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.
For some reason, this long-running project from English guitarist Andy Cartwright has stayed largely under my radar until now, despite my occasional brushes with his work through various blogs and his splits with Dean McPhee and Loscil. This latest release, Seabuckthorn's ninth, is deeply influenced by Cartwright's rustic and mountainous new surroundings in the Southern Alps, yet his work has always had an earthy, widescreen grandeur. As I am only casually familiar with the rest of the Seabuckthorn oeuvre, I cannot confidently state that Cartwright's new environment or recent focus on textural experimentation have radically transformed his work, but A House With Too Much Fire definitely feels like an especially strong showing. Much like the aforementioned McPhee, Cartwright has carved out a sublime and alternately haunting and gorgeous niche all his own, far transcending my expectations of what a lone guitarist can achieve (though Cartwright certainly embraces a much more expansive palette than his peers).
I am not quite sure what I expected from this album, but I am absolutely certain that whatever vague expectations I had were either transcended or outright wrong.This is quite a curious and fascinating album to try to wrap my head around, as Cartwright seems to be equal parts visionary and chameleon.It is easy to see how Seabuckthorn acquired such a devoted cult following over the years though, as Cartwright's inspiration burns quite brightly during the album's best moments, occasionally calling to mind the timeless, elemental power of prime Richard Skelton.More often, however, Cartwright feels like a kindred spirit to iconoclastic American composer and Lost Tribe label mate William Ryan Fritch, as the two artists channel very similar strains of melancholy and cinematic Americana (though Fritch is considerably more eclectic these days).Along with Aaron Martin and Western Skies Motel, the two seem like the incipient vanguard of an unnamed movement that I will tentatively dub The Haunted West which inventively blurs the lines between folk, modern composition, and atmospheric post-rock a la Mogwai and Explosions In The Sky.The finest example of that vein on A House With Too Much Fire is probably "It Was Aglow," which unfolds as a mournful cascade of banjo arpeggios that casts off a spark-like spray of spectral, delay-heavy ripples."What The Shepherds Call Ghosts" is similarly dazzling, as Cartwright unleashes a roiling web of rapidly picked arpeggios as a gently plucked melody winds its way through a rattling and moaning gauntlet of tormented strings.If the whole album had expanded that aesthetic into a focused vision, A House With Too Much Fire would likely be a stone-cold masterpiece.The rest of the album occasionally does delve further into that theme beautifully (the title piece, "Sent in by the Cold," etc.), yet Cartwright's mercurial muse led him in some other interesting directions as well, resulting in a bit more of a complicated and shifting affair.
In some cases, Cartwright's divergence from the expected path pays off beautifully, as the slowly churning string elegy of "Somewhat Like Vision" burrows even deeper into the past to evoke a deep, primeval sadness that predates anything resembling America.Elsewhere, "Disentangled" is a foray into languorous and lyrical Eastern-tinged desert blues."Figure Afar" is yet another departure of sorts, as Cartwright sets aside his guitar and banjo for a churning reverie of mournful bowed strings.Unfortunately, there is also one perplexing misstep that continues to mystify me: "Inner."It is not necessarily a bad piece, though it admittedly errs on the side of meandering and improvisatory-sounding.The more significant issue is the strange decision to include a gently burbling and plodding synth backdrop, which transforms an otherwise unmemorable interlude into something that breaks the album's timeless and hallucinatory spell and unceremoniously drops me back in the present.Thankfully, Cartwright's rare dubious decisions are completely eclipsed by everything that he does exactly right, as my appreciation for House deepens with each fresh listen.In particular, I am struck the sheer craftsmanship and intuitive genius for texture and dynamics displayed on pieces like "Somewhat Like Vision," as Cartwright has the nuance and lightness of touch to weave a dreamlike state, yet also grasps exactly when to allow a crucial note to viscerally carve through the mist.He also brings a deep soul and quiet intensity to his vision, as these pieces do not just evoke desolate prairies and forgotten towns like a soundtrack composer might–Cartwright instead conjures imagined places that feel pregnant with enough mystery and hidden meaning to linger in my mind long after the album has ended.
