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.
Hidden in plain sight, grinning through worry, living in insecurity – modern society has returned to a day-by-day race for survival. To be vulnerable is the new normal; afraid, a bare minimum. Something was bound to emerge from the quiet throngs of the new precariat, and Racine is such a voice, setting to music those modern lives defined by uncertainty.
Quelque Chose Tombe ("Something Falls") is a set of compositions that confronts demons both inner and outer head-on. Created during a period of necessary unemployment somewhere in Montreal – caring for one's health can take precedence over work – the music is both a grotesque dance of the goblins and the gentle opiatic breath of the protectors. It's a harrowing reflection of the prevalent vampiric hypochondria forcing a generation into fatigue.
The sounds crawling out of Racine speak with their own internal logic. Snippets of fractured tunes creak through perturbed post-digital soundscapes, blurred and fragmented along the way into haunting amorphous instrumentals. The two-part title track is multi-part sonic maze where raven-like pitch-bent notes gather, a broken rave theme punctures its way through bass fog, and silence clefts the music in two, ushering in a coda of heartbroken ambience. As the album's suite progresses, Racine shepherds mutant melodic themes in and out of earshot, like clear thoughts bringing temporary order to a state of emotional panic and withdrawal. A host of other sounds too – voices and birdsong, cybernetically deformed – populate Racine's scarred productions.
Emerging from Quelque Chose Tombe’s constant darkness however, is a latent sense of hope. Racine is turning modern vulnerability into a strength, creating a singular aesthetic to reflect and confront an uncomfortable present.
Both Ryoko Akama and Anne-F Jacques have large discographies focusing on the creation of music with improvised and constructed devices based on everyday objects, so working together makes perfect sense. The two live collaborations Evaporation is comprised of feature the duo blending the methodologies of live performance and art installation, with the self-guiding objects manipulated in real time as the two move about the performance space while adjusting the objects and mixing the sound. The resulting recordings are two unique, yet complementary long-form works that, while difficult at times, are captivating throughout.
Recorded at two consecutive performances during the duo’s Winter 2018 tour, there are notable similarities, as well as differences, between the two pieces.Both are of equal length and using many of the same home-built idiosyncratic instruments, but the performance and the interactions of the two artists differ greatly.The combination works since there is a clear cohesion from one half of the tape to the other via the mechanical sound generators, but it is the human element that creates the most distinct variations.
The New York performance comes across as the more structured and composed one.After a brief passage of incidental "warming up" noises, looped almost-scraping like bits lead off, paired with the ringing of what sounds to be miniature bells or chimes.The source of these sounds is anything but clear, but they link together in their own sense of rhythm.Other elements are blended in by the duo, including additional ringing bells and a crackling/rattling bit that almost resembles popcorn or bubble wrap.Once electronic tonal sounds are blended in, including a rather harsh alarm tone; things turn towards darker spaces before drifting off.
Comparably, the Boston performance has a slower start, with an extended bit of object clattering and movement before the work begins properly.When it does, there is a notable amount of what sounds like equipment rolling around and an overall a looser feel to the performance.The approximated rhythms and repetition are not quite as prominent, and instead there is a greater presence of chaos.Random instrument sounds seem to pop up all around, and the whole piece feels more incidental than planned.The alarm type tone from the New York performance is here and pushed to the front, and the sharp, shrill character gives the whole piece a slightly more confrontational edge.
Home built devices and electronic experimentation may not make for the easiest of listening experiences, but Ryoko Ayama and Anne-F Jacques combine these two elements in an especially compelling way.I was most fascinated by the distinctly different character between the two performances despite them being only around 24 hours removed from one another.The first half captures the structured approach and the musicality of their distinctly un-musical instrumentation, while the second comes across less about composition and more about the full exploration of sound.The two performances complement each other perfectly and paired together makes for a fascinating, if occasionally challenging, tape.
