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.
While this latest album from the 10 person collective may feature only three of its members (Ezra Buchla, John Krausbauer, and Agnes Szelag, recorded in 2012), that reduced personnel is hardly perceptible from the sound. The subset trio create an unbroken noise squall of over 40 minutes that channels the best of truly minimalist compositions while at the same time it is reminiscent of the most chaotic (and therefore most amazing) of psych rock freakouts.
Approaching the Infinite is not just a title but also essentially a statement of purpose for the record.In a single unbroken performance, the trio strive for a distinctly maximalist sound, even if from a compositional standpoint there is a greater adherence to the minimalist school of structure.Liner notes are scant, other than the band roster, so the instrumentation is somewhat ambiguous.However, I think it is pretty clear that squalling, aggressive guitar is the source of the beautiful racket that makes up this album.
The guitar sounds are multilayered and diverse, but they all have an intentionally ugly sheen of distortion to them.The layers intersect brilliantly, clashing with the right amount of noise and distortion to hit all the right buttons, but to never devolve into purely harsh noise murk."Drone" is an overused term, I am well aware, but it fits this band’s ethos well from a structural view.EMB is all about big, sustained squalls of guitar that stretch out and expand to, well, infinity.
There is an intentional repetition to Approaching the Infinite, but there are a number of seemingly minute changes that result in a much greater sense of evolution and development.Some of the layers almost take on a rhythmic quality, but more in the sense of looping/delayed passages as opposed to anything percussive.The multitracked noise results in a great paring of the ugliness of distortion and feedback, while still allowing the more beautiful, purely tonal sounds to appear as well.
If I needed to boil the sound of this record down to the most basic of descriptors though, the most specific reference I can conjure is the traditional feedback and noise that opens or closes a many a great space/psych rock song, but harnessed and stretched out for an intense 40 minutes.All the harshness and beauty that is usually contained into those few seconds is here, expanded massively.The audacity of listening to such a massive wall of noise can be imposing, but the way the Ecstatic Music Band brings it all together results in a much more stunning experience on Approaching the Infinite.
Daniel Menche's latest work is a bit daunting on paper: a three disc, three-plus hour work of 12 pieces, ranging between 10 and 25 minutes each. However, this is not the Menche of old, who was an adherent to that old school noise blast mentality that was so heavily the focus in the early days of the noise scene. Instead, there is rich variation and diversity on Sleeper, and the range of moods he creates is fitting the somnial implications of title, capturing the soundtrack to the most pleasant of dreams to the most terrifying of nightmares.
The initial most striking part of Sleeper is the complexity of the mixing and sound design that Menche pulls together.For someone usually associated with harsh noise, his ear for subtle development and varying frequencies is immediately apparent.This is not a new phenomenon:even Menche's harshest works were the product of devotion to sonic perfection.Right from the start of "Sleeper I," he constructs this massive, flickering wall that is imposing, yet comprised of glorious and regal sounding tones.Blended with a heavy undercurrent that gives a comfortable rumble, there is a lot of variation despite its monolithic structure.
The following piece keeps a thunderous pulse to it, but the overall sense is more elongated and expansive.The composition is slower and darker, with sinister electronic buzzing and metal percussion creating a tense, daunting atmosphere that builds up to a heavy crescendo and then stops nicely.Dark harshness also abounds on "Sleeper VIII," an instantaneous collage of distortion and low, rumbling feedback that in some ways calls back to his work from two decades prior.Loops that almost resemble old computer data cassettes buzz about and he brings it all together with an oddly light, ambient sound around the whole mess that builds to a chaotic, amazing conclusion.
Other moments of Sleeper feature Menche creating a backdrop for more pleasant dreams.For example, "Sleeper V" is a swirling mass of alien metallic tones and noises that never become too distorted.There is still a daunting depth to the sound, but it is a lighter sounding mood overall."Sleeper IV" stands out with Menche constructing the piece around a two-note organ pattern that, while he adds a healthy amount of noise to the piece, stays grounded in a more peaceful sensibility.Shimmering chime-like tones also envelope the less dynamic "Sleeper XI" that, even with a bit of rather heavy bass rumble is a pleasant sounding work.
