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.
The four untitled pieces that make up this (similarly untitled) cassette were recorded one November in 2016 as John Olson (Spykes) was in the upstate New York area and looking to collaborate. Thus enters electronics virtuoso Mike Griffin (Parashi, also a member of psych rock collective Burnt Hills), and the two got together in Griffin's suburban basement studio. With Olson in full on psy jazz mode and Griffin manning the pedals, the final product is a combination of two disparate, yet perfectly complementary performers.
The first of the four performances builds up from a wall of squelchy loops and droning electronics conjured by Parashi.The noise chaotic and at times seemingly random, but clearly under Griffin's control as Olson's reeds rise up like a snake charmer’s cobra.The nasal tones contrast the crunching electronic rumble expertly, pairing the organic with inorganic and the two perfectly complementing each other.
Olson's reeds lead off the second performance as well:a pained caterwaul cutting through the surging, spacious electronics that nearly engulf his playing.With time Griffin introduces some treated tapes and sputtering voices, as Olson works in some unconventional reed noises.Eventually he switches over to saxophone and the mood turns to a jazzier one.While Olson gets down, Griffin's electronics are repurposed into expanding waves of sound and textured with flatulent bursts and ending with sputtering, decaying electronics.
On the other side of the tape, the horns and scraping electronics come out aggressively, like white noise sheets piled atop a buzzing electric generator.Eventually Olson takes a break from actually playing his instrument and instead uses it to make a slew of noises it was not intended for as Griffin keeps the electronics running.Soon the traditional horn sound is back and animal like noises come forth from sped up and mangled cassette tapes.By the end the duo sink into an almost conventional jazz groove, with horns in the lead and electronics taking up the role of the backing band in a pleasantly obtuse way.
The final collaboration is a slower growing one, at first a pairing of smooth horn and dubby, delayed electronics.The two exercise an admirable amount of restraint here, each contributing more subtle sounds and allowing them to expand in the mix, doing quite a bit of work with just a little in the way of actual performance.In its closing moments, however, the sound builds up powerfully.Olson keeps his playing jazzy and traditional, but Griffin works in a multitude of distortion and shrill, Theremin like blasts to end on an appropriately aggressive conclusion.
Listened to in isolation, it would at times seem like Spykes and Parashi are making sounds with drastically different intent from one another: when the former decides to take things smooth, the latter adds another pedal to the textural sonic abyss.Even with all of this contrast, the sound is always fitting and complementary between the two artists.They may have drastically different approaches to this recording, but Griffin and Olson’s performances bounce off each other perfectly, demonstrating both artists’ ability not only as performers, but improvisers in the classical sense.
The Skull Defekts have long been one of the most baffling, wonderful, and unpredictable bands in underground music, equally likely to dazzle, disappoint, or just thoroughly confuse me with each fresh release. While far from infallible, they were also a restlessly experimental, viscerally heavy, and frequently fascinating creative force. Consequently, I am very sad to see them go, as The Skull Defekts is the band's farewell album (though a bit of the band's brutal alchemy continues to live on in The Orchestra of Constant Distress). As far as swan songs go, however, I am pleased to say that The Skull Defekts' final chapter is an especially strong one, inventively balancing noisy experimentation, art-damaged rock, and visceral brute force.
It recently occurred to me that my longstanding sticking point with The Skull Defekts is that they are essentially a wonderfully explosive noise band/art project that seems inexplicably hell-bent on masquerading as a rock band (at least for their Thrill Jockey albums).Sometimes their ruse works wonderfully and they are able to brilliantly distill that firepower into something hooky and songlike, but it also can be kind of an awkward fit, as this collective is just too fundamentally volcanic and idiosyncratic for conventional music.The face-melting opener "A Brief History of Rhythm, Dub, Life, and Death" is an especially powerful illustration of what this foursome are capable of when they completely disregard lyrics, riffs, choruses, and verses and just rip it up.It is noise at its absolute best, erupting as a cacophonous juggernaut of stomping kick drum, clattering junkyard percussion, blown-out bass, and vicious snarls of strangled feedback and mangled electronics.It never evolves into anything more and it truly does not need to, as it is a perfect and dynamically satisfying baseball bat to the face from start to finish.The following "Clean Mind" initially does a stellar job of following that seemingly impossible-to-follow opening salvo, as the band locks into a wonderfully bludgeoning bass and drum groove beautifully enhanced by some unexpected industrial percussion.The chorus riffing eventually loses me a bit, sadly, yet it is still ultimately quite a wonderfully feral song, sounding like a death-rock A Place To Bury Strangers that have completely gone off the rails into a frenzy of bent notes and feedback howls.That bracingly heavy one-two punch is certainly an attention-grabbing way to open an album, but the Defekts get a bit artier and more varied once the dust settles.