I am hardly unique in this regard, but Markus Popp's classic run of mid-'90s albums made a huge impression on me, acting as a Rosetta Stone that led me to a world of radical (and also not-so-radical) electronic music far more compelling than the punk and industrial music that I was into at the time. Sadly, I cannot say that I have been a particularly loyal fan over the ensuing two decades, so I did not stick with Popp through his various bold attempts to reinvent his aesthetic. However, his work has never stopped interesting me–it is just that the allure of his earlier work was its perfect balance of bold concept and skilled execution. And, of course, an artist only gets to make a mind-blowing first impression once. As a result, later Oval albums simply did not leave a deep impression on me anything like that left by 94 Diskont. That said, there is definitely something to be said for masterful execution on its own and Scis fitfully captures Popp at the absolute height of his powers in that regard (particularly on the second half of the album). While my nostalgia—and expectation—clouded vision makes it impossible to rank this album within Oval's discography with any degree of objectivity, I feel quite confident in stating that some of the individual songs on Scis easily stand among the finest of Popp's long career (especially "Mikk").
I think I can say with absolute certainty that my head would probably explode if I ever tried to fully understand Markus Popp's creative process, as he has made a career of self-imposed constraints, pushing software to its limits, and manipulating complex webs of loops with surgical precision.On top of that, he is quite a creatively restless guy, so he has no problem cheerfully abandoning a winning formula to attempt something unexpected and totally unfamiliar whenever the inclination strikes him.As such, articulating exactly what sets Scis apart from other Oval releases is no simple task.That said, Popp has stated that one of his driving objectives on past albums was to "reduce his own visible hand in the music" and that he is now trying to do the opposite through the use of acoustic instruments and "live" performance.I can certainly see evidence of that objective in the comparative looseness and sense of gleeful spontaneity that pervades these pieces, yet that does not make them any less fiendishly complex.Similarly, there are recognizably acoustic instruments throughout the album, such as the piano melody at the heart of the opening "Twirror," but Popp has used acoustic drums and human vocalists in the past and "Twirror" ultimately erupts into a pummeling maelstrom of electronic beats, buzzing electronic chaos, and electronically gnarled textures.Consequently, the difference is mostly just the balance between those various elements and how they are used.For the most part, Popp juggles those divergent approaches masterfully, though his beats tend to be somewhat rigid and thudding even while the rest of his aesthetic is basically a master class on how to make visionary, forward-thinking electronic music.That is a hurdle of sorts at times, but not an insurmountable one.
Unsurprisingly, one of the perks of Popp's expanded palette and hybrid software/live approach is that Scis is a remarkably varied album, albeit one that is held together beautifully by its propulsive rhythms and strong melodic focus.In fact, I am morbidly curious about how much material Popp must have discarded, as every single one of these ten songs has a strong enough motif at its core to be strong single.The only indication that Popp was not in an constant state of infallible, white-hot inspiration is that he has a tendency to return again and again to the same dynamic trajectory (a quiet, beatless lead-in that builds to a pounding kick drum crescendo).That tends to give a number of pieces an overly familiar feel on the first half of the album.It is not ineffective though, even if the power of the percussion overshadows some of the intricacy and beauty of Popp's dazzling melodic and textural achievements.It feels somewhat akin to a killer jazz ensemble enlisting a muscular rock drummer to transcend genre constraints and expand their appeal.As the album progresses, however, Popp finds some imaginative ways to untether himself from that recurring rhythmic framework.In "Improg," for example, Popp keeps the beat buried deep in the mix and periodically allows it to drop out altogether, which serves the delicately plinking and exhalation-like music quite nicely.Moreover, when the piece inevitably does increase in rhythmic intensity, the drums are periodically overpowered by a stammering and garbed melodic hook.Elsewhere, Popp organically balances the clattering and pounding percussion crescendo in "Piqqo" with an escalating surge of gorgeously blooping and swooning synth tones.The album's strongest piece ("Mikk") even goes one step further, bulldozing over its climactic beat explosion with an intense, throbbing pulse and a spark-throwing onslaught of skipping and distressed loops.  
