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.
Released earlier this year as a single 120 minute cassette, the two variations on Pisaro's composition for guitar, performed by Barry Chabala, appears as a gorgeous new two CD reissue on the Winds Measure label. While it may lose a bit in its transition from analog to digital, the clarity of the CD format actually enhances the contrast between the two separate versions.
"Black, White, Red, Green, Blue" is an hour long, five part composition for electric guitar that is focused on specific tones, but was open to interpretation by the performer as far as tempo and pacing goes.Besides the notes used, each part differs with the method of guitar playing utilized.For the first part, a soft, repeating malleted chord is used, almost mimicking a tolling church bell that conjures a lot of warmth in its sparseness.
For the second movement, the piece shifts to light, gliding tones from single played notes.The dynamics shift from quiet to almost silent, with long passages of actual silence between the sounds.By the third movement, the sounds moves more into actual pseudo-chords while retaining its long gaps of silence.The depth and intensity builds as Chabala switches to an ebow, staying low but into thicker, vibrating moments before switching back to a mallet, resulting in an ending similar to the opening.
Most of the original piece remains intact on the second piece, "Voyelles," but processed cassette tape hiss and other incidental sounds gleaned from that dated format are added in.While "Black, White…" was sparse and pure, "Voyelles" is a bit more ragged and messy in the best possible way.Right from the onset, the repeated note is paired with a rough, grinding type sound of a cassette tape motor above it.
The sound of tape noise appears via slight processing throughout:soon the aforementioned motor sound is replaced by what sounds like tape hiss amplified to imitate surging rain, before reassembling into an almost painful, super high frequency like an ancient, slightly off-track audio tape.The addition of the analog noise pushes the piece into an entirely different direction, but never loses its original character.
"Black, White, Red, Green, Blue" in its original form surely benefits greatly from the clarity of the CD format, emphasizing the silent spaces and low tones with digital purity, something that may have been obscured in the original cassette format.On the other piece, however, the innate tape noise would have made each playing different depending on conditions and equipment.Even with the clarity, "Voyelles" works wonderfully, and I have to admit to favoring that version of Pisaro’s composition, the contrast between pure guitar and raw textural noise works perfectly.
Straddling the line between carefully programmed electronic rhythms and aggressive dissonance, this EP strikes an odd, yet fascinating balance between the two. Parts of the album are familiar, reminiscent of late 1990s electronica, but Damaskin takes the final product in a different direction, however, and puts a unique spin on a familiar sound.
I could not help but detect a bit of drum and bass influence to the sound of Unseen Warfare, though it would not necessarily sit too nicely amongst the classics of that genre.While the skittering rhythms on "Glory" might fit into that same rhythmic template, the standard drum and synth samples are replaced with sloshing water and cricket like noises to resemble something entirely different.
The same complex, chaotic rhythms appear on the title song as well, heavily panned and bouncing erratically from left to right.The careful, deliberate rhythm programming is not too far removed from the likes of older Photek or Source Direct, but again the sound is made up of a slew of violent and aggressive noises rather than anything clearly identifiable or traditional.
The flip side of this vinyl leans into more of a traditional techno sound, but maintains the same ugly, unique identity.On "Remembrance of Death," there is a looser, slightly off kilter sense to the song, overall, that at times almost seems to drift off-beat in a way that keeps things on edge.The rhythm is more conventional, but features some wonderfully processed handclap sounds that violently slice through the mix.
"Contra Theatra" closes the record, and initially is heavily steeped in repetition.Thin, brittle rhythms at first lock in solidly atop a distorted synth pattern that could almost work on a dance floor.Soon, however, pieces come and go, layers shift in dynamics, and everything around that steady beat keeps changing and evolving to excellent effect.
It's been nearly 5 years since Brock's highly acclaimed White Clouds Drift On And On debuted on Echospace earning a plethora of critical acclaim including many coveted top albums of the year list from RA to The Wire. Brock returns in beautiful form with what he's said to us is his most personal and self-defining moment in his fruitful musical career. This album, however, strikes on a very different chord from the last: rather than find contentment in repeating himself, he's sculpted a unique sound slightly out of focus from his previous work, a sound one could only say is like drifting in and out of consciousness. A place where early LSD experiments reveal third dimensions of the mind and evoke emotions so powerful they haunt you forever.