Although disappointingly brief, "The Dance" is a swaggering and simmering fully formed song that intriguing marries a playfully funky, palm-muted strumming pattern with gnarled, ugly riffage worthy of Godflesh.Significantly, the larger-than-life presence of Daniel Higgs is absent on this album, but that perversely benefits the band, as he always had a tendency to eclipse nearly everything around him.The current vocalists, Joachim Nordwall and new member Mariam Wallentin, blend into the underlying music quite a bit more seamlessly, making it much easier to notice Fagerström's densely churning riffs and The Skull Defekts' absolutely punishing rhythm section.I hate to bring up Godflesh again, but The Skull Defekts share an intuitive grasp of what makes heavy music great with Justin Broadrick: the sludgy tempo, the seismic percussive assault, the brutal guitar tone, and the absolutely ruthless sense of unstoppable forward motion.No frills, no clutter–just focused, relentless intensity.In the case of The Skull Defekts, however, that bulldozing power is not always the raison d'etre, as it is sometimes twisted into a hooky rock-like structure or employed as the foundation for something a bit artier or psych-damaged.
Wallentin's songs definitely tend to fall into the "arty" category, particularly "Slow Storm," which features a bloodless, poetic monologue over pummeling tribal toms and lysergic swaths of guitar noise. Stretching out into a heavy, trancelike groove suits The Skull Defekts especially well.Unexpectedly, however, the band also managed to craft a couple of strong would-be singles this time around too (their poppier instincts have historically been derailed by an excess of intensity or obtuseness).The strongest of the pair is "All Thoughts Thought," which blends taut post-punk riffing with howls of noise and reverberating metal percussion."The Beauty of Creation and Destruction" has a similarly punchy foundation, but takes a much richer direction harmonically, fleshing out the arrangement with vibrato-enhanced chord washes and a descending piano melody.Being the final song on the album, it has the honor of being The Skull Defekts final farewell and it is an unexpectedly tender one: gradually all of the heavier bits fall away to leave only an elegiac coda of maracas, piano, and a blearily moaning synth undercurrent.
Admittedly, I do not quite love (or even like) every single song on this album, but there are not any real missteps and the oft-crushing, laser-focused execution easily outweighs any wobbles in judgment.The Defekts have always been a chameleonic entity (sometimes maddeningly so), yet they have always been strikingly good at distilling their disparate influences into something that still sounds uniquely their own.All of that remains true with this album.The key thing is mostly that this is an especially strong batch of songs that have been painstakingly sculpted to sinewy perfection: when they are firing on all cylinders, The Skull Defekts tend to be better than any of the bands that they might resemble.And sometimes they even kick open some new doors themselves.With this record, they are in peak form on both fronts.This is my favorite Skull Defekts album in a long time and "A Brief History" may very well be the single best song that they have ever recorded, which begs the question "wait-you're breaking up now?!?"Knowing exactly when to leave is an undervalued skill, however: it is far better to close with an excellent album and leave everyone lamenting that they did not appreciate The Skull Defekts more when they had the chance than soldiering on when it does not feel right anymore.As bittersweet as this farewell is, The Skull Defekts certainly does a stellar job of bolstering their messy, strange, and fitfully brilliant legacy.
Back in 2001, Eyvind Kang recorded an absolutely wonderful album on Sun City Girls' Abduction imprint (Live Low To The Earth In The Iron Age), which I naturally missed because everything related to Sun City Girls was maddeningly difficult to find in those days. Also, I was not at all familiar with Kang back then, though he has long since become a reliably ubiquitous presence in the experimental music scene. Sadly, Live Low is still woefully out-of-print, but Kang has finally recorded its follow-up anyway. Plainlight is quite a bit different from the drone- and shoegaze-influenced post-rock of its predecessor though, as the only real consistent thread between the two is a vague aesthetic of rustic psychedelia. Instead, the two albums feel like very different stages of the same long journey, which is a large part of why Plainlight took so long to appear: Kang did not want to repeat himself and patiently waited until the next stage of this project's natural evolution finally revealed itself. If Live Low To The Earth can be said to resemble a slow, subtly hallucinatory journey across a vast, open plain, the more structured and ritualistic Plainlight is a glimpse inside an ancient and remote temple nestled in the mountains.
