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.
Carla dal Forno's latest EP is an absolute stunner, distilling her dark pop genius into four perfect gems of dreamy, intimate, haunted, and endearingly ramshackle beauty. Aside from being four of the finest songs that she has ever recorded (any one of these pieces could be a single), The Garden is most striking for the improbable collision of influences that dal Forno seems to balance effortlessly: in a perverse way, this Australian dreampop chanteuese might be the most perfect and transcendent embodiment of the Blackest Ever Black aesthetic. While her songs are certainly catchy and propulsive (a inarguable anomaly in that milieu), The Garden's feast of hooks blossoms out of an ultra-DIY/underground backdrop of stark and gritty basslines, primative drum machine clatter, tape hiss, and warped electronics. At its best, The Garden sounds like a singularly muscular and half-sexy/half-unnerving dreampop album that is too well informed by the darker, uglier undercurrents of post-punk and early industrial to ever lapse into soft-focus navel-gazing.
The opening "We Shouldn’t Have to Wait" is possibly the most lovely song on the entire EP, yet almost sounds like it could have been recorded on a crappy tape deck in a bleak warehouse in Manchester in 1981.That collision of beauty, vulnerability, intimacy, and industrial decay seems to be where dal Forno truly thrives.The essence of the song, of course, is dal Forno’s lovely, bittersweet, and reverb-swathed vocal melody.A lot of artists in this vein tend to reverb their vocals into abstract soft-focus oblivion, but dal Forno employs just enough to give her confessional and half-seductive/half-wounded vocals a subtle ghostly unreality.The underlying music is quite striking as well, as the piece is essentially just built from a meaty, raw-sounding, and extremely simple bass line over a starkly clattering and echoing drum machine pattern.There is also some brooding synth coloration and fluttering electronic weirdness in the periphery, but the actual meat of the piece is about as hyper-minimalist and pared-down as it is possibly to get, as Carla’s voice does absolutely all of the heavy lifting.It basically feels like she just just plugged in her bass, hit "record," and some kind of occult pop magic happened.The following "Clusters" is no less haunting and dreamlike, but it is a bit more rhythmic and experimental, as Carla's lyrics are culled from recontextualized text from magazines and the underlying music achieves kind of a weirdly lurching and rolling groove.Again, "Clusters" would probably still be great if all of the music vanished, but I would not want it to, as dal Forno wrests some wonderfully wobbly, woozy, and strangled-sounding textures out of her synths.Blackest Ever Black compare "Clusters" to Broadcast, which is not far from the mark, but it feels more like dal Forno is singing over a Broadcast instrumental being played at the wrong speed on partially blown speakers.
"Make Up Talk" is the sort of song that feels composed specifically for me, as it pared down to nothing except a propulsive yet distant-sounding martial drum machine thump, a simple bass groove, and a hallucinatory nimbus of reverberating bird-like chirps and industrial clatter.There is no clutter, just a handful of great motifs artfully combined in service of an extremely cool song that marches relentlessly forward amidst a hallucinatory storm of low-level lysergic mindfuckery.The closing Einstürzende Neubauten homage "The Garden" is probably the purest distillation of dal Forno’s skewed and shadowy pop genius of all, however, reducing the backdrop to little more than a two-note bass line and an eerie glass harp-esque melody.Naturally, it also one of her strongest compositions, as its languorous and lilting vocal melody would have been one of the best songs on the EP even if it were strictly a capella.Happily, it is not though, as I very much enjoy its swaying and dreamlike waltz feel, as well as the occasional strangled snarl of feedback or woozily rippling synth tone.That, in essence, illustrates one of my absolute favorite features of The Garden: all four songs are so well-crafted, seductive, and haunting that they would be great if dal Forno just played bass and sang them into a boombox.No artifice at all was needed to make them work, yet her artful balance of hissing, lo-fi textures and hallucinatory synth and electronic flourishes elevates them to another level altogether.
