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.
Brace Up! is the first ever studio release from the duo of Chris Corsano (drums) and Bill Orcutt (guitar). Recorded in Brussels at Les Ateliers Claus by Christophe Albertijn on March 19th and 20th, 2018. Stage dive photograph by Jason Penner.
"Over the past six years or so, drummer Chris Corsano has proven to be one of Bill Orcutt's most reliably flexible collusionists. Regardless of whether Bill is cluster-busting electric guitar strings, weaseling around with cracked electronics, or playing relatively spacious free-rock, Corsano is able to provide the proper base for his aural sculpting. A lot of Orcutt's instrumental work has traditionally felt hermetic even though he's exploring caverns of explosive ecstasy. One often got the impression Bill was operating in the way John Travolta did in the classic 1976 ABC television drama, The Boy in the Plastic Bubble. Orcutt's actual interaction with collaborators emerged not from communication so much as pure observation. While he was fully cognizant of his musical surroundings, his reactions to it were walled off. This approach did not encourage sonic dialogue so much as parallel streams of discourse. These streams could interact with each other, but not in particularly standard ways. On Brace Up! , their first ever studio release, this precept has changed considerably. Whether it's a function of emotional familiarity or an intellectual choice I dunno, but there's a whole new kind of duo exchange going down on this record. Bill and Chris are clearly playing off each other's moves throughout the album. And it really raises the level of the music to an all-time high. From the cop car see-saw of "Poundland Frenzy" to the mutual pummeling of "Paranoid Time" (possibly a Minutemen tribute?) to the lazychicken-gets-stung-prog of "She Punched a Hole in the Moon for Me," the sounds on Brace Up! display a constant flow of ideas and instantaneous conjugation of newly forged verbs. As great as Bill and Chris's previous duo records have been, this one's greater." -- Byron Coley
To simply categorize the music of Rivulets as spare or desolate is to unjustly deny it the hot blood sizzling through its very veins.
Sure, on the band's 6th album In Our Circle, there are prairies of space over which notes and tones often hang like dust specks in a light beam. But there is a pulsing intensity to these moments, these Rust Belt incantations. Denver-via-Minneapolis Songwriter Nathan Amundson might be laconic in his presentation, but his music is abound with thoughtful sentiment and rich in soul. Think of the way the seemingly austere music of Low (with whom Amundson has toured and collaborated), Jason Molina or even, say, the repetitive psych-metal of the vastly under-appreciated Lungfish, vibrated with raw nerve and dark energy. In Our Circle vibrates with a similar hard-earned confidence and perhaps with an even darker energy.
In Our Circle dwells heavy in a contemporary American psyche. Rare is the news that doesn’t feel worse than the day before. If we're currently in the Autumn of the American Era, then In Our Circle sits out there in late November in a first snow made of ash. And this is from a band who once called an album We're Fucked. But the hounds of time are really nipping at our heels now. "Another dark day, another dark day, another dark day, another dark day," Amundson quivers in his lovely, breathy tenor over a slo(ooo)w shuffling strum and a striking lap steel. Coming at the album's midpoint, one might see this as Rivulets waving the white flag halfway through. But there's a comfort in these blues, some sort of communal sadness in the dark. If the dad in Cormac McCarthy's The Road had a guitar in his grocery cart, these would be the last songs he played before he used the guitar for campfire kindling.
BEAST is a new project by composer Koen Holtkamp, known for his sweeping, maximalist work with Mountains, as well as his labyrinthian solo recordings. While taking some time away from music to focus on working with light and color his approach shifted, opening himself up to new working methods which led to the creation of a virtual ensemble of sorts. The process of refocusing on music found Holtkamp gravitating towards pieces centered on simple rhythmic patterns which, when built upon one another, create elaborately intertwining castles of sound. On Ens, Holtkamp reins in his sprawling sound with new resolve, crafting tightly constructed pieces of engaging and ecstatic beauty.