The lengthy conclusion, "Sleeper XII," is the perfect culmination of the set.Over the nearly 26 minute work, Menche first blends heavy low end tones with less jarring ones, blending layer with layer to take on the entire sonic spectrum of possible sound.From there he does a push/pull strategy with the sound, alternating between lifting the piece up to heavenly beauty, then pulling down to frightening, hellish infernos.It is like an entire nights dreaming compiled together into a single bit of sound, with all the pleasantness and foreboding that can bring.
Even clocking in at over three hours, Sleeper is a consistently gripping piece of art.Never able to fall into the background, these 12 pieces command attention from beginning to end, and the images they conjure are amazing. Daniel Menche has always been a rather prolific artist, but never has any of his works seem superfluous.Sleeper, is, however, a masterwork from an undisputed legend of noise.
Svendsen's most recent work has been either in the form of concept-heavy improvised jazz performances (as Nakama) or as solo excursions that feature him bending his double bass in any possible way to make sounds the inventor never intended. Compared to that, Avin is a drastic departure. What is so drastic is that, with a cadre of Norwegian virtuosos, he has created a significantly more intimate, singer-songwriter type record that maintains his edge for the bizarre and experimentation, which is superficially "normal" but hides much strangeness.
Besides the total genre flip, one thing that sets the stage for Avin's sonic departure is Svendsen's abandonment of his double bass and picking up a guitar.His vocals, which are not often heard elsewhere, have a pleasant, slightly folksy tinge to them that is pleasant (though being fully in Norwegian, I have no idea what he is actually saying).At other times he takes on a spoken word approach, such as on the opening of "Kretsløp", and the brief interlude "Katarsis", but there is more singing to be had, and it is quite enjoyable.His echoing vocals have a folk quality to them, intimate, as the sound is a complex intermingling of drones and unconventional noises, such as through the complex "Da Du Og Jeg Var Vi". The arrangement and overall sound is extremely nuanced and complex, but the sum of these strange parts is a pleasurable, pop oriented sound.
For "11 Dager," Svendsen and Agnes Hvizdalek pair up to augment a gentle, pleasant sounding arrangement with their differing vocal ranges.The remainder of the octet provides a lush, diverse instrumental backing, with a bit of noise offsetting the conventional sounds far in the background.This mix of the weird with the normal is a defining feature of this record, and probably what makes it the most compelling to me.For example, "Avin" is a delicate construction of chamber pop and muted horns, making for a warm, inviting sound, but there is just something "off" about it.Either the mix or the processing or the performance, it is hard to say, but that weirdness is what makes it great.
More conventional string arrangements may at first be the focus of "Kretsløp," but some decidedly unconventional string sounds pop up to make things strange, as does bizarre vocal treatments toward the end, which becomes a stuttering, cut up, and eventually disintegrating mass of sound.For "I Berlin", the sound is more of a conventional jazz one that hearkens to Svendsen’s more conventional works with Nakama, but abrupt outbursts make it anything but smooth.The concluding "Tørr Og Sliten Jord" is at first a strange mass of noises but soon becomes stripped down to just vocals and guitar.As it goes on, the mix becomes bigger and more dramatic, culminating in an exceptional conclusion.
Christian Meaas Svendsen has been doing an exemplary job at bending the rules of improvised jazz and free music, and so there is little surprise that, turning his focus to more traditional genres, the results are going to be unique.Avin can be confounding at times, which is exactly why I enjoyed it so much.The blend of the familiar and comfortable with the strange or the dissonant is a significant asset to the record, making it among the most unique I have heard lately.
This innovative collaboration between Telefon Tel Aviv's Joshua Eustis and Belong's Turk Dietrich picks up right where the eponymous 2016 release left off, as the duo continue to gleefully pick apart and stretch minimal dub-techno into splintered unrecognizability.  As such, it would be quite a leap to describe S/W as dance music: all of the expected elements are present, but Second Woman reduce beats to skittering, stuttering abstraction.  The overall effect is quite a dynamically compelling one, ambitiously marrying an erratically sputtering and chopped-up synth haze with understated beats that seem equally inspired by skipping CDs, jackhammers, and ping-pong.  While some more hooks would certainly have been welcome, it is hard to grumble much about an album that sounds like it was sent from the future to show us what pop music for robots will be like.