As is befitting for an album this exotic and lysergically meditative, the original inspiration for Plainlight cryptically came to Kang in a dream.The crux of the dream was the phrase "because a plainlight has fallen in Heaven, heartbreak would cease," which became a guiding mantra for Kang.Unsurprisingly, figuring out how translate such a gorgeously poetic phase into a gorgeously poetic album was a bit of challenge, but Kang ultimately decided that a droning backdrop of traditional Korean instruments felt right for his vision.The one striking exception is the title piece, which eschews drone for a lovely and lyrical melody of gently plucked gayageum and geomungo (both zither-like instruments totally unfamiliar to me).Kang himself plays vielle on the piece, which is a kind of medieval violin.As arcane as the instrumentation seems to my western ears, "Plainlight" is an elegantly simple piece, organically allowing its bittersweetly beautiful central theme to slowly build in power and momentum with a minimal accompaniment of quavering organ-like drones.Unexpectedly, it dissolves into a final coda of throbbing synth pulses beneath a shimmering vielle drone, which dispels the timeless spell and organic, wood-and-steel purity a bit, but that odd detour is not enough to mar an otherwise achingly lovely composition.The following "Bay of Fundy" is a bit of a wobble though, as it feels like a minimal drone interlude composed primarily to fill the remaining space on the first side of the record.It is not a bad piece, as it has kind of a glimmering celestial radiance, but unavoidably pales in comparison to its strikingly lovely processor.While I have heard plenty of other music in the same vein before, Kang at least gets to this well-traveled place in an unusual way, as the piece is essentially a duet for glass and sheng (with some added ultraharmonizer processing courtesy of producer Randall Dunn).
The second half of the record is devoted to Plainlight's tour de force, a lengthy ensemble piece entitled "Sanjaya the Sceptic."It seems to draw its inspiration from the story of Indian ascetic Sanjaya Belatthiputta, whose proto-existentialist philosophy has been amusingly described as "endless equivocation."Based on my minimal research, his most notable achievement seems to have been losing two of his students to Buddha because he "did not address their unresolved desire to end ultimate suffering."Kang’s darkly psychedelic and malevolently buzzing drone reverie is probably equally unlikely to end ultimate suffering, as it is a wonderfully hypnotic and shifting mirage rather than any kind of glimpse of enlightenment.It is certainly a great mirage though.Initially, it takes quite an eerily beautiful form, as a languorous arpeggio slowly rings out amidst buzzing tambura while an understated melody evasively intertwines itself, unpredictably appearing and disappearing like a ghost.Things soon take a much stranger turn, however, as the piece unexpectedly dissolves into a surreal cacophony of clattering Korean percussion and dissonantly harmonizing and undulating trumpet, trombone, and oboe drones, resembling some kind of nightmarish ritual procession. Gradually, that too settles down into a final simmering coda of spectral overtones slowly dancing over a spare backdrop of steadily clicking percussion, ending the album on a fittingly ambiguous and haunted note.
I am reluctant to say that Plainlight has any flaws, as it is an absolutely wonderful release, yet there are definitely some notable caveats that must be stated.For one, it is quite brief for an LP, clocking in at just under half an hour.That brevity feels even more extreme due to the inclusion of the 7-minute "Bay of Fundy," which is essentially just an interlude that bridges the album's two major statements.Also, I am concerned that Plainlight may also suffer the same fate as Live Low To The Earth, appearing only fleetingly in physical form, then damned to an eternal half-life of being heard only by obsessive fans who frequent obscure music blogs.Plainlight may be just two songs, but they are singular and gorgeous ones and people should hear them.Also, that leads me to yet another observation about this album: aside from the stylistic gulf that separates it from Live Low To The Earth, there is quite a dramatic and fundamental shift in scope as well.Live Low conjured up an expansive, sweeping vista to get deliciously lost in.Plainlight, on the other hand, is the polar opposite: all the beauty and mystery of Kang's vision distilled into just two perfect and pure glimpses of heaven.There may not be much here, but what is here is absolutely sublime and essential.
I cannot think of many other projects that have been quite as instantly revered as Fred Welton Warmsley III's Dedekind Cut, nor can I think of any other artists who could comfortably fit in at both Hospital Productions and Kranky. Tahoe, Warmsley's first album for the latter, admittedly focuses primarily on Dedekind Cut's more meditative, drone-based side, but there are still some moments ("Spiral," for example) that would not seem out of place on a Raime or Haxan Cloak album. That shifting and elusive aesthetic sometimes leads to some unusual sequencing choices and disorienting mood shifts, but any potential grumblings I may have about Dedekind Cut's fitfully focused vision are silenced by how gorgeous these pieces can be when Warmsley hits the mark (which he does with truly impressive frequency). This is one of the best albums that Kranky has released in a long time.