I have to admit that this EP kind of blindsided me, as it feels like a major creative breakthrough that I did not see coming.Before The Garden, I viewed dal Forno as a solid artist who occasionally turned out a wonderfully bloodless and deadpan post-punk-influenced gem.With The Garden, she seems to have become an artist who ONLY writes great songs, dispelling much of the ghostly detachment of her earlier work to make a more direct emotional connection.Also, it now feels like dal Forno owns her stylistic niche quite definitively–instead of trying to spot her influences, I will now likely be describing other artists (in my head, at least) as "trying very hard to sound like Carla dal Forno" (and presumably failing).This truly is a perfect EP, as there is not a misstep to be found and each of these four songs has been jostling to be my favorite for weeks.Every single one is built upon a great hook, carved down to its unadulterated soul, and executed with unerring dynamic, textural, and melodic instincts.It is a no-brainer to say that this is easily the strongest release of dal Forno's career, but it is probably also safe to say that this is one of the strongest releases of 2017 by anyone, full-stop.
After two fine vinyl releases on Pomperipossa, Mark van Hoen and Mike Harding's mesmerizing sound collage project now takes a detour to Touch's Field Music imprint. While the transition to CD format does not seem to have made much of a structural impact (the album still feels like a single, abstract, and longform piece), Mappa Mundi is nonetheless a radically different album from last year's more musical A Perfect Blind. The abandonment of the more composed, melodic, and "structured" elements of their sound may seem like a deeply counterintuitive move after such a wonderful leap forward, yet Drøne prove themselves to be remarkably fluid and adept at changing their aesthetic to fit their conceptual inspirations. In this case, the stated objective is "tracing and describing the audio surrounding and occupying the planet Earth," which mostly translates into a hauntingly strange and mysterious immersion into a crackling entropy of phantom radio transmissions, squalls of static, choruses of insects, and creepily digitized voices.
Mappa Mundi is ostensibly divided into five discrete sections, but trying to figure out where one ends and another begins feels like a very meaningless and unnecessary endeavor.I can say with completely certainty that the first section is sardonically titled "Voice of the People" though and that any sounds directly emanating from actual humans are conspicuously absent.Instead, the piece unfolds as a throbbing metallic rhythm of clanging machinery, cavernous echoes, and an ominous bass thrum.It sounds a lot like a field recording from an especially reverberant factory with all of the non-machine sounds excised.Gradually, however, it gives way to a garbled spew of jabbering electronics, like a duet between a dial-up modem and a disoriented robot.That curious scene is then disrupted by the sound of a jet taking off coupled with an erratic high-hat rhythm that bleeds into the sounds of a train.It would be exhausting to recount all of the similarly surreal segues that follow, but rest assured that there are many more and that Mappa Mundi kind of feels like someone artfully swirled several Chris Watson albums together into a disorienting mindfuck.Occasionally there are some ghostly sounds that seem like they may have originated from a synth, but they still feel like ambient sounds that Harding and van Hoen plucked from the ether rather than played.
To their credit, however, the duo are not content to simply cull evocative sounds from the world around them nor are they willing to linger on a single passage just because it sounds good: Mappa Mundi is a restlessly kinetic and endlessly evolving collage from start to finish.In fact, this aesthetic feels like a greater and more transcendent artistic achievement than previous Drøne albums in many ways: while not "composed" in the traditional sense, Mappa Mundi weaves an extremely complex, shifting, and very deliberate unreality with its recontextualized snatches of audio detritus.More hyperbolically put: Harding and van Hoen have moved beyond creating music and into creating worlds...or at least artfully conveying their perceptions of an existing one.I am not projecting any God-like genius onto Drøne , mind you, but the current shift in scope is definitely a trickier and more ambitious endeavor.