The opening "/" is probably the clearest possible statement of intent that Second Woman could have possibly made, as it begins with an unadorned kick drum thump that gradually increases in speed until it is almost a blur, then reverses course and slows back down to its original pace.  In essence, that repeating pattern is the entire song, though it is subtly fleshed-out by a bit of subdued synth shimmer.  While it is not an aberration by any means, it is probably the most extreme example of Second Woman's hyper-minimalist bent on the album, throwing down the gauntlet immediately to make it clear that S/W is first and foremost a playground for unusual percussion experiments.  That aggressively purist aesthetic admittedly softens a bit for the following "//," as Dietrich and Eustis enhance their scuttling and alternately expanding and contracting kick drum motif with a repeating reverberant chord, but it is still clear that the music is secondary and the erratic wanderings of the bass drum thump are the true focus.  While a lot of what follows can essentially be viewed as just a series of jackhammering bass drum variations, Second Woman tweak that simple formula more and more dramatically with each successive piece, giving the first half of the album an arc of nervous, snowballing intensity.  For example, "///" is the first piece to actually include chord changes, as well as the first to transform the ping-ponging thump into something resembling a fully formed groove with an off-kilter clapping rhythm.  The following "////" goes further still, bringing a stuttering, broken sounding chord progression to the foreground along with a ghostly and indistinct vocal sample.
Regardless of the shape the music takes, the overall effect is like watching two magicians obsessively repeating the same trick over and over again.  Admittedly, their feat is quite a good one, as these pieces simultaneously achieve a relentless industrial precision and a tense sense of being precarious and a little bit out of control: the erratic and conclusively undanceable tempo of the bass drum makes it feel like the entire pristine edifice is built upon shifting sands.  Despite my appreciation for that unconventional aesthetic, however, the sheer monomania of S/W can be a bit wearying.  Consequently, I was relieved when the second half of the album took an unexpected turn and alternately dismantled further or rebuilt Second Woman's deconstructed vision, a transformation mirrored by the odd symmetry of the cryptic track numbering system.  "////\" is the first piece to explore this slightly different side, dispensing entirely with percussion in favor of an oscillating and shuddering series of warm synth chords.  It is certainly no less obsessive-sounding than its predecessors, but it has quite a different feel.  Then the following "////\\" does the most unimaginable thing possible, locking into an actual groove with a bass line and consistent beat, though it still feels more like a simple vamp than an actual song.  Unsurprisingly, the ping-ponging drums return for the manic "////\\\," but the piece unexpectedly gives way to a series of weirdly melancholy and throbbing drones at the end, which is probably the first glimpse of human emotion on the entire album.
Second Woman save their best for (almost) last, however, as the penultimate "////\\\\" is a gorgeous eruption of all the S/W's pent-up and simmering potential, basically lighting up the album like a goddamn fireworks display.  All the expected components are still in place, but the wildly careening percussion locks into a groove with actual forward momentum, adding and subtracting elements in a way that feels genuinely songlike.  Or at least close to it: it feels more like a wild drum solo unleashed by a computer with an intuitive dynamic knack for build-ups and breakdowns, but it does culminate in a crescendo where the ricocheting percussion is viscerally strafed by gnarled streaks of textured synths.  Curiously, the final piece ("////\\\\/") takes an extremely anticlimactic turn after that firestorm, blearily drifting along for almost five minutes in a haze of plinking, disjointed percussion; seasick synth tones; and jarring alarm-bell disruptions.  That makes for a very odd and perplexing final impression, but S/W is a very odd and perplexing album, so I suppose that makes perverse sense.  Aside from "////\\\\," which is a legitimate tour de force, this album is far too one-dimensional and willfully bloodless to love.  That said, it is an album that I very much respect, as Second Woman unwaveringly display clear vision, rigorous focus, and crystalline clarity.  It would have been easy to make a more listenable album by adding a bit more in the way of warmth, depth, melody, or harmony, but Dietrich and Eustis took the harder route and achieved some rarefied and hard-won moments of singular and alien machine-music beauty instead.