While Dedekind Cut is a fairly recent endeavor, it is actually just a new chapter in a much longer career, as Warmsley has been steadily releasing hip-hop and dance albums for almost a decade under the name Lee Bannon.That goes a long way towards explaining Warmsley's formidable talents as a producer, but it does not make Dedekind Cut's rise any less impressive, as there is not a huge amount of crossover between fans of Ninja Tune and people buying post-industrial drone tapes.I suppose there were some hints of a more blurred and ambient bent in the last few Lee Bannon albums, yet Dedekind Cut is very much a radical reinvention, a change perhaps best illustrated by Warmsley's recent unerring genius for choosing iconic and provocative cover art for his full-lengths.The dark and striking art for Tahoe is an especially interesting and perverse choice, as the album is largely inspired by the serene beauty of Walmsley's scenic surroundings (he now lives in Lake Tahoe).The art feels weirdly apt though, highlighting the bleary, haunted undercurrent that subtly darkens otherwise heavenly reveries like "The Crossing Guard."That pervasive ambiguity is what makes Tahoe such an unusually compelling release, as the glacial flow, understated nature sounds, and warm chords of the title piece all embrace blissful tranquility, yet they are swathed in enough murk and hiss to suggest that none of it is quite real.At its best, Tahoe feels like a hallucinatory and bittersweet plunge into swirl of happy memories being experienced in a distant and lonely place.An entire album in the vein of those two pieces, the swooning bliss of "Equity," or the lushly rapturous "De-Civilization" would probably be an absolute masterpiece, but Warmsley's mercurial muse leads him down some other paths as well.Some are great, while others are a bit less so.
For me, "MMXIX" falls in the latter category, as its gothic choral touches, choppy synths, and bizarrely shifting structure awkwardly disrupt the album's dreamlike spell.It a baffling piece from start to finish, opening with a flourish that calls to mind Oneohtrix Point Never's more bombastic moments, then dissolving into a surreal fugue of Tuvan throat-singing and benignly radiant New Age shimmer.I suppose that makes it one of the album’s more ambitious and experimental pieces, but it is alternately too fractured, too pastoral, and too heavy-handed to quite fit with the surrounding material.Tahoe's other divergences fare far better, however, resembling corroded negative images of the album's more lovely moments, albeit still with their own ephemeral flashes of beauty."Spiral," for example, sounds like it may have once been a quietly beautiful composition like some of Tahoe's other fare, but got twisted into a grotesque caricature of sharp treble; grindingly metallic textures; and swirling, dissonant overtones.Deep into the jabbering cacophony, there is a calm, structured chord progression unfolding, yet it is almost entirely eclipsed by what feels like a sustained howl of anguish.Elsewhere, the epic "Hollow Earth" is initially a feast of deep, hollow drones amidst evocative field recordings of natural night sounds.That soon dissolves into a gorgeous interlude of distantly reverberant choral music, but the idyll is jarringly short-lived, as the piece erupts into a roiling miasma of dense, blow-out bass; heavy drones; and arrhythmic kick drums.Rather than diving full-on into his best Haxan Cloak pastiche, however, Warmsley continually dissolves each new motif into another in a kind of languorously flowing dream logic.Eventually, "Hollow Earth" coheres into a lovely final coda of rippling waves and warmly beautiful synth melodies, which is admittedly a very neat trick.Within the sequencing context of the album, it briefly feels like Tahoe's blissed-out, soft-focus heaven is being ripped apart by a visceral surge of gnarled, ugliness, yet the howling gateway to hell is quickly sealed back up and everyone is (precariously) happy again.
Tahoe's final piece, "Virtues," is yet another quiet stunner, resembling an achingly beautiful organ mass languorously drifting through the mists of a dream.It is perfect end to a near-perfect album, racking up one last transcendent highlight on a release that was already stellar.Even taken purely on a surface level, most of these pieces are beautifully crafted, expertly balancing warmth and melody with hissing, blurred textures to weave an immersive and sensuous half-dream.With deeper listening, however, Tahoe reveals deeper emotional heft simmering beneath the surface and unexpected shadows flickering across the lovely billowing clouds of drone nirvana.  Much like some of Tim Hecker's albums, Tahoe is the kind of jewel in Kranky's catalog that perfectly embodies the label's aesthetic while simultaneously deepening and expanding it.This is one of the first great albums of 2018.
October Language is the debut album by New Orleans-based duo Belong, comprised of Turk Dietrich and Mike Jones.
Since its release in early 2006, Belong's debut masterpiece has accumulated a dedicated cult following, with comparisons to the work of Christian Fennesz and Gas, with some claims that it plays like My Bloody Valentine's Loveless sans the songs. While these comparisons are useful for filing this album into a particular bin in the record shop, time has proven that October Language is a unique album which remains unmatched by its contemporaries.
Despite the warm and welcome accolades of the album's arrival, there was no vinyl pressing until 2009, of which a limited one-time pressing vanished immediately. Spectrum Spools is pleased to present a pristine vinyl cut to go with reimagined album art for the definitive edition of this legendary classic.
