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.
BLUES FOR A UFO is music made from frustration and compassion. From a place of anger and of understanding. We have been living across from a huge construction project – a ten year overhaul of an old research and devolpment complex in Dearborn owned and operated by FMC, and it is ruining our lives. Day by day and bit by bit our house and mental health fade. Our beautiful historic home has cracks and issues and is covered in dirt and cement dust each day, with the sounds of cranes rumbling and cement trucks beeping going on for 12 hours a day, 6 days a week. We tried to move, and found our home had been devalued until the work was done – in ten years.......
During this past year, our friends Dion Fischer and Aliccia Bollig-Fischer, had some issues of their own at the bar they run in Corktown, an up and coming neighborhood in Detroit. A multi-millionaire developer bought all the land around their historic bar and made a plan to build muti-story condos and high end reail. The UFO Factory lost it's egress for trash and grease storage and removal. They lost the chance to maybe purchase a tiny side lot for extra parking. They tried to take the developer to court to at least get their trash egress reinstated, and the judge threw out the case. The little guy was losing to the millionaire developer.
And then total tragedy struck. On the very first day of construction work for the new $150 MILLION dollar condo development, a cement truck ran into the side of the UFO Factory – splitting it's load bearing wall right open. The employees in the bar at the time escaped – but the bar has been structurally damaged and condemned by the city of Detroit.
We KNOW what this feels like. We KNOW how it is to be the little guy and have the huge corporation steal the life out from under us. And while we have tried, truly tried, to change our own situation, we've had no luck. Which is why we have taken our time and energy and turned it in a direction we can help.
This is new music, born out of frustration and sadness and anger, and hope. A hope that our energy can help heal the situation Dion and Aliccia have found themselevs in. A hope that making art and music gives way to release – a release of frustration and sadness, even if for only a little while. The knowledge that our love for the culture of Detroit, for the culture Dion has been a part of and spent 20 plus years supporting, could help in a time of need.
We are donating half of all proceeds from this new music to help the UFO Factory pay bills – all the bills a business has even if it is closed and the building s condemned. Insurance vendors, gas and electric, water, money for a new soundsystem, dollars to buy a new set of kitchen appliances....whatever is needed – we made this music to help. To help us in our time of utter frustration, and to help Dion in his time of temporary defeat.
Somehow, we will all beat this time of sadness. Please join us in supporting an institution in the Detroit arts and music scene, and help all of us have a little faith that the little guy can rise again.
Ora was always a rather curious and enigmatic project, as the collective formed by Andrew Chalk and Darren Tate in the '80s has been historically characterized by extremely limited releases and shifting membership.  Time Out of Mind adds yet another strange chapter to the Ora tale, as it is a reworking of unreleased material that largely pre-dates Ora's debut release (1992's DAAC cassette).  Chalk and Tate make it clear that this is not a "lost album" though–it is more of an alternate history, suggesting a path that the project might have explored without the intervention of line-up changes and new working methods.  Naturally, Chalk fans will probably swoop down on this album en masse, as material from this project is so maddeningly rare, but this collection is a modest and understated affair content-wise, consisting primarily of brief sketches and vignettes of mysterious field recordings and bleary drones.
I am not quite as familiar with Ora's oeuvre as I am with Andrew Chalk's solo work, but there are certainly some recurring themes throughout the band's long and underheard history.  Naturally, I associate Ora most closely with drone music, but they also had a strong bent for both field recording and luring in fresh collaborators. All of those tendencies are reflected here to some degree, albeit in somewhat embryonic form.  For example, future members Colin Potter and Daisuke Suzuki both turn up, but Suzuki only appears on two songs and Potter is largely relegated to engineering.  Far more interesting are the divergences from Ora's future work.  The most significant is arguably the brief, sketch-like nature of these miniatures, which is a far cry from project's characteristic longform work.  Also, Chalk and Tate occasionally flirt with eschewing music altogether in favor of strange and evocative collages of field recordings, such as "Path To Infinity," which sounds like a mysterious figure slowly wandering through an abandoned factory full of echoing metallic clangs and ominous bubblings.  Another crucial component here is that Tate and Chalk greatly valued spontaneity at this phase of their career, using a portable recorder to work outdoors and incorporate natural ambiance into their work.  I believe Ora never fully abandoned that approach, but they did transition into using that material as grist for more elaborate studio recordings.  On this album, it feels like those initial explorations were the endpoint rather than the beginning.  Given the degree of transformational wizardry that Potter has brought to Nurse With Wound’s studio scraps, the ephemeral, fractured nature of this album can only be a deliberate choice.
