We have finally cleared out the backlog of great music and present some new episodes.
Episode 711 features music from The Jesus and Mary Chain, Zola Jesus, Duster, Sangre Nueva, Dialect, The Bug, Cleared, Mount Eerie, Mulatu Astatke & Hoodna Orchestra, Hayden Pedigo, Bistro Boy, and Ibukun Sunday.
Episode 712 has tunes by Mazza Vision, Waveskania, Black Pus, Sam Gendel, Benny Bock, and Hans Kjorstad, Katharina Grosse, Carina Khorkhordina, Tintin Patrone, Billy Roisz, and Stefan Schneider, His Name Is Alive, artificial memory trace, mclusky, Justin Walter, mastroKristo, Başak Günak, and William Basinski.
Episode 713 brings you sounds from Mouse On Mars, Leavs, Lawrence English, Mo Dotti, Wendy Eisenberg, Envy, Ben Lukas Boysen, Cindytalk, Mercury Rev, White Poppy, Anadol & Marie Klock, and Galaxie 500.
Skolavordustigur Street in Reykjavík photo by Jon (your Podcast DJ).
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I don't believe Sleazy for a minute when, in interviews, he calls Love's Secret Domain a "positive" recording. After making Horse Rotorvator, sounding more positive was probably as easy as finding something softer than a hammer. If there is a positive thread running through Coil's third full-length, songs like "Things Happen" and "Titan Arch" dye it black; if anything purely positive is left over, "Further Back and Faster" and "Chaostrophy" obliterate it entirely. I've been listening to L.S.D. for 15 years now, and I'm convinced that it is Coil's most beguiling record, a fun-house mirror that warps and subverts everything held up to it. Calling it their acid album is just insulting, because there's much more to it than the drugs that helped spawn it.
In a 1992 interview published in Option Magazine, Scott Lewis describes the lyrics on Coil's latest record as "lighter" and "more optimistic," and bafflingly, Peter and John concur. In fact, the same thing happens in numerous interviews.
I remember hearing "Love's Secret Domain" and "Teenage Lightning 2" for the first time and my opinion then was the same as it is now: in the wake of Horse Rotorvator's trials, Coil had opted to embrace deliriousness rather than dive further into the murk of their previous work. Perhaps their music had become lighter in some respects, but that didn't mean they had become lighthearted. Balance wasn't screaming about Nero's long hot tongue anymore, but he was meditating on sick love, quoting William Blake and Roy Orbison in the same song, and Peter was piling sound upon sound, cutting heavily processed vocals with Latin rhythms and caustic bursts of bubbling noise. By working with Little Annie, Marc Almond, This Heat's Charles Hayward, Juan Ramirez, and Billy McGee, Coil opened up their sound and gave their audience a chance to come up for air, but at the same time they became subtler, devious even, and more enigmatic.
On L.S.D., martial rhythms replace dance floor rhythms, and resonant synthesizers replace apocalyptic horns, but Coil's subversive spirit remains intact. The proof isn't in every song, but in the way certain pieces color others. On one half of the album, "Windowpane" and "The Snow" celebrates ecstasy and hedonistic impulses, but the lurch of "Further Back and Faster" scrutinizes both, with lines from Charles Laughton's Night of the Hunter utilized to blur the line between love and hate. Laden with pounding drums and constantly shifting rhythms, "Further Back" disrupts the playfulness of the songs around it by taking that playfulness to its limit. "Chaostrophy" follows suit; radio signals, distortion, orchestral fragments, frustration, and sadness all fight with each other as one of the most beautiful melodies Peter ever wrote emerges from the chaos, half triumphant and half resigned. Billy McGee's arrangement is stunning, and Julia Girdwood's oboe sounds heavenly among the strings and reverberating noise, but it's resigned, too, almost too pretty for the chaos around it. "Lorca Not Orca" follows, but the Latin rhythms from earlier have lost their vigor, and all that's left is for Jhonn to sing his ode to mad love. As he puts it, "innocence is dripping red."
Thematically, there are numerous reasons to characterize L.S.D. as a foreboding record. Sonically, I think its ominous character is obvious. Play it back to back with Horse Rotorvator and Gold is the Metal with the Broadest Shoulders and the jubilant character it is so often assigned disappears instantaneously. Coil's acid album, or their party album, or their dance record isn't an acid-dance-party record at all. Rather, it exists in continuum inhabited by the albums that precede it, and even by some that follow it. But there isn't another record like it out there; nothing else in my collection successfully combines so many ideas into a single statement.