The last time I covered this enigmatic Midwestern ensemble, I was a bit frustrated by the limitations of their constrained palette, but I have since warmed to them quite a bit due to their endearingly obsessive commitment to their aesthetic. Fossil Aerosol Mining Project is less like a band than like the extremely persistent ghost of a blackly funny anthropologist hell-bent on dredging up everything our culture would like to forget. That is truly a niche that needed to be filled and August 53rd fills it beautifully. Cryptically billed as a prequel to The Day 1982 Contaminated 1971, this latest album seems to revisit the same source material of decaying film reels liberated from an abandoned drive-in, yet instead focuses upon the ones in a less conspicuously advanced state of ruin. As such, this album is every bit as haunted, murky, and mysterious as its predecessor, but not quite as eviscerated of all human warmth.
It is nearly impossible to discuss Fossil Aerosol Mining Project without mentioning George Romero, as the influence of 1978's Dawn of the Dead seems like a crucial foundational element to the band's vision.While they have explicitly devoted work to that film (and zombies in general) in the past, FAMP's recent outings have transcended those origins to blossom into something quite sophisticated and complex.In the world of August 53rd, it seems like the United States did not survive that particular zombie apocalypse.This feels like a vision of what would remain if Americans had been conclusively erased from the planet in the late '70s: miles and miles of rusted cars, empty malls, desolate gas stations, and ruined Burger Kings.While humanity itself is conspicuously absent, the album periodically comes alive with flickering ghosts of its former presence, such as the scratchy and wobbly looping country music of "The Failed Resurrection of Easy Listening."That piece is easily one of the more strikingly evocative ones on the album, as I feel like I just stumbled upon the burned-out husk of a car that still somehow had a working radio…or like I am strolling through a dust-covered and skeleton-strewn mall while being serenaded by a deeply weary (yet miraculously still functioning) Muzak system.Muzak amusingly returns again in the following "V-Broadcast (Closed Circuit) 1986," resembling an upbeat K-Mart commercial suddenly springing to life on a dead television.
Aside from the occasional welcome oases of kitsch, the music of August 53rd mostly takes the shape of murky, drone-centric collages of distressed tape and/or film loops.In less skilled hands, an album like this would probably blunder into bombastic dark ambient atmospheres, but this album is instead like stepping into a dense, billowing, and hallucinatory fog of weird.The opening "July Melody #1," for example, is built on an eerily see-sawing low whistle disrupted by washes of static and crackling voices that sound like fragmented news reports.While some of the individual textures and details are quite wonderful, the real beauty lies in the utterly disorienting and uneasily ambiguous mood: it feels like a glimpse of an eerily lonely factory in the future that is devoid of human life, yet swirling with vaporous spirits.Elsewhere, on "The Failed Resurrection of Easy Listening," the woozy, stuttering pedal steel guitars are increasingly disrupted by gnarled, inhuman howls and seismic shudders that sound like a radio broadcast straight from hell with no concern for earthly volume or frequency thresholds.Like the best horror movies, the Fossil cabal season their discrete sound worlds with just enough flickers of unknown terror to keep me in a permanent state of tense unease.It can work the other way as well, however, as the submerged and ominous thrum of "Retail Retrospect" unexpectedly gives way to an interlude of breezy big band jazz drifting out from a simmering miasma of gurgle and hiss.The album highlight is probably "Aestas Anatis 2016" though, which feels like a wobbly, seasick reverie of blurred guitars periodically interrupted by a strange jabbering voice.If Kevin Shields got tagged to soundtrack a darkly lysergic re-envisioning of Fraggle Rock directed by David Lynch, the result would probably not be far off from whatever the hell seems to be happening in "Aestas Anatis."
Lamentably, I have not delved deeply enough into Fossil's rich back catalog to have an opinion about how this stacks up against the rest of their oeuvre.They certainly have released other excellent albums (Red Fades First springs to mind) and this one is yet another.While I am categorically enthralled and eternally intrigued by their overarching concept and celebration of time-ravaged documents from the past, the balance between "art" and "music" is especially favorable on August 53rd, as enough melody, humor, and warmth breaks through the phantasmagoric murk to make it seem like there is a complex and coherent album underneath that keeps fleetingly breaking through an impenetrable fog.I was tempted to try to write something eloquent about post-industrial scavengers plumbing our collective unconscious and finding beauty in the ruins, but Fossil Aerosol Mining Project actually do something far weirder and compellingly ambiguous: they have built a desolately eerie and dystopian new world from the abandoned and long-forgotten detritus that our own world has left in its wake.Sometimes ruins were once beautiful buildings, making them a far too easy and obvious target.August 53rd is something quite different altogether: a haunted city built entirely from garbage.
A Place To Bury Strangers have announced their new album, Pinned, coming out April 13th. Their fifth full-length finds them converting difficult moments into some of their most urgent work to date. It's their first since the 2016 election, and their first since the 2014 closing of Death By Audio, the beloved Brooklyn DIY space where founding guitarist/singer Oliver Ackerman lived, worked, and created with complete freedom.
