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.
Recently reissued in expanded form, A Turn of Breath was Ian William Craig's 2014 formal debut, though it was predated by a handful of digital-only and cassette releases. In fact, I am quite fond of his first two Recital Program albums, even if they betray a strong Tim Hecker influence. With A Turn of Breath, however, Craig made a major creative leap forward, casting aside any lingering derivative touches to establish himself as one of the most talented and distinctive sound artists in recent memory. Using just his voice as his primary instrument, Craig employs an arsenal of tape players to transform his simple, naked melodies into swooning and warbling dream-like bliss. He later expanded considerably on that aesthetic with the more song-based and shoegaze-inspired Centres, but that vision was already quite lovely and fully formed here–A Turn of Breath just happens to be a more fragmented, flickering, and hallucinatory incarnation of it.
For good reason, it is damn near impossible to find any description of A Turn of Breath that does not use the word "angelic."There is no word more apt for this album, so there is no point in going through linguistic contortions to find an alternative.Craig, a classically trained vocalist, certainly sings quite beautifully, yet the world is absolutely full of other classically trained vocalists and I generally have no interest in their recordings–a great voice is only a starting point.Fortunately, Craig had (and has) plenty of great ideas for how to use that voice.His work is special primarily because he has found an especially ingenious way to use tapes and has a singular compositional genius for transforming tape music into something warm, melodic, and lushly Romantic.At its best, A Turn of Breath sounds like the sublimely rapturous recordings of a heavenly choir…if a bumbling recording engineer tripped and the master tapes rolled off the cloud and fell to earth.That is only the first part, though, as it also seem like the tapes probably sat in the sun for a while before Craig found them.That last bit is especially crucial, as pieces like "Red Gate With Starling" and "Either Or" seems to retain a divine essence, yet transform that prettiness into something deeper, elegantly frayed, and vulnerable.While that summarizes the bulk of the album, Craig occasionally picks up his guitar as well, earning him several similarly deserved comparisons to a medieval troubadour (albeit one with access to some reverb effects).Admittedly, I am not quite as fond of that side of Breath, but pieces like "Rooms" and "A Forgetting Place" play an essential role in balancing out the vaporous and elusive nature of the more abstract pieces with some clear words and melodies.I am able to fully appreciate the gorgeous fog of this album precisely because there are occasional breaks in it.
The album's best pieces tend to be ones that blur the lines between those two poles, however.Only "A Slight Grip, A Gentle Hold" fully achieves that feat, but it is the album's two-part centerpiece and the two halves take achingly beautiful and divergent paths.For the first part, Craig weaves an unusually lush and layered backdrop of warbling, fluttering vocal loops that are quite gorgeous on their own.When the main vocals finally appear, it feels absolutely transcendent, like Craig is singing a simple and pure hymn as the heavens open up and cherubim flutter around the rafters.The second part boldly strips away all those underlying loops, reducing the piece to just the unadorned central melody, then adding layers of harmonies until Craig sounds like a one-man choir.It is great, of course, but it gets even better when it unexpectedly erupts into a shivering and lovely coda of lush organ chords and wobbly tapes.Speaking of the latter, I am also quite fond of "Second Lens," which sounds like the tape machine itself has become possessed with the divine spirit.There are still some lovely slow-moving clouds of harmonized vocals, but the real magic of the piece lies in the textural details, as it feels like all of the smallest mechanical sounds have been amplified to become a symphony of hiss, crackle, straining wheels, and flapping tape.
Curiously, it was only with the gift of hindsight that I was able to appreciate what a unique and wonderful album this is: Craig was great when he was just using self-built instruments (Heretic Surface), then he was great when he started singing into tape recorders.It did not seem like a big deal to me at the time, though it is now baffling to think that there was once a time when Craig conspicuously avoided singing.I needed the added context of Centres to grasp that a seismic shift had occurred.I suppose part of that slow realization was because Breath was still primarily composed of soundscapes rather than songs, though "A Slight Grip" is a dazzling exception.This album is far more like a beautiful mosaic rather than a collection of individual highlights–a structure that makes the expanded edition's inclusion of two additional EPs quite interesting.The Short of Breath EP is the less striking of the two, as it simply feels like a seamless extension of the parent album (there is even a third variation of "A Slight Grip").It is all good, but it is so clearly cut from the exact same cloth as A Turn of Breath that it just feels like the album got a little longer.The Fresh Breath EP, on the other hand, offers a glimpse of a slightly darker, starker, and more experimental album that might have been.It seems like it would have been a good one, but Craig's instincts were infallible enough to leave me with no regrets about the path he chose.To go back to my mosaic metaphor, what Craig left out of the album is just as important as what he left in: A Turn of Breath is not great solely because he had plenty of wonderful new material–it is also great because he distilled it all to its simplest essence and avoided diluting that by paring away absolutely everything that was not necessary.The extra material is nice, but A Turn of Breath was already an essential release without it.