After being struck by how much I loved some of the pieces on Scis, I decided to go back and re-listen to some other recent Oval albums and realized that I had woefully underappreciated several of them.More significantly, I belatedly realized that it is frankly amazing that just one person (mostly) is responsible for such a varied and visionary body of work, as Popp's oeuvre represents a truly improbable convergence of conceptual genius, tight songcraft, strong melodic sensibility, creative arrangements, and production mastery that blurs the lines between several genres.All of those elements are in ample abundance on Scis, which adds up to a legitimately dazzling and vibrant batch of songs.Moreover, Popp's curious approach to percussion seems to be a deliberate and subversive one, as he notes that he approached beats as an "instrumentalist rather than a beat-maker."On its face, that is an enigmatic statement, but I believe it means that he views drums like a classical composer views a timpani: there are actual grooves in every song, but they are used to more for shifts in dynamic intensity that as an end unto themselves.That said, I still wish those beats were more fluid and a bit less overpowering (a feat achieved only on "Oxagon"), as the music on Scis is hook-filled, nuanced, and playfully experimental enough to make this a near-masterpiece.In its current form, that likely means that there are a handful of songs that I will likely play to death, but Scis is an album that is absolutely screaming for a remix treatment: all of the greatness is there, but several of these songs could use a bit more space and rhythmic fluidity to realize their full potential.Until that happens, however, Scis is a very strong album that reminds me exactly why I was—and should continue to be—a devoted fan of Popp's work.
Originally released back in 1989 on the New Albion label, this landmark celebration of extreme natural reverb has finally received a long-deserved reissue in honor of its thirtieth anniversary. Obviously, production technology has evolved quite a lot since the '80s and site-specific performances have since become a somewhat common occurrence in the experimental music world, so Deep Listening does not feel quite as radical now as it did when it was first released. Nevertheless, it is still quite a strange and magical album, as I cannot think of any other accordionists who have descended into a two million gallon cistern to explore the incredible acoustic possibilities inherent in a 45-second reverb decay. As someone without a deep technical understanding of how reverb works, I found the new liner notes from recording engineer Al Swanson and Peter Ward quite helpful in explaining exactly why these recordings feel so unreal, but such knowledge is not necessary to appreciate this album: I have been able to enjoy the epic and eerie slow-motion beauty of Deep Listening for years without knowing a single goddamn thing about phase integrity or slap-back. While I cannot say I was exactly clamoring to see this album released in the vinyl format, I am absolutely delighted to see it resurrected and back in the public consciousness.
For some reason, my mind has proven extremely resistant to viewing Deep Listening as anything other than a Pauline Oliveros album.Obviously, she is the most famous and influential member of this trio, as well as the artist most closely associated with "deep listening" as a kind of philosophy, but it would be more accurate to view this album as both the birth of Deep Listening Band and the beginning of a long, fruitful creative partnership with composer Stuart Dempster.In fact, it is Dempster's trombone and didgeridoo playing that most prominently sets the tone for the album's two most memorable pieces: the bookends "Lear" and "Nike."To some degree, that suggests "shallow listening" on my part, as Oliveros's subtly shifting bed of lingering accordion tones is crucial in shaping the subtly hallucinatory and harmonically rich backdrop in "Lear."Nevertheless, it is the deep, roiling drone of the didgeridoo that gives the piece its heft and it is the slow, majestic trombone melody that evokes its distinctively timeless and somber feel.That melancholy and vaguely medieval-sounding aesthetic is apt, as "Lear" was incorporated into Lee Breuer's production of King Lear (though I do not know if it was originally composed with that in mind)."Nike," on the other hand, is a bit more abstract and inventive, as it gradually takes shape from a ghostly miasma of voices, clattering metal pipes, and breathy conch shell drones.Admittedly, it takes a little while to fully come together, but it is a quite a bizarre and compelling piece nonetheless, resembling an angelic choir in a desolate factory that gradually curdles into an infernal-sounding crescendo that calls to mind an ancient battlefield littered with corpses (or at least a banshee caught in a thunderstorm).  
Between those two poles, there are a pair of more subtle and nuanced pieces: "Suiren" and "Ione."For the most part, "Ione" is kind of a beatific and meditative inversion of the palette employed for "Lear," as the didgeridoo and accordion converge into a languorously undulating bed of shifting harmonies.More importantly, Dempster's trombone melodies are not at all portentous and blood-soaked, instead lazily unfurling like smoke in something approximating a major key.It is not a bad piece by any means, but "Suiren" is considerably more compelling and is arguably the one piece that most fully captures the transformative alchemy of the cistern's unique acoustics. Aside from an unconventionally employed garden hose, Oliveros, Dempster, and Peter Ward completely abandoned their formidable arsenal of instruments, seashells, and metal pipes to see what they could achieve solely with the sound of their voices.As it turns out, they could achieve quite a lot, as "Suiren" unfolds as a phantasmagoric fog that lies somewhere between Gregorian chant and time-stretched Tuvan throat-singing.It is quite a hauntingly lovely piece and also a comparatively quiet one, which makes it the arguably the one that benefits the most from deep listening (there are no dramatic motifs to steal the focus away from its nuances).It is also very effective illustration of one of Ward's observations about the acoustic character of the space: aside from the long decay, the smooth and pure nature of the cistern's reverb "makes it impossible to tell where the performer stops and the reverberation takes over."
