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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After a terrific debut EP in 2010, Bell Gardens finally return with a full album of mostly new music. As usual, the musical arrangements are lush and saturated with beauty as Brian McBride and Kenneth James Gibson try to recreate the moods and sounds of the golden era of pop studio recordings without using the typical computer-based short cuts and technological workarounds that have become de rigour for modern studio work. The end result is a triumph of song writing, musicianship and integrity, highlighting just how good humble songs can be without the need for following trends or to be striving to be the next big thing.
After a terrific debut EP in 2010, Bell Gardens finally return with a full album of mostly new music. As usual, the musical arrangements are lush and saturated with beauty as Brian McBride and Kenneth James Gibson try to recreate the moods and sounds of the golden era of pop studio recordings without using the typical computer-based short cuts and technological workarounds that have become de rigour for modern studio work. The end result is a triumph of song writing, musicianship and integrity, highlighting just how good humble songs can be without the need for following trends or to be striving to be the next big thing.
The worlds of dance and experimental guitar music rarely intersect (for good reason, probably), but the artistic director of Australia's Chunky Move company had a wild enough imagination to bring Ambarchi and abstract electronics maniac Robin Fox together to compose this soundtrack.  In many ways, that gamble paid off handsomely, as Connected is surprisingly inventive, challenging, and divergent (and no doubt inspired some very unusual choreography).  As a purely audio experience, however, it is pretty tame and comparatively characterless by either artist's normal standards.
The five pieces that compromise this album are dramatically different stylistically and subverted my expectations at every turn.  That may sound great, but my expectations included thoughts like "this will sound kind of like Oren Ambarchi" and "this will not be puzzlingly schizophrenic."  Consequently, my first impression of Connected was not favorable.  That impression gradually changed to "grudging admiration" with future listens, but I still have a hard time accepting how much the distinctive aesthetics of Fox and Ambarchi are either watered-down or presented with no clear evidence of collaborative influence.
That said, the kinetic opening piece, "Standing Mandala," is arguably the album's clear highlight and the most fully-realized melding of the duo's guitars and electronics.  Over an insistently throbbing and burbling electronic pulse, Ambarchi gradually escalates in intensity from rhythmic clicking and a pedal tone to well-placed snarls of feedback and guitar noise.  It ultimately culminates in a crescendo of insectoid hiss and chittering from Fox before ending abruptly at around nine minutes.  Aside from the sudden ending, it is a pretty masterful display of how to slowly and enticingly build tension.
Unfortunately, that momentum is killed instantly by "Game of Two," a piece that I still have very mixed feelings about.  If I am in a mood where I can listen intently and appreciate nuance and subtlety, I can definitely hear some beauty in the way that Ambarchi's lazily strummed chords dissipate into feedback and creaking strings.  When I am not in that mood, it basically sounds like someone playing an uninteresting chord progression extremely slowly for eight interminable minutes.  I am more frequently in the latter mood.
"Connected" follows in similarly frustrating fashion, only this time it is Fox's turn to take center stage.  Again, the music is relatively static, consisting almost entirely of sustained hums, whines, and sub-bass tones.  In the foreground, there are occasionally sounds that resemble quavering, electronically processed bells.  In the context of a dance performance, I imagine its near-silence could be quite intriguing. Sonically, however, it is the album's nadir, as there is nothing compelling about it for me at all.
The proceedings liven up quite a bit as the album draws near the end though, as the comparatively brief "Trios" sounds like traditional clicking-and-blurting Robin Fox-style electronic chaos with some buried gnarled guitar noise thrown in.  Hopefully, there is footage of the performance somewhere, as I  cannot even begin to imagine what the associated dancing would look like.  I suspect it was epic.
That howling climax is then followed by the droning, discordant coda of "Invigilation," which combines dense layers of oscillating synths into a queasily, heavy thrum.  It's a pretty likeable slab of drone, certainly, but it is pretty hard to see anything distinctively Fox- or Ambarchi-esque about it.  That, essentially, is Connected's biggest problem: generally, pieces either sound like passable Fox, sub-par Ambarchi, or neither.  Only "Standing Mandala" comes close to blending their two distinct personalities together.