For his Editions Mego debut, the singular and polymorphously creative Simon Fisher Turner takes a break from his soundtrack career for a feast of smaller and more experimental works.  While the fourteen individual pieces of Giraffe are thematically united by an overarching concept regarding the blending of "life" sounds with music and machines, that concept allows for quite a wide variety of moods and textures.  The clear centerpiece is a gorgeously woozy soundscape ("Slight Smile") featuring a mysterious monologue from Emma Smith that ultimately turns creepily garbled and digitized, but a few other pieces are similarly inspired.  Though many individual pieces err a bit too much on the side of brevity, Giraffe as a whole is quite an absorbing work, languorously flowing from one mysterious and surreal scene to another with occasional unexpected detours into demented chaos, menacing industrial clangor, and lush Romanticism.
Knowingly or not, Simon Fisher Turner started collecting inspiration and raw material for Giraffe all the way back in 2008, dutifully recording the world around him with an mp3 recorder and his iPhone whenever promising opportunities arose.  Many of the field recordings were taken around venues in England and Japan, but Simon also covered Germany, Spain, and Portugal.  He seems particularly fond of voices and ambient sounds from interiors and other urban spaces.  In a few cases, the recordings are compelling enough to take center stage, such as the quietly singing woman in "Shine Up" or the jabbering meltdown/performance art of "Clean Page," but most of Giraffe’s field recordings are quite cryptic, understated, and textural, primarily serving to provide a vague sense of place rather than a strong central theme.  There are some exceptions though, with the aforementioned and unhinged "Clean Page" being the most significant of all.  Elsewhere, "Burnt In" largely eschews music entirely, featuring a recording of "Mumbai night dogs" by Avjit Mukul Kishore that gradually morphs into something that sounds like a futuristic elevator.  Later on the album, "Mud Larks" takes similarly music-averse stance, resembling a relatively untreated field recording of a reverberant and dripping parking garage with some distant construction.
Simon Fisher Turner is not Chris Watson though, so most of Giraffe's field recordings are merely one minor layer of a composed, melodic work or a somewhat unexpected foray into heavy industrial experimentation.  Given his long background in composing for film, it is not surprising that the bulk of Simon's pieces are incidental ambient works that create a vivid mood.  At its core, Giraffe is essentially a dream-like sequence of mysterious or beautiful "scenes" that leave fleeting emotional impressions.  Sometimes the scene can be quite a conventionally pretty one, like the bleary, gently ringing bliss of "Hope Swims," even if it is disconcertingly curdled by an unexpected power drill near the end.  The warm and ghostly "Clean Page" takes an even more perverse trajectory, as its blurred and heavenly reverie is unnervingly destroyed by the incomprehensible sputtering and grunting of a very agitated man.  Curiously, the album's strongest piece (the gorgeously dream-like "Slight Smile") is one of the only ones that does not feature chance as major component, as it built upon the eerie transformation of a scripted monologue.  Those three pieces, along with the haunting warble of the opener and the bittersweetly orchestral closer, feel like the deliberate set pieces that the rest of Giraffe orbits around, as many of the remainders are too ephemeral and vaporous to leave much of a lingering impact (though the more jarring industrial pieces certainly grab my attention whenever they unexpectedly erupt) .  As sequential stages of Giraffe's alternately beautiful and disorienting hallucinatory spell, those minor/incidental pieces all work just fine, but they generally lack the depth and substance to hold up on their own.
That brings me to the sole grievance that I have with Giraffe: there are plenty of beautiful motifs, intriguing experiments, and evocative moods here, but they rarely stick around long enough to blossom into anything particularly substantial.  As much as I love the wonderful juxtaposition of lush, dreamy drones with feral jabbering in "Clean Page," for example, it is disappointingly over in under three minutes: all the elements of a slow-burning major piece are there, but Giraffe's brisk sequencing pace leaves no time for that.  That seems like an odd move for someone who has made a career out of lengthy and thematically focused soundtrack albums, but it also has a certain logic if I view this release as Simon's vacation from his day job: Giraffe is a varied outpouring of accumulated ideas rather than a rigorous, constrained work commissioned by someone else.  The sole exception to that kaleidoscopic ephemera trend is the gorgeous and mesmerizing 8-minute "Slight Smile," which is more or less an instant classic.  While that one piece is legitimately essential, the rest of Giraffe is merely enjoyable and interesting, though Simon's attention to detail probably makes for a fine headphone album. That is a perfectly respectable achievement, obviously, but this modest cavalcade of curious vignettes amounts to an album that Simon Fisher Turner fans will enjoy rather than the sort of album that would instantly make someone a new Simon Fisher Turner fan.