That reduced emphasis on composition is admittedly felt a bit here, as there are no newly unearthed masterpieces lurking amongst these fifteen songs.  Again, however, that seems to be entirely by choice, as Time Out of Mind feels like a willfully naturalistic and egoless experiment: Chalk and Tate seem like they were not so much harvesting material for a great album so much as wandering about the English countryside in search of sonically intriguing or inspiring settings, then attempting to capture the essence of those settings in the moment.  That admittedly sounds a bit more beautiful and pure than the actual reality, as the duo were quite fixated upon scraping metal and cavernous natural reverb rather than, say, bird songs or whispering breezes, but it still makes for quite an unusual album and justifies this belated vault-exhumation: no one needs a collection of "normal" Ora songs that were not good enough to wind up on an album, but a strange and cryptic collection of sonic postcards from far-flung and obscure places has a definite appeal.
For the most part, the individual songs blossom into being and disappear too quickly to leave any kind of strong impression, but a few pieces stand out nonetheless.  One such piece is one of Suzuki's appearances, "Inastateless," which weaves a bizarre fantasia of scraping metal cacophony and dreamily swooping feedback.  Elsewhere, the flickering and undulating drones of "Windmill" and the menacing submerged ambiance of "Taiga" seem like legitimately fine Ora fare that should have probably surfaced on an album long before now.  I was also quite struck by the sheer strangeness of "Picturebox," a sound collage that sounds like a close mic’d field recording of marbles rattling around an elaborate Rube Goldberg-esque contraption as a jet passes by overhead.
Obviously, the one big caveat with this release is that these songs languished in the vault for two or three decades for a reason and all of the participants have since gone on to do far better work than is captured here. As such, this is not a viable entry point for new fans, nor will existing fans find a revelatory treasure trove of crucial recordings and they should not expect to: Time Out of Mind does not pretend to be anything more than an intriguingly divergent time capsule.  Given those modest expectations, this is a varied, experimental, and endearingly odd release that unveils a few fine pieces and offers a host of evocative miniature sound puzzles to mull over.  As the balance errs much more heavily on the latter, this release is probably strictly for completists and serious fans, but they are fairly certain to find its small pleasures absorbing.
Compiling recent small-run cassette works into a luxurious double record set, Essential Anatomies represents a reunion for the duo of Colin Andrew Sheffield and James Eck Rippie.  Collaborators since 2000 and friends for even longer, the four lengthy recordings here capture their Texas reunion in 2015, and with its undeniable sense of complexity and cohesion, makes it clear that they have not missed a step from their time apart.
On paper, what Sheffield and Rippie do is well-trod ground:  processing and recontexualization of samples and other forms of pre-recorded music.  But rather than being another pair of John Oswald wannabes, they do so with distinct expertise and precision.  To use a slightly abstract metaphor, they are much closer to Public Enemy’s Bomb Squad production, taking bits here and there and using them as elements in a much different whole, than they are Puff Daddy’s wholesale plagiarism and lack of innovation.
The first of the four lengthy pieces (each around 22 to 23 minutes long) is an instant launch into the gloom that is Essential Anatomies.  Chilling, piano like scrapes cut through a blackened, churning abyss of sound.  Some shrill, sharp bits pierce through the darkness here and there, but the piece largely stays pleasant, even though it is rather bleak and covered in a nicely noisy sheen of fuzz.  Tortured, almost melodic tones occasionally shine through a wall of ghostly drifts and heavy rumbles, at times heading toward a bit of harsh crunch, but stays in check.  The melodies appear here and there again, acting as a slightly less oppressive counterpoint to the sound of decay that surrounds it.  Finally, the duo end the piece on a lighter note, like sun shining through menacing gray skies.