Another illustrative piece is "Balloon Payment," one of the three bonus tracks that Important has added for their reissue: it is nothing more than the sound of a balloon being popped, leaving roughly 45 seconds of rumbling reverberation in its wake.It is admittedly kind of a throwaway piece that only needs to be heard once, but the other two newly added songs ("Phantom" and "Geocentric") are an inspired curatorial inclusion, as they broaden the album's mood palette and end Deep Listening on a considerably brighter note than the war-like intensity of "Nike."Notably, all three new pieces were taken from Deep Listening Band's The Ready Made Boomerang (1991), which was recorded in the same cistern with a somewhat expanded ensemble.I suspect that means Important has no plans to reissue that album and that decision makes sense: the primary appeal of Deep Listening is that it was a cool idea and a fascinating process: trying to unravel the blurry relationships between sounds and their lingering afterimages makes for a very absorbing listen.It was a great experiment and statement of intent, but Dempster and Oliveros did not need to repeatedly collaborate with that same cistern once they learned its acoustic secrets.Moreover, these pieces are far from the best that Dempster and Oliveros have recorded together, as Important's previous Deep Listening Band reissues capture the pair in significantly more sophisticated and refined form.As such, Deep Listening is unquestionably a significant and influential album, but it should be appreciated as the initial creative breakthrough that led to even better things rather than something akin to a stand-alone crown jewel in Oliveros's discography.
The Air Texture series returns, this time inviting Rrose and Silent Servant to curate the seventh release.
The Air Texture compilation series, the core project of our label, asks two producers to collaborate on a combined release. Typically the two are connected in some way through past projects. The only rules are no rules - focus on finding music that isn't just straight-ahead club music. Within this approach, the series has presented a diverse array of music on the edges of experimental and dance - and always unreleased new music.
Rrose is the latest incarnation of Seth Horvitz, an interdisciplinary artist from California (now residing in London) whose 20+ year history weaves in and out of both dance music culture and academic circles.
The work of Seth Horvitz focuses on the limits of perception and the idiosyncrasies of machines, and the Rrose project focuses these ideas into an immersive and noisy, yet highly detailed form of techno meant to move the mind and body in equal measures. On stage, Rrose often stands in the shadows, going by he and she interchangeably (Rrose's name and image allude to Duchamp’s female alter-ego) – an implied interrogation of gender norms and artistry in techno circles.
Currently residing in Los Angeles, Silent Servant's Juan Mendez was instrumental in the reboot of the legendary Sandwell District label and the Jealous God label with Regis and James Ruskin.
His DJ and live sets are another matter of inventiveness. The superfluous eliminated, Silent Servant has, for years, been rewiring the minds and moving the bodies of those seeking the most meaningful and potent energies that electronic music has to offer.
Silent Servant's productions reference warehouse techno, industrial noise and post-punk reworked to form a uniquely modern style - a vitality so controlled and concentrated that it captivates immediately.
Both individuals are old friends and collaborators going back to the 1990s. Juan's early label Cytrax released one of Seth's first records under his Sutekh moniker. In 1998, they went on their first tour of Germany together with other artists from California.
When asking the artists on their process of selection, Rrose states: “"I selected a group of artists that would reflect both the dancefloor and experimental/avant-garde side of my influences. I wanted to see if I could make a compilation that sounded as cohesive as an album, but with contributions from a diverse range of artists. I asked the artists to focus on "sound, space, and drones" over easily identifiable "beats" and "songs" - with the intention of pushing the techno/dancefloor artists out of their comfort zones."
Silent Servant conveys "The choices on this compilation were based on people that I respect on all levels. It's a very mixed bag and I have a personal connection to each one of these people, and they are all people I knew would have something interesting to say. I feel grateful for the opportunity to have brought all of these people's art together for this project."
