Leigh’s ungraspable and vaguely unnerving blurring together of "Siren" and "honky-tonk jukebox" into something that ambiguously rides the line between hypnagogic country music, catharsis, and nightmare.
Brainwashed and Holodeck Records are proud to premiere "Closed Eye", by Future Museums, from the album Rosewater Ceremony Pt. II: Guardian of Solitude coming out October 19th. Following up the first installment from earlier in 2018, Neil Lord (Thousand Foot Whale Claw, Single Lash), "Closed Eye" is awash with lush synthesizers and pensive, plaintive guitar work delicately unfurled over haunting ambience. The title specifically refers to how Lord recorded the song: live, in one take, while blindfolded. The full cassette is even more multifaceted, capturing everything from pulsating synth arpeggios and bubbling keyboards to introspective, expansive atmospheres. Rosewater Ceremony Pt. II: Guardian of Solitude is available to order now on tape and digital via holodeckrecords.com.
This is the first part of a planned trilogy that is apparently a continuation of Brainnectar's "studies of psycho-spiritual forces."There seems to be quite a lot of conceptual and philosophical background to this release, which makes a lot of sense, as I suspect someone can only get to this place through a combination of intense thought and an even more intense desire to transcend consciousness entirely.That latter has always been a driving force for Eb.er, as his work has historically tended to have a very primal and physical component.That drive manifests itself in a compellingly different way on Om Kult though, as these 31 fragments manage to mingle a meditative feel with a strikingly animalistic and guttural sensibility.Those two threads normally could not easily coexist, but Eb.er's approach to Zen lies more in the acceptance that he will inevitably die, rot, and be reabsorbed by the earth than in imagining a peaceful stream or feeling any sense of oneness with his fellow man.While I definitely appreciate where Eb.er is coming from conceptually and artistically, the world is littered with underwhelming albums birthed from interesting ideas.Fortunately, this is not one of those albums, as Eb.er's approach to composition was every bit as ingenious and unconventional as his inspirations.Much like Graham Lambkin, Eb.er proves himself to be the kind of artist that can create something truly bizarre and memorably disturbing with only a microphone or a crappy tape recorder.
Being able to make a complex and absorbing album from virtually nothing is undeniably an impressive feat, but it is also something much than that: in reducing his palette to just his voice and some field recordings, Eb.er eliminates any artifice that might have blunted the raw, direct connection of these pieces.The sole concession made to conventional musicality is the occasional use of a sine wave generator, which Eb.er generally uses to create a shifting and uneasy backdrop of subtly menacing drones at uncomfortably close frequencies.At other times, however, the sine waves sound like an emergency broadcast tone emanating from a living room television as the room's occupants are being messily and loudly devoured by blood-thirsty demons.The album's latter half is especially rife with such viscerally nightmarish moments, particularly "Hexenerscheinung," "Beelzefest," and "Schmerzmasse abfaulend," which seem to form an infernal triptych of shrieking women, crackling fires, demonically pitch-shifted voices, and shuddering machinery.All three resemble a troublingly realistic field recording of hell opening up to engulf a small village in fiery, murderous chaos.If the album was entirely in that vein, it would be quite a grueling and unpleasant experience, but Om Kult has such a thoughtful and deliberate arc that such moments actually feel earned and cathartic by the time they arrive.The majority of the album resembles a slow-building and phantasmagoric series of vividly textured abstract vignettes built from tape hiss, chittering insects, rusted industrial machinery, falling water, and recognizably distressed and cryptic snatches of voices.
The trajectory of Drew McDowall’s recent resurgence as a solo artist continues to be a compelling and unpredictable one, as The Third Helix is quite a bit different from either of his previous Dais outings. If Collapse felt like a lost Coil session and Unnatural Channel felt like a vintage noise tape, Helix feels like the assimilation of those two sides into something more forward-looking and unique. It does not quite unseat Collapse as my favorite of McDowall's albums, but a couple of pieces easily rank among his finest work to date. More importantly, the album as a whole cumulatively casts a wonderfully immersive and disorienting spell that is ideal for headphone listening. This is the first of McDowall's albums that makes me feel like he is currently in the midst of a fresh new creative phase rather than merely unearthing and reworking a deep backlog of unreleased material.