Personally, I'll always remember hearing "Teenage Lightning 2" for the first time and being carried away by its density. I remember feeling a little stupid when I discovered that some of the melody was actually a heavily processed voice, and I remember the excitement I felt when I realized what could be done with texture and noise. Coil helped open my brain up, even without the use of drugs, and their influence, largely due to this album, has stayed with me to the present.
Ultimately, Love's Secret Domain changed the way I listen to music; it was the right record for me at the right time, and after 15 years I'm still hearing new things in it every time I listen.
Like many, my first exposure to Coil was via their Nine Inch Nails remixes in the early 1990s, which, as a middle schooler, perplexed me more than anything else. It wasn't until I was a bit older and had exchanged some mix tapes that I heard Coil properly, and "got" it. While I might be in the minority by not ranking this album as my favorite from them, Love's Secret Domain still stands as a distinct and creative album that is artistically, as well as technically fascinating.
Looking back, I'm somewhat surprised I didn't hear this album earlier, because not long after the aforementioned NIN period but before delving into their catalog, I was a whore for pretty much anything Wax Trax put out, and I was, in fact, into the label around the time this album came out.Looking back, I would have probably been a bit better off laying off the KMFDM and looking more towards this disc.
Personally, my favorite Coil works tend to be the ones I heard first, which were mostly from mix tapes culled from Scatology and Horse Rotorvator, to this day still my two favorite works from them.While those discs straddled the line between what used to be and what is now "industrial" (for the abstraction of "The Sewage Worker’s Birthday Party" there was the catchy "Panic"), LSD flirted with techno and house music, which was a bit less of my "thing".
In hindsight, it's only the two singles, "The Snow" and "Windowpane" that are overtly using stiff 4/4 beats and squelchy 303 synths, and consequently the ones that sound the most of their era.They’re not necessarily dated, but at the same time not as timeless as the other songs either.
In comparison, "Things Happen" sound of no era in particular: a hallucinogenic cocktail of difficult to identify songs and rhythms, all of which come together perfectly, polished off with Annie Anxiety's inebriated vocals."Where Even the Darkness is Something to See" carries a similar vibe:a cut and pasted didgeridoo and erratic rhythm come together into a bizarre mutation that is almost unidentifiable.
While the techno/house theme runs throughout the album, it does not define it, nor does it restrict it:"Chaostrophy" makes no concessions to rhythms and instead links swirling layers of noise with a melancholy horn melody to wonderful effect.The closing title track also is, to me, the perfect culmination of the album:John Balance's snarling vocals and menacing electronics beautifully pervert traditional electronic "dance" music.
The "hallucinogenic" tag I mentioned earlier is one that applies to pretty much every song on this album, and given its title, I don’t think it’s accidental.As someone who doesn't use recreational drugs, I cannot say with certainty the relationship of them to this album, but I can imagine the influence, if on nothing else the ideal of experimentation.
That's one of the most amazing things hearing this album today:it was recorded 20 years ago.The idiosyncratic sound of this album is one that, even with an absurd amount of VST plug-ins and technical know-how, would be extremely difficult to replicate.Here, with just rudimentary samplers, MIDI, and analogue tape, Coil created something more original and creative than 99 percent of the world.
It's hard to imagine what experimental and electronic music would be today if this album had not been released.Artists like Autechre and Aphex Twin are indebted to Coil and their willingness to misuse technology and re-contextualize "conventional" sounds to their own ends.Even with its house tendencies, Love's Secret Domain could be released today and it would still be as lauded as it has been for the past two decades.
"Out of Light, Cometh Darkness" proclaims the scroll on the cover of Love’s Secret Domain, a fitting epitaph for Coil. The rest of the cover shows a skeleton, an eye, flames, occult symbols and a spectral penis painted on an outhouse door, all combining to form the face of a lion. Feral, phallic and fantastic, Steven Stapleton’s artwork perfectly prepares you for what is to come after pressing play. Chimeric and disjointed, decadent and symmetrical, this is one of Coil’s finest moments.