"Electro-acoustic maestro and noted mastering engineer Stephen Mathieu commits a decade of spellbinding work to Radiance, collecting 12 album length discs (total: almost 13 hours!) revolving around the concept of stasis, the unfolding of time and sustained frequencies, deep listening, and immersive soundscapes. We've barely touched the sides with this one but, boy, it's a compelling, deeply immersive ride...
Completing Mathieu’s most significant cycle of work in his twenty year oeuvre, Radiance operates in a push and pull of reflection and absorption, using heat and light as metaphors for the synaesthetic qualities of sound, and how it is perceived by the listener not just thru ears. The title itself also connotes a vast scale of timelessness, but also one prone to fade away, decay, and its from these polysemous readings that Mathieu draws a remarkable spectrum of interrelated yet variegated compositions.
As ever, Mathieu is effectively dealing with the metaphysics of sound, using an array of electronics and electronic processes to divine new life in old instruments and samples, getting right down to their grain and accentuating their normally imperceptible peculiarities and latent spirits. In a sense he’s tactfully highlighting the lustre of his sounds, brining out their unique qualities for the ear to feel.That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s all shiny and seductive. Rather, the pieces' textures range from blingy to coruscating and every integer in-between, sharing a feel for and fascination with the infidelity of acoustic, mechanical, and electronic sounds perhaps only comparable with the likes of previous collaborators, Akira Rabelais and the GRM’s Kassel Jaeger, or Leyland Kirby, for example, within the contemporary field.
All 12 albums in the set were individually a year or so in the making, and thusly require patient, committed listening for full comprehension The time we've spent with it so far is enlightening, rendering truly sublime passages and moments in the multi-timbral shimmer of "Sea Song I," and likewise in the tantalizing, prickly haze of "The Answer VII," while the longer pieces naturally give broader room for his ideas to grow, and beautifully so in the likes of his heavy-lidded and keening drone panorama "First Consort," while "To Have Elements Exist In Space (GRM Version)" patiently and exquisitely evokes a state of weightlessness, and, at its longest, the hour long breadth of "Feldman" operates with deeply uncanny, surface level tonal reflections, which, as glib as it may read, recalls to us the magick of looking out a bus window at night, where the internal reflections and external street lights create refractive, illusory dimensions to get totally lost in.
The slow gaze is key to this amazing suite, as it purposefully pulls away from the time-constricted demands of contemporary music consumption to offer a wide, open space where time moves differently and perceptions are readjusted, becoming malleable in the process. It’s not quick fix music, but when applied properly, the results endure."
Building from a reputation of arresting live performances and critically acclaimed releases Puce Mary breaks new ground with The Drought, evolving from the tropes of industrial and power electronics to forge a complex story of adapting to new realities. Remnants of noise still exist, sustaining the penetrative viscerality offered on previous records, however, The Drought demonstrates an intention to expand on the vocabulary of confrontational music and into a grander narrative defined by technical and emotional growth.
Bringing together introspective examination with literary frameworks by writers such as Charles Baudelaire and Jean Genet, Puce Mary’s compositions manifest an ongoing power struggle within the self towards preservation. The traumatized body serves as a dry landscape of which obscured memories and escape mechanisms fold reality into fiction, making sense of desire, loss and control. The Drought presents both danger and opportunity; through rebuilding a creative practice centered on first-person narrative and a deliberate collage of field recordings and sound sources Puce Mary injects an acute urgency across the album seeking resilience.