What is abundantly clear right from this start is that Sheffield and Rippie are not only extremely proficient at creating moods and space with their samplers and turntables (respectively), but also a creating dynamic compositions that are quite expansive and varied, changing often but returning to reoccurring motifs that results in a more composed, rather than improvised sound.  The second piece allows a bit more of their source material to shine through, mostly in the form of piano notes and what sounds like frozen reverberations of chimes far in the distance.  There is the same sense of space, but erratic loops and mangled notes result in a composition that builds in tension, eventually transitioning into haunting church organ like walls that dominate the latter half of the piece.
Comparably, the second record comes across a bit less melodic and a bit more textural in the composition and structure.  Part three begins with an almost percussive, crunching machinery like opening that is eventually melded with a batch of wet, almost organic like noises and radio static.  Bits of recognizable music still sneak through here and there, but it is less the focus.  Instead, metallic sweeps and unnatural field recording like sounds fill out the mix, though it ends on a slightly more ambient note.  The final composition first is free and spacious, with some crackling tactile like elements at first, but soon it takes on a decaying sound.  More organ and mangled string fanfares give a more conventional signpost here and there, but by the end the duo has already transitioned the sound to one of tension and fright, slowly evolving into an uncomfortable silence to end the record.
While I do not believe I could ever manage to place the source of the sounds Colin Andrew Sheffield and James Eck Rippie utilized in making Essential Anatomies, never does it feel like the two overly processed or from their source.  Meaning that, there is some of the original character left from the source material, however subtle it may be.  Instead these audio building blocks are obscured but tastefully utilized to construct these atmosphere heavy works.  Rippie’s day job is a sound mixer for films and television shows, which surely aided the two in creating the cinematic mood that these two records conjure up.  It is that combination of sonic nuance and compositional strength and diversity that make Essential Anatomies so good.
This collaboration between Andrew Chalk and Timo Van Luijk (Af Ursin) has been active since 2011, yet this is the first of their albums that I have actually heard, as Van Luijk shares Chalk's love of limited, small press-style releases.  As a result, Elodie's output has mostly been a series of vinyl-only releases from Belgium and Japan, though Stephen O'Malley’s Ideologic Organ has thankfully stepped up to get their next album to a wider audience.  On paper, Odyssee seems like a very poor choice for my first Elodie experience, as it has two traits that generally make me steer clear of an album: it is both a live recording and the soundtrack to a film.  In reality, however, this album is quietly stunning, taking Debussy-style Impressionism into gorgeously smoky, twilit, and eerily hallucinatory territory.
Odyssee consists of just one 33-minute piece, "Musique En Scène II," which was recorded live at the Geräueschwelten Festival in Münster in 2015.Although the release itself is characteristically lean on background information or useful details, the piece was apparently performed as accompaniment to a film that Van Luijk made that very evening.  Since the film did not exist earlier that day, it is probably safe to say that the music was completely improvised.  It certainly does not sound like it though, nor does it sound at all live (until the audience begins clapping at the end, anyway).  More importantly, it also does not sound particularly like an Andrew Chalk album, nor does it bear all that much resemblance to what little Af Ursin I have heard (though Van Luijk is admittedly kind of multi-instrumentalist shape-shifter).  I will not say that Elodie is necessarily greater than the sum of its parts here, but they certainly transcend whatever expectations I had and offer something a bit unexpected.  Of course, part of that stylistic transformation is due to the piece's simple structure and instrumentation, as it is essentially a languorous and Eastern-flavored flute solo centered on a small cluster of notes.  For his part, Chalk provides a shifting and understated backdrop of quietly swelling synth chords, which is just perfect, as a large part of Odyssee's otherworldly beauty lies in the breathy intimacy of Van Luijk’s flute.  Any further clutter would dilute the magic.