Chemistry and alchemy run through Coil’s back catalog but it is on Love’s Secret Domain where these processes are at their most evident. Peter Christopherson, John Balance, and Stephen Thrower’s experiments with mind-altering substances during these sessions have taken on the status of legend at this point; judging by some reports, it is hard to imagine how any work got done at all at this time. Yet it is obvious that a lot of hard graft went into the music as the fine editing and arrangements throughout the album do not sound like they happened by accident. In saying that, even the "accidents" like Annie Anxiety’s slurred and intoxicated performance on "Things Happen" sound like she was riding the vibe in the studio as much as she was getting hammered on tequila.
While "The Snow" and "Windowpane" have not aged terribly well (I still love them but they certainly sound like the early ‘90s), they are in the minority here. The various permutations of "Teenage Lightning" still sound as alive now as ever. Out of the three versions, "Lorca Not Orca" always has a timeless punch that always takes me aback. The spidery "Dark River," much like "The First Five Minutes After Death" from Horse Rotorvator, may use sounds which should sound dated now but the energy and power of the music transcends this sort of superficial criticism.
It was fitting considering the song’s fixation on love and death; Balance combines the words and concepts of Roy Orbison’s hopeful but sorrowful "In Dreams" with the poetry of William Blake; particularly his two poems on love and loss "Love’s Secret" and "The Sick Rose." Balance adds his own thorns to the words and delivers them with a ferocity that never fails to unnerve. The violence and obsessiveness of his delivery of Orbison’s words; in Balance’s hands these lyrics are an oneiromantic threat. This assimilation and appropriation of Blake and Orbison within Coil’s creative process shows them at their alchemical peak.
Like Coil’s other masterpieces, each play through of Love’s Secret Domain reveals a little more each time. The other day, I noticed some sounds in "Windowpane" which I had never attended to before. Out of all the pieces on this album, "Windowpane" was the last one I expected to still yield surprises but there it was. I feel moments like this demonstrates how much depth Coil went to in creating Love’s Secret Domain. From the original ideas and performances down to Danny Hyde’s production, there is nothing here I would change. Indeed, I always found Stolen and Contaminated Songs, the companion CD to Love’s Secret Domain, to be a pale and flawed mirror to the brilliant and bewitching LSD. My affection for this album can be boiled down to one sentence: "This is mad love, in love’s secret domain."
My first experience of the music of Coil came in the mid-'90s, hearing their remixes of Nine Inch Nails songs. I tended to prefer the remixes to the NIN originals, and the versions by Coil were some of the best of those: creative and bizarre sound construction and deconstruction. Still, as remixes they were not the unfiltered visionary music of Coil proper which still allures and intrigues me to this day, a vision I fell for completely on listening to Love’s Secret Domain.
The album is a seminal one. Steve Stapleton captured this feeling in his brilliant cover art, painted on a wooden door. The door is also emblematic of the songs, and to unlock their full meaning it is necessary to pass through various gateways and gatekeepers: the skeleton of death, the pentagram of the five elements, the chemical pills which open various neural pathways of perception. As the group were huge fans of eccentric British occultist and draughtsman Austin Osman Spare it should be noted that the hand with an eye in its palm is a symbol of Spare’s Zos Kia Cultus. (Zos being the body or hand and Kia the eye or sight, the image conjoins the desires of the body to the internal imagination. Astute readers will also note that Zos Kia was also the name of a musical project John Balance and Peter Christopherson were involved in for a brief time in the early '80s, before devoting themselves fully to Coil.) The winged penis can be seen as an expression of the male virility at play within the group and as a metaphor for the power of astral flight developed by those who practice sexual magick.
It was 1998 when I was at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio when I first saw and heard this album. I saw a lot of other things while listening to these songs in the darkness of my dorm room, lying on a mattress with my eyes closed, concentrating on the sounds. The disc belonged to another kid named Justin who had a record collection I was very envious of. After he played it for me once I wanted my own copy. While there were people with CD burners all around campus, I didn't have one of my own and for some reason didn't copy the disc that way. I probably just wanted to listen to it again while I transferred it to a cassette. But before I could, I had to finagle my friend to let me borrow it from him. He was very protective of the disc, and reluctant to let me take it out of his sight. In the end our shared enthusiasm for music decided in my favor. (I eventually did snatch up a copy of Thighpaulsandra's remastered version.)