Ens was made during a time of anticipation of change for Holtkamp: the birth of his first child. Having recorded and mixed the album late at night and at odd hours in the months leading up to the birth and during the early sleepless days of fatherhood, Ens (which means entity or existence) is a profoundly intimate and heartfelt journey into Holtkamp’s psyche. The constant motion created by the ebb and flow of rhythmic elements connects Ens’ diverse compositions and mirrors the building expectation of such a momentous change.
Holtkamp’s initial recordings as BEAST (Vol 1 & Vol 2) were mostly conceived for the immediacy and physicality of performance and were directly linked to a series of visual environments he created with 3D laser projections. As a purely studio project, Ens takes on a more precise and contemplative approach. Moments of blissful grandeur such as the convalescence of melodies in "Paprika Shorts" are at once overwhelming and crystalline in the placement and clarity of each sound. Deceptively simple pieces like "Boketto" and "Miniature" appear more sparse and subtle, but the arrangement of sounds reveal deeper levels of nuance with each listen. By carefully arranging and selecting each element, Holtkamp both references genre tropes, from classical minimalism to beat-driven dance music, and constructs a sound all his own. The intricately detailed depth of field gives the album an almost sculptural presence. This level of detail is underpinned by Holtkamp's move towards more virtual instrumentation which he utilizes to push beyond the physical limitations of their acoustic equivalents, as well as to synthesize new instruments.
As BEAST, Holtkamp has nimbly altered his process of creating dense, immersive music. Ens stands as not only the culmination of his newfound methods, but also a deeply personal moment. In crafting the graceful and passionate sonic tapestries into compact compositions, BEAST's Ens masterfully melds the earthbound and the ethereal.
Since assuming the recording moniker Hiro Kone in 2011, New York City-based electronic artist Nicky Mao has personalized a space predicated on dark layers interacting with rhythm. With her early EPs on Group Tightener and Bitterroots, leading up to the EP Fallen Angels and the acclaimed debut full length album, Love Is the Capital (both on Geographic North), Mao's meticulously crafted textures attracted collaborators like Drew McDowall (Coil), Little Annie, and Roxy Farman (Wetware) while driving against the grain of experimental techno. Mao's explorations often cast themselves against danceable structures, creating a duality of crisis and escapism.
For Pure Expenditure—her debut on DAIS Records—Mao continues to weave a labyrinth of electronic pattern, with an often economical usage of repeating sequences and ethereal stasis to drive the narrative. The title refers to the sovereign release of a surplus energy, divorced from all imperatives of utility, which otherwise threatens to become morbid. Working from this creative theme, Mao uses this theoretical concept to seek out a long form statement without regard for any immediate interpretation or return.
In the context and construct of the album's format, Pure Expenditure reaches into the psyche of sacrifice and the danger of excess, not in a traditional allegory, but in the actual investigation of where energy is absorbed and how it’s often negatively seeped into moral fiber. While the albums' seven tracks don't offer so much as a resolution to these conundrums as they do a case study, Mao's sound has developed forcibly into the conscientious voice of systematic injustice, albeit often without syntax. Pure Expenditure creates thought through concept and volume through space. Thematically, acclaimed visual artist Tauba Auerbach created the album art, lending a conceptual cohesion through her spectral dissection of structure and ornamental arrangement.
As a journey, Pure Expenditure plunges into meditation and throbs in and out of a lucid consciousness orchestrated by Mao, but never veering into vanity. Pure Expenditure is as much rumination as it is ritual, querying the corners of Capitalism by hypnotically circling its tenets in measured cadence.
Mixed by Telefon Tel Aviv’s Josh Eustis, mastered and cut by Josh Bonati.
Apollo welcomes ambient legend bvdub AKA San Franciscan Brock Van Wey for a new album Drowning in Daylight.
Van Wey's latest explores cavernous soundscapes on a grand canvas that throbs with a delicate intimacy. A stalwart DJ and promoter of the halcyon '90s San Francisco rave scene, Van Wey fled to China in the early 2000s to escape the curdling of his musical dreams as the scene became more commercial.
Since his return, he's been incredibly prolific in his creation, etching out peerless ambient works that have captivated listeners with their delicate melody and fascinating textures through releases for the likes of Echospace, Kompakt and Styrax - 2018's A Different Definition of Love marks his 30th bvdub album to date.