Here we see Brock's true dedication to vision, maturity and growth, the reason why so many people have gravitated to his heart-tugging productions. On Home, he paints a near 3-hour exploration so beautiful and hypnotic the listener feels as if only moments passed by, a second to forever. This is a welcome return to form in the one place Brock refers to as "Home": here on Echospace. If Burial were to meet Eno in the studio of a BBC radio workshop session with Tape masters sent to Steve Roach for further deconstruction, this might be the unique result, residing somewhere in the ether. Brock has truly blown us away yet again with another stunning masterpiece.
Visibility Is A Trap is the new EP by Dalhous, comprised of four originals together with a masterfully understated Regis remix of "He Was Human And Belonged With Humans."
The EP heralds the arrival of the Edinburgh-based project's sophomore album, Will To Be Well, due out on Blackest Ever Black in early Summer 2014.
Dalhous first announced its existence in 2012 with the Mitchell Heisman 10", and last year released its debut full-length: An Ambassador For Laing. Both Visibility Is A Trap and the upcoming Will To Be Well LP reflect writer-producer Marc Dall's continued interest in the language and imagery of self-help, R.D. Laing and the anti-psychiatry movement.
Though recorded after Will To Be Well, the tracks on Visibility Is A Trap at first appear to have more in common with the blue ethereal drift of Ambassador. While "Information Is Forever" and "A Change Of Attitude" are firmly in the ambient mode, "Active Discovering" fizzes with arpeggiated energy, and a battery of percussion disrupts the calm surface of "Sight Of Hirta." Something is up. Things are not as they seem.
The Regis remix of Ambassador highlight "He Was A Human And Belonged With Humans" finds Karl O'Connor in unusually pensive mood. In fact, it's fair to say that this near-beatless, dubwise version is unlike anything he has put his name to before. Discarding the rhythmic skeleton of Dalhous's original, he gives the weeping saxophone more space to roam and resonate, adding off-beat, sleep-deprived keys, murmured vocal fragments and swells of sub-bass pressure. It could be construed as a love letter to his former home in West Berlin; certainly it evokes and effortlessly updates the drugsick grandeur of later Neubauten or Low side 2.
Millie & Andrea are Miles Whittaker (Demdike Stare) and Andy Stott, fellow labelmates at Modern Love who collaborated on an occasional series of 12" releases between 2008 and 2010. It's been four years since we last heard from them, but they now return with Drop The Vowels, their debut album. Produced fast and loose through late 2013 / early 2014, it's an album that recalls the strict and stripped funk of Anthony Shakir as much as it does Leila's incredible debut Like Weather, eschewing the dark aesthetic both producers are best known for in favor of something much more visceral. It's an album borne from a love of both pop and club music, made to evoke an adrenalized, hedonistic, as well as emotional, response.
Opener "GIF RIFF" brings to life a Gamelan edit stripped bare before the over-compressed "Stay Ugly" breaks out with a tumbling, broken arrangement situated somewhere between Richard D. James and Jai Paul. "Temper Tantrum" and "Spectral Source" follow, versions of tracks originally released on the second and third Daphne EPs respectively, the former a rugged rave anthem tempered by blue strings, the latter a proper dancefloor destroyer recalling Shake's mighty "Madmen." "Corrosive" flits between a fillibrating, arpeggiated steppers rhythm and a brutal jungle breakdown, while "Drop The Vowels" further explores and strips bare bass & drums before the slow but jacking warehouse killer "Back Down" provides pure percussive abandon. "Quay" ends the set with something quieter, a sublime coda made entirely from field recordings.
Soundway's second foray into South East Asia is focused on North-East Thailand, the epicenter of Molam and Luk Thung Isan music. Hypnotic phin & khaen riffs, pulsing, electrified country rhythms and heartfelt vocals punctuate another journey into the lesser known reaches of 1970s Thai music.