Critiquing an album like this one feels a bit frustrating and pointless, as the music has been completely decontextualized from its intended purpose–this is merely one element of a complete work.  Based upon the bizarre moods and willful absence of traditional rhythm here, I suspect Chunky Move's performance was a strange and memorable one, but I do not understand the purpose of a disembodied soundtrack album.  Artistically, Fox and Ambarchi managed to provide a dance company with something quite unique and inspiring while intermittently finding a fertile creative common ground for their disparate styles.  As a musical document, however, Connected is too restrained and compromised to rank very highly in either artist's oeuvre.
My opinion of Edward Ka-Spel has undergone a dramatic overhaul over the last few years, as the last several albums that I have heard have all floored me with at least one song (often more).  While he has been admirably devoted to making weird, uncompromising psychedelia for more than 30 years, he seems to be making some of the best and most disturbing music of his career right now (as evidenced here).  That is not to say that he has become dramatically less indulgent or difficult (unlikely to ever occur), but the high points of Ghost Logik are truly mesmerizing, haunting, and unique.
The more I listen to Ka-Spel's work, the more i seem to fall in love with his voice.  While it can certainly be shrill and maniacal-sounding sometimes (he has sounded like a crazed elf in the past), both his deep, resonant speaking voice and his lazily lilting singing voice can be enormously evocative and affecting.  The latter effect is most evident on Ghost Logik's most conventional song, "Throwing Things," where Ka-Spel makes otherwise mundane lyrics feel imbued with cryptic menace.
His vocals have an almost sing-song, nursery rhyme tone to them, which contrasts creepily and surreally with the shimmering and skittering melancholia of the music.  Of course, Ka-Spel is even more powerful when his words are as disturbing as his delivery, as they are on the album's highlight, "The Voyeur."  The accompanying music is little more than some minimal droning and crackling, but Edward's monologue is unwaveringly gripping and spine-chilling–except when it is darkly hilarious ("you...really...need..to..get...out...more.").
Most of the other songs occupy a similar "uneasy soundscape and spoken word" aesthetic territory, but the balance between storytelling and atmosphere varies quite a bit from piece to piece.  The disquieting tug-of-war between childlike simplicity and macabre sophistication persists in varying manifestations throughout the entire album, creating a unifying theme of sorts.  The feeling of entering someone else's already-unfolding nightmare is yet another (even stronger) theme.  In fact, that may be where Ka-Spel's true genius lies, as he is at his best when he drops into an enigmatic and vaguely sinister scenario, patiently and masterfully escalates the tension and dread, then ends it all with a darkly funny or ominously ambiguous turn of phrase.
It is remarkable that that "formula" works as often as it does, but Edward has a seemingly inexhaustible supply of such bizarre situations and unravels his tales with perfect timing and pacing.  No one else could make these songs work, as their success is irrevocably intertwined with the gravity of Ka-Spel's voice and his knack for pregnant pauses and hesitations.
The catch–there's always a catch–is that Edward's inexhaustible supply of dreamlike vignettes is not quite able to keep up with his prolific output.  Consequently, Ghost Logik is a somewhat insubstantial album (albeit very a cohesive one).  While "Throwing Things" and "The Voyeur" are both mesmerizing and perfectly realized, the remaining six songs are comparatively a mixed bag.  Two are only about a minute long, and several of the remaining four blunt their more inspired passages with some significant bloat.  They still definitely have their share of striking or chilling moments though, particularly "So What?" and "Brighton Line."  Also, they are surprisingly listenable, as only the 13-minute "Brighton Line" manages to grate on me with an extended jazz/quasi-beat poetry section.  It would be great if Edward could slow down long enough to make an entirely brilliant album rather than a partially brilliant one, but I am more than happy to settle for two amazing songs and a handful of very good soundscapes.