The whole two year time period of 1998 and 1999 was one of deep musical discovery for me. My tastes had already shifted to a predilection for "experimental" music, whatever that problematic term means. My brain had already been washed after being exposed to the radio-active broadcasts of Art Damage, a community radio show in Cincinnati which remains a stout supporter of strange and eclectic music, providing an outlet for musicians in the thriving noise and art music scene of my hometown. Antioch further influenced my listening habits. It was there I was turned on to the myriad joys of Meat Beat Manifesto. A girl I was friends with actually said to me one night, "I’ll never take acid again" embarking on a freak out and bum trip after my friends and I played her a track with those words in it from Actual Sounds and Voices. Some other people got me up to speed on the Legendary Pink Dots, and much to the annoyance of my dorm mates, the warbling synths of the Silverman and the delectable voice of Edward Ka-Spel could be heard blaring from my room at all hours, especially in my more melancholy moods. Download, Autechre, Merzbow, and Psychic TV were all new experiences and I ate them all up. Current 93 and Nurse With Wound followed in short order.
Love’s Secret Domain was a watershed among all those listening experiences, and in many ways it summed up a number of my musical interests into one album. The garbled collage of "Disco Hospital," with its cut-up voices disarranged towards the incomprehensible played to my love of the abstract, while still laying down a catchy hook and rhythm. The recurrence of expertly treated digeridoos and bossa-nova like beats give the whole album a feeling of completeness, but it still explored a diverse territory. Tracks like "Dark River" branched off into a nebulous ambiance while "The Snow" found anchor on the dance floor among the techno elite. This latter track also has a jazz tinged piano riff that even after countless listens never fails to send my mind spiraling up into heavenly realms. It is hard to pick a favorite here, when all the tunes are touched by genius. In "Further Back & Faster" I hear premonitions of future directions Coil would take in sidereal sound, promises kept on the Musick to Play in the Dark duology. The track has an ineffable quality to it, but the effect is surely atavistic. The use of Spanish guitars on "Lorca Not Orca" foreshadows the brilliant guitar work heard on later tracks like "Amethyst Deceivers."
In considering the twenty year anniversary of this landmark work, I can say with certainty that Love’s Secret Domain is worth falling into over and over again.
When I first heard Skinny Puppy's chaotic and deranged Too Dark Park album in high school, it completely tore my head off.  Then, naturally, I immediately decided that I needed to find something even more uncompromising and unhinged.  The most promising possibilities at the time seemed to be Nurse With Wound and Coil, so I spent much of the early '90s in a comically doomed and wide-ranging scavenger hunt through northeastern record stores for albums like Thunder Perfect Mind, Love's Secret Domain, and the unreleased Hellraiser themes.  Love's Secret Domain wound up being the most elusive of them all (due to the collapse of Wax Trax!), but was probably also the most revelatory.
My memory is hazy, but I don't think I managed to hear Love's Secret Domain until 1994, by which point I had already accumulated several other Coil albums as consolation purchases.  Despite that, the album was still enough of a departure from what I had heard to make a huge impact on me.  Sleazy jokingly described it as the band's "party album" for a reason, as there is a great deal of fun, kitsch, and wry comedy lurking amidst the darkness.  It most overtly manifests itself in the lysergic exotica of "Teenage Lightning" and "Disco Hospital," both of which brilliantly approximate a bizarre cabaret of the damned.  "Disco Hospital," incidentally, is probably my favorite opening track from any album ever, sounding like an unholy collaboration between a VCR eating a Looney Tunes episode, a swirling blade, and a relentlessly cheery organist.  Then, of course, there is Annie Anxiety's faux-Nicaraguan prostitute stream of consciousness rambling in "Things Happen."  Still more amusement lies further beneath the surface, as Balance appropriates the entire chorus of Roy Orbison's "In Dreams" for the title piece and the album's cover art is actually the door of Stephen Stapleton's outhouse.
Probably the most important thing about this album, however, is the fact that it contains the utterly mesmerizing "Love's Secret Domain," which still sounds completely deranged, fresh, and unique even two decades later.  Despite their vast discography, it was pretty rare for Coil to record actual focused, structured "songs" and "Love's Secret Domain" might be the most single most perfectly distilled example of Coil's genius ever released.  Few songs have had as massive an impact on me as that one, as a Blake-quoting Englishman instantly made most of the "extreme" music that I had been listening to sound dull and dogmatic by comparison.  Blast beats, de-tuned guitars, raspy "industrial" vocals, and squalls of feedback were not nearly as scary and heavy as whatever the hell it was that John Balance was channeling.  Rarely has the massive gulf between style and substance been so starkly illustrated for me: the song sounds like a wounded and wrenching dispatch from somewhere well past the edge of sanity.