The first volume of The Sound of Siam, released in 2011, was the first introduction for many to the artistry and innovations of modern Thai music. One of the most popular compilations on Soundway Records the music even made it onto the big screen with "Mae Jom Ka Lon" by Dao Bandon featured on the soundtrack of The Hangover Part II. In an interview with LA Times, Mick Jagger spoke of discovering the collection that "some nutter put together" after hearing the riff from Jumpin' Jack Flash on one of the tracks from the compilation.
In this second volume of The Sound of Siam, the focus is firmly on the music the sounds of northeast Thailand, or Isan, and attempts to show how a genre evolved and developed from essentially an acoustic tradition with specific geographic roots, to one that started to incorporate other instruments and influences that reached out to the Isan diaspora around the country.
The term "molam" is actually two separate words pushed together: Mo meaning "expert" or "doctor" and lam meaning "to sing." Hence the literal translation means "singing expert." Many molam records have extended intros that allow a vocalist to establish the theme of the song, as well as flex their improvisational muscles.
Luk thung (literally "song of the countryside")is a much broader, rural style that had a bigger impact nationally. Artists like Saksiam Petchompu began fusing this style with molam, a move which propelled him to national fame. You can hear the influence of western funk, as well as Thai arrangements, on the luk thung Isan (as the hybrid became known) smash "Jeb Jin Jeb Jai" included here.
The Sound of Siam 2 - Molam & Luk Thung Isan from North-East Thailand 1970 - 1979 features 19 tracks, many appearing outside of Thailand for the first time. Both CD and double LP & is accompanied with detailed liner notes written by compilers Chris Menist and Maft Sai.
A little more than 20 years ago, in the fall of 1993, Windy Weber and Carl Hultgren started the Blue Flea label together in order to release their first record. Pressed to black wax, or purple if you were very lucky, the Watersong/Dragonfly 7" was presented in a simple green sleeve with a picture of a tree on one side and, on the other, the image of three broad maple leaves. Last year, for Record Store Day 2013, Windy and Carl inaugurated their 20th anniversary celebrations with the release of a cassette documenting their 2009 performance at the Solar Culture Gallery in Tucson, Arizona, a single night on what they claim was their last ever tour. Then, in December, they reunited with Dominic Martin, who put out the Emerald 7" on Enraptured in 1995, and released the Calliope/Carnivale single. The cassette caught Windy and Carl somewhere between We Will Always Be and Songs for the Broken Hearted mode, but the 45 was a glance over their shoulders, with a surprise percussion-injected twist tucked away on the B-side. Pressed to red vinyl (the orange vinyl edition sold out in a flash) and adorned in bright, hand painted sleeves that resemble fossilized leaves, I Walked Alone/At Night concludes the celebratory trilogy with a pair of reflective beauties, cool and crystalline from a distance, but red hot at their core. It is a fiery return to that green-sleeved single from 1993, reinforced and refreshed by Windy’s new-found inspiration, Carl’s seemingly effortless playing, and 20 years of hard work.
Windy and Carl’s last two full-length albums saw them become an entirely new band. They’d never been as rock ‘n’ roll as the space-rock label suggested, but in the seven years between 2001’s Consciousness and 2008’s Songs for the Broken Hearted they had left the earthy orbit of their more song-based material behind entirely. By 2012’s We Will Always Be, they had tumbled through empty space and sailed straight into the sun, where Windy’s vocals turned to liquid heat and Carl’s weighty drones became streams of white hot light. The songs melted away, the bodies burned away, and all that was left was their sound: Windy and Carl. Think of it as one name, without the conjunction or the spaces.
The Solar Culture Gallery cassette, recorded in 2009, was a snapshot of what that transformation had looked like on the road, and an indication of how Songs for the Broken Hearted had become We Will Always Be, both musically and privately. Calliope/Carnivale, which came eight months later, looked like a "from the vault" release too, until you got to the B-side. On "Calliope," Windy sang wordlessly over Carl’s strummed guitars. They laid a droning bit in there, probably drawn from an E-bow, but the melody was carried on the low strings, undistorted and completely discrete. It could have been a Drawing of Sound B-side, or a sketch from the same sessions, had it turned up on the Introspection set. It was ethereal, but nothing like their later, more abstract work.