(Note- there are actually three versions of this album.  The "limited box" includes a second disc (Spectrescapes) featuring more abstract/longform ambient pieces, while the "deluxe limited box" also includes a third disc and a short film.)
Despite knowing Ulrich Krieger from a number of recordings, this is the first time I have heard one of his own compositions. Based on his work with Phill Niblock, Steve Reich and Zeitkratzer, I am not surprised by the form of Fathom (long tones, deliberate use of dynamics and a geological approach to timing) but I am surprised at how he has managed to take all his previous experience and influences and craft a truly original piece of music.
Fathom was commissioned by Sub Rosa for their new Framework series of albums. Each of the releases in this series feature a geometric pattern on the back of the sleeve and in Fathom’s case, the pattern has a Rorschach inkblot quality to it. This is fitting as Krieger’s piece has a lot in common with Rorschach’s open-ended visual stimuli. The role of the inkblots in therapy is to facilitate the patient’s dialogue with the therapist by giving them a starting point to begin describing their own thought processes. Abstract art has acted in a similar, if less directed way, and sound art too has this open, interpretive aspect to it. Fathom certainly leaves much to the imagination, depending on my mood the sounds range from being warm, womb-like and relaxing to being sinister, dangerous and arousing, much in the same way that a Rorschach inkblot could be both a demon and a flower depending on the inclination of the viewer.
Krieger’s composition also has an inkblot quality in its symmetrical structure. Two electric guitars (played by Krieger’s companions in the group Text of Light, Lee Ranaldo and Alan Licht) initially form the focus of the piece, gently strummed harmonics shining bright in the middle of the darkness (represented by Krieger’s long, slow blows on the saxophone). Tim Barnes’ atmospheric percussion completes the picture, filling it out to the edges. Yet halfway through, this suddenly and almost subconsciously switches around with Barnes becoming the central point of the music, striking more bell-like instruments while Ranaldo and Licht move to a more vague and impressionistic mode of playing.
The line "Like flying through liquid space" adorns the back of the album and I honestly cannot beat that description when it comes to this music. It does feel like I am being pulled through some other, previously imperceptible dimension of reality for as long as the music is playing.
Press release: Unique mix of ambient, industrial, experimental trip hop, jazz and electronica: Formed in a dingy Melbourne warehouse at the turn of the century, TERMINAL SOUND SYSTEM began as a vehicle for Skye Klein, half of Relapse Records cult doom/noise duo HALO, to explore his interest in experimental electronic music and Dub. Eight albums later, TSS has expanded to include live instrumentation and synchronious video projection, merging epic doom, post-rock and jazz with electronica, drum'n'bass and heavy dub into a style wholly unique. Ostensibly a studio project, Terminal Sound System takes on new life as a live entity, infusing hyperprecise digital audio with the energy of rock& metal, all presented before synchronised video projection.
TERMINAL SOUND SYSTEM's ninth album - the first for Germany's Denovali Records - called HEAVY WEATHER kicks the doomy shoegazing headphase into top gear, draping layers of detuned drone& dissonance over beds of swampy synths and meticulous rhythms. Created over a period of a year using everything from custom-programmed software instruments to a miced-up room full of feeding back amplifiers, HEAVY WEATHER represents the ultimate realisation thus far of Klein's mission with TSS: complete and uncompromising immersion.
Minneapolis' favorite sons (and daughters), mostly led by Emil Hagstrom and Matt Bacon, have been cranking out releases since the mid 1990s. While they've shared releases with sleaze noise kings Macronympha and Japan's master of sterile sound art Aube, they've never shied away from a healthy dose of absurdity and insanity, and on this messy, sprawling 99 track album, they allow it to fully devour them and revel in it. As much parody as heartfelt tribute to their influences, this is an unabashedly fun album.
Taking the title literally, this album is a loving parody of the experimental/avant garde/noise world, a collective of artists and works that aren't known for showcasing a sense of humor.With over 100 pieces in less than 40 minutes, the sound is all over the place by definition, united mostly by outbursts of harsh noise and a joyful disregard of formality and pretentiousness.