Drew McDowall’s second solo album for Dais is a bit of a surprise detour from 2015's more Coil-esque Collapse, largely abandoning the melodicism and eerie moods of its predecessor in favor of more fragmented and disorienting fare.  Many of these pieces ambiguously ride the line between bold evolution and perplexing regression, as McDowall's previously clear vision sounds broken and deconstructed into a miasma of lurching percussion, throbbing drones, and clattering metallic textures. As such, I had to re-calibrate my expectations a bit, but Unnatural Channel get points for taking chances and not going back to the same well a second time.  While I am not sure if Unnatural Channel comes at all close to realizing McDowall's potential, it is certainly an oft-compelling experiment, resembling a well-produced homage to the golden age of the noise/experimental cassette underground.
The opening "Tell Me The Name" initially starts the album on a deceptively subdued note, as the first minute or so is consumed with disjointed, cavernous, and brooding moans and a slow, erratic rhythm of electronic blurts, hollow clangs, and washes of hiss.  Gradually, the individual components of that pulse get closer together and cohere into a heavy, stumbling groove with viscerally pounding percussion.  Almost before I even realize what a cool trick McDowall has pulled off, however, the piece dissipates once more into fitful dark ambient abstraction.  To a large degree, that strange trajectory sets the tone for the whole album, as McDowall returns again to deep, heavy grooves weaved together from seemingly unrelated materials, but deems his work complete once he reaches that point and goes no further.  That aesthetic certainly has its appeal, as a piece like "Habitat" sounds menacing, futuristic, and inhuman.  However, it is quite a constrained vision to explore, causing much of Unnatural Channel to feel like slight variations on a single theme (though that theme admittedly sounds like it would be the perfect soundtrack for some kind of Terminator-esque mechanized apocalypse).
Naturally, the most memorable moments tend to be those where McDowall adds some twists or surprises to his "lumbering robotic menace" template.  One such highlight is "This is What It’s Like," which culminates in a creepy, insistent loop of Roxy Farman's voice whispering "this is what it’s like…sleep-deprived" over a clanging and shuddering march of buzzing electronics and metallic percussion.  Elsewhere, "Unnatural Channel (Part 2)" combines its crunching, stomping juggernaut of a groove with a fairly straightforward and melodic pulse to create a shambling and grotesque caricature of synthpop.  Wetware's Farman surfaces yet again on the all-too-brief closer "Unshielded," which conclusively steals the show with its deranged swirl of animal whoops, nerve-jangling chopped and overlapping vocal snatches, pounding low end, and snarls of grinding electronics.  It feels like a full-on nightmare set in some kind of cyberpunk jungle.  Also, in a perverse way, the extreme brevity is kind of an asset, as "Unshielded" packs a perfect visceral punch, then abruptly leaves me reeling and wondering what the hell just happened.
As with Collapse, Unnatural Channel feels like the work of an artist with a lot of great ideas that don't always translate into complete, fully formed songs.  It is hard to say whether or not McDowall has evolved as a composer since his debut, as strong melodic or harmonic motifs are in noticeably short supply here.  However, many of these songs have quite an inventive and deftly executed dynamic arc, even if the song always seems to quickly come to an end once the rabbit is out of the hat and the rhythm is fully established.  As a result, I cannot tell if Unnatural Channel is just a series of cool (if a bit baggy) modular synth jams that never went further or if we have instead entered McDowall’s bold new Percussion Phase.  Whichever it is, "Unshielded" is the current zenith of this direction, unleashing a wonderful and unhinged cacophony that starts at full power and ends long before it overstays its welcome.  Aside from that, Unnatural Channel is primarily enjoyable as just a feast of heavy industrial textures and inventive rhythms, resembling field recordings from a monstrous, rumbling factory floor in a bleakly dystopian and inhuman future.
Jessica Moss is best known as violinist, backing vocalist and co-composer with the acclaimed cult chamber-punk band Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra, the avant-klezmer group Black Ox Orkestar, and for her involvement in multiple records by Carla Bozulich’s Evangelista and two albums by Vic Chesnutt.