Pinned opens with "Never Coming Back," a frightening crescendo of group vocals, vertiginous guitar work, and bassist Dion Lunadon's unrelenting bass. "That song is a big concept," Ackermann says. "You make these decisions in your life…you're contemplating whether or not this will be the end. You think of your mortality, those moments you could die and what that means. You're thinking about that edge of the end, deciding whether or not it’s over. When you’re close to that edge, you could teeter over."
A couple of years ago, A Place To Bury Strangers made one of those big decisions Ackermann speaks of on "Never Coming Back." They were in search of a new drummer and Lunadon met Lia Simone Braswell who was playing shows around Brooklyn where she had recently relocated from Los Angeles. After seeing her play, Lunadon was moved to ask Braswell if she'd want to come to a band practice sometime.
While not only cementing herself as the band’s new drummer, Braswell also contributes vocals on "Never Coming Back" and elsewhere on Pinned, opening up a whole new dimension in the band’s music. "As things go on, you don't want them to be stagnant," Ackermann remarks. "Being a band for ten years, it's hard to keep things moving forward. I see so many bands that have been around and they're a weaker version of what they used to be. This band is anti-that. We try to push ourselves constantly, with the live shows and the recordings. We always want to get better. You've got to dig deep and take chances, and sometimes, I questioned that. It took really breaking through to make it work. I think we did that."
It's a clear and honest statement of intent, not just for everything that follows, but for this band as a whole.
This confident and well-balanced record by multi-instrumentalist and producer Jason Wietlispach confounded my high expectations. From the intriguing choice of instruments and the way they are played and recorded, to the subtle variety and flow of the music, it is an inspired assemblage of diverse musical elements. Some are finely layered and deliberately structured, others more improvised, but all add to the unfussy atmosphere and clear sense of direction pervading Oak Creek Recordings.
Soutrane
As a fully paid-up member of The Cloud Appreciation Society the superb opening track "Cumulus" hooked me immediately. Building slowly with snatches of acoustic guitar, adding other strings, synths and percussion, it pulses into being quite beautifully. It is the longest piece on the album and I did not really want it to end. Lauren Hummert sings a list of cloud types in a similar way to how The Cavaliers once recited names of legendary English cricketers on "It’s A Beautiful Game." Alex Stewart’s sparse guitar solo is the very definition of unpredictable and even perhaps of post-rock. Similarly Wietlispach's tenor sax is warm and slightly abrasive manner but devoid of any cliched associations. When instruments drop down in (or entirely out of) the mix, the subsequent dip in intensity suggests patches of clear sky between cloud formations.
A theory exists which states that sound waves never truly fade or disappear but travel through time and space becoming fainter and fainter. Thus, if equipment were invented with sufficient precision and power it would be possible to hear any sound that has ever occurred. We could listen in at The Sermon on the Mount or hear the final words of Admiral Nelson. Such technology is not yet available but this does make me wonder about where inspiration arrives from and what conscious or unconscious references are at play when an artist composes or plays music. The second song, "The Joe Daley Trio," salutes a tenor sax player based in Chicago for four decades (who I am guessing may have taught Wietlispach). Hal Russell and Russell Thorne were the other members of the trio. This is one of several places on the album where the tone and mood are such that I half expected a recognizable figure from history to make an appearance: in this instance Moondog, the Viking of 6th Avenue, improvising with a foghorn from the Staten island ferry. Similarly, "Sketch for 24 bass clarinets" achieves a droning quality like the sound of a vacuum cleaner heard several rooms away during a semi-nap on a summer afternoon and I waited in vain for the voice of Ivor Cutler to break in telling some tale about pylons, stones, or life in a scotch sitting room. If only. Both these tracks have an unpolished feel in contrast to "Cumulus" and could easily fit into an earlier musical milieu, for example Matching Mole’s first album.
"Improvisation For Two Waterphone players, Vibrationist and Bass Clarinet" has a magnificent sonorous quality. Anyone who has ever felt that Harry Partch’s cloud chamber bowls should have sounded better should listen to this piece. At any rate this is how I would have preferred them to sound - more like a massive church bell that has just been released from its cast and is being polished. Two tracks feature Wietlispach alone, including "Silent Rael’s Empty Boat" where the combination of Mellotron m400 and bass clarinet throbs and pulses as might a vessel passing through caves or tunnels. I imagined a train more than a boat. There are a lot more instruments and players on "Washington Island" with guitar, singing bowls, modular synth, sound icon, mellotron, bass guitar, bass clarinet, and upright bass for a similar effect of being on a journey, in this case passing through the hiss and purr of a thick mist of pollution.