"To Possess Is To Be In Control" makes use of lyrical repetition as an ambiguity of two selves, or a divided self, attempting to consume one another, while "Red Desert," named after Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1964 film, portrays the individual subsumed by surrounding environmental forces. The seven-minute epic "The Size of Our Desires" acts as the emotional tipping point of the record; amongst the ominous drone and dense feedback flutters almost-beatific melodies, while the lyrics reveal a romantic call to be swept up in the midst of an increasingly uninhabitable world.
Rather than escape, The Drought dramatises a metamorphosis in which vulnerability is confronted through regeneration. Noise and aggression no longer act as an affront to react against but part of a 'corporeal architecture' where space, harmony and lyricism surface from the harsh tropes of industrial music. The Drought chronologizes the artist's transformation through a psychological famine, new ways of coping akin to plant survival in a desert – to live without drying out.
Building from a reputation of arresting live performances and critically acclaimed releases, Puce Mary breaks new ground with The Drought, evolving from the tropes of industrial and power electronics to forge a complex story of adapting to new realities. Remnants of noise still exist, sustaining the penetrative viscerality offered on previous records. However, The Drought demonstrates an intention to expand on the vocabulary of confrontational music and into a grander narrative defined by technical and emotional growth.
Bringing together introspective examination with literary frameworks by writers such as Charles Baudelaire and Jean Genet, Puce Mary's compositions manifest an ongoing power struggle within the self towards preservation. The traumatized body serves as a dry landscape of which obscured memories and escape mechanisms fold reality into fiction, making sense of desire, loss and control. The Drought presents both danger and opportunity; through rebuilding a creative practice centered on first-person narrative and a deliberate collage of field recordings and sound sources Puce Mary injects an acute urgency across the album seeking resilience.
"To Possess Is To Be In Control" makes use of lyrical repetition as an ambiguity of two selves, or a divided self, attempting to consume one another, while "Red Desert," named after Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1964 film, portrays the individual subsumed by surrounding environmental forces. The seven-minute epic "The Size of Our Desires" acts as the emotional tipping point of the record; amongst the ominous drone and dense feedback flutters almost-beatific melodies, while the lyrics reveal a romantic call to be swept up in the midst of an increasingly uninhabitable world.
Rather than escape, The Drought dramatises a metamorphosis in which vulnerability is confronted through regeneration. Noise and aggression no longer act as an affront to react against but part of a ‘corporeal architecture’ where space, harmony and lyricism surface from the harsh tropes of industrial music. The Drought chronologizes the artist’s transformation through a psychological famine, new ways of coping akin to plant survival in a desert – to live without drying out.
Originally published as a tour cassette in June 2017, the initial run of 100 hand-numbered copies sold out at the end of the tour. A second edition was published in July and that edition sold out soon thereafter.
Many people have asked about buying downloads so we've finally decided to honor these requests while also offering a hard copy available for collectors that enjoy seeing spines on shelves.
We hope you can appreciate that we've decided to make this album an unlimited edition here on Bandcamp instead of repressing the cassette for a third edition.
You may also notice the appearance of a bonus track taken from a live recording in June 2017. Please enjoy!
For his inaugural LP for Moving Furniture Records, the Amsterdam-based Swedish sound artist BJ Nilsen turns his intense aural focus and compelling narrative power away from his well-known and much lauded predilection for field recordings of organic nature or the urban built environment. The five pieces presented on this record capture Nilsen during a short residency he did in the Fall of 2017 at Willem Twee Electronic Music Studio in Den Bosch, The Netherlands – five documents these are of improvised sessions using modular synthesizers, tone generators and test and measurement instruments.
Nilsen, ever the exploratory sound experimenter, de facto exchanged his wax rain coat for the white laboratory mantle. On Focus Intensity Power he lets the machines rule supreme. Although BJ says there's no underlying major concept to the record, the quintet of recordings is tied together to form a sturdy sonic package, tied with a red thread of analog pulse, droning waves and subtle and surprising noise interventions. Washes of natural wind or condensed bustle of London traffic as we have come to know and highly appreciate from his previous works have found their machine-counterparts in sessions that retain the flâneur's touch of slowly moving, roaming open ears with keen interest in texture and timbre. And at the same time these indoor improvisations yield a tremendous poetic freedom for both artist and listener; boundless walking through layers of pure sound – freed from time and place and space.