Having made six full-length albums and toured extensively with Mt. Zion from 2001-2014, Moss began performing solo work two years ago as that band went on hiatus, leading to mesmerizing solo appearances at ATP Festival, Le Guess Who? Festival, the Basilica Hudson 24-Hour Drone, the Winnipeg New Music Festival and the Montréal Museum of Contemporary Art, among others. Pools Of Light is her first full-length solo album, following the 2015 self-released cassette Under Plastic Island (recorded with Guy Picciotto of Fugazi).
As fans of the aforementioned projects will know, Moss has developed a distinctive and impressive approach to violin that combines a natural technical fluidity, a recombinant command of folk, classical and modern idioms, and an adventurous exploration of signal-bending and analog effects that uniquely expand the spectrum of the violin as sound source. Her solo work is deeply rooted in live performance, where she builds up and breaks down stunning longform compositions in real time with an array of pedals – including distortions, octave/harmonizers and samplers/loopers. To hear all of this brilliantly rallied and unfolded on a wholly solo recording (without reliance on software-based dubbing or effects) is intensely rewarding.
Comprised of two side-length multi-movement compositions, Pools Of Light unfolds at a stately, inexorable pace, combining sound-art and signal-processed timbres, extended melodic and contrapuntal lines, and the periodic deployment of stark, minimalist vocals. "Entire Populations" is a 24-minute tour de force on Side One, opening with gently blown-out solo violin layering a maqam- and klezmer-inflected theme that gradually recedes to near-silence as vocals are introduced, with Moss singing a single phrase (anchored by the song’s title) which builds up anew in careening stacked vocal loops, towards a majestic juxtaposition of dive-bombing electronics and strident melodic string excursions, ending in a tender scorched-earth denouement. "Glaciers I" and "Glaciers II" on Side Two are more explicitly textural and cinematic, moving between minimalist and maximalist, widescreen and intimate, ice and heat; a highly compelling suite of drone-inflected, nuanced and subtly plaintive instrumental pieces.
Pools Of Light is elegiac durational music at the intersection of neo-classicism, soundtrack, electronic, art-punk and avant-folk – a decidedly organic, non-academic, profoundly searching and emotive work, guided by Moss’s liner note mantra: "FEELING LOVE IN A MELTING WORLD."
Italian electro-acoustic composers Giuseppe Ielasi and Nicola Ratti reconvene their unique Bellows collaborative project for a new album on Shelter Press.
Continuously drawing an hypnotic maze with albums on Boomkat Editions, Entr’acte, and Ielasi’s cult Senufo label, Bellows offers their first album on Shelter Press with Strand.
Clocking right under 40 minutes, Strand is direct and disorienting. With eight tactile but distant untitled tracks, the album convokes a complex sound palette between acousmatic sound and fractal beats.
Recorded in Milano at their very own Standards recording studio, Strand marks a shift in Bellows previous recording process, bringing more music gear on the table: tapes, modular synthesizers, effects and samples. Captured live over the course of a four days improvised session, the album floats between ghostly melodies, musique concrète, and analog electronics.
Echoing with the artwork by Amsterdam-based artist Louis Reith, whose collages made of found black and white images are disrupted by bold geometric constructions, the album is disorienting and fascinating, seating right in between the challenging world of electro-acoustic and a more welcoming beat-oriented territory.
Strand is a fascinating body of work, growing over time and revealing more of its complexity at every listen.
"Out of the crystal clear and warm cosmic perennial waters comes forth another sparkling jewel from Anahita (Tara Burke (Fursaxa) and Helena Espvall (Espers). Two elves dancing amidst gnarled branches of ancient trees and fragrant herbs, concocting a magical potion for the mind of floating medieval cello spheres and melancholic ceremonial madrigals under the blinking eye of a pale moon and far off constellations of shooting stars."
–Bart De Paepe, founder of the Belgian tape label Sloow Tapes
I have been on an extended Croatian Amor bender since last year's Love Means Taking Action, so I was delighted when I found out that Loke Rahbek was releasing his first solo album under his own name on Editions Mego.  Unsurprisingly, City of Women does not sound much like Croatian Amor at all, as Rahbek has been involved in at least a dozen other projects.  In fact, this release is billed as sort of a culminating convergence of Rahbek's varied and prolific history of underground music projects, though it is not nearly the radical compositional leap forward one might expect from that statement.  Instead, City of Women is a lot like a well-produced Loke Rahbek buffet that offers discrete forays into the many facets of his artistry (noise, dense synth soundscapes, sound collage, and even an occasional piano miniature) rather than a thematically consistent major work.  Several of the piece are quite good, naturally, but expectations should be moderated: this is only another characteristically fine Rahbek release rather than the beginning of a bold new chapter.