A House With Too Much Fire is quietly beguiling in deeper, more abstract ways as well.For example, Cartwright has reached a Zen-like plane of casual virtuosity in which the desire to compose something beautiful supplants any ego-driven need to showcase his playing (a feat that is all too rare among technically proficient musicians).When a piece calls for it, Cartwright is certainly game to unleash a dazzling and intricate flurry of notes, but he is just as content to craft a slow-moving and impressionistic scene from ghostly smears of harmonics, feedback, and string drones ("Blackout").On a larger scale, I am also quite impressed with Cartwright's vision in general, as he deftly avoids crossing the blurry line that would make House feel like at all like a soundtrack (though "Submerged Past" errs on that side).For the most part, however, A House With Too Much Fire never feels like an imagined accompaniment to a film in Cartwright's mind.Rather, it feels like it is that film.The difference is subtle, I suppose, but it has massive implications when it comes to how much I love an album and I mostly love this one.It is not quite a perfect whole, yet the highlights are legitimately amazing: pieces like "It was Aglow" and "Somewhat Like Vision" masterfully weave vividly realized worlds that swirl with beauty, mystery, and ineffable sadness.
Deluxe edition of Ian William Craig's landmark debut album A Turn of Breath in its final form. Includes an additional LP of unpublished material.
Final Edition of 1000 pressed on black wax
Gatefold jacket with new artwork by Ian William Craig
Additional LP that holds the Short of Breath EP (a limited CDr included with first copies of ATOB in 2014), and the unreleased Fresh Breath collection.
"As if some lovelorn romantic troubadour had been summoned forth from the recording of séances on old shellac 78s" – MOJO
"A classically trained opera singer who buries his voice in desiccated, decaying loops" – ROLLING STONE
"a powerfully blurry canvas of hymn, chant and drone, through multi-tracking, echo, looping, abrasions and erasures." – NEW YORK TIMES
"This is a truly brilliant album – inhale it now." – THE GUARDIAN
"Ian William Craig pulled breath from night and made a voice." – TINY MIX TAPES
Norman Westberg is perhaps best recognised for his truly individual approach to guitar with the band SWANS. His playing with SWANS has influenced a generation of musicians across genres. His particular approaches to that instrument, in creating both harmony and brute force, have challenged and ultimately informed a great many players.
His new solo record, After Vacation, is his first full length to come in the wake of the final SWANS outing in its current configuration. More importantly it is also the first record to see Westberg move beyond a more performative mode of single take composition.
After Vacation sees Westberg significantly expand his sonic palette. He opens up the tonal and harmonic possibilities of his instrument in unexpected and profoundly beautiful ways. His guitar, as singular source, becomes transformed through a web of outboard processes. He transforms vibrating strings completely, taking singular gesture and reshapes it through webs of delay, reverb and other treatments.
Moreover he finds a new sense of space and dimension with these recordings. After Vacation has a decidedly more topographic sense. It charts out the dark contours of places unseen but imagined. It traverses a divergent range of places in search of a ever opening compositional approach.
The results are in excess of anything Westberg has created previously. His melodic capacities come to the fore; matching his distinctly personal approach to the textural qualities of his instrument.
Not long after bemoaning the lack of full-length releases from Matt Weston (following a string of excellent 7"s) he quickly announced This Is Your Rosemont Horizon, a full length LP of two side-long compositions. Following the patterns set forth in his singles, both are ever changing pieces rich with electronics, guitar, and of course unconventional percussion that shift and change with every minute that goes by, never stagnating or even sitting still, resulting in a fascinating suite of complex electro-acoustic composition and exploration.
Even in the more limited single format, Weston’s pieces always shifted and evolved often drastically, even within the limited duration of the format.On here, with more time to work with this variability is even more pronounced.Matt's jerky glitch electronics that open "Special Apparatus for Coercion" lead the proceedings with a stammer; an off-kilter opening that sets a woozy mood for what follows.He punctuates the electronics with some heavy cavernous pulsations before allowing the remaining layers fully come into focus.Shrill scrapes are cast out above a layer of dramatic, tympani-like drumming, creating a sense of high drama and tension.
Of course Weston is quick to switch things up, and soon he devolves the piece into a swarm of pitch-bent tones and roughly strummed guitar.This eventually transitions into a strange paring of tense, bowed strings and deep bass, two very different sounds that work perfectly together.Before finally concluding the piece he throws in some cheap, brittle electronics run through odd processing, cut-up voices, clattering bells, and eventually some big guitar riffs before dropping everything with an abrupt conclusion.