There are some other great songs as well ("Chaostrophy," for example), but the album admittedly has some flaws as a complete and coherent artistic statement.  However, I don’t feel that they are especially damning ones.  The first is that it is a bit bloated, featuring no less than 3 versions of "Teenage Lightning" and few less-than-amazing pieces that maybe should not have made the cut.  The original version of Love's Secret Domain (on Torso) only had 9 extremely well-chosen songs though and I would rather hear the bonus material (especially "Lorca Not Orca") than not hear it.  This was a hugely fruitful creative period (Stolen and Contaminated Songs was also culled from these sessions), so I don't mind the extra material, even if it comes at the expense of sequencing a bit.
The other oft-cited issue is that the album is stylistically all over the map and that some of those styles have not aged particularly well, primarily the straightforward club beats of "Windowpane" and "The Snow."  To a certain extent, I agree– I rarely listen to those two songs at all.  However, it wasn't like Coil tried to make house music and failed miserably.  "The Snow" was a pretty unusual and innovative take on what was happening in dance music at the time.  Despite the pedestrian beats, they brought some uniquely queasy and spectral textures to the form–Coil were not a band that cheerfully relied on factory preset sounds, nor were they content to let anything make it onto an album without at least some hallucinatory studio-tweaking.  Certainly, Coil was a bit fractured and scattered direction-wise at this point in their career (and a bit over-prone to embracing trends), but their inventiveness and sheer otherness was apparent no matter what they tried.  Love's Secret Domain is an eccentric grab bag rather than a solid, deliberate album, but the low-points are more due to the vagaries of changing tastes over time rather than any egregious artistic failings.
Love's Secret Domain is not Coil's greatest work and it is rare for me to listen to it in its entirety these days, but I still love it.  I would not hesitate at all to describe it as a masterpiece.  It is not perfect by any means, yet there is no denying that it was (and is) an audacious, wild, passionate, and gutsy effort that sounded like absolutely no one else around (and even made oboes sound cool).  It is very difficult to hear this album for the first time and not emerge startled, changed, or moved in some way.
The new CD edition of ‘Wounded Galaxies Tap at The Window’ is now available from the Cyclobe shop. It comes in a full colour deluxe laminated wallet containing a fold-out poster with artwork by Alex Rose. A new film is available for view at the Cyclobe site as well.
CYCLOBE WOUNDED GALAXIES TAP AT THE WINDOW Compact Disc 25th July, 2011
The new CD edition of ‘Wounded Galaxies Tap at The Window’ is now available from the Cyclobe shop. It comes in a full colour deluxe laminated wallet containing a fold-out poster with artwork by Alex Rose.
While they might not be as lauded as their contemporaries, at least in relative terms, the Graeme Revell fronted SPK was one of the essential contributors to "industrial" music, as well as the various permutations of it that came afterward. This, their debut full-length album, carefully balances the abrasive harshness, but also hints of moody, depressive ambience that would define their future.
SPK has always been, at least to me, one of the "big three" innovators in early industrial music, alongside Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire.However, they always seem to be considered third on that list, and I can’t completely understand why.Perhaps it was because, even at the time, they were one of the more "extreme" practitioners of the genre.Early work, especially Information Overload Unit, was more on the noisy end of the spectrum than the harsher TG stuff, so that may have marginalized them somewhat.Imagery-wise even they leaned towards the more disgusting and confrontational, using autopsy images throughout their work and a skewered penis on the Meat Processing Section single, which definitely out-grossed TG and CV.Or perhaps it was because their transition to more conventional music was more abrupt (and seemingly more forced) then their contemporaries.
Throbbing Gristle broke apart before they had a chance to fully embrace more commercial sounds, and Cabaret Voltaire kept their paranoid, creepy edge when they started adding in danceable beats and actual singing.SPK, on the other hand, went drastically commercial with 1984's Machine Age Voodoo, keeping only the occasional bit of metal percussion from their early days.A recent revisiting of the album just screamed generic 1980s cheesy synth pop, a far cry from their innovative, experimental beginnings.