Featuring unreleased tracks from underground talent including Anthony Child (Surgeon), Ron Morelli, Laurel Halo, Octo Octa, Phase Fatale, Luke Slater, Function, as well as Rrose and Silent Servant and legends Laetitia Sonami and Charlemagne Palestine.
Workaround is the lucidly playful and ambitious solo debut album by rhythm-obsessive musician and DJ, Beatrice Dillon for PAN. It combines her love of UK club music's syncopated suss and Afro-Caribbean influences with a gamely experimental approach to modern composition and stylistic fusion, using inventive sampling and luminous mixing techniques adapted from modern pop to express fresh ideas about groove-driven music and perpetuate its form with timeless, future-proofed clarity.
Recorded over 2017-19 between studios in London, Berlin and New York, Workaround renders a hypnotic series of polymetric permutations at a fixed 150bpm tempo. Mixing meticulous FM synthesis and harmonics with crisply edited acoustic samples from a wide range of guests including UK Bhangra pioneer Kuljit Bhamra (tabla); Pharoah Sanders Band's Jonny Lam (pedal steel guitar); techno innovators Laurel Halo (synth/vocal) and Batu (samples); Senegalese Griot Kadialy Kouyaté (Kora), Hemlock's Untold and new music specialist Lucy Railton (cello); amongst others, Dillon deftly absorbs their distinct instrumental colours and melody into 14 bright and spacious computerized frameworks that suggest immersive, nuanced options for dancers, DJs and domestic play.
Workaround evolves Dillon's notions in a coolly unfolding manner that speaks directly to the album’s literary and visual inspirations, ranging from James P. Carse's book "Finite And Infinite Games" to the abstract drawings of Tomma Abts or Jorinde Voigt as well as painter Bridget Riley’s essays on grids and colour. Operating inside this rooted but mutable theoretical wireframe, Dillon's ideas come to life as interrelated, efficient patterns in a self-sufficient system.
With a naturally fractal-not-fractional logic, Dillon's rhythms unfold between unresolved 5/4 tresillo patterns, complex tabla strokes and spark-jumping tics in a fluid, tactile dance of dynamic contrasts between strong/light, sudden/restrained, and bound/free made in reference to the notational instructions of choreographer Rudolf Laban. Working in and around the beat and philosophy, the album’s freehand physics contract and expand between the lissom rolls of Bhamra's tabla in the first, to a harmonious balance of hard drum angles and swooping FM synth cadence featuring additional synth and vocal from Laurel Halo in "Workaround Two," while the extruded strings of Lucy Railton create a sublime tension at the album’s palate-cleansing denouement, triggering a scintillating run of technoid pieces that riff on the kind of swung physics found in Artwork's seminal "Basic G," or Rian Treanor's disruptive flux with a singularly tight yet loose motion and infectious joy.
Crucially, the album sees Dillon focus on dub music's pliable emptiness, rather than the moody dematerialization of reverb and echo. The substance of her music is rematerialized in supple, concise emotional curves and soberly freed to enact its ideas in balletic plies, rugged parries and sweeping, capoeira-like floor action. Applying deeply canny insight drawn from her years of practice as sound designer, musician and hugely knowledgable/intuitive DJ, Workaround can be heard as Dillon's ingenious solution or key to unlocking to perceptions of stiffness, darkness or grid-locked rigidity in electronic music. And as such it speaks to an ideal of rhythm-based and experimental music ranging from the hypnotic Senegalese mbalax of Mark Ernestus's Ndagga Rhythm Force, through SND and, more currently, the hard drum torque of DJ Plead; to adroitly exert the sensation of weightlessness and freedom in the dance and personal headspace.
Die Stadt presents the follow up to last year’s critically acclaimed album HERBSTSONNE (Die Stadt / DS119), SILENCE IN THAT TIME (DS123) is a direct offshoot of the former album, adding more sounds to the overall sound palette. Recorded at RMS Studios South London in 2019, the single 42 min. long track stands as another distinctively beautiful and haunting work in the artist’s discography.
Release date February 9, 2020, limited to 300 copies.
Eighteen months on from his last solo release, Vancouver-based singer/composer Ian William Craig returns with a brilliant and powerfully emotive new album. His first for a long while to be centered around the piano - and also one of his most pared back - the record was made through an intense period of personal loss and environmental catastrophe.