A more significant part of Odyssee's mesmerizing spell lies in the eerily melancholy and exotic mood, as it evokes nothing less than the exquisitely lonely sensation of being alone in a vast desert at night, though the piece gradually becomes somewhat less haunted-sounding as it progresses.  There is also quite a bit of subtle beauty to be found in the details.  For example, while Van Luijk’s woozily snaking flute melody is presented with crystalline clarity, it often leaves a ghostly afterimage that lingers in the air.  That dreamy reverie is sometimes additionally enhanced by a sheen of feedback or chirping, trilling overtones. The overall effect is quite a surreal one, as the piece leaves a wake of lingering shadow and murk while simultaneously conjuring up a chorus of illusory birds.  While that is essentially all the piece offers, that turns out to be more than enough, as both the melody and the atmosphere are quite entrancing.  The piece does have a clear arc of sorts, however, as Chalk’s synthesizer gradually becomes a bit more intrusive, creating more complex harmonies.  At the same time, the backdrop gradually shifts towards radiant major chords in the second half, though they are thankfully still vaporous enough to maintain the delicious spell of bleary unreality.  Granted, I would probably like the piece more if the occasional shafts of light were even more toned down, yet I appreciate the ambiguous precariousness of the brighter interludes, as the encroaching undercurrent often suggests a mirage rather than an oasis.
Given its humble origins, Odyssee was probably intended as a somewhat minor release, but it is a weirdly perfect one.My only minor issue is with its brevity, which was no doubt dictated by the film.  As far as I am concerned, it could have easily extended for twice as long, as the duo weave a gorgeously haunting dreamscene from the first notes, nimbly walking the tightrope of providing enough small-scale dynamic variation to keep me deeply immersed while never disrupting that spell with anything more forceful. Granted, I was admittedly quite predisposed to like this album as an Andrew Chalk fan, but that only got my initial attention: if this album were not special, I would have quickly lost interest.  Fortunately, Odyssee feels like something entirely unique.  I love pleasant surprises.  This is exactly the sort of hidden gem that I am always looking for, though I suspect it may herald the dawn of a painfully expensive scavenger hunt for the rest of Elodie's oeuvre.
Post-minimalist American composer Rafael Anton Irisarri makes his Umor Rex debut with bold new album, The Shameless Years. Inspired by a troubled socio-political climate, buried melodies punch their way through a bleak cover of noisy drones, periodically veering into some of Irisarri's most eerily pertinent music to date.
One of Rafael Anton Irisarri's most thematically and sonically cohesive records to date The Shameless Years came together in a relatively short burst of creativity starting at the end of 2016. Rediscovering some relatively older tools – namely Native Instruments' Reaktor, Absynth, and Kontakt software – Irisarri combined them with his collection of guitars, pedals, amps, and analogue processing gear, turning his Black Knoll Studio north of NYC into a powerful writing tool. Completed quickly by Irisarri's standards, let alone during a period of social upheaval in American society, the record faces down several key personal themes. The title, suggests Irisarri, could in fact be seen as a reflection of the era of shamelessness we're currently living in; a time of fake news and alternative facts.
Two tracks were completed remotely between Irisarri in New York and Umor Rex veteran Siavash Amini from his home in Tehran, Iran. This music came together at the peak of all the anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant rhetoric happening in the USA, not to mention the banning of Iranians from entering the country, explains Irisarri. The diptych with Amini, "Karma Krama" and "The Faithless," seems bathed in additional waves of sorrow and dread. The wash of symphonic stormclouds of synth drones and processed notes on the latter gradually appears and disappears over the course of thirteen mournful minutes.
"Rh Negative" marches gigantic guitars through towering valleys of scarred ambient noise dealing with Irisarri's own heritage, many of his ancestors having come to America to escape poverty and oppression. The refusal of modern America to extend similar sanctuary to refugees escaping turmoil weighs heavily on the composer. Elsewhere an emotional onslaught of notes buried in mounds of greyscale noise on "Sky Burial" aims to deal with Irisarri's very own mortality – something he was recently confronted with following health scares, an accident, and a near-death experience in 2016. Pushing 40 as this album was being made, the composer is constantly aware that he's already outlived his own father, who died at the age of 32. Facing down both intolerance and the void, the epic soundscapes of The Shameless Years are a vast cry of emotion from Irisarri. The clock is ticking – gotta make the most out of it while you still can.