Classically trained in piano and violin as a child, Van Wey's symphonic approach to ambience is truly remarkable,
Epic in its scale with each of its 4 tracks clocking in around the 20-minute mark, Drowning In Daylight envelops the listener in swathes of nostalgic pads and nested layers of distortion, strings and haunted voices.
Drowning In Daylight could well be Van Wey's crowning achievement to date and a testament to the power of instrumental abstract music to emotionally engulf the listener.
2018 marks the 20th anniversary of Wisconsin-based guitarist Erik Kowalski’s expansive and expressionistic solo vehicle, Casino Versus Japan. Across the past two decades he has explored variously interwoven realms of ambient sound – hazy IDM, experimental shoegaze, cinematic drift – but his latest collection voyages even deeper into soft-focus abstraction, unspooling 73 minutes of emotive electric immersion.
Suicide By Sun accrued across countless home studio sessions, slowly sequenced into four sides of narcotic reverberation, reflective loops, and dream-soaked delay. Guitar gestures refract into twilit horizons; hymnal drones swell and shimmer; smeared notes sway like lullabies of quiet communion. This is pensive, patient, personal music, mapped with feeling and finesse by storied hands.
URUK comes from the meeting in 2016 of two totally unclassifiable musicians: Thighpaulsandra and Massimo Pupillo.
Thighpaulsandra has an impressive track record particularly playing on many Coil albums. Traces of this influence can be found in the keyboards used on Mysterium Coniunctionis. We could randomly pick such masterpieces as the two volumes of Musick to Play in the Dark and Astral Disaster, records that were and still are among the best ambient albums ever made. He has also made several records in his own name (including the unpredictable Double Vulgar) and was a member of the UUUU (Mego Editions) project in 2017 which also featured a particularly creative Graham Lewis (Wire).
Massimo Pupillo is well known for having slammed a lot of ears as the bassist with the highly imposing Italian jazzcore trio Zu (those who saw them on stage will understand). 2009's Carboniferous or the more recent 2014 collaboration with Eugene Robinson (Oxbow) still resonate for a lot of listeners. In 2016, Massimo was in Triple Sun (no doubt a reference to the splendid song by Coil, again..) alongside two well-known musicians at Ici d'ailleurs - Raphaël Séguinier and David Chalmin (The Third Eye Foundation).
URUK also and especially brought out their first album in 2017 - I Leave A Silver Trail Through Blackness (Consouling Sounds). This is an imposing piece of dark ambient music in which the two musicians proved that they are more than just the sum their respective experiences. They are sound explorers obsessed by grasping the detail that shifts listeners from one world to another.
Their second album, Mysterium Coniunctionis makes direct reference to the eponymous and testamentary work of the psychiatrist Carl Jung, subtitled An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy. It clearly reflects the duo's intention to create particularly immersive and meaningful music from supposedly opposing materials - in this case the meeting of electronic and organic sounds.
There is complexity in simplicity, and Sparrow Nights is Peter Brötzmann and Heather Leigh's most enduring record to date, and their first studio album. A series of emotionally rich and boldly elucidated tonal and timbral exchanges played like compositions on pedal steel and reeds, the tracks (released as a 6-track LP and 10-track CD) are cold-forged minimalist blues motifs dragged from instrumental laments.
After three years playing together Brötzmann/Leigh's connection and understanding is by now both cerebral and deeply invested in the physical and sensory possibilities of their combined sound, while retaining a melancholic distance. Within this duo there is fluidity – neither is the anchor – and these recordings sound with as much variety as the sea. At times Sparrow Nights carries the clarity and poeticism of still water and open horizon ("This Word Love"), and at others it contains the elemental and ferocious roar of white water breakers on black rocks ("This Time Around").
On their previous three live albums (Ears Are Filled With Wonder, Sex Tape, Crowmoon) the duo have developed an intimate and intense language that manifests here as a focus on power and control, where figures blasted of unnecessary decoration are drawn from the shadows and smoke of collapse. The studio setting also allows Brötzmann to bring a broader range of reeds than in live scenarios: where previously he has played primarily tenor, clarinet and tarogato with Leigh, here he delivers the heat of alto and the low pressure of bass saxophone and clarinet.