The opening "Rhizome" embodies a curious dichotomy that runs throughout The Third Helix, as McDowall seems equally drawn to both sublime beauty and collapsing, distended ruin.Those two sides rarely come together elsewhere on the album, but they certainly do on "Rhizome," making it the strongest and most instantly gratifying piece on the album.While it deceptively begins with a disjointed series of warmly shuddering string flourishes adrift in a haze of slow-motion synth swells, the piece soon coheres into a recognizable structure…then unexpectedly blossoms into rapturous swirl of choral voices and achingly beautiful strings.Once he hits that wonderful crescendo, however, McDowall immediately sets about dismantling it and the piece dissolves into a clanging and buzzing industrial coda.The Third Helix never quite delves into such naked and unambiguous beauty ever again, but it does feature at least one another piece of similar caliber, as the densely throbbing and see-sawing "Impulse" gradually transforms into a lysergically heavy feast of rattling drones and garbled voices.It manages to evoke a mood that is best described as "nightmarishly beautiful," resembling a simple string piece that has been stretched and smeared into lurching horror.I also quite like "Nothing is Hidden," which sounds somewhat similar, yet excises everything organic or melodic to leave only a shambling, hissing, and grinding mechanized hellscape.
Interestingly, the album's brief closer "Immanent Condition" goes in completely the opposite direction, unfolding as a quietly melodic synth theme that merely frays at the edges rather than completely corrode and collapse.The rest of the album takes a much more subtle and willfully destructive approach though, as the appeal lies less in the strength of the motifs and the compositions than it does in how McDowall plays with time and pulls everything apart to weave a fragmented and kaleidoscopic fantasia.I have no idea how much of that strategy was premeditated, but it definitely seems like McDowall had enough strong ideas for only half an album and ingeniously opted to use the second half to mangle and manipulate his lesser ideas in interesting ways.In some cases, such as the excellent "Proximity," it is easy to see the ghost of a fully formed idea driving the churning and heaving abstraction.In most of the other cases, however, the degree to which McDowall succeeds is directly related to how closely I am listening to how things break apart. For example, "YLL" feels like a very simple pattern that has been reduced to a creeping granular ooze.Elsewhere, "Tendrils" is a quietly pretty ambient piece drifting through a reverberant ruin of stomping and clattering machinery, though it eventually loses its way and seems to morph into a completely different piece altogether.The remaining piece, "False Memory," is a bit of a fascinating outlier, as collaborator James K's vocals swoon and slide in a bleary haze over an unpredictably throbbing and jackhammering backdrop.The prominent presence of vocals is an obvious departure for McDowall, but it is equally significant that he completely abandons his usual pattern-manipulation for something more unpredictable and organic.I like it, but it sounds like it belongs on a completely different album or possibly in some kind of avant-garde theater mindfuck.
If The Third Helix has a weakness, it is mostly that some of the more fragmented and deconstructed pieces are too insubstantial to make a real impact on their own or linger in my memory after they are gone.Also, a strong appreciation for nuance, texture, and detail is quite helpful in unlocking the full depth of McDowall's artistry, as the straining seams, falling detritus, and sluggishly hallucinatory timescale play a crucial role in elevating several of these pieces into something much more compelling than is immediately obvious.The Third Helix would probably be a more unambiguously fine album if it featured a better balance between melody/harmony and clattering post-industrial experimentation, yet it still feels like a significant step forward to me, as McDowall has found a novel way to work around his limitations.He has always been much better at coming up with great ideas than he has been at building those ideas into strong compositions with a satisfying arc.With this new approach to time-stretching, however, McDowall manages to drag and strain even the simplest ideas into song-like durations.If that was all he managed to do, it would not be much of an achievement, but almost every one of those distended and broken fragments plays a significant role in the assembly of a slow-burning, coherent, and wonderfully warped and dreamlike whole.
There is an old Norse myth that says the great northern glaciers stored energy until they burst with fluorescent light, creating the Aurora Borealis. Saariselka is inspired by the meeting of earth and light, where slowly moving land masses merge with enveloping light fields. This sonic collaboration is between composers Marielle Jakobsons (Fender Rhodes, organ, synthesisers) and Chuck Johnson (pedal steel guitar and treatments).
Chuck Johnson is an Oakland, California based composer and musician. He approaches his work with an ear towards finding faults and instabilities that might reveal latent beauty, with a focus on guitar, experimental electronics, minimalism and soundtrack composition. Recordings of his work have been published by VDSQ, Trouble in Mind, Scissor Tail, Merge, and Three Lobed, among others.