Once the initial industrial theme fully subsides, Mappa Mundi's primary canvas gradually becomes Harding’s shortwave radio recordings, transforming the album into a fitful crackling fog that mysterious shapes continually emerge from.In a bizarre way, this album creates the illusion that I have suddenly become clairaudient and hyper-sensitive, yet have not quite worked out how to harness those powers or choose what I focus on.Instead, I am just able to hear the cacophony of hidden signals and transmissions that are all around me every day and it is exactly that (a low-level cacophony) for the most part.Sometimes, however, there is a clearer signal and I can pick out an enigmatic tangle of overlapping voices.Other times, the background noise subsides enough to allow the usual ambient sounds of the world to peak through, and I get a glimpse of a church choir, children scampering around a playground, distorted announcements echoing though interior of a train station, or some excited dogs barking on their suburban lawns.At times, the juxtapositions are weirdly beautiful or cryptically haunting, but the real achievement is the unpredictably shifting and immersive world that van Hoen and Harding conjure from all their layers of static, hiss, garbled voices, and scrambled electronics.It may not culminate in any kind of mindblowing climax or epiphany, but the elaborate aural hallucination of previously hidden frequencies roiling throughout my previously structured sonic reality is quite a satisfying one.
As much as I find this album beguiling, I am hesitant to declare it the crown jewel of Drøne 's small discography, as the more melodic and accessible A Perfect Blind is a hard act to top.Perhaps that is why Mappa Mundi took such a divergent direction, evolving in a lateral way rather than building upon the success of the previous template.If this album has a flaw, it is merely that it is a bit more challenging and abstract than its predecessor, creeping much closer to field recording territory than the strains of experimental music that are more in vogue at the moment.This is definitely more "serious sound art" than "underground music," feeling like an intriguing new phase of the musique concrète tradition rather than an offshoot of a hip contemporary scene that happens to be somewhat influenced by the GRM milieu.Also, some listeners may find it a bit too understated and drifting when compared to the duo’s more conventionally dynamic previous work.I am not one of those listeners though, as I tend to find grand gestures and clear set pieces somewhat distracting and disruptive.For what it is, Mappa Mundi is pitch-perfect.As such, I am more than happy to give myself over to itsunhurried and phantasmagoric flow.To my ears, this is one of the great secret treasures of the year.
Alter is the new album from Belgium-based double bass player and electronic producer Otto Lindholm.
Divided into four colour-inspired, long-form movements, Alter takes off from Lindholm’s previous work - a self-titled album released in 2015 on Icarus Records, and pushes the already abundant palette of sounds even further. This new work is more brooding and hypnotic. A deep, resonating bass is present - hinting at the likes of Greek, chamber-doom merchants Mohammad but perhaps with more attention placed upon textures and melody.
The record moves at a funereal pace and opener "Fauve" hits abyssal depths from the outset. A bowed melody is coaxed through the throbbing bass with dissonant harmonics drawing you in and holding you close. The ghostly beginnings of "Alyscamps" create an overwhelmingly tense atmosphere where acoustic and electronic elements collide and evolve into a heaving, ceremonious drone. Shafts of light emerge through the fog but the tone remains a haunted one. Closer, "Heliotrope" strikes a more hopeful note. A lighter, more open feel emerges - bringing to mind early work of The Rachels or perhaps Deaf Center.
Alter is a triumphant record in its entirety. Seamlessly moving from light to shade and back again, experimenting in heavy atmosphere and ultimately drawing you into its deep and mysterious world.
First outing for this collaborative effort from the prolific Posh Isolation mainstay Loke Rahbek and Frederik Valentin of KYO, also on the revered Danish label. As old friends circling around the same scene, this is the first time they have combined their respective perspectives. The results are an ambitious aquatic infused audio environment. Recorded near water at Valentin’s studio within the vicinity of the new aquarium in Copenhagen, Buy Corals Online channels the sensual floating aspects of such environments.
"During Japan’s Edo period (1615–1868) the phrase "the floating world" (ukiyo) evoked an imagined universe of wit, stylishness, and extravagance—with overtones of naughtiness, hedonism, and transgression. Implicit was a contrast to the humdrum of everyday obligation. The concept of the floating world began in the Japanese heartland, migrated eastward, and came to full flower in Edo (present-day Tokyo), where its main venues were popular Kabuki theaters and red-light districts." - Wikipedia
Buy Corals Online arrives as a suite of works embracing the joy of being close to something you don’t require interaction in order to experience. This enchanting aquatic infused audio hovers a sensual world rich in sensory experience. Loke Rahbek & Frederik Valentin’s debut outing conjurers a world both sensual and abstract as it moves casually alongside fantasy.