Brötzmann's duo with Leigh continues to trace a fresh new arc in his trajectory, and this release also falls at a time when Leigh releases Throne, her most song-based record to date. Here as a studio duo they play a new-old blues for times of complexity, noise and chaos, continuing to redefine and re-sound possibilities for improvised music.
Geographic North proudly presents Don't Look Now, our second frightening foray into Halloween-inspired sounds to delight and dismay throughout the season. Featuring 90 minutes of haunted, hellish hysteria composed by some of the most abominable names in ambient music, the compilation nearly splits at the seams with grotesque grace.
All proceeds from this morbid mirth go directly toward youthSpark, an Atlanta-based non-profit that works directly with, and protects, at-risk youth from exploitation, abuse and trafficking in the Southeastern United States.
The compilation opens with "The Visitor," a peculiar prologue that portends potential peril ahead and one of two bookends concocted by Arp, who serves as the compilation's crypt-keeper of sorts. As the fog begins to swell, Ka Baird’s "Clearing" brings a trickle of overcast textures and exquisitely disorienting organ tones. Algiers shatter into the scene with brooding vehemence, sounding like a biting mix of John Carpenter and the Pop Group. Perennial witching hour heroes Anjou bring a moonlit mantra of eroding melodies that blossom with decay. "Sada," composed and performed by Clarice Jensen, steers the action deep into the underworld, projecting an inverted soundscape of smeared beauty. Western six-string virtuoso Danny Paul Grody carries the bizarre bewilderment into an open den of shimmering, pristine melody and resonance. The first main passage is nailed shut by "Cement Dossier," one of three anonymous and obscene chapter breaks from the Geographic North house band.
Next up, Christina Vantzou and John Also Bennett unfurl a hypnotic hymn of rustic kosmische bliss that balances a deathly mix of paranoia and resolution. Eluvium's "Surrounded by Illusion" is a mini-epic of textural maximalism that only confirms the Pacific NW ambient godhead's emotional prowess. Jefre Cantu-Ledesma summons the ghost of Hildegard von Bingen for an organ-filled interpretation of "O virtus sapientiae" that's both life-affirming and devastating.
Robert Donne (Labradford, Anjou) crafts a pummeling waltz of soot and emaciation with "Rakkauslaulu," a stinging salute to Mika Vainio. Ilyas Ahmed offers an ice-cold hand to lead you through the ornately crumbing decay of "Local Blues," blurring itself almost too perfectly into the eerie, almost too comforting calmness of Félicia Atkinson’s "Little Things." Richard Chartier assumes his Pinkcourtesyphone guise for a purely cinematic lapse into the netherworld. The incognito amusement continues with "Stabbing," an extended, slow-motion scene that brings some of Suzanne Kraft’' most volatile and vile work to date.
"Thunderhead," a menacingly paced slow burn from Moon Diagrams (Moses Archuleta of Deerhunter), could be the soundtrack to the most alluring haunted house you’ve ever seen, while Roberto Carlos Lange's "Indian Rope" casts a curiously charming spell of glitter and gloom. Vancouver's own Secret Pyramid crafts a bewitching bereavement from the North, permeating everything it touches with bedeviled beauty for an unforgettable climax of bleak allure. Arp returns again to bookend Don't Look Now with "Love Theme," a fitting epilogue that reflects on the receding haze with hopeful optimism.
Although the sun has finally rose, plenty of shadows remain.
Los Angeles-based DJ and composer Nick Malkin is perhaps best known for his noirish, backlit ambient dance music under the name Afterhours (Not Not Fun). Malkin's also moonlighted as a casual collaborator with LA Vampires and Sun Araw, served as an early DJ with Chinatown-based experimental radio station KCHUNG, and currently hosts a radio show of atmospheric selections on NTS radio called Post-Geography. Now, Malkin returns with Slow Day on Brilliant Drive, his most radiant work to date.