Possible descriptions for this album might be ambient, experimental, improvisational, modern classical, folk, jazz, post-rock or even world. None really fit the bill, though, since these tracks skirt genre-boundaries and strip individual instruments of cliche. This is refreshing. warm, unsentimental, carefully underdone, spacey and intense music. It is a treat to have a release where the instruments are clearly identified track by track on the cover. Equal detail and care has been taken in producing and recording the music to let them all be heard and breathe in some separation. Oak Creek Recordings goes against a few grains and does so very well.
[I listened to the vinyl on a Reloop turn3 turntable, through HE1000 headphones powered by a Fosgate Signature headphone amp at Duet Audio in Bergen.]
It is remarkable that I did not sprain my finger mashing the "order now" button when this vinyl boxed set was announced, as Folklore Tapes' elusive season-themed cassettes are among the label's most crucial releases. Being someone who has not always been particularly enthusiastic about cassette culture, I was slow to realize just how unique and special those limited releases were when the series first appeared. Consequently, this lavish boxed set is the first time that I heard many of these pieces, though the strange and eclectic stable of artists is certainly an endearingly familiar one for me at this point. Obviously, having extremely high expectations for something is usually a sure-fire way to end up disappointed, but Calendar Customs actually exceeded my hopes, opening up a deep rabbit hole into an idiosyncratic, phantasmagoric, and sublime alternate history.
Much like the original cassettes, the four LPs of Calendar Customs are each devoted to a single season, the first one being autumn (2014's Fore Hallowe'en).Naturally, I would expect such a theme to lend itself extremely well to the eerie and hauntological aesthetic of many Folklore Tapes artists and I suppose it does, yet these nine autumnal pieces are no better and no worse than anything that follows.There is one extremely conspicuous exception, however, as Snail Hunter's "Domnhuil Dhu" is one of the most gloriously batshit crazy pieces of music that I have ever encountered.It is inspired by the story of a blasphemous seal on the Scottish isle of Iona who set about loudly proclaiming to all his aquatic neighbors that God is dead.A passing human who laughed at his ridiculous performance was immediately struck by paralysis, meeting an unpleasant watery end.To replicate that arcane legend, the croaking voice of the seal is hilariously "channeled" by John Billar over dream-like synth drones and field recordings of crashing waves from the island…and then the piece explodes into something that sounds like a raucous laser battle at a rodeo.It is memorably and brain-fryingly ridiculous and exactly the sort of bizarre piece that could only be at home on a Folklore Tapes collection.The rest of the autumnal fare is considerably more restrained, however, touching upon surreal collage (Mary Stark's "Nos"), creepily haunted and childlike vocal pieces (Eva Bowen's "Aos Si"), and a varied array of instrumentals.The strongest of the lot is probably "Punkie Night" by Carl Turney and Brian Campbell (of Clinic), which marries an exotic and vaguely "Arabian" melody to a heavy, rolling groove of booming drums.
The Merry May (2015) LP that follows is not quite as strong as the rest of collection, which is unexpected given the seemingly rich vein of spring traditions available to explore.That said, Snail Hunter again steals the show, this time as part of The Blue Funz.Their brief, yet woozily beautiful "Milking Cows Through Cake" may very well be the most achingly lovely piece in the entire set.Sam McLoughin contributes another memorably odd piece ("I Want to Sing Like the Birds Sing") that resembles a deranged and lurching festival procession of muddled flutes, whistles, and erratic percussion.Arianne Churchman, one of the most reliably inventive and compelling contributors in the Folklore Tapes family, makes an appearance as well.Her "Minehead Hobby Horse" is not quite as otherworldly or trance-like as some of her other work, but the evocative collage of clopping horses, cheering crowds, and crashing waves makes for an absorbing interlude nonetheless.
Mid Winter Rites & Revelries, released later that same year, marks a significant leap forward in both quality and consistency.Most of the usual participants return, but they all seemed to be especially inspired this time around.The Clinic folks definitely score one of the most bizarre highlights of lot, however, as their maniacal ode to the festival of Saturnalia brilliantly mashes together a pulsing sex beat, a sinister-sounding bell melody, and a contextually disturbing loop of a chortling and jolly Santa Claus.Aside from being great, "Lo Saturnalia!" highlights something rather unexpected about Mid Winter Rites: it is probably the most haunted and dark record in the entire collection.Almost everything sounds like it was either recorded by a ghost or is a distressed and disorienting field recording of some celebration from long ago.As unnerving as it all is, there is a lot of eerily beautiful melody to be found in the strange and hallucinatory vignettes, particularly those by Magpahi and Mary Stark.Elsewhere, Arianne Churchman contributes a mesmerizing spoken word performance ("Fourth Solo Cutty Wren Ritual") and Dean McPhee's wonderful "The Devil's Knell" turns up as well (a classic piece that also appears on his recent Four Stones album).