Following up last year’s equally difficult titled tape release, the mysterious break_fold project’s newest work, 27_05_17-21_01_18 continues the stripped-down techno style that the artist cultivated on that previous release, but in a way that demonstrates a sense of growth and complexity in comparison. With a unified sound across each of the seven songs—but different arrangements for each—the final product is a varied, satisfying one that draws from a wide variety of rhythm oriented electronic music.
Compared to 07_07_15-13_04_16, there is more of an overall album-like sense of structure here, evident by the specifically designated intro and outro pieces that encapsulate the rest of the cassette very well.The opening "08_01_18_Intro" sets the stage:a short song of microscopic drum machine sounds and dramatic synth pads, it provides a strong summary of what is to follow.The concluding "08_01_18_Outro" is instead a cool-down piece:spacy, beat-less sounds that end the tape on a pleasantly calm note.
Between these two points, however, is a lot of activity.The particular sound of break_fold is not necessarily one for pounding club numbers, nor is it clinically minimalist in its approach.Instead it lies somewhere between these two extremes.For "21_01_18" there is a sense of restraint.Beats are held back to place the focus on the gliding, melodic synth passages, all propelled by a lush, dubby bassline.Rich melodies also form the core of "27_05_17," a mass of pulsating electronics that are allowed to breath and slowly expand into a great sense of ambience.
On "07_08_17," the structure may be sparse but the dynamics are not, as old school analog synth stabs and big, echoing drums stand out strongly.The break_fold sense of melody is still here, but in this case, they are pushed down a bit to give emphasis to the rhythms.The final product is a wonderful melding of the rigid, heavy beats that never relent with the subtle, slowly evolving synth melodies that evolve and vary consistently throughout.
The high point of the tape for me would be "15_10_17," which excels in its complex mix and variation in arrangement.The rhythms are layered more densely, there is a greater variety of synth work, and with some almost guitar-like melodies thrown in the piece gels as an excellent piece of instrumental synth-pop.Some of the similar melodies also appear on "19_11_17" as well, within a buzzing electronic lead and fluttering electronics.Here, however, the more melodic elements have a bit too much of a new age-y feel for my liking, but the rest of the piece is quite strong.
Like the previous tape from break_fold, there is a lot of great electronic music to be heard on 27_05_17-21_01_18.There does seem to be a greater sense of structure and cohesion this time, with the pieces going in different directions but all having a unified feel to them.Combined with the carefully planned flow of the tape from song to song, and the final product is an exceptional work of memorable melodies and strong, commanding beats.
Newly reissued, 2011's The Letter was Liberez's formal debut, but it is new to me and confirms that John Hannon's gnarled post-industrial vision was great right from the beginning. In some ways, I suppose The Letter is a bit more primitive than the shifting ensemble's more recent releases, but that is more of an asset than a shortcoming with this project–it simply means that Hannon and his collaborators sound even more like a bunch of early '80s experimentalists bashing on oil drums and chopping up tape loops in a freezing squat or abandoned warehouse. I suppose Hannon's more recent work is a bit more distinctive in some ways, often resembling some kind of Eastern European folk music played with rusted junkyard instruments and blown-out amps, but The Letter has enough visceral power, freewheeling experimentation, and unconventional percussion to stand out in its own right. It might actually be my favorite of Liberez's three albums, though Sane Men Surround is damn hard to top.