For instance, "Annette's Got the Tits/We've Got a Glitter Problem Now" is like a class of five year olds trying to play hardcore punk, and almost pulling it off, while "Muslim-Gay/Second Anal Report" throws pseudo Middle Eastern beats with a droning soundscape, and "Right to be Silly" is a spot on parody of the infamous Whitehouse track.
In many ways it is reminiscent of the spastic genre hopping of Naked City's Torture Garden, though focusing more on the realms of noise, metal and artsy avant garde, and with a sense of fun and joy that John Zorn's project lacked.For all its hyperkinetic, ADHD motives, the 11 thematically linked segments feel somehow unified beyond all reasonable logic.
While the audio portion of the disc is solid on its own, I must confess that I took the same sophomoric joy in reading the track list that I always felt from Anal Cunt's albums, but the results are only a bit less offensive.In comparison, however the actual music is far more diverse than the grindcore blast AC is known for, though it often comes back to the harsh walls of noise I'd expect.
With "categories" such as "What’s THIS Lube For…!" and "My Dick is on Your iPod", we're not talking subtlety here, nor should we be.With individual pieces such as "Acid 2 Mouth/Wake Me Up Before You Guru Guru" (in the krautrock segment) and "Hanatarasha Montana" and "Lady Gerogerigagaga/Ornette Coleminer's Daughter" towards the end, it's not high brow, but for any noise fan who enjoys a good laugh, and I know there are some others like me out there, it’s a brilliant work.
While many (including myself) associate the Prurient moniker with Dominick Fernow's abuse of distortion and feedback, the project has been shifting more and more into some hard to define realm that has slowly engulfed more "traditional" musical elements. Here that has taken hold even more, putting less of a focus on the harshness and bringing out a different beast of equal darkness.
Opening with a scream and a blast of noise that hearkens back to some of the earliest Prurient material, "Many Jewels Surround the Crown (The District)" at first is entirely familiar.However, much of the harshness pulls away in the first minute, leaving behind a rudimentary, but functional synth melody that develops and expands, offset by sheets of white noise and Fernow’s spoken word delivery.The keyboard based sound is something that’s appeared in previous Prurient works, such as And Still, Wanting and the Cocaine Death compilation, but here it’s more fully fleshed out and structured, even soaring to dramatic, grandiose passages to close the track.
The "instrumental" version is far more different than simply removing the vocals.Instead, the synth melody is recast as pure black metal guitar and surges of noise.Hollow drums and more synths fill out the piece, but it’s far closer to metal than most of the Prurient stuff I’ve heard, even if it’s a bit too off kilter to be embraced in that genre.
It almost seems like two of Fernow's multitude of side projects, namely Cold Cave and Ash Pool, inspired the altering versions of this track.Between the synth heavy "The District" version, which wouldn’t have been entirely out of place on Cold Cave's Cremations, and the instrumental side channeling the "kvlt" end of Ash Pool's metallic leanings, it definitely feels like there's some influence here.Regardless though, it still sounds more like Prurient more than anything else.Even if the lack of pure unadulterated harsh noise may alienate some fans, the drama and ambience created are its greatest strength.
This is the first ever release for the new Editions Mego imprint curated by Emeralds' John Elliott and it is an extremely auspicious start.  Fabric is the guise of Chicago's Matthew Mullane and this is his first major release under that moniker, though he has previously surfaced on a number of limited releases as both Fabric and his own name. He describes himself primarily as a guitarist and "computerist," however A Form of Radiance is a wonderfully spacey, endlessly pulsing bedroom synth epic...that may or may not have been created using actual synthesizers.  Mullane's methods are inscrutable.