Having been entranced by both Andrew Chalk’s work with MIRROR (and back to his solo works as FERIAL CONFINE, plus multiple collaborations with David Jackman, The New Blockaders, Daisuke Suzuki, etc ) and Timo van Luijk (as Af Ursin, In Camera, La Poupée Vivante, and collaborations with Kris Vanderstraeten and others) for many years, I was naturally intrigued to hear about and hear their duo project ELODIE. The project formed in 2010, and has spanned eleven beautiful albums already, to date.
Vieux Silence for Ideologic Organ is their first release presented outside of their own record publishing nook, Faraway Press & La Scie Dorée. However this is not the first encounter between Ideologic Organ & ELODIE: they performed at a night in London I curated in February 2012, alongside Jessika Kenney & Eyvind Kang. Elodie's performance was among the most delicately engaging and savant I have witnessed… so very quiet, with snow falling in London outside Cafe Oto's windows, the audience palpably entered a high intensity listening focus. The impression of this vivid memory is striking, considering how spare each of the individual elements present that night were.
Vieux Silence, and ELODIE in general, provoke a visual imagination in an instant, perhaps filtered through aged watercolour, tape grain, antique lenses, forgotten levels of listening and observational patience. On this gorgeous album, Chalk & van Luijk also collaborate with piano, pedal steel and clarinet (played by Tom James Scott, Daniel Morris and Jean-Noel Rebilly, respectively). Each detail carefully considered and colouring step by step, like an impressionist watercolour.
The frontier for French electroacoustic mystical music has traversed much ground since Pierre Schaeffer sloughed off the past and laid out a map without borders or designated ground. Seventy years in this land of the fried, we hear a plethora of ideas and ongoing potential coming from all corners of the globe. Inheriting the wisdom of past masters whilst forging a signature style of his own, Kassel Jaeger persists as one of the premier explorers of these unknown worlds today. Comprised of recently recorded tracks, Aster is a work of revisits and reworkings, one which acts as a hinge in both closing this particular chapter whilst opening up the windows to new sound world to come. In Aster we have a rich, deep music replete with dark ambient sonorities swirling amongst intense buzzing tones. Often chilling and ominous, this is a fearless music with abstracted corners and dynamic leverage. Unafraid to embed itself in the ongoing whirlpool of sonic progress. Jaeger's output remains a thrilling body of exploration and ongoing transformation.
Hood Faire are raising funds to release solo electric guitarist Dean McPhee's third full length album, a collection of free-flowing solo electric guitar instrumentals which combine fluid fingerpicked melodies with atmospheric drones and hypnotic loops.
"Four Stones" brings together remastered versions of three tracks that were only previously available on limited edition tape compilations on the Folklore Tapes label (which are now sold out) along with two new pieces "Dance Macabre" and the epic 14 minute "Four Stones" which sees Dean using a new kick drum pedal to add a percussive undercurrent to his music.
To read a biography and some reviews of Dean's previous albums click here.
Funds pledged will be spent on pressing 500 records. Backers will be kept up to date with previews of the album art as it is finished and with the progress of the vinyl pressing, as well as upcoming launch gig dates and documentation of any live gigs or other events.
After backers have received their copies the finished album will be given a wider release and will be distributed by Cargo Records
Risks and challenges
The tracks are already recorded and mastered and are waiting to be sent to be pressed. The aim is to have the album ready to ship by November.
There are no major issues anticipated except for the possibility of delays at the pressing plant. This risk has been managed by using Vinyl Factory who have an excellent reputation for quality control.