The only true constant in Liberez's long and enigmatic history is John Hannon, but it could be said that The Letter's configuration of Hannon, Pete Wilkins, Nina Bosnic, and Tom James Scott represents the band's classic line-up.After all, The Letter was the album that put the project on the map after nearly a decade of self-released CD-Rs and the foursome held together long enough to produce 2013's Sane Men Surround as well.Obviously, Hannon's collaborators always play a significant role in shaping Liberez’s direction, but this "band" is first and foremost a studio project that chops, processes, and reshapes its raw material into hallucinatory and distorted collages.Naturally, it is damn near impossible to tell what anyone may have played, as everything is reduced to corroded textures, ghostly moods, and caustic snarls of noise.At the album's core, however, are some texts written by Bosnic (and presumably read by her as well).The album appropriately opens with a fragment of those writings, as a female voice that sounds like it is coming from an answering machine simply states "a letter."That is the entirety of the one-second "The Letter (Part One)," but fragments of that dispassionate, clipped voice continue to surface throughout the album, giving it a fever dream-like narrative thread of sorts.The album's first real piece, "_gag" also features a voice (male this time), but it sounds like someone is strangling a malfunctioning walkie-talkie.To Hannon’s credit, he manages to craft a nearly five-minute song out of those distressed eruptions of static, as the piece crawls slowly along over a hollow, repeating thrum and a hauntingly obscured undercurrent of chimes and simmering entropy.That entropy does not stay simmering forever, however, as it finally boils over and tears the piece apart in the final minute.Liberez excel at catharsis.
That vein of dreamlike, rhythmic hallucination ripped to shreds by howling eruptions of snarling noise is definitely a deliciously recurring one on The Letter.In fact, it resurfaces almost immediately with "Exercise Restraint," which marries a woody and plinking Eastern percussion motif with buried snatches of voice and a warbling drone, then burns it all to the ground with a churning explosion of roaring guitars and scorched trails of feedback.Sometimes Hannon is content to simply weave a surreal vignette without any towering cascades of noise though.The two strongest manifestations of Liberez's more nuanced side are both tucked away near the end of the album.The first, "Moved To Quell," is essentially just a ringing, percussive-sounding guitar motif that insistently repeats as an evocative fantasia of train sounds, drifting voices, and ravaged electronics bleed together in its depths.Elsewhere, the closing "Exercise Restraint (Part Two)" brings together an endearingly lurching groove, a woozily spectral pulse, an unintelligibly muddied monologue, and a quivering haze of harmonics.To my ears, it is the strongest piece on the album, but it gets serious competition from the blackened guitar squall and hammered metal percussion of "Atheist Rabble.""The Letter (Part Three)" is yet another highlight, resembling a disorienting pile-up of overlapping tape loops, moaning strings, and a sputtering chord that is desperately trying to force itself into the piece.
For years, I have rightly hailed Campbell Kneale as one of the true dark wizards of gnarled guitar noise, but I did not fully appreciate the depth and breadth of his vision until only recently: pre-Bandcamp, it was quite a difficult, expensive, and overwhelming endeavor to keep up with his sprawling body of work. As a result, several landmark albums fell through the cracks and remain woefully underappreciated to this day. One such example is this 2004 release on the now-defunct Scarcelight label, a hallucinatory suite of musique concrète, deep drones, and innovative collage that drew in a murderers' row of talented collaborators like John Wiese, Bruce Russell, Jonathan Coleclough, Peter Wright, and Neil Campbell. As with many Kneale releases, With Maples Ablaze occasionally dips into some nerve-jangling and dissonant territory, but the high points are legitimately amazing to behold.
Kneale’s singular vision for With Maples Ablaze is one that defies easy description, but the first two of the album's ten untitled pieces do as good a job at laying out its enigmatic parameters as anything that follows.After a slow fade-in that sounds like a gentle wind rustling through a meadow, the opening piece unexpectedly comes alive with brooding metallic drones and a sputtering eruption of hums and blurts that sounds like someone fighting with a patch cord that keeps shorting out.That cryptic and somewhat unpromising opening salvo then abruptly segues into the more compelling second piece, which marries a chorus of cheerily chirping birds with buzzing, heavy drones that converge into a throbbing and see-sawing pulse.Curiously, however, the field recordings stay in the foreground for most of the piece, only gradually and partially becoming consumed by hallucinatory flourishes of chimes and a queasily undulating haze of overtones.For the most part, the rest of the album continues in a similarly elusive vein, casting a fragile and dreamlike spell that slowly dissolves from collage into drone and back again.As befits an album with such an unusual and fluid structure, Kneale and his collaborators were similarly unconventional in their choice of instrumentation.Even the most overtly musical bits (the drones) feel like they are emanating from rubbed glass, groaning metal, or spectral harmonics rather than actual struck notes.At other times, the sounds on With Maples Ablaze sound far more like someone throttling a large balloon animal in the empty hull of a vast cargo ship.Consequently, it feels like absolute supernatural sorcery when the album's many strange textures and motifs cohere into something richly harmonic and sophisticated, which first happens on the album's epic fourth movement.