I think it might be impossible to describe this album without using words like "futuristic" (or better yet, "retro-futurist"), as this is the sort of music that sounds like it belongs in the worlds depicted in films like Blade Runner or Terminator.  It doesn't sound like it belongs in the actual films though, nor does it resemble either existing soundtrack.  It's more like an imaginary soundtrack to an altogether artier, more melancholy, and subtly psychedelic work.  Mullane has clearly been influenced by the warm pads, thick throbs, and sequencer-heavy arpeggios of '80s synth music and Kosmische titans like Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze, but A Sort of Radiance has a density, complexity, and experimental streak that is very contemporary.  In fact, Fabric fits very nicely into the pantheon of newer synthesizer luminaries like Emeralds, though his work is a bit more understated and meditative.  It is also pretty brilliantly executed: while all of the pieces are essentially built upon lush swells of slowly unfolding chord progressions, there is an enormous amount of vibrant activity surrounding them.  Pieces like "High Ceilings" and "Light Float" burble, quaver, swoop, and shimmer to a transfixing degree.
The entire album is surprisingly varied and imaginative, especially given that all nine songs have very similar textures and timbres.  Also, it is pretty short, as four of the songs are under two minutes.  The briefer pieces aren't filler though, as "Controls" is actually one of my favorite pieces on the album.  Mullane displays an impressive intuitive understanding of exactly how long an idea can unfold before wearing out its welcome: if a piece like "Light Float" is hypnotic and immersive enough to unfold for 8 minutes, it does.  Conversely, if a fragile interlude like "Containers" says everything it needs to say in a minute, it ends there.  Matthew also has an impressive talent for mood and subtlety, allowing just enough melody to give the songs color and personality, but never being blunt enough to disrupt the lazily warm and hallucinatory flow of the album.
I did not expect to like this nearly as much as I do, as I generally find albums this unapologetically synthesizer-heavy to be very limited and often quite masturbatory.  A Sort of Radiance is, quite happily, neither of those things.  This is a thoroughly impressive and mesmerizing debut.
This extremely minimalist album of high-concept drone was composed as the soundtrack for a Michael Azar play about the life of one of the most iconic tortured artists in history: poet Arthur Rimbaud.  The actual music seems to have been secondary to the cleverness, veracity, and thematic consistency of the process, which I find both problematic and intriguing. That particular aesthetic often makes for an underwhelming and difficult listening experience, but Harar can sometimes be perversely mesmerizing in its simplicity too.
This album takes its title from the fact that Hausswolff spent ten days in the Ethiopian city of Harar gathering the source material, a place where Rimbaud spent the final years of his life as gun-runner and coffee trader.  Notably, the sounds that Hausswolff decided to capture and incorporate to his music are fairly abstract and a little perplexing.  For example, the backbone of the album's centerpiece, the three-part epic "Day and Night" is comprised of drones made on a krar that he bought after several days of searching.  However, he very quickly realized that he could not effectively play his new stringed instrument, so he opted to use a bow to get a good droning single tone and then heavily processed it with his computer.
He also made some field recordings, some of crickets, gentle breezes, and distant children's voices taken from a hillside (which appear on "Day") and some less ambitious ones of his hotel faucet dripping (which appear on "Night").  That is essentially it.  Musically, that translates into the first 14 minutes of the album being devoted to a single subtly wavering note or chord with some quiet natural ambient sounds around it.  Such extreme stasis is difficult to get very enthusiastic about, but waiting for something to happen for so long is deliciously tense and makes the transition into the lengthy third section ("Alas!") extremely powerful simply because the damn note changed.  Thankfully, things also get a bit dark, unsettling, and complexly multi-layered at that point (though they are still largely centered around a one-chord drone).  After several listens, I've ultimately decided that I like the entire piece quite a bit, but it demands an enormous amount of patience and attention to nuance to appreciate it enough to make it to the pay-off.
Unfortunately, the album's closing piece, the 13-minute "The Sleeper in the Valley," is not nearly as successful.  Hausswolff abandons his krar and opts instead for several oscillators droning away in uncomfortably dissonant harmony.  The twist is that there is a low-frequency oscillator in the mix that is transmitting the words to Rimbaud's "Le Dormeur Du Val" in Morse code, which is entirely too cerebral/"high art" for me (in fact, I think I simultaneously cringed and grimaced when I learned that).  Such a move wouldn't be nearly as irksome if the piece held up musically, but it is basically just a somewhat annoying buzz with an erratic pulse thrown in.  I definitely wish the album had ended after "Night and Day."