Red Sun Through Smoke was recorded over two cataclysmic weeks in August 2018 in Kelowna, whilst the city was encircled by the forest fires which, under a warming climate, now regularly rage through British Columbia in summertime. With smoke engulfing the landscape, Ian describes how "the houses across the road couldn’t be seen save for a brief white on white outline. The sun was dull red on grey. The air was becoming steadily dangerous. There was nowhere to go that was not this way; all the space filled up with worry." Having committed to recording that August, Ian sought a supposedly calmer retreat in which to work. Carrying his gear across the province to set up a temporary studio space, the album was recorded from start to finish in the living room of a small house owned by his grandfather who was now residing in a care facility across the street, having been afflicted with dementia for the past decade. The morning after Ian arrived, his parents unexpectedly phoned to say that they would be flying in too, as Grampa had been moved into palliative care, his lungs filled with fluid as a result of the smoke. Despite this shocking turn of events, Ian's parents convinced him to keep recording, with the process ultimately becoming a document of the difficult place in which they found themselves.
One benefit of recording at his grandad's lay in gaining access to his piano, which became the record's anchoring point. Beyond this, the only other instrumentation consisted of Ian’s voice, a shortwave radio set, several modified tape decks and a bunch of tape loops. Ian notes how events helped force the shape of the record and a tendency toward a less layered, more spartan expression. "Everything felt raw, I didn't want there to be anywhere to hide in this record. My parents and I were cramped together in a small house while my grandfather slowly died across the street in a world filled with smoke, after all. So, in this record, more than most, there exist a great many things straight to tape without any effects because there really was no space."
Forged in trauma and an intense, bewildering slew of mixed emotions, Ian William Craig has created an album of incredible beauty, sadness and depth. Red Sun Through Smoke is a profoundly moving album, a standout record in a prolific body of work that shows no sign of faltering.
Second volume in a trilogy exploring the teenage tape experimentation of Warren Defever aka His Name Is Alive. Echo-drenched guitar instrumentals, field recordings and gorgeous ambient tones pulsate through the analogue murk, also taking in dalliances with greyscale industrial drone, musique concrète and even a burst of 4-track noise pop reminiscent of the early work of The Jesus And Mary Chain.
TJ and I recorded these songs in her backyard studio in February of 2018. We've been friends and occasional collaborators for years, crossing paths and sharing stages and the timing was right to capture a certain moment. I was on my way back from Mexico, not quite ready to return to the grey skies of the Pacific Northwest, and to me these songs capture a bit of lazy California winter, crossing paths with a trusted friend, playing guitars and singing old songs. – Marisa Anderson
Cole Porter and Gene Clark are among my favorite songsmiths and rendering their music during that warm midwinter of wildfires and aftermaths was perfect. Marisa and i have had an adventurous collaborative friendship, playing sonics and playing standards. The songs on this 7 inch are a cool continuation of our shared journey. – tjo
I always love scavenging the internet for interesting end-of-year lists every December, as I invariably find a handful of great albums and films that I slept on like a fool. In fact, a lot of those belated finds wind up being among my favorites, as the albums I miss tend to be inspired and refreshing departures from the labels and scenes that I usually follow. This unusual debut album from LA's Ana Roxanne was one such find from last year, as it surfaced back in March and I probably dismissed it instantly as a vinyl reissue of some private press New Age obscurity (if I noticed it at all). Given both the look of the album and Roxanne's aesthetic, that is not a terribly outlandish conclusion to make, but a closer listen reveals that ~~~ is considerably more compelling and distinctive than it first appears. For example, Roxanne checks two boxes that have historically been strong indicators of a radical compositional approach: she both studied Hindustani singing in India and attended the fabled Mills College. As a result, Roxanne has an unusually sophisticated understanding of harmony and avant-garde compositional techniques for this stylistic milieu. Such a path would normally steer an artist towards an Eastern drone/La Monte Young vein, yet Roxanne deftly sidesteps anything resembling a predictable path, as ~~~ can best be described as what might result if a mermaid studied with Eliane Radigue: drone-based minimalism that evokes a soft-focus idyll of lapping waves and floating, angelic voices.