Information Overload Unit, released in 1980, remains their most aggressive and harsh album, matched only by the "Slogun" single. The original vinyl was split in half, with the "Ultra" A-side consisting of the manic, hostile pieces, while the "Hyper" side is the more bleak and depressive tracks, a sound they would perfect even more on the following Leichenschrei album.
The buzzing feedback and delay-drenched opening of "Emanation Machine R. Gie 1916" sets up the rest of the album perfectly, launching full on into what sounds like malfunctioning machinery crashing onto itself.Roars, feedback, and power tools mask a subtle, but perceptible rhythm undulating low in the mix that eventually is revealed as a rather simple, but effective analog drum machine loop beneath the chaos.
Aggression wise, "Emanation Machine" is matched only by "Berufsverbot," which closes the "Ultra" half of the album.Focusing more on junk metal percussion, it isn’t too far removed from a less theatrical, more hate-filled take on early Neubauten, complete with Revell's barked German vocals."Suture Obsession" brings in a bit of the squalling, damaged guitar sound that characterized their earliest, almost punk work, although tapes, synth noise and an almost buoyant bassline do their best to obscure it.
On the opposite side, "Ground Zero: Infinity Dose" somewhat bridges the two styles, as its pace is slow and plodding, but the sound is more harsh and aggressive.Rather than barked or screamed vocals, here they are processed beyond recognition, like the smallest piece of humanity left in a mechanized disaster.The remaining tracks tend to be more restrained, focusing a lot on slow, reverberated analog beats and the occasionally raw synth stab, especially on "Stammheim Tortukammer" and "Retard.""Epilept: Convulse" is the closest thing to an actual "song" on this album:a steady synthetic rhythm and noisy, but restrained electronic swells appear throughout, never pushing into the world of pure noise, but with a greater sense of structure and direction compared to the other tracks.
While SPK diversified their sound more after this album, Information Overload Unit remains probably their harshest and most dissonant work, without which I doubt the death industrial scenes of Cold Meat Industries and Tesco would exist.Although it definitely leans into formless noise, there is a rhythmic undercurrent that sets it apart and gives it its identity.Leichenschrei is a bit more fleshed out and fully realized in comparison, but this album is an important piece of their history, as well as the entire spectrum of dark and aggressive music.
While he's spent much of this year designing and composing his Ante Algo Azul subscription series, Szczepanik has managed to also complete this full-length album, consisting of a single, beautiful piece of lingering ambience. Released on Christoph Heemann's Streamline label, it is a heartwrenchingly gorgeous piece of melancholy sound that is wonderfully unique and sounds like no one else.
The subscription series thus far seems like an ideal outlet to try new and diverse approaches to music, while this album is a culmination of a style he has essentially perfected.What he does best is composing emotional, expressive expanses of sound, conveying far more in the way of feeling and humanity than the genre is known for.
Drone is over-used to the point of almost being pejorative, so I'm hesitant to even mention it, but the genre’s staunch minimalism and attention to detail is definitely prevalent here, but it in the truly respectable classic sense.Drone does not have to be synonymous with lazy and repetitive, and here it most definitely is neither.Szczepanik works with natural, symphonic like rich tones, forceful and commanding, but not oppressive or heavy.
The disc opens with deep, resonating notes, slow and melodic, but also dynamic, constantly varying and shifting all throughout.Rather than the slow, often tedious build of similar artists, this disc just launches into the rich atmospheres.The album essentially feels like that heavily emotional, but beautiful and powerful moment of a great film stretched out for its 47 minute duration.
Throughout the piece, the sound builds up to dramatic crescendos before falling back to more pensive, quiet moments before reaching up again to even more dramatic heights, creating a cyclic, but still varying structure that continues throughout.The dramatic moments keep getting bigger and richer until there is essentially nowhere else to go, as the piece then comes to its pensive, funereal ending.
I've referred many times to the feeling and emotion that Please Stop Loving Me conveys throughout, and I must say that it is really a defining facet of the album, and also one that feels extremely subjective based on mood.During some listens it felt pained and agonizing, with a sense of loss that music rarely conveys.At other times it was much more glorious and uplifting, radiating a natural beauty that few albums can match.
Within that trite and generic "drone" label, I'd have to say that this is on par for me with the best Organum works, which is always a high water mark for me.There are very few albums like this that can remain enchanting with each and every listen, with new subtle elements to be heard.For such a relatively new artist, Szczepanik has the talents and ability of someone with a much larger discography, which makes this album all the more impressive.