The album opens with "Like A Still Pool," a drone piece built upon a densely throbbing foundation of modular synthesizer that sizzles, snarls, and fitfully decays into bubbling entropy.  It does not evolve much beyond that strong theme, but it is compelling enough in its visceral force and textural eruptions to grab and hold my attention for its entire duration.  The following "Fermented," however, takes quite a different direction, exploring a relatively simple and unmolested progression of piano arpeggios.  While there is a consistent sort of cascading melody, the emphasis seems to be primarily upon the textural juxtaposition of the rippling piano patterns with mysterious beeps and hissing field recordings.  Also of note: the brief piece abruptly stops without warning, so it mainly just serves as a disorienting and pastoral interlude to set the stage for the more substantial title piece.  At its core, "City of Women" is a reprise of the "Still Pool" aesthetic, but more advanced compositionally, as it offers a bit more in the way of mood, melody, and dynamic arc.  It is definitely one of the album’s more evocative pieces, achieving an appealing degree of neon-lit Bladerunner-esque futurist grandeur.  The languorous and swaying ambient drone of "A Mess of Love" continues that brief hot streak to a minor degree, but it is quite clear at this point that City of Women is largely a strange and kaleidoscopic trip of brief and vaguely hallucinatory vignettes, a revelation reinforced by the ominous tonal shift brought by the brooding, pulsing, and hazy collage aesthetic of the following "Palm."  There are a lot of interesting motifs that surface in the first half of the album, but they rarely feel substantial and tend to flog a single motif until Rahbek feels like fading out to make room for the next piece.
If the album continued in that fitfully intriguing and oft-subdued vein indefinitely, I would be a somewhat disappointed man, as City of Women often feels a lot like a series of mysterious preludes to a pay-off that never comes.  Fortunately, the album's second half is enlivened by a pair of heavier pieces that tear through the slow-moving flow of sketches and meditative reveries.  The first is "In Piles of Magazines," a menacing and lurching bed of throbbing drones, grinding swells, and ugly oscillating overtones.  Near the end, Rahbek embellishes his gnarled horror with some precarious glimpses of more harmonically welcome territory and recurring deep exhalations, which only makes the whole thing more unsettling.  Also, unlike many other pieces on the album, "Magazines" boasts a clear ending that comes at exactly the right time.  To my ears, it is easily the best piece on the album.  After that nightmare subsides, Rahbek initially seems intent on wading back into more pastoral and piano-centric waters, but "A Word A Day" runs its course in under a minute and the rumbling, murky dread of "Swimsuit" creeps to ruin the bucolic scene quite conclusively.  As much as I enjoy Croatian Amor, Rahbek seems most at home when he is indulging his darker impulses, which is hardly surprising given that runs a (mostly) noise label, plays in a long-running noise project (Damien Dubrovnik), and has collaborated with Puce Mary.  The album's final piece is "Take Pleasure in Habits," a piece that initially feels like an otherwise straightforward synthscape that fitfully fades in and out of focus, but soon deepens with addition of an erratically quaking industrial undercurrent.  While it ends a bit too suddenly for my taste (a recurring theme), it provides an arguably fitting closure to the album, as it is the most successful blending of Rahbek’s melodic and noise sides to surface here.
Curiously, Editions Mego describes City of Women as "21st century pop music," a perplexing description that would be far more apt for Rahbek's work in Croatian Amor (pop music deconstructed) or Lust For Youth (cannibalized '80s synthpop).  To my ears, there are actually no elements of pop music to this album at all, though it could be argued that the lack of a human element abstractly captures the sterile disconnection of our century quite effectively.  While I doubt that is what Rahbek was going for here, the album’s clean production and synth- and machine-centrism was undoubtedly a deliberate step away from the more soulful recent Croatian Amor fare and the tape hiss-heavy and homespun collage aesthetic of Croatian Amor's past.  If anything, City of Women sounds like a sketchbook of ideas for a stab at being a serious composer (as opposed to being an influential DIY/underground one).  That seems like a perfectly reasonable ambition, as many of these pieces could have easily been the foundation for a more substantial work in the same direction.  Instead, however, they all wound up here in a gallery of promising unrealized ideas.  I am perfectly fine with that, as there are a handful of enjoyable pieces here that display facets of Rahbek's artistry rarely glimpsed in his other (predominantly collaborative) work, but this uneven collection feels like a bit of a missed opportunity as a whole.