For all intents and purposes, ~~~ admittedly does sound a hell of a lot like it could have been the work of some gifted, synth-wielding yoga hermit from the '80s. The fact that it is not, however, is noteworthy: there is nothing about this album or Roxanne's background to suggest that she had any interest in undertaking any sort of homage to that era. More likely, she just independently wound up in a similar place simply by virtue of her similarly meditative and autodidactic bent.In fact, it seems like Roxanne's biggest single influence was probably her own life (with a particular emphasis on her early love of R&B and all the time that she spent in church choirs growing up). That, in essence, is what I most love about this album, as it is all-too-rare these days to encounter art in such a pure, unselfconscious form. At its best, ~~~ sounds like the work of a composer who wants nothing more than to transform her lived experiences into something intimate, poetic, and beautiful. Moreover, Roxanne achieves that in an inventive way that feels both timeless and effortless. She arguably only threatens that perfect, idyllic spell on the rare occasions when the synths blossom into something more prominent and melodic than mere drones. To Roxanne's credit, however, those sparing psych flourishes are almost always effective enough to justify such an out-of-character nod to recognizably "cool" influences.
The opening "Immortality" captures Roxanne in her purest, most undiluted form, as it is essentially just her voice (alternately singing and speaking) over a warm, gently quivering, and blurry bed of drones. It is quite a gorgeous piece, as Roxanne's harmonizing vocals have an angelic quality that calls to mind Julee Cruise's work with Angelo Badalamenti and David Lynch (minus all the creepy and seductive overtones and undercurrents). The next two pieces only deepen that sense of dissolving into a quietly rapturous dreamscape, as Roxanne subtly expands her palette in an increasingly layered, immersive, and reality-bending direction."Slowness" is the most "composed" piece on the album, as it lies somewhere between a meditation tape, an exercise in tape-loop experimentation, and a bittersweetly lovely organ piece. The lazily intertwining melodies and warm harmonies of the latter are the best part, but the way that all of the disparate elements come together is quite effective as well (I especially like the ghostly, steadily pulsing synth loop that functions as the piece's backbone). The following "It's a Rainy Day on the Cosmic Shore" is even better still, though it admittedly takes a little while before it fully coheres. Once it does, however, it is an absolutely sublime piece of music, as crashing waves, swelling drones, and fluttering synth melodies combine to evoke a heavenly, hallucinatory beach or magical undersea grotto. Elsewhere, "Nocturne" then returns to the minimalism and swooningly lovely Siren-esque vocals of "Immortality," while "I'm Every Sparkly Woman" approximates a curious collision of deconstructed R&B and radiant, rippling New Age bliss. The album then winds to a close with a remarkably good sound collage that blends together a church chorus, a singing toddler, lapping waves, strains of pop music from a radio, wind chimes, and a group of cheerfully bantering women.
While that final piece ("In a Small Valley") is not my favorite piece on the album, it is a beautiful illustration of one key element makes Roxanne's aesthetic so special and unique: her incredibly effective and intuitively organic use of field recordings.Obviously, using field recordings for texture or surrealist mindfuckery is quite common in contemporary experimental music circles these days, yet Roxanne seems to use them only to vividly evoke specific scenes and all of those scenes seem personally meaningful. As such,~~~ has an abstractly diaristic feel that suggests a languorous, impressionistic flow of poignant memories and allusions to significant moments. That unerring instinct for simple, uncluttered artistic honesty is evident in other ways too, as Roxanne's elegantly blurred and beautiful voice is the true heart of her art, so she is wise to limit her musical accompaniment to little more than subdued drones and looping melody fragments (even if the more fleshed out "Slowness" is a highlight). It is a tricky balance to get just right, which probably explains why ~~~ is such an unusually brief album (it clocks in at under half an hour): Roxanne could have easily padded out the release with some additional drone or synth-driven pieces, but that would have diluted the power and simple beauty of her statement. This is not a unique and beguiling album because Roxanne has an especially bold experimental vision or a knack for killer synth patches—it is a unique and beguiling album because such things are relegated to a mere supporting role as she strives for something deeper, more intimate, and more elusive. When those experimental or hook-sculpting tendencies surface, they are certainly welcome, but the true brilliance of ~~~ is that it captures self-expression in its most distilled and sincere form. This is a hell of a debut.