For the other side of the record, Weston introduces "A Simple Machine Without a Machine" with shrill scraping sounds which leap out front. He eventually melds with uncomfortable guttural noises and sustained tonal drones, wonderfully juxtaposing layers of jerky, cut-up passages with elongated and sustained drones to excellent effect.Unspecific processed sounds are cast in an out and, despite its seemingly chaotic nature, the overall feel is that Weston allows a bit more breathing room here compared to the other side, although the tension is still palpable.
Eventually he develops a junky sense of rhythm here, not unlike some of Merzbow's earliest works as the piece drifts off further and further into chaos.Eventually it becomes a pastiche of all sorts of sounds, vacillating between bent fragments of melody and free jazz freak-outs that mesh together wonderfully.Towards the end, the piece trails off to its inevitable conclusion, closing on an outburst of malfunctioning electronics and complex metallic drone.
Compared to his recent single Searchlight Swings, This is Your Rosemont Horizon is a bit darker, a bit heavier, but no less amazing.It is distinctly the work of Matt Weston, but perhaps it is the time or setting, but there is a greater sense of desolation it would seem.However, he plays off this tension extremely well, weaving together idiosyncratic electronics and unconventional percussion like no other composer or performer does.It may not be as quirky as some of his other material, but the gravitas adds an additional asset to an already exceptional record.
This week Brainwashed and SIGE Records are proud to premiere "Reconciliation," (MP3 download here), a song from the upcoming 2xLP by Black Spirituals entitled Black Access/Black Axes.
The pairing of Zachary James Watkins (guitar and electronics) and Marshall Trammell (percussion) have created another masterpiece, and their final collaboration in this arrangement. Reclaiming the core fundamentals of jazz and rock and roll, but completely recontextualizing them in a distinctly modern framework, Black Spirituals are an entirely unique entity in the world of experimental music. While Black Access/Black Axes is a multifaceted and varied album, "Reconciliation" is an excellent summation: Watkins generates a constantly building squall of noise and distortion, but never lets his guitar be lost in the mix, as Trammell deliberately enters the frame, transitioning from subtle cymbal accents to sharp, cracking snares that pierce powerfully through the psychedelic haze. To call the dynamic intense would be a serious understatement, culminating in a brilliantly heavy, ecstatic crescendo that is nothing short of amazing. Black Access/Black Axes is presented in a deluxe 2xLP gatefold record, limited to 300 copies, and will be released July 6, 2018 via SIGE.
The final installment of Carsten Nicolai's "Uni" trilogy is a curious addition to the Alva Noto's historically conceptual-minded and experimental discography, as it is essentially a straight techno album. Given that this comparatively dancefloor-oriented series was initially inspired by a trip to Tokyo nightclub Unit, however, I suppose a nakedly beat-driven and somewhat straight-forward album like Unieqav makes some perverse sense (especially as a culminating statement). There is a bit more to Unieqav than mere music though, as the album is part of a larger, more ambitious multimedia work, as Nicolai reportedly floored festival audiences with an intense video onslaught synced to his hyper-precise rhythmic salvos. As a result, Unieqav feels like a somewhat minor release compared to Nicolai's other work when decontextualized from its intended high-volume/sensory overload presentation, but his unparalleled exactitude and clarity still make for a fine minimal techno album.
One aspect of Carsten Nicolai's Alva Noto project that I have always appreciated is that each new album is absolutely certain to feature a very clear and coherent vision that has been executed masterfully.Obviously, perfectionism has its downsides too, but that approach lends itself quite nicely to crystalline and cerebral sound art.At worst, Nicolai's vision occasionally errs a bit too much on the side of coldly mathematical to resonate deeply with me, yet his work is always intriguing and distinctive and it is never plagued by half-baked ideas, sloppy craftsmanship, or fits of self-indulgence.Nicolai is the kind of guy that I would probably trust to design a spaceship or expect to pioneer a radical new style of architecture.That is not something I would say of many other artists.On Unieqav, that clear and coherent vision is generally one of futuristic-sounding techno stripped down to just insistently repeating kick drum patterns and a host of machine-like clicks, hums, and pops.
The opening "Uni Sub" is a perfectly representative statement of intent, combining a somewhat lurching rhythm with a one-note bass line, subtle mechanical sounds, and a "hook" of gurgling and sizzling noise.There are also some understated synth chords that lurk and undulate in the background, but the most compelling parts of the piece are definitely the textures.It sounds a lot like Nicolai contact mic’d his coffee pot, processed the sounds until they were supernaturally crisp and clear, and then presented them in wonderfully magnified form.The underlying "song" is cool too, but it is essentially just a vehicle to stealthily deliver that textural sorcery, providing the necessary pulse and momentum to keep everything vibrant and purposeful.For better or worse, the remaining 11 songs are all essentially variations on that same template, with the more successful ones being those that offer the more ingenious or striking twists.