I had absolutely no idea what to expect from a new Tear Garden album, as it has been nearly a decade since the last one and The Brown Acid Caveat slowly came together while cEvin Key was dealing with cancer and Edward Ka-Spel was deeply immersed in I Can Spin A Rainbow.  Despite that, the impending release bizarrely took on a near-mythic significance for me, as this project has inspired several of Ka-Spel most enduring moments of genius ("Romulus and Venus," "Hyperform," etc.) and he has been riding quite a (fitful) hot streak over the last few years.  Also, the time simply felt right for The Tear Garden to return.  Happily, Caveat largely lives up to my unreasonably high expectations even while it subverts them, as the duo largely eschew deep psychedelia in favor of propulsive, tightly structured electronic pop (albeit with some inspired detours along the way).  Naturally, the album’s hookiness is mingled with Ka-Spel and Key's deeply skewed and oft-hallucinatory aesthetic, but I was still completely unprepared for the throbbing disco groove of the opening "Strange Land."
I dearly wish I could have been at the listening party that Key and Ka-Spel threw in LA for the release of this album (it was a crowd-funded release), as I would have absolutely loved to see the looks on everyone's faces when they hit "play" and the sexy bass throb and disco thump erupted from the speakers.  "Strange Land" is definitely the first Tear Garden song that I can imagine someone blasting as they speed along the Autobahn in a classic convertible, but Edward Ka-Spel is still Edward Ka-Spel, so the infectious groove, jangling guitars, and strong melodies are still shot through with a healthy dose of surreality–it just happens to be couched in stronger hooks than usual.  While the naked catchiness of "Strange Land" turns out to be a bit of an exception (sadly, this is not quite The Tear Garden’s "party album"), Key and Ka-Spel definitely place a very strong emphasis on groove and tight structure here.  The closest thing to another would-be hit single is only "Calling Time," which boasts a similarly fluid bass line, 4/4 thump, tight structure, and penchant for catchy vocal melodies.  Within that poppy framework, however, the duo allow quite a bit more weirdness to kick in, as the beat features an exhalation-like call-and-response snare and the piece becomes increasing buffeted by sputtering and jabbering electronics as it unfolds.  Less accessible still is my favorite piece on the album, "Lola's Rock," a classic Ka-Spel narrative about a giant meteor speeding toward the earth that unfolds over an erratically stumbling beat mingled with woozy Theremin-like synths, squiggling electronics, deranged-sounding textural intrusions, and dubby percussion flourishes (quite fitting, given that Twilight Circus's Ryan Moore had a hand in some of these recordings).
The rest of the album is a considerably less groove-centric, however: the first half feels like an appealingly hooky gateway designed to lure me into the deeper and more lysergic waters of the second half.  The duo's pop instincts largely remain intact though, even as they leave the surrealist dancefloor far in the rearview mirror.  On the lovely and lilting waltz "Kiss Don’t Tell," Key and Ka-Spel craft a gorgeous piece of psychedelic chamber pop that feels like it was recorded inside a snowglobe: the swaying and elegant rhythm, the twinkling synth melodies, and the languorous glissando of Martijn De Kleer’s guitar all combine to evoke a wonderful illusion of timelessness and dreamy unreality.  Elsewhere, the duo shine again with the simmering and faintly menacing "Sinister Science," which weaves a brooding spell from a skeletal groove, a richly textured haze of electronic effects, and Patrick Wright's Romantic and melancholy strings.  "Stars On The Sidewalk," on the other hand, feels like a reprise of the winning "Hyperform" formula: a slow-burning and minimalist pulse of insistent synthesizer endlessly creeps forward beneath Ka-Spel's ominous and understated vocals.  More than anything else on the album, "Stars" sounds like a return to the classic Tear Garden sound, right down to an extended length and an interlude of expected psych tropes like a guitar solo and some space-y whooshing.  I like it, but this latest reconvening of the core duo has largely transcended the more straight-forward psychedelia of their early years.  The Tear Garden is on another plane altogether these days, so indulgences and rock-isms feel conspicuously out of place now.  Even during its weaker moments, The Brown Acid Caveat shows that Ka-Spel and Key can engage in any kind of stylistic tourism they wish and still come out with a memorable song that nimbly dodges pastiche and feels very much like Tear Garden (i.e. the acoustic blues of the closing "Object").  During their stronger moments like "Lola’s Rock," however, Key and Ka-Spel display a distinctive vision and synergistic chemistry that no one else could possibly replicate.