The final record, 2016's Crown of Light, is yet another improbably wonderful batch of delightful and mutifarious surprises.Churchman is in especially fine form, as her "Midsummer Ley Line Hotline" creepily mimics an automated voicemail greeting concerning the blurring together of our world with the spirit world ("You are not dead…you are and are not yourself").Carl and Brian also conjure up another idiosyncratic gem with "Maximum Tilt," which gradually evolves from a clattering, swirling cacophony into a gorgeous coda of lush drones and backwards vocal loops.Some talented new participants join the fold here as well, as mainstay Rob St. John brings along the rest of his band (Modern Studies) for a lovely string reverie ("The Green Ray") inspired by an unusual optical phenomenon that only occurs on the horizon of the sea.Mary & David's "Solar Spell" gamely dives into similar drone-inspired territory, but takes it in a more elusive, hazy, and dreamlike direction.The delicious unpredictable Funz folks also make their usual appearance (this time as The Yellow Funz), but unexpectedly turn in a tenderly rippling and music box-esque homage to a "moongate" said to fleetingly open in the woods of Stoke each summer.Also, I would be remiss if I did not mention that yet another piece from Four Stones first surfaced here first ("The Blood of St. John").
Characteristically, a lot of effort and attention was devoted to both research and artwork for this milestone release, making it more of a lovingly assembled cultural artifact than a mere collection of songs.The lengthy booklet is particularly welcome, providing brief background for many of the songs, as well as a much deeper plunge in seasonal customs in general from Jez Winship.As such this collection is an embarrassment of riches, with the only real caveat being that these riches are a bit more diluted than those of the more recent and more distilled The Folklore of Plants.Not every song here is great, but it would be very easy to assemble two excellent albums from this sprawling collection if I were so inclined.Even the weaker pieces are a key part of the larger tapestry, however, and the Folklore Tapes milieu is nothing if not unusual and inventive.That last part is the primary reason these collections are always so delightful and absorbing, as the label's early core of David Chatton Barker and Ian Humberstone has gradually blossomed into an eclectic, smart, and deeply creative community.Such a fertile assemblage of disparate artists, writers, and musicians has seemingly fostered a friendly competition that encourages increasingly lovely, bizarre, or deep forays into the blurry aesthetic realm where history and folklore converge.In a way, major Folklore Tapes releases such as this one are kind of their own ephemeral moongate, as each one is a rare artifact that opens a fresh portal into a mysterious, imagined past for the label's devoted acolytes.
"When I sit down to write an album I will usually come up with a technical and compositional concept to help focus my writing. Whether it is a restricted palette of instruments or a specific way of approaching the writing, this practice has helped me explore different processes and helps keep the album focused.
My previous album Somi was such an album. Hyper-focused and very deliberate in creation. However, there are times where I want to be more relaxed and just write what comes freely. In a way Fallen is such an album. When I began writing it the only strong rule I put on myself is that it would be my first album centered around the piano as the main instrument.
There were times when I wanted Fallen to be an album for solo piano but the more I pushed and explored the more I was drawn to accompanying the piano with modular and Moog synthesizers, tape machines and the occasional guitar.
Fallen was supposed to be, after all, a relaxed album, one that would come quickly, off-the-cuff, and with little regard to any rules or restrictions. It, however, ended up being one of the longest albums for me to create; well over a year and a half, as it had coincided with a particularly dark and difficult time in my personal life.
As the album progressed the thoughts of a freer, solo-piano sound quickly faded as layers of disintegration and noise came to the foreground. Half-broken tape machines and plenty of ghostly echoes helped hide the honesty of the piano as I hid myself, and my music, away under the cover of abstraction.
In a way, I feel that Fallen is most like my album Northern. One that was intended to be more free-spirited but became very much about a particular place and time. "
"Glass offers the sublime results of a collaboration between Ryuichi Sakamoto and Carsten Nicolai (Alva Noto), as performed and recorded at Philip Johnson’s Glass House in Connecticut during the private opening to Yayoi Kusama's installation marking the 110th anniversary of Johnson’s birth.
Making sterling use of the landmark architectural work's pellucid dimensions, the pair fixed contact mics to its glass walls, which they effectively played as an "instrument," rubbing it with rubber gong mallets to generate delicate tones which they combined with a sympathetic palette of singing glass bowls, crotales, keyboards and mixers.
The seamless performance of floating, weightless tones and exquisitely quivering timbres is without doubt one of their finest. For the duration we're held static and spellbound by the pair's interplay of microtonal shifts and plasmic chronics, keening the listener thru hazes of digital dust and vortices of angelic harmonics to locate, alchemise and resolve a rarified, deeply mysterious spirit before the piece closes.
As the follow-up to their OST for The Revenant [2015] and the warbling keys of Summvs [2011] before that, the achingly lush tension of Glass is perhaps the purest testament to the clarity of vision and endless minimalist mutability of this highly revered duo."