I have historically been quite fond of Barn Owl's work, but I sometimes find their extreme malleability a bit frustrating.  This collaboration with Ellen Fullman and Theresa Wong takes that trait a bit further than usual, as there is very little here that is immediately identifiable as "Barn Owl."  Perversely, though, that works just fine–in fact, all of the artists involved are almost completely and unrecognizably subsumed by the rich and vibrant drone music they've created.  This collaboration is so perfect and seamless that it sounds like a completely new band rather than the some of its parts.
This is a reissue of a 2010 LP that vanished quite quickly.  The album takes its name from the Headlands Center for the Arts, where it was recorded.  That fact is notable because Ellen Fullman's massive self-invented Long String Instrument requires an entire large room and several days of set-up and tuning.  I suspect it is not very easy to arrange a collaboration with her.  Significantly, Wong (a cellist), Fullman, and Barn Owl are additionally joined by producer The Norman Conquest, who contributes some acoustic guitar and moaning wordless vocals.  That guy has been popping up on a lot of great albums lately.  In fact, he might actually be the most important single force in this entire collaboration: Headlands owes a lot of its success to his unusual production and mixing.
The most striking aspect of this release is that the various instruments rarely seem to have an audible attack–everything floats and drifts without any clear sounds of notes or chords being struck.  The second big thing is that all of the instruments bleed together, but not in a murky way…more in an "organic, amorphous, and edgeless wall of sound" way.  It is very difficult to tell which sounds are coming from which instruments or which performers, aside from those emanating from Fullman.  There is nothing that can be described as conventional or "rock" about Evan Caminiti and Jon Porras' guitar work–they must have either used EBows or just been especially masterful at harnessing feedback.  Wong, for her part, seems to just pick one note to slowly and somberly bow away at.  That should make for a dull or toothless album, but Fullman's dense and vibrant oscillations tend to make the simplest things seem compelling and alive.
A drone band could not possibly hope for a better anchor than Ellen and her Long String Instrument.  Barn Owl and Wong certainly manage to weave a beguilingly shimmering and undulating haze for almost forty minutes, but it is Ellen's massive buzzing strings that give its album its gravitas and heft.  Without that heavy omnipresent thrum, this album would be too vaporous to stand out much from the many other ambient drone albums pouring into the world.  The album's sole small weakness is that there isn't much to distinguish these pieces from each other aside from small details (i.e. someone is scraping a pick across the strings at the head of the guitar near the end of "The Light"), but they certainly combine to form a transfixing, egoless, and remarkably coherent whole.  I am not at all surprised that this is a great drone album, but I was definitely caught off-guard by how beautifully and intuitively this quintet cohered into a natural-sounding single entity. This stands with the best work of any of its participants.
Fullman and her Long String Instrument have been quite active with collaborations, commissions, and residencies over the last few years, but this album is her debut full-length as a solo artist.  On one hand, that is quite remarkable, as she began working with her self-invented instrument of choice just about three decades ago.  On the other hand, the wait makes perfect sense, as the instrument's limited range and versatility make it a very difficult foundation to base an entire album upon.
I'm sure that Ellen Fullman is not the first person to string wires across the entire length of a room (Alvin Lucier springs to mind), but her Long String Instrument is definitely unique in its complexity and scale: it features dozens of wires over 18 feet in length tuned in Just Intonation, an uncommon ratio-based tuning most famously used in LaMonte Young's epic "The Well-Tuned Piano."  Fullman's instrument also requires its own notation to "choreograph" its unusual playing technique (the performer walks slowly back and forth dragging their resin-covered fingers along the strings).  The overall effect is akin to a slow-motion raga being performed by a bunch of buzzing and humming power lines.  It's admittedly very impressive and unusual (probably much more so when experienced live, as the resonance of the performance space itself is a necessary part of the instrument), but it is also a very, very specific niche to be constrained to.
Wisely, Fullman only includes one completely pure Long String Instrument piece, the metallic and dissonant drone of "Event Locations No.2," which focuses on the beating created by uncomfortable harmonies.  The album's title piece also relies exclusively on the instrument, but Ellen percussively employs a "box bow" to achieve a strangely clipped autoharp effect.  My favorite pieces, however, are the two that involve other musicians, both of which were originally composed for Kronos Quartet and are very loosely based on Geeshie Wiley's timeless and singularly bleak "Last Kind Words Blues."  Normally, the idea of someone appropriating a simple, gut-level American Primitive classic for elaborate and expensive contemporary sound art would anger me, but Ellen's transfiguration is imaginative and unrecognizable enough to escape my wrath.