On the other hand, there wasn’t a single guitar on "Carnivale," at least not for a solid two and half minutes. It was all tambourine and bells, or xylophone, and Windy sang clear as day over the top, without anything there to obscure her words. Happily, on the other side of We Will Always Be, things sounded light-hearted and experimental.
"I Walked Alone" keeps that playful feeling up, but dresses it in murkier, more meditative attire. Windy’s vocals are front and center again, but they move in and out of the music more fluidly, some phrases disappearing into the haze of Carl’s circular melodies, others cresting just long enough to hear her sing lines like "time waits for no one" and "so begins the march toward becoming dust." The sound is melancholy, but not despairing, with the low strings again pushing the song forward and giving it a hopeful, yearning inflection.
The rest of Carl’s string work is a play of light and dark. His guitars shift and rock against each other, emanating bright clouds of melody and obscure, misty tone clusters. It recalls "Watersong’s" echo-drenched sound, but with twice the deliberation. Carl’s arrangements are tighter and more intricately woven, building tension and releasing it one hypnotic wave at a time.
Refracted chords and sharp angles dance all over "At Night," and Windy meets them with deep, almost chanted poetry. The particulars are hard to catch, but one line is certain: "I never knew what it meant to hear your voice at night." Carl’s playing rotates around those words like a mass of glassy, twinkling ice so delicate it might shatter. It never does, though. The whirl of words and flickering lights continues trance-like until it comes to a calm, glowing conclusion. The guitars might sound fragile, but the words and the mood are warm; they shine through the dusky atmosphere of the song the way embers shine through ash.
As much as these songs recall Windy and Carl’s beginnings, they point in a new direction too. Carl has a solo record on the way and his choices indicate what he might be up to in the near future. It also suggests that Windy and Carl have a lot more to say as a duo. When you come to a fork in the road and things seem uncertain, looking backwards can sometimes be the best way to move forwards.
The pairing of Jenks Miller (Horseback) and James Toth (Wooden Wand) makes perfect sense, given both of them work with their own idiosyncratic approaches to southern Americana, resulting in music that is at times familiar and simultaneously unique. On this split release, each artist submitted three songs that are not only some of their most accessible material, but also complement each other wonderfully.
The three songs from Miller unsurprisingly sound like a hybrid of his recent Spirit Signal album and the newest Horseback release."Imperishable Sacred Land" leans a bit more towards his recent solo work, with its lead twanging guitar.A short piece, and even despite the droning organ that slowly slinks its way in, it has a sunnier, less sinister vibe compared to most of his work.
"Have Mercy" works as more of a hybrid piece, with its loose, living drumming and church-like organ giving an almost gospel-pop undercurrent to Miller’s guitar and processed vocals.Due to its overall simplicity and lo-fi sound, it results in a catchy, very natural sounding piece of music."Hats Off to (Roy) Montgomery" leans more into his recent Horseback sound, with haunting, shimmering layers of guitar atop one another.As feedback and dissonant passages slip in, the guitar tone drops down, everything gets darker and simultaneously more captivating.
Toth's side sticks even more to convention, and casually drifts between acoustic folk and country twang."The Sun Shines Brightly on the Road to Ruin" sticks more in the folksy realm, with simple guitar and vocal melodies over a bed of droning shruti box.With its slow pace and sparse structure, there is a dour, yet simultaneously uplifting vibe to it.
The remaining two songs stick a bit more in the realm of country influenced sound, both stripped down and sparse in comparison to "The Sun Shines.""Quicksand Rose" maintains a sad, but not necessarily depressive mood with its slow pace."Remember Me to Stone" has a modernized old country vibe to it, with references to "deleting numbers of dead friends".Here there is more of an emphasis on the vocals in the mix, plus additional backing vocals from Leah Toth to flesh it all out.
Similar in imagery and mood, but equally difficult to classify, Jenks Miller and James Toth are paired perfectly on Roads to Ruin.Compared to their respective discographies, these six songs might not make for their most difficult or challenging works, but are more song oriented and therefore memorable in their occult backwoods country folk ambience.