Apart is a mini-album containing a set of cello improvisations, conceived during days of solemn recording in the basement of an unused industrial space outside of Bern, Switzerland.
"In autumn 2015 I was invited to perform and stay for a week "residency" at the – as it turned out one off - Rebirth Festival in Bern, Switzerland. I was staying at an abandoned farm in the hills, half an hour outside the city with the group of young people responsible for the festival. My room was equipped with a mattress on the floor, some strange paintings, and a lot of spider webs. The view outside was straight into an open field with mostly hills, a forest, and some tents, all of which would be covered in fog every morning. By night I was driven to the venue - an unused industrial building slightly outside of central Bern. Three of the nights there I was given a cello, a sleeping bag, full access to the building, and especially its big open basement space for recording. Something that ended up as both a fruitful and an uneasy experience. The walls were spray-painted and the space was scattered with bizarre, elaborate tree / steel sculptures. Most of the rooms was made into some kind of surreal art object, often recalling a sort of Mad Max post-apocalyptic feel.
I realized that getting a clean recording here would be nearly impossible, as the building had a tendency for strange noises, clicks and sounds, seemingly turning itself on and off at random. It was also located right next to the train tracks, which meant I had about 10 minutes of quiet in which to record in between the thunder of passing trains - a lot of recordings were ruined. However, all these off elements somehow had their charm. Having such a big empty space for myself, filled with strange installations and sculptures set up for the festival, was both inspiring and eerie. When not playing and just sitting still, it was unnerving. The lights were on motion detectors and would automatically turn off after 5 minutes without movement, leaving me alone with nothing but a small lamp and my thoughts. Sometimes I wished my imagination would be less vivid, as I'd have an easier time not imagining all kinds of obscure happenings in the shadows. Then again, this is also something that intrigued me so much that I felt no choice but to investigate closer. Spurred by this intrigue/paranoia, I would often walk around the empty building to soak up the atmosphere and check if someone was there." – Svarte Greiner
Under his guises Blessed Initiative and Ketev, as well as his own name, composer and sound artist Yair Elazar Glotman has explored extended techniques and processes to forge new sonic textures and musical forms. Compound picks up where the previous solo work under Glotman’s own name - 2015's Études - left off. The acoustic sound palette has now expanded from solo contrabass into a trio including pianist Rieko Okuda and percussionist Marcello Silvio Busato.
Glotman guides the trio into utilising sounds from the edges of their instruments' abilities - arguably mere byproducts of harmony - and through improvisation, repetition, and post- production, conjures new sonic bodies over two sidelong pieces. His guidelines for each improvisation gave the players autonomy to emphasize the microscopic details of certain sounds: the shudder of a piano key, the hum of a cymbal, the incidental click of a plucked contrabass string. The recordings were then layered and reformulated by Glotman into two separate structures to complete the composition process. Both "Veil" and "Revelate" utilize the full spectral potential of each instrument, revealing new rhythmic patterns and harmonic content in the process.
Taking Glotman's microscopic focus on instrument noises he put began on Études as a starting point, the trio on Compound ultimately bring into question both density and contrast, rhythm itself losing its stricter structures and becoming a purely pattern-based driving force in the music. The resultant unit contradicts and opposes itself, all sorts of clashing rhythms and melodies coexisting within the body of the two compositions of evolving sonic architecture.
The 6th in the series of limited edition compact disc live recordings (after Thomas Köner & Jana Winderen, Simon Scott, Bethan Kellough, Yann Novak, Robert Crouch) brings Philip Jeck live at Iklectik, London.
Collaboration can be a fraught proposition. It relies on an attentiveness between those involved that is receptive, and at times confrontational and directed. When it succeeds, collaborative music making is a profound chemistry, an inexplicable series of eruptive forces that transform singular choices into spirally possibilities. Ogive, bares the marks of these eruptions, albeit expressed through a reductive minimalist electronic sound.