It takes about five minutes to finally reveal its sublimely rapturous heart, of course, which is a rather masterful use of tension and deception.In any case, the vista that opens up is a truly gorgeous one, as Kneale combines a ghostly, vaporous haze of moaning melodies with a massive and shuddering edifice of shaking metal and warbling harmonics.It feels a lot like a haunted record player fading in and out of focus in a towering empty building that is shaking, swaying, and on the verge of collapse.In fact, it seems almost Biblical in its scope and beauty, like a non-hubristic Tower of Babel that is valiantly straining to reach the heavens despite the inexorable adversity of gravity.Of course, what Kneale was actually going for is anyone's guess, as the piece eventually transforms into a long, clattering field recording of a train pulling into the Hamburg station.Trying to find meaning in this album is probably a fool’s game, but Maples certainly whips up a wonderful illusion that there is something profoundly meaningful happening that remains maddeningly out of my grasp.
Naturally, Kneale felt there needed to be a counterbalance to that achingly gorgeous centerpiece, so the album’s next major piece is a nightmarish, disorienting plunge into gibbering bedlam that sounds like a loop of backwards, pitch-shifted pop music.If I had an extremely bad reaction to a psychotropic drug while at a rave in the Smurfs' village, it would probably feel a hell of a lot like "With Maples Ablaze VI."From there, things stay very goddamn lysergic and unnerving for a while, as the eighth section feels like a field of infernal cows lazily mooing near a lake of bubbling lava. Unexpectedly, however, the album closes with lengthy final act of immersive, dreamlike reverie (albeit with some friendly chickens thrown into the mix, as well as some creeping menace).The twelve-minute "With Maples Ablaze IX" is the album's languorous and lush false ending of sorts, as gently oscillating and slow-moving drones drift like heavenly clouds over distant sounds of clattering metal, chirping birds, twinkling wind chimes, and happy barnyard animals.It is a wonderfully warm and lovely piece, but it gives way to a more uneasy and ambiguous coda, as the lingering chimes are slowly consumed by a crackling and bleary haze of ringing metal and smeared, uncomfortably harmonizing drones.It evokes quite a surreal and enigmatically haunting tableau, like a solitary figure is quietly setting the forest ablaze around a small village as a church organ mournfully drones and a blacksmith hammers away in the distance.
The trajectory of With Maples Ablaze is not unlike sinking into an increasingly fractured and disturbing dream that opens up into an oasis of clarity once a crucial threshold has been reached...then having the slow realization that the oasis is actually a mirage.I was caught completely off-guard by how beautifully this album came together at the end, as there are definitely some lulls in the album where it feels like the narrative arc has been lost or derailed by indulgent bouts of abstraction.I suppose it is entirely possible that the thread was sometimes lost or that the album's trajectory gradually took shape organically, but it is far more significant that Kneale ultimately pulled the disparate threads together into something exquisitely satisfying.With Maples Ablaze is not quite a perfect album, but it is absolutely a unique one and some of the individual pieces are quite beautiful, brilliant, and deeply nuanced.Naturally, Kneale's many collaborators deserve some credit for the fascinating and ingenious directions that Maples takes, but he was the one that painstakingly assembled it into its complex and beguiling final form.Campbell Kneale took a leap into the unknown with this album and I have not heard anything else that resembles it before or since.Given the sheer volume of Kneale’s output, it is hopeless to guess where this release ranks in his vast discography, but I can confidently state that Maples is one of the more essential tips of an iceberg that I will be exploring for years.
Last year's Patterns of Consciousness was a massive, ambitious, and occasionally dazzling psychotropic opus that sought to reshape consciousness through pattern manipulation, instantly establishing Caterina Barbieri as one of the most compelling contemporary synthesizer composers. Naturally, it will be a damn tough act to follow, but Born Again in the Voltage is not its highly anticipated successor, as its four pieces were recorded back in 2014 and 2015. On this more drone-based affair composed for the Buchla 200, Barbieri is joined by cellist Antonello Mostacci for a more modest and understated batch of songs. As such, Voltage is not quite as striking or distinctive as Barbieri's debut, but it is still quite good and "How to Decode an Illusion" is an absolutely gorgeous work.