Much like drone music, minimal techno can often be formulaic and simple to a self-parodying degree, but artists who have the lightness of touch, attention to detail, and genius for subtle dynamic shifts necessary for great minimal techno are a truly rare breed indeed.Nicolai earns his place in that exclusive brotherhood here, as Unieqav is a feast of sharply realized textures and masterfully manipulated rhythms, as Nicolai deftly adds and subtracts cymbals and embellishes his grooves with all manner of squelches, throbs, crackles, scrapes, and sundry other machine-like flourishes.As a result, Unieqav improbably works as both a cutting-edge dance album and a headphone experience that rewards deep-listening.That said, I do especially enjoy the occasional moments where Nicolai eases up on some of his rigorous self-constraints and expands his palette with splashes of harmony or melody.
One such piece is the eerily beautiful "Uni Mia," as Nicolai embellishes his pummeling thump with vibrant splashes of laser-like sounds as warm synth clouds fitfully drift through the piece like passing clouds."Uni Blue" is another more expansive piece, boasting an actual chord progression, gnarled distortion, and quasi-melodic sonar-like pings.To some degree it feels a bit heavy-handed and bombastic in the context of such a uniformly stark album, but that seems to be by design, as the simmering and squelching beat sounds amazing when all the synths fall away.That is quite a neat trick, as having that veil pulled away like that forced my complete focus onto Nicolai's dazzling rhythm (it is very easy to become numb to the more inspired bits of an uncompromisingly beat-driven album unless they are ingeniously framed).Elsewhere, the closing "Uni Chord" is another highlight, as dreamily melancholy synth drones unfold over a wonderfully twitching, shivering, and stuttering beat.
As a long-time Alva Noto fan, it is quite hard to separate my opinion of Unieqav from my deeply entrenched personal expectations, as it is definitely a bit of an outlier.It is too one-dimensional and stripped-down to feel like a great Alva Noto album, yet the complex and inventive beats make this an excellent album by minimal techno standards: Unieqav easily holds its own when stacked up against classic Chain Reaction or Mille Plateaux fare and I love that stuff.I suppose I just have a nagging regret that Nicolai did not take this opportunity to break new ground by more aggressively synthesizing his love of techno with his genius for experimentalism and unconventional sounds.That imaginary album would have been a bit more compelling that this relatively straight homage, but Unieqav is nevertheless a stellar homage, succeeding as both a dance album and a master class in dynamics and sound design.
Polish label Zoharum take a very deep dive into Justin Wright’s exquisite solo guitar psychedelia with this sprawling 2xCD collection of various limited Expo '70 releases. For the most part, these extended pieces have a very drone-based and cosmic bent, but the two 2009 collaborations with Umberto's Matt Hill are legitimately transcendent and entrancing epics of slow-burning space-rock nirvana. Giving those two pieces a well-deserved second life is unquestionably Mother Universe's raison d'être, so the remaining pieces are more for devout fans and completists (though they are also quite good in their own right). The various physical formats all compensate for potential Expo '70 overload in their own ways, however, making it very easy to alternate between experiencing Mother Universe as a concise distillation of some of Wright's finest work or as an immersive and extended lysergic plunge.
Every couple of years, I go through a phase in which I quixotically make yet another concerted (and doomed) effort to like Hawkwind.I generally love the idea of Hawkwind, but I suspect their actual music will always be too heavy-handed and indulgent to fully connect with me: the gulf between what I want them to sound like and what they actually sound like is just too wide.The reason that I bring that up is that Wright has uncannily managed to replicate the imaginary Hawkwind that exists only in my mind with the 22-minute title piece that opens this album (it originally appeared as a CDr on Mother Tongue). Of course, Matt Hill deserves a lot of the credit for that success as well, as his wonderfully rolling and propulsive bass line provides the perfect foundation for Wright to gradually build up a gorgeously rippling and elegant swirl of shimmering arpeggios and understated soloing that dissolves into a lingering vapor trail.Structurally, the piece is essentially just an extended vamp, but "Mother Universe" easily transcends any limitations that may suggest, organically ebbing and flowing through rhythmic shifts and occasionally sounding like it is on verge of being sucked into a greedily whooshing black hole.The following "Ostara," on the other hand, feels like it was sucked into that black hole and spat out the other end as a pulsing and splintered ghost of its former self.In lesser hands, "Ostara" would probably linger forever in that state of hallucinatory deep-space suspended animation, but here it gradually evolves beyond mere ambience into a queasily roiling fantasia of cosmic dread worthy of Andrei Tarkovsky.While that is quite a wonderfully immersive illusion, Wright still has one last trick up his sleeve, as the final moments of "Ostara" sneakily re-cohere into something approaching a song…before dissolving again into an eerie coda that sounds like a broken reel-to-reel machine endlessly repeating the same tape snippet at the wrong speed.