The sole significant difference between the two Wiley-based pieces ("Flowers" and "Never Gets Out of Me") is that one features mournful violins (and an interloping flock of sparrows) and one features a mournful cello.  Ellen went about composing the violin and cello parts quite similarly, taking selected segments of Geeshie's original melody and reconstructing them to mimic North Indian vocal music.  That approach is certainly fairly novel and effective, but a lot of the power stems from the simple fact that Fullman's heavily texture- and harmony-based music feels more complete with the addition of melody (and some new textures don't hurt either).  The trade-off, unfortunately, is that my ear is then drawn mostly to the melodic foreground.  That, lamentably, is Though Glass Panes' tragic flaw: the Long String Instrument is probably best used as an accompaniment rather than as a focal point (on album, anyway).  Ellen's artistry relies far too heavily on process, performance, and scale to reach its full potential on a recording.  Still, I was very much impressed by Through Glass Panes on a purely cerebral level: during its best moments, it certainly felt like Fullman was on the verge of warping both time and music into something uniquely her own.
This latest release from the long-running duo of Jonnine Standish and Nigel Yang is quite a bombshell, as Rhinestones was "inspired by a recent infatuation with 'eerie and gothic country music.'" To my ears, HTRK drawing inspiration from classic country heartache is already a winning formula right out of the gate, yet Rhinestones is even better than I might have hoped, as the Melbourne-based pair have spiced that new direction up further by filtering it through a "narcotic, nocturnal lens" in order to "map enigmatic badlands of strung out beauty" (count me in!). In less poetic terms, that means that Rhinestones is full of acoustic guitars, heartbreak, and half-sultry/half-ghostly vocal melodies and that every single one of these nine songs attain some degree of greatness. While yet another excellent HTRK album is hardly unexpected territory, I was nevertheless legitimately floored by how masterfully Standish and Yang executed this new vision, as Rhinestones is a beautifully stark, sensual, and effortlessly psychedelic tour de force that somehow also fitfully evokes great '80s pop in the vein of Pat Benatar. That is quite an impressive feat. This album will deservedly be all over "best of 2021" lists next month.
This album is an extremely impressive example of how an absolutely gorgeous album can result from a very stark and simple palette, as Rhinestones is basically just an acoustic guitar, an occasional drum machine click, Standish's breathily sensuous voice, some great songs, and plenty of unerring instincts. While the whole album is wonderful, it starts to become something transcendent at the end of the second piece. "Valentina" initially sounds like a lovesick folkie got the hypnagogic David Lynch/Julee Cruise treatment, but it ends in unexpectedly heavy fashion, as the final line "can you remove it from my finger?" locks into a haunting spiral of looping repetition. That cool surprise then happily seques into a three-song run of absolutely killer songs. On "Sunlight Feels like Bee Stings," what initially sounds like a sadness-soaked breakup song quickly blossoms into something darkly sexual and swirling with understatedly beautiful ripples of echoing psych guitar. The following "Siren Song," on the other hand, only lasts a mere 49 seconds, yet every single one of those seconds rules, as Yang unleashes a phantasmagoric reverie of hollow, wobbly chords and string scrapes augmented with little more than murmured vocals and a slow rhythm of finger snaps.
"Fast Friend" is another quiet masterpiece of psych guitar, approximating a sultry, bleary Pat Benatar cover with a slinky drum machine pulse and host of painterly hallucinatory touches. Some artists make great psychedelia with cool layering and inspired juxtapositions, but Yang is the sort that can make just a single note or chord sound amazing and I am very much into it. The rest of the album is rounded out by a classic HTRK-style single "Real Headfuck" and a few seemingly lesser pieces that are ultimately elevated by great outros. Yang and Standish are truly in peak form on this album, as the vocals seductively dance over a simmering array of cool backdrops and every last hand clap or string scrape is executed with flawless timing and maximum impact. If there is any caveat with Rhinestones at all, it is only that it might feel a bit too melancholy for some, but I found these songs to be a lot like the old joke about New England weather: if a song seems unmemorable or oppressively sad at first, odds are quite strong that something cool and unexpected is about to dramatically change that trajectory for the better. This is a hell of an album.