As a former member of Skullflower and Ascension, Jaworzyn was one of the elite guitar manglers of the '90s noise rock UK scene before seemingly disappearing form the earth. Last year, along with a series of Skullflower reissues, Jaworzyn reappeared with a few singles embracing electronic instrumentation, while still pursuing that world of noise and entropy he did via six strings. Principles of Inertia is another manifestation of this electronic infatuation, with a joyful disregard for genre traditions or conventions.
The two pieces that open and close the album are the ones that flirt most with conventional electronic sounds, although in such a way that ignores expectations as far as structure and rhythm goes."Biorigged" is all nearly random synth beeps and noises, collaged together in something that vaguely resembles a rhythm, but too chaotic to settle in comfortably.A steady, distorted beat underpins everything, and while the changes are slight, there is a lot of variation throughout while keeping the same cyclic rhythm.
That schizoid version of techno appears again on the closing "Apocalypse," all erratic and jerky beats over machine gun like synth sequences.Again, it has an intentionally repetitive quality, but the ghostly synth backing that lurks in the distance makes for a more unsettling feel.Stuttering drum machines are also prevalent on "Festival of Lies," but positioned atop a crackling static backing and dissonant electronics, it almost has a harsh noise quality to it as opposed to a danceable one.
"Gland Collector" is also heavy steeped in rhythm, but again erratic, and with its spiky FM synth sound giving it a dirty edge.It does admittedly stay a bit too repetitive, however, with the changes being too miniscule.The digital only "Dawn of a New Ice Age" is the least focused on rhythm, and instead emphasizes sweeping, vaguely progressive rock synth pads.Like "Gland Collector," the electronics have that same raw, harsh FM digital sheen to them that put the piece on just the right side of noisy.
I was always a fan of Jaworzyn’s guitar noise based endeavors, and that feeling carries over into his newer electronic excursions.When I first went into this album expecting something more akin to conventional techno or electronic music, I was a bit disappointed at the randomness and overly repetitive rhythms.After sitting with the album for a bit, I started to look at it more objectively without any specific expectations, and that is when the strengths became evident.I would still love to hear some throwback guitar noise from him, but works like Principles of Inertia will definitely keep me listening to his work.
My general lack of excitement about current glut of synthesizer albums is well-documented, but there are a handful of artists that I still look forward to and Koen Holtkamp is one of them. On this, his first solo album for Thrill Jockey, he delivers yet another fine set of vibrantly burbling analog sounds. While I do not necessarily love every single song on Motion, it certainly contains some of his best work and reaffirms my belief that Koen is in a class of his own when it comes to constructing dynamic, multi-layered synth opuses.
This album is a bit of a compositional divergence for Holtkamp, as the first three of these four songs were all composed and recorded in the studio.  While that is generally a very normal way to create an album for many, it is not for Koen, as most of his previous solo work has evolved from his live performances.  Initially, that seemed like a dubious move to me, as one of my favorite parts of Holtkamp's aesthetic has always been the way that his songs can gradually blossom from unpromising beginnings into something quite mesmerizing once all of the accumulating loops are finally in place.  Thankfully, that magic remains mostly intact–the only real change is that the pieces maybe develop a bit faster than they did previously, though they still all feel somewhat epic in scope.  Yet another of Motion's innovations is that working primarily in the studio inspired Koen to augment a few pieces with non-synth textures, most prominently with the distorted electric guitar melody in "Vert."
Astonishingly, I like electric guitars even less than vintage synthesizer textures (I am very picky), so "Vert" is my least favorite song on the album, though it is not bad by any means.  Koen's other instrumental divergence, "Crotales," is much more to my liking, augmenting its burbling, shimmering arpeggios with warm (virtual) stand-up bass and gently twinkling crotales.  The best pieces, however, are the synth-only bookends, "Between Visible Things" and the legitimately epic "Endlessness," which was not composed in the studio.