Belgium’s Aguirre Records seems to have quite a talent for digging up some singularly obscure, weird, and surprising releases lately.  The latest one to knock me sideways is this one, a free-folk project that seemingly involves most of the Swedish underground. Ostensibly formed to reignite and continue the tradition of communal psych genius of heavyweights like Pärson Sound, Enhet För Fri Muzik made a rather intriguing detour along the way and wound up deep in idiosyncratic and otherworldly "outsider folk" territory instead.  Even that is a bit of an oversimplification though, as Sofie Herner's alternately fragile, distracted, ritualistic, and trance-like vocals are unpredictably accompanied with everything from saxophones to field recordings of birds and streams.  Admittedly, tight songcraft was clearly not a big priority during these sessions, but Inom Dig casts an absorbing spell of timeless unreality that transcends mere melodies and hooks.
As befits a deeply strange folk album featuring folks like Sewer Election's Dan Johansson and Release The Bats founder Matthias Andersson, Inom Dig, Inom Mig (roughly "Within You, Within Me") has some rather kaleidoscopic and unusual sequencing.  For example, the first side is composed of four sketchlike pieces of varying lengths, while the second side is consumed entirely by the epic 18-minute "Det Ordnar Sig Ska Du Se" ("That's What You'll See").  Only a few pieces feel like actual songs, which both adds to the feeling of spontaneity and generally makes me feel like I am listening to a mysterious jumble of field recordings of an arcane forest ritual (at least sometimes, anyway).  That said, the whole experience opens in comparatively contemporary and straightforward fashion with a brief introduction of trebly strummed electric guitar chords until the following "Se Dig Om" ("See You On") quickly leaves conventional music far behind.  I suppose it still technically counts as a "song" though, as Herner is clearly singing actual words and sticks to a melody, even if she sounds like she is deep in a trance and emanating from a scratchy, hissing old recording.  Despite all that, Herner's vocals are still the closest thing to normalcy in the piece, as the underlying music is a brooding miasma of crackling field recordings, tape hiss, detuned and murky drones, and reverberating string noises–essentially the least likely possible place for a quietly melodic saxophone solo to erupt.  That is exactly what happens though, as the second half of the piece is devoted to a soulful, jazz-inflected, and reasonably competent duet with some sparse nature sounds.
The following "Droppar På Din Hud" ("Drops on Your Skin") takes a similarly aberrant and surprising path, as its central motif is an insistent chord played on an out-of-tune-sounding string instrument over a bed of strange scrapes.  If I had to guess, I would say that it sounds like the source material is culled entirely from the rusting innards of a long-forgotten piano.  Unexpectedly, however, that theme segues into a simple acoustic guitar ballad.  To their credit, Enhet För Fri Muzik even manage to make a simple acoustic guitar melody seem fresh and strange, as it sounds very trebly and close-mic’d and the occasional flubbed notes and string buzz feel like a textural component every bit as important as the melody.  "Stilla Vatten" takes yet another hard detour, resembling a snippet of a mildly distressed old recording of an improv-prone church organist.
As strange and enjoyable as it is, however, the first side of the album is merely a series of appetizers leading up to the main course of "Det Ordnar Sig Ska Du Se."  Structurally, it could not possibly be simpler, as it is essentially just Herner singing a bittersweet melody over an insistently repeating and somewhat broken/out-of-tune sounding arpeggio.  That arpeggio weaves quite an evocative hypnotic spell though, as do the underlying field recordings of what sounds like a windswept field.  Eventually, the arpeggio abruptly stops and the player seems to fumble with a few dissonant chords as the wind swirls around him or her.  Once it starts up again, the field recordings (featuring some birds and mysterious footsteps now) have crept a bit further into the foreground, as has the occasional disruptive wash of static.  While the music itself is weirdly beautiful, the real magic lies in its unreal sense of time and place, as it feels like the band managed to channel the spirit of an ancient Druidic priestess through a secret pagan ceremony in a moonlit grotto.