The remaining four songs are taken from the Woolgatherer Visions and Mechanical Elements tapes on Norway's Gold Soundz label and date from roughly the same period.They are either relegated to a second disk or a supplementary download, depending on physical format, which I suppose makes them bonus tracks to some degree."Tropical Trip Through Acid Clouds" initially sounds like fairly standard Expo '70 fare, unfolding as a delay-heavy riff beneath a trippy haze of looping and blurred improvisation, but then it unexpectedly gives way to a pulsing and futuristic-sounding soundscape evokes the flickering corridors of a damaged and abandoned space ship.That eventually becomes the backdrop for some more soloing, which illustrates the key difference between these four pieces and the previous two: these feel like good ideas in raw form that have not yet been edited to perfection.Sometimes that more spontaneous approach still works wonderfully though.The following "Hexed By A Devil in the Cemetery," for example,is a darkly throbbing drone piece that Wright beautifully embellishes with an unsettling arsenal of echoing, spectral scrapes and uneasily quavering synth coloration. Elsewhere, "You and Your Dreamcatcher Should Take a Hike" is a foray into buzzing and meditative minimalist synth drone, while "Neither Here Nor There (A Study)" takes a similar theme and uses it as the backdrop for a dreamily meandering flow of looping, intertwined guitar patterns.Of the four, "Hexed," "Dreamcatcher," and "Neither Here Nor There" all stand out as understated gems, with the latter two evoking sublime, trancelike states through languorously shifting waveforms or gently buzzing and swaying clouds of echoing accumulated loops.
This is exactly the kind of compilation that I dearly wish there were more of in the world, as some artists are just far too prolific for me to be able to keep up with the volume of their output (Wright, Kevin Drumm, Jim O'Rourke, etc.).Consequently, it is quite nice to have record labels around who are keen to sift through it all and illuminate great work that might have otherwise fallen into obscurity.At best, I can keep up with Wright's major LPs, so I definitely would have missed all of the comparatively minor and considerably more limited releases assembled here ("Ostara" is from a CDr on Small Doses, incidentally).Obviously, some of these six pieces are better than others, but they cumulatively provide a condensed overview of quite a year-long hot streak that most fans either only got a small taste of or missed altogether.As such, Mother Universe makes a fine and varied entry point into Wright's work.It is a body of work well worth getting acquainted with too, as Justin Wright at his best is kind of a Zen master of all things psychedelic, absorbing a wide spectrum of Eastern drone, krautrock, and heavy psych influences and distilling them into a wonderfully unhurried and understated psychotropic reverie.Mother Universe provides a strong argument that the golden age of bands like Popul Vuh and Ash Ra Tempel never fully ended–it just took a bit of a nap before unexpectedly reawakening in Missouri.
You can see what you want to see when you stare in to the world of The Myrrors, and to some degree, you can also hear what you want to hear on their expansive, extraordinary new album, Borderlands – an album that nominally references the collective boundaries we draw, all the while offering a soundtrack for setting forth strategies that either ignore or erase our self-made barriers.
If you see The Myrrors as the dust-caked disciples of a specific strain of desert-drone mysticism, there's little on Borderlands, their fourth full-length Myrrors album released in as many years, to dissuade you from that vision. Instead, there's only confirmation—an intoxicating combination of outlook and output that clarifies and crystallizes the band's many sonic strengths throughout the album’s fantastically unfolding forty-plus minutes.