Created by Chris Herbert (UK) and Elías Merino (ES), Ogive is an exploration of intermeshing and contrasting approaches to sound and music. Meeting some years ago, these two artists found a shared interest in their desire to create unfamiliar landscapes of texture and harmony. Encouraging each other to drill ever deeper into the material content of their sound, Folds their debut edition, is driven by a shared aesthetic desire to work beyond the bounds of their individual sonic interests. This project rather focuses on the beauty of imperfections and gestural sound accidents. Amidst clouds of shortwave radio, ghostly voices appear, compressed in dense layers of warped white noise. At other times the work is less haunted, dwelling in spaces of vast open sound fields, in which collections of frequencies gently undulate.
These pieces collected as Folds have slowly crystallised, rooted in methodologies such as generative music, algorithmic processes, and extreme sound synthesis. Ogive's complex sound world synthesizes reduced sound particles, which create complex behaviours, while constructing both active and static microstructures. The results are dense, but minimal; intensive, but with great subtlety. The music is an endlessly shifting correspondence between laminar plateaus and surface details.
Unearth is the first solo recording from Australia-born, Berlin-based composer and drummer Tony Buck in 15 years.
Many would recognize Buck from his work with the iconic Australia avant trio The Necks. His history as a player however reaches much further than this engagement. Over the past few decades, Tony has cultivated a language that escapes easy categorization.
With Unearth he delivers his most accomplished solo composition. Built across several years, the record is the culmination of his approaches to percussive intensive, pulse and explorations in compositional density. The architecture of this work is framed unsurprisingly around a core of percussion but also draws heavily on Buck’s less known interests in guitar, synthesizer and field recordings. These elements coalesce, haunting one another in an evasive manner that is inexorable, creating a slow moving dialogue of extreme dynamic interchange.
Operating at a pace not dissimilar to what one might expect from a recording by The Necks, Unearth explores a gradual, swelling sound mass, teeming with details, cast across long dynamic arcs. Seeming to move at a pace simultaneously brisk and unhurried, the piece represents an exploration of and meditation on, the duality and paradox of time itself. Moments of fragile and infinitesimal sounds contrast with droning, dense layers; melodic and harmonic elements play out against backgrounds of texture and noise. The pieces elements operate together to render an impressionistic multiverse of worlds, unfolding and wrapping themselves around one another. The work exists as a hierarchical sound mass; a sedimentary layering of intensities , unearthed and unearthly.
We're very excited to reissue Hisato Higuchi's stunning 2003 debut She as an expanded LP/CD on Sept. 22. It features new cover art by Higuchi, two additional songs from the original recording session and remastered audio by Taylor Deupree. This album perfectly captures the 4 a.m. vibe where consciousness, sleep, and dreams slip into each other. To celebrate the reissue, here's a new video for "Girl Sister" that captures those states.
Hisato Higuchi was born in Nagoya, Japan and now lives in Tokyo. A guitarist and vocalist, Hisato first embarked on his artistic travels as a puppeteer for a theater company. In 1990 he started creating music in his home studio and eventually released his debut CD EP She in 2003. Higuchi's spectral tone and haunting sing-style has best been described by Volcanic Tongue's David Keenan as "beautiful melodic/melancholic space-blues that touch on poles as precious as Mazzacane, Keiji Haino and Patty Waters."
Brainwashed and Holodeck are proud to premiere "Never Enough Time" by Sungod member and Austin resident Michael C. Sharp here, as well as on the latest Brainwashed podcast episode. The song appears on the upcoming limited edition cassette, also titled Never Enough Time, and is one of five beautiful tracks of lush synthesizer expanse and heavily processed guitar work. Sharp may be a percussionist, but his work here is centered on tone and mood, rather than beats. "Never Enough Time" begins from shimmering layers and loops, which he then merges with dream-like synth patterns and delicate effects. Indicative of the album as a whole, it is an entrancing, engaging blending of melody, loops, and experimentation that is as complex as it is gorgeous.