"Between Visible Things" begins with bright, gently phasing arpeggios over a slowly descending chord progression augmented by sustained electric guitar.  Gradually, however, Koen starts spiraling some sounds out of his previously rigid pattern and a melancholy bass burble appears to pull the cheeriness into darker and more emotionally resonant waters.  Once that happens, the piece is essentially firing on all cylinders and Koen expertly keeps the proceedings compelling by artfully adding and removing layers.  The 21-minute "Endlessness," on the other hand, captures Holtkamp at his long-form, snowballing zenith, evolving from swaying minimal drone into a complexly multi-layered crescendo with a very cool swooping melody.  While it is by far the best piece on Motion, "Endlessness" is basically a reprise of all of the same themes that fill the rest of the album–the sole key difference is that it is just much longer and more slow-burning.
As far as straight-up synthesizer albums go, this is definitely one of the best ones that I have heard in the last few years, but "Endlessness" (which takes up literally half of the album) is actually wonderful enough to make me forget that I am listening to a synth album altogether: sure, the textures still sound like synthesizers, but they feel like a mere tool used to create something of hypnotic, evolving beauty rather than the main attraction.  Though I suppose there is some irony in the fact that the best piece on this album is the sole piece that stuck to Koen's previous methods, the end result is quite possibly the best album of his career, so he is probably nearing the peak of his powers no matter how he chooses to work.
This is Thielemans' first full-length for Miasmah as a solo artist, but he has previously turned up on the label as a guest on Kreng's debut album, which provides a fairly accurate window into the milieu from which he is coming: the darker, weirder fringes of Belgium's theater/improv/art scene. Unlike his fellow shadowy avant-garde eccentrics, however, Eric is primarily a drummer and Sprang is composed almost entirely of unusual percussion experiments. Needless to say, that is some rather niche territory to occupy in an already very niche scene, but this is quite a remarkably fascinating album for a one-man tour de force of skittering, plinking percussion.
Despite Eric's long history as a drummer (a jazz drummer even), it is quite difficult to find much on Sprang that sounds like it came from an actual drum kit.A few pieces, such as onomatopoetically titled "Sprrrrrrr," admittedly feature some subtle mallet- or brush-driven drum rhythms, but such touches are rarely (if ever) the focus.Rather, the bulk of Sprang sounds like the work of a whimsically deranged inventor who has created an arsenal of clattering, plinking, plonking, and rattling wind-up mechanical devices, which is certainly a hell of a lot cooler than a 40-minute drum solo would have been.The overall feel is definitely an understated, small-scale, fragile, and cinematic one, like something that might be playing during a Quay Brothers film.That rickety, dreamlike illusion is further enhanced by a number of small touches throughout the album, particularly on "Garden," which features a bittersweet whistled melody and a stumbling, disjointed glockenspiel motif.
While almost the entire album maintains a deliciously forlorn "wounded toy" aesthetic, the individual pieces cover an impressive amount of stylistic ground.  "Tptptptp," for example, sounds like a crazily virtuosic drum solo performed entirely with spoons and things lying around a kitchen, while "Kkkkrrrrr" sounds like someone playing an empty oil drum with a violin bow inside the violently creaking hull of a sinking ship.  And then there is "River," which resembles nothing less than a room full of malfunctioning, out-of-control antique clocks.
Conversely, the lengthiest (and perhaps best) piece on Sprang almost sounds conventionally musical, as "Post Soldiers' Hymn" combines an oddly lurching, stumbling beat with a humming, quavering drone.  In fact, there are even chord changes at one point, though Thielemans mostly uses his glockenspiel to create a hanging, oscillating haze of overtones.  Despite being the most "straight" piece on the album, it perversely manages to highlight just how ingenious Eric is, as even his concessions to things like beats and melodies manage to sound quite broken and unique.  I suppose drifting within shouting distance of normalcy probably provided me with the necessary context for appreciating the full aberrance and otherworldliness of Thielemans’ vision, which I ultimately appreciated immensely.  I guess that makes Sprang a minor masterpiece of sorts and an inspiring one at that, as it feels like a secret and surreal handmade thing that seems totally detached from the time and place that birthed it.