Marielle V. Jakobsons is a composer and intermedia artist based in Oakland, CA. Her compositions evoke minimalism with melodic drone and enveloping polyrhythmic soundscapes of synthesizers, strings, and voice. She has published recordings and toured internationally on Thrill Jockey, Mexican Summer, Students of Decay, Digitalis, Important Records, among others.
Artist notes:
"Ceres is inspired by whiteouts, where the rhythm of your breath and body become a container for experiencing the fine gradations of your surroundings. The process of creating this piece was one of learning how to get out of the way, and of emphasizing the use of space and decay to alter one’s perception of time. With a skeleton formed by a simple chord progression, we focused on the compelling sonic subtleties of the pedal steel guitar, Fender Rhodes electric piano, and a Yamaha electric organ.
One of the many profound lessons I learned from my studies with Pauline Oliveros was the concept of truly existing inside the sound. Rather than thinking about a sonic structure as a horizontal timeline as in a score or audio editing software, or as a vertical stack of frequencies as depicted in a spectrogram, Oliveros' approach invites us to exist inside a piece as if it was a three dimensional structure that surrounds the listener like a sphere. In fact, in her meditation exercises she encouraged participants to think of any sonic environment as a composition that is always available if one is willing to listen. These ideas inform my music making to this day." (Chuck)
When is one plus one not two? When two paths converge and a new one appears. But what is this newly activated neural pathway? A Third Mind? In the 1960s, multimedia artist Brion Gysin cut through the words of a newspaper and rearranged them to reveal a new kind of truth contained within the words but not freed until his knife cut it loose. He described this as part of the Third Mind. Likewise, Limpid As The Solitudes cuts through sound-making techniques to enter a new zone of sonic revelations.
If you had to look for musical precedents, you might say the record recalls the turn-of-the-century Mille Plateaux glitch era, the warmth of La Monte Young's raga-inspired microtonal electronic "dream house" drones, a sense of adventure evident in the acousmatic non-space recordings made by GRM artists in the 1960s/ 1970s, 4AD's floor-gazing guitar sound circa Cocteau Twins peak, and blissfully diverse field recordings. But you could equally equate it with entirely different recording sources. Limpid As The Solitudes has a widescreen sound that is both familiar and unfamiliar. Warm, comforting and also unsettling in unpredictable ways. Deliberate yet exploratory. It’s a record composed of opposites and contrasts. Following historical guidelines yet also throwing them out of the window. It's hard to tell if the process of creating it was more akin to abstract painting but it might possibly be easier to understand if it was a large museum painting (to steal a thought from David Stubbs). To describe the album as ambient would indicate a much too passive engagement with the sound – leave it to play in the background and you’ll miss a lot of the joy.
Felicia Atkinson and Jefre Cantu-Ledesma describe the record as a series of postcards - things and sounds that happen vertically as a slow ascension, vessels communicating in dreams. In this collaborative recording, there is a feeling of "becoming" - things metamorphose - a concrete sound turns into a electronic sound that turns into a spiral-like melody which then furls / unfurls at the same time.
The title of the album - Limpid As The Solitudes - as well as track titles, are all verses stolen from Sylvia Plath's poems. If you look at the cover, you’ll find another key clue - you’ll see an image created by photographer Julien Carreyn of a young women wearing destroyed jeans, playing with bubble wrap. The image is intended to give the viewer an eerie 1990's feeling that echoes the recording. Think films like Trust (Hal Hartley, 1990) or Chungking Express (Wong Kar Wai, 1994). It's the ultra modern solitude of characters lost in an early-digital urban vacuum, looking for a more time to wonder, a soul mate or just some compassion in the grey sky.
Among the many other references for this album is how Google Maps have created new digital perceptions of space, Gilles Deleuze's examination of Alice In Wonderland, Andre Breton's poems, and more films including the classics Sacrifice (Tarkovsky), Passenger (Antonioni), and Last Year In Marienbad (Resnais). To dig into the more of the ideas and sources behind this record, you'll simply have to talk to the duo. We simply cannot give you the full depth here.
Be sure to come back to this record more than once - it's then that its power will work - you'll recall the sound of a lover, a garden you once walked through, an echo of a record you once loved. To be appreciated, Limpid As The Solitudes requires you to immerse yourself as if in a hot spring, letting the sounds float over you and alter your perceptions and memories.