Often ominous in its ambience, Borderlands begins with an appropriately Albert Ayler-ish blast of "Awakening," which serves as a short, slumber-shattering introduction to "The Blood That Runs the Border." Here, The Myrrors sound somewhat haunted and heartbroken, while nevertheless driven and determined. It's a crestfallen crusade of sanguinary sound that spreads across the album as a whole, an impression powered in no small part by the echoes of dervishes danced by Sufi mystics in centuries-old efforts to open other borders, as it were. This dynamic dance of conflicting emotions finds its contours on tracks like the meditative "Biznagas" and the propulsive "Formaciones Rojas," which, for all of their otherworldly-ness, wouldn’t be tremendously out of place if described as an outtake from Dylan's Desire, recalling the genius contributions of one Scarlet Rivera.
However, for sheer atomic mass, the beating heart of Borderlands must be the album's final, twenty-one minute excursion to the center of the territory that The Myrrors seek to map—namely, "Note From the Underground," a Dostoyevsky-referencing drone that wordlessly reflects on that book's less-than-optimistic tone:
"In any case, civilization has made mankind if not more blood-thirsty, at least more vilely, more loathsomely blood-thirsty … now, we do think bloodshed abominable and yet, we engage in this abomination, with more energy than ever. Which is worse? Decide that for yourselves."
Decide for yourself what you want to see in The Myrrors.
This album, Dalt's sixth, is my first exposure to the iconoclastic Colombian's work and it feels like an ideal entry point, as it is quite a beguiling album that is universally hailed as a major creative breakthrough. Due to its stark and unusual futurist aesthetic and constrained palette of primitive-sounding electronics, Anticlines definitely calls to mind both classic Chris & Cosey and minimal wave fare, yet Dalt's vision is transcendently bizarre enough to feel like something radical and new. Her desiccated and industrialized Latin/South American rhythms are certainly a part of that, but the real brilliance of Anticlines lies in Dalt’s lyrics and vocals: on songs like "Tar," she resembles a sexy cyborg, bloodlessly and seductively intoning breathy, cryptic poetry that feels like it alludes to vast depths of hidden meaning and feeling.
My sole caveat with Anticlines is that it is heavily front-loaded with Dalt's most inspired and fully formed songs (the voice-centered ones), which I suppose makes a great deal of sense from a sequencing perspective: Dalt drew me in with her catchy avant-garde pop fare, then expanded into increasingly experimental and obtuse fare once I was ensnared.While I do enjoy the many strange instrumental vignettes that populate the second half of the album, it is the comparatively accessible songs like "Tar" and "Edge" that stand out as memorable and capture Dalt at the height of her powers as a visionary avant-pop auteur.Anticlines is leaner on such moments than would be ideal and would be better if the last part of the album were broken up by another hook-filled gem or two.That said, the album does otherwise have a very distinctive and coherent aesthetic, an effective dynamic arc, and a sense of constant forward momentum, as Dalt is always doing something appealingly unusual and never lets a piece overstay its welcome. Anticlines maintains an unbroken and evocative retro-futurist spell from start to finish.More importantly, Anticlines' minor flaws are easily eclipsed by the magnitude of its success, as Dalt has achieved something quite wonderful and singular: she has conjured up a perversely sensuous futurist dystopia that feels refreshingly simple and intimate.Given all of its conceptual and cerebral themes, this album is unquestionably Serious Sound Art, yet Dalt has found a way to imbue her more challenging impulses with soul, dark eroticism, and DIY charm.
Three years after his eclectic and excellent solo debut, Bourbonese Qualk founder Simon Crab is back, albeit in radically transformed fashion. Crab's eclecticism certainly remains intact, yet Demand Full Automation is a bit of a tough album to wrap my head around: it kind of sounds like Crab started composing a similarly fine follow-up, then got commissioned to soundtrack some kind of neon-lit impressionist urban noir film…then took a break and time-traveled back to the '90s to do a DJ set at the Haçienda.  Unsurprisingly, those disparate threads make very strange bedfellows indeed, yet the enigmatic logic of Crab's overarching vision is countered by some sizable leaps forward in his craftsmanship. While I admittedly miss the homespun charm of After America a lot, Demand Full Automation is quite a likable (if sometimes quizzical) album in its own right, as it is a considerably tighter, more beat-driven, and more hook-filled affair than its predecessor.