The album opens with its most slow-building and minimal piece, "Human Developers," which gradually takes shape around a core motif of distorted synth pulses with long decays.Soon after, Mostacci's cello takes over the foreground and a wonderfully moaning, shivering, and whining swirl of strings coheres, yet Barbieri's Buchla eventually makes a decidedly seismic resurgence.That is probably the most compelling part of the piece, as she whips up a shuddering earthquake of deep throbs that rumble up from the depths.That climax turns out to only be the piece's halfway point though.The second half emerges from that crescendo as a twinkling, cosmic fantasia of rapidly rippling arpeggios, buzzing chords, and vibrantly chirping electronics.It kind of feels like I am in an electronic aviary that is simultaneously hallucinatory and a bit too busy and cacophonous to be entirely comfortable.I am not sure if that is an entirely good thing, but it is certainly a unique headspace to inhabit for a while.The following "Rendering Intuitions" is considerably calmer, as it is built from a slowly churning bed of Mostacci's moaning cello drones.Gradually, a glacial and elegiac chord progression coheres and the piece achieves a kind of lurching, melancholy beauty.It is hard to tell what (if anything) Barbieri is doing performance-wise, as synthesizers are conspicuously absent, but her hand definitely shows in the layering and processing of the intertwining cello themes.In a purely textural sense, I am actually fonder of the warm and organic cello sounds than those of the Buchla, but the next piece shows that the latter can open up an absolutely sublime world of rich emotional depth in the right hands.
"How to Decode an Illusion" is a legitimate stunner, as Barbieri balances a slowly burbling, buzzing, and throbbing melody with bittersweetly swooping bloops and a vivid, haunting undercurrent of buried feedback, crackling noise, and distorted afterimages.It feels a lot like a beautifully heartfelt requiem penned by an android, but the bubbling forward momentum and vibrant textural dynamics create a perfect blend of light and shadow that prevents it from ever becoming a slog through sadness.In fact, it could very well be the most wonderful piece that Barbieri has released to date.After that triumph, the closing "We Access Only a Fraction" comes as quite a bizarre and candy-colored shock, resembling a relentlessly cheery, bubbling, and hyperkinetic synth pop freak-out.Or at least, it would sound like synth pop if it were not so maniacally busy and over-the-top.I truly do not know quite what to make of it, which I suppose is an achievement of sorts.In one sense, it is a bit annoying, but it is also transcendently bonkers, taking a mercilessly repeating simple theme and elevating it to over-caffeinated, tumbling lunacy.As a one-time experiment, its arpeggiated mayhem has some definite appeal, but a full album in that vein would be a borderline psychotic endeavor. I am relieved that Barbieri has thus far not opted to explore that direction further.
Aside from the questionable success of that final piece, however, Born Again in The Voltage is a strong and enjoyable album.Barbieri occasionally makes some unusual compositional choices, but they do seem like deliberate choices rather than flaws and the execution of her ideas is every bit as focused and vividly realized as her work on Patterns of Consciousness.The only real caveat with this release is that Barbieri's overarching aesthetic vision feels like it was still in the formative stages, as each piece on Voltage seems to pull in a different direction.That said, it was an unexpected delight to hear a cello composition from her.Moreover, Barbieri's talents as a composer were already quite formidable at this stage of her career, as "Illusion" is easily one of the best synth pieces that I have ever heard.While Patterns of Consciousness is unquestionably a more essential and visionary album than this one, Born Again in the Voltage is the more accessible and melodic of the pair.As such, it is a welcome addition to Barbieri's discography, offering a more instantly gratifying entry point for new fans than her more challenging, sprawling, and consciousness-warping 2017 epic.
"In the wake of our recent 2xLP reissues of Radio Amor and Haunt Me, Haunt Me Do It Again, we're pleased to announce Tim Hecker's proper return to the label with a brand new full-length recorded in Japan utilizing a traditional gagaku ensemble: Konoyo. Worldwide release date is September 28th.
Hecker will also stage a series of special performances in tandem with the album's release in Tokyo, London, Krakow, and Berlin."