Along with Maxwell Sterling (double bass) and Jon-Kyle Mohr (percussion), Malkin self-instituted an intricate form of collaboration that required extensive amounts of improvisation, meditation, and editing. Malkin introduced a curated series of loops to his collaborators, who then embellished them with textures and muted motifs. Malkin then laid everything out and went to work scouring, polishing, and re-contextualizing certain elements into something entirely new, with elements within dating back to 2014.
The end result is a profound live-band ambient record that celebrates a curated but communal musical dynamic, along the lines of The Necks or Supersilent, but heavily informed by the micro-delicacy of Mille Plateaux’s most fathomless works. Even with the highly disparate sound sources, Slow Day on Brilliant Drive is a deeply cohesive and surprisingly intimate work that speaks to Malkin's uncanny ear and devotion to a concept.
Released October 10th, 1988 (LP reissue out Oct 12th, 2018)
BBL-96
Format: Orange LP reissue (pre-order)
I Am Kurious Oranj is The Fall’s eleventh studio album. Released by Beggars Banquet 30 years ago in 1988, it contains some of their most loved songs including “Cab It Up!” “Jerusalem” (which takes its lyrics from a poem by William Blake) and “New Big Prinz” which Pitchfork called “one of the songs that defined The Fall and Mark E. Smith”. They also said that it “has the sort of jaunty bass line that would later emerge on Pavement’s “Two States” to Blur’s “Parklife.” When Smith utters “check the record, check the guy’s track record,” the words melt into glorious nonsense a la “Surfin’ Bird.”
The album was written as the soundtrack to an avant-garde ballet titled “I Am Curious, Orange”, produced by the experimental Michael Clark Company and performed in London with The Fall playing live. As it said in the original ballet program, replicated inside this reissue, “Mark E. Smith is a history buff and admirer of Michael Clark, and I Am Curious, Orange spawned the idea of a thematic delving into the foibles and little-known psyche of William of Orange.”
According to Mark E. Smith in his book, Renegade, “We adapted the title from a Swedish porno film--I am Curious, Yellow. I was trying to make the point that we all share some kind of common knowledge that’s within ourselves; that comes out in all sorts of things. Some people call it a gene pool. It’s as if you already know subconsciously about historical incidents. You don’t have to have been taught it. It’s in-built. At the time I wanted to put this across, basically as a loose explanation of what was happening in Belfast: it’s in the head and bones and there’s nothing you can do about it. I was on a roll at the time. I’m rarely short of ideas, and I’m not into preserving them much, either. If it’s in your head and you’ve got the right people around you them there’s no better time to tell the story. You can’t be afraid of reactions when it’s like that. I think too many writers hold too much back for another time and then lose the initial spark. The idea was that Clark would do the ballet side to it and we’d come on and play every now and again. The band was very tight at the time and I reckon we could have played anywhere and delivered. We took it to the Edinburgh Festival and it was a real punch in the face for the artistes and critics. The confidence behind the production threw people; there were no half-measures. It was all very bright and brash, and those that got it really got it. You see it a lot more in films and on TV, historical fiction depicted in a brazen way. It was never intended to be high art or low art. I don’t know what those terms mean, to be honest. It was fuck-all like anything else. That’s good enough in itself, if you ask me. I’m not saying it was perfect or brilliant, but I know for a fact that those who did hook into it experiences something special.
“[The Fall have] retained the power to surprise, to provoke and occasionally outrage that only The Smiths could pretend to possess in the ‘80s.” - NME “Smith’s work was the manna that gave a certain cross-section of music culture sustenance for 40 years.” - Pitchfork
“Part musical hypnotist, part ranting madman, Smith was a singular figure in post-punk...Their songs were odysseys into his ever-verbose psyche, marked by repetitive rhythms and melodies.” – Rolling Stone
A. New Big Prinz Overture from ‘I Am Curious Orange’ Dog Is Life/Jerusalem Kurious Oranj Wrong Place, Right Time
B. Win Fall C.D. 2080 Yes, O Yes Van Plague? Bad News Girl Cab It Up!