On one hand, it seems unfair to disparage something intended as a soundtrack for not being particularly compelling on its own.  On the other hand, however, this has been released as a stand-alone album and it needs to be judged as such. Additionally, it drives me crazy when great art or a fascinating life are co-opted into something that is neither particularly great nor fascinating.  Rimbaud was a very singular, brilliant, and passionate guy: 800,000 Seconds in Harar is at best a better-than-average drone album (and at its worst, an exasperating exercise in bloodless over-intellectualism).
This Norwegian duo made a big splash in certain circles with their 2005 debut Pale Ravine, but their haunted, shadowy chamber drone held somewhat limited appeal for me.  While accomplished and unique, it was simply too cinematic and oppressively dark: whenever it was on, I felt like I was either trapped in a very slow-moving and somberly brooding art film or attending a witch-burning (both feelings that I generally do not actively seek out).  On this, their long-awaited follow-up, Deaf Center’s sound has become a bit more substantial musically and a bit less narrow mood-wise.  Also, they toned down the bombast and recorded in an actual studio.  All of that tweaking has cumulatively resulted in a significantly more gratifying album.
Aside from its pronounced predisposition towards murkiness and misery, the main thing that differentiated Deaf Center's Pale Ravine from rest of the drone world was its somewhat unusual instrumentation: Otto Totland is a pianist and Erik Skodvin is a cellist.  Unfortunately, they did not capitalize on that asset nearly as much as they could have, opting to frequently employ synthesizers and losing a lot of texture and tone due to underproduction (though they certainly gained some mystery and ominousness in return).  Thankfully, Deaf Center have largely ditched the synths and made everything much clearer, more spacious, and organic-sounding.  In fact, the album even features a handful of rather naked solo pieces.  The best of the lot is Totland's brief and fragile "Time Spent," which could almost pass for a lost Erik Satie piece if it were not for the dark undercurrent and intentionally clashing notes.  Skodvin, for his part, definitely has more of a talent for evocative song titles: "Animal Sacrifice" captures him sawing away at his cello to produce a host of moaning and squealing harmonics.  Unfortunately, it lacks any sort of melodic framework to hold it all together, so it is not much more than a passing curiosity.
As much as I liked "Time Spent," there is no denying that Deaf Center are at their best when they are in full collaboration.  The best example of this, and the best thing they've ever actually recorded, is the slow-burning epic "The Day I Would Never Have," which deceptively begins with a gently melancholy piano motif.  Gradually, Skodvin's cello fades in with a glacially intensifying three-note progression and a quivering nimbus of feedback.  It is so simple, yet so perfect: the three notes keep relentlessly repeating while everything in the periphery grows steadily more dense, distorted, and snarling for nearly 9 minutes before it all abruptly drops out to make way for the piano's quiet return.  My other favorite piece is the opener, "Divided," which takes the tortured-sounding bow-squeals of "Animal Sacrifice" and puts them to much better use over a slow-moving wall of dense swells.
While it certainly has flashes of tenderness and fragility, Owl Splinters is still very much a dark album.  That darkness seems much more honest, earthy, and meaningful now, however, arising from primal cello ferocity rather than field recordings of crackling fires and murky minor key synth chords–I want to hear those strings scrape, strain, and stretch.  This album is undeniably a big step forward, but Otto and Erik still have some work to do in getting everything together in the right place and at the right time.  If these guys can find a way to more seamlessly blend Totland's impressive melodic talents to their newfound knack for roiling density and power, they might unleash an absolute monster of an album.  As it stands, Owl Splinters is merely an intermittently very good one.
(Note: The vinyl version of this album comes with a bonus disc of reinterpretations by Skodvin's Svarte Greiner project.  That seems fairly promising, but I have not heard it yet.)