This album is quite an unusual convergence of curious artistic choices, unexpected anachronisms, and seemingly contradictory impulses roughly united by Crab's vision of Automation as a "futurist narrative" that "anticipates our world at a crossroads where either machines liberate the working class to pursue meaningful tasks, or automation is used as yet a another tool to subdue."In practical stylistic terms, Demand Full Automation is an album with very high production quality, as each song has been painstakingly polished to vibrant, crystalline clarity.There is also a very conscious mingling of organic instrumentation, modern electronics, deep human emotion, and exacting precision, albeit not always an entirely seamless one.While the glittering, crisp production is by far the most immediately striking surprise that Automation offers, Crab's restless genre-shifting is yet another unexpected curveball: in the past, Crab has assimilated a wide variety of disparate influences in a relatively distinct (if ever-evolving) aesthetic.He achieves that with Automation a few times as well, but more frequently chooses to completely give himself over to different aesthetics like a master spy trying on various disguises.That approach is where the album loses me a bit, as I would much rather hear Crab focusing his formidable talents on his own vision rather than crafting a series of skilled pastiches.  Occasionally, however, Crab's oddly retro pastiches can be quite good, as the opening "E11" is a lovely throwback to late '90s techno that marries burbling synths, a charmingly blooping melody, and a big, straightforward beat to great effect.The opposite end of the spectrum is the title piece, which sounds like a lost early '90s New Order instrumental (the height of their "dance" phase).Similarly flummoxing is "According to Plan," which sounds like an ABC remix recorded during New Jack Swing's brief window of popularity.
Despite being an incredibly varied and occasionally puzzling album, Automation is a remarkably well-crafted whole in which each song flows seamlessly into the next.As far as songcraft and craftsmanship are concerned, this album is unquestionably the high-water mark of Crab's career, as almost nothing about Automation feels meandering, improvised, exploratory, or cluttered: nearly every piece is a stylish, masterfully executed gem of perfect focus.If Automation has a flaw, it is only that Crab's muse is quite a mercurial and enigmatic one.This album is like a tank being operated by someone prone to uncontrollable hallucinations: it is sometimes quite hard to guess why a particular target was chosen, but Crab definitely makes a significant impact at whatever winds up in his quixotically unpredictable crosshairs.Crab's newly polished and clean production aesthetic, combined with his baffling compulsion to craft anachronistic mainstream-sounding pop makes this album a bit of a baffling enigma, yet all of his weird decisions are beautifully crafted and enjoyable. Demand Full Automation is a lot like watching a great auteur direct a genre film or an installment of some long-running franchise: the result is stylish, skillfully executed, and quite good, but it just is not what that auteur will be remembered for. As such, I prefer After America and some late-period Bourbonese Qualk to this particular direction.Demand Full Automation's stellar execution and wealth of hooks would have been quite amazing if it had been in service of a more distinctive vision though.Hopefully, that convergence will someday come.Until then, Demand Full Automation is yet another strong and unusual album in a uniquely unpredictable career.
Kali Malone's sophomore LP Cast of Mind investigates the use of harmony as a force of psychological impact through the exclusive use of the Buchla 200 synthesizer in combination with acoustic woodwind and brass instruments.
The record begins as a cascade of battle calls from the wind instruments that shift ephemerally between triumphant and anguished howls upon each exhale. While the other pieces pull from the septimal harmonic framework of the title track, they extract a more confined palate to depict their sonic identities indicated by the song titles. "Bondage To Formula" weaves synthesis, trombone and bass clarinet in a delicate pattern, conjuring an ambiguous assimilation of the acoustic and synthetic. Dominated by columns of sawtooth waveforms, "Arched In Hysteria" unravels as a sharp and sober harmony perched on the border of violence, ringing in paranoia amongst a foundation of low beating oscillators. The record concludes in the rapture of "Empty The Belief," swollen with undulating bassoon striving to intonate to the towering stability of machine-generated harmony.
Using justly tuned synthetic and acoustic instrumentation, Cast of Mind's rich harmonic textures emit a distinct emotive hue serving to generate a static and captivating depth of focus.
Kali Malone (b. 1994, Colorado) is an American artist living and working in Stockholm, Sweden since 2012. Her solo works implement unique tuning systems in minimalist form for analog and digital synthesis often combined with acoustic instrumentation - such as pipe organ, string and wind instruments, lute and gong. Malone's 2017 debut LP Velocity of Sleep was released on her own label XKatedral following tape releases put out by Ascetic House, Bleak Environment and Total Black. She is active in the groups Sorrowing Christ, Swap Babies and Upper Glossa with Caterina Barbieri. She has performed most notably at Berlin Atonal, Moogfest and Norberg Festival.