If The Brown Acid Caveat has a flaw, it is probably its length: it would be much stronger if it were condensed into a single LP rather than a double one.  In Tear Garden's defense, however, they simply had an excess of fine material to share: while this might be an overwhelming album to take in in one sitting, it is nevertheless a solid and filler-free affair from start to finish.  Also, plunging into an epic like this feels like a legitimately immersive and mind-bending event, which is probably something that could not be achieved with a condensed version that pared away everything but the highlights.  My other minor quibble is more of an observation: previous and more uneven Tear Garden albums have yielded some of my favorite songs ever ("In Search of My Rose," for example), yet there is tentatively nothing on The Brown Acid Caveat that quite joins that rarefied pantheon.  The compensation, however, is that this album is probably the strongest whole that the union of Key and Ka-Spel has ever produced: everything here is at least very good and a handful of pieces are even better than that.  In more practical terms, I will probably be putting "Romulus and Venus" on mixtapes until I die, but when I want to dive into an entire Tear Garden album, this will most likely be the one that I choose. As such, my minor grievances are mostly just reasons why this legitimately excellent album falls shy of being a legitimately perfect album: my overall impression is almost entirely delight.  I would have been happy with just a return to form, but The Brown Acid Caveat feels like the reinvigorated beginning of a promising new chapter, which is a truly astonishing feat from a project three decades into its run.
As a follow-up to 2015's debut EP, the duo of multimedia artists Nicol Eltzroth Rosendorf and Jonathan Lukens expand on the ambiguity and sparseness on Two, while still showing marked development and innovation in their work. With their sonic palates expanded and a determined focus, the final product is an album that conveys a significant amount within its somewhat minimalistic framework.
With nine pieces spread over two sides of a cassette, there is a clear sense of two distinct suites of music, joined together but with each half developing and evolving on its own as a distinct organism.The slow, bleak opening of "Wolf Tone" sets the stage as sparse yet deliberate.Bleak melodies are perceptible, but low in the mix, to give a nicely haunting sense of space. This transitions into "Duet," which sees the duo adding an intentionally erratic kick drum into the already complex layered structure.The layers swell and retreat, providing a strong contrast to the more strident rhythms that stab through.
The overt beats retreat on "Circularity of Action," but the piece comes together as a science fiction tinged composition, with hollow machinery noises reverberating throughout a cold, clinically clean space.The piece does not move as much as drift on its own inertia, and although the piece is extremely rich and complex, there is an unabashed frigidity to the music.The closer of side one, "Null," is a brief respite that ends the first half very well.Instead of the icy space that preceded it, it is more of a warm, pleasant cloud of sounds that slowly fill the space and concludes the first half on a calm note.
On the other half, Rosendorf and Lukens start off big with "Tremendum."Multiple passages of dissonance and melody intersect, propelled by a rumbling low end and expansive mid range of sound.The sound is a bit of everything, but never discordant or chaotic in nature.Instead it is a strong balance of noise and tone, and covers the Scratched Glass school of sound perfectly.Comparatively, "Manifest" is a bit more understated, and has a pleasant murk to it, with the two weaving in a nice passage of feedback-like chaos to contrast the calmer moments.
"Perverse Instantiation" features a return to rhythm, though much less conventional than heard on "Duet."Instead the work is more an examination of textures, with a continual shift between the more musical facets of the band’s sound, and their occasionally abrasive approaches.This transitions into "Gold," although at this point there is a greater sense of space and expanse.The harsher elements build slowly simmering and eventually become the primary focus.The second half of Two is tied up nicely on "Normative", a slowly lurching piece that pulls the entire tape together handily.
Scratched Glass’ debut was a good bit of ambiguous sound and composition, but Two feels like a more fully realized work.The strongest elements of the first tape are still here: a blending of dichotomous sounds, but the whole is stronger this time around.While I would have enjoyed hearing Rosendorf and Lukens flirt with rhythms a bit more as they did on "Duet," the nuanced and constantly evolving sound on this tape is extremely effective in its own right.