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.
"Raime strain at the harness in four cuttingly sharp mutations of Afrobeats, Footwork, and Jungle with scintillating results on the 2nd release on their RR imprint.
Where the London duo’s 2018 EP and RR debut We Can't Be That Far From The Beginning evoked a meditative mood from the info overload of their home city that left acres of space to the imagination, the Planted EP rejoins the dance with four tracks that icily acknowledge strong influence from Latin American and Chicago footwork styles in a classically skooled mutation of hardcore British dance music.
In four fleetingly ambiguous dancefloor workouts they carry on a conceptual theme exploring the digital subconscious with persistently invasive, alien ambient shrapnel - half-heard voices, aleatoric prangs, and tag-covered signposts - woven into and thru their tightly coiled and reflexive drum programming.
Uptown, "Num" flexes tendons and hips like a Leonce riddim that danced all the way from NOLA and ATL to the wintery dawn of a LDN warehouse, while the lip-biting tension of minimalist 160bpm jungle/footwork patterns and jibber-jawed vocals in "Ripli" suggests the Alien film's protagonist lost in a mazy rave space, chased by H.R. Giger-designed face huggers (or gurning energy vampires). Downtown "Kella" then catches them on a grimy dubtech bounce, cocked back and straining at the harness, before "Belly" shuts down the dance with invasive, demonic motifs exploding over dark blue chords and palpitating jungle subs with impeccable darkside style."
On September 12, 2018 Sonic Youth co-founder Lee Ranaldo and guitarist extraordinaire Jean-Marc Montera joined Maurizio and Roberto Opalio in their hometown Torino, Italy, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the brothers' visionary project My Cat Is An Alien. That evening the stage of Alfa Teatro—a liberty-style, historical theater built in 1928—hosted the live world premiere of this quartet, whose members already collaborated live and on records with each other during the years, yet never all the four together. The quartet live performance followed MCIAA's radical aesthetic of "instantaneous composition," where nothing is defined nor drafted prior to the act of music creation, and every sound and action is shaped around a higher-order scheme dictated by the empathy and synergy of the actual moment of enlightenment. The show was also accompanied by the projection of a brand new cinematic poetry dual film created by Roberto Opalio and previewed on the occasion, whose Super-8 film's relentless flickering and ascending motion worked "ad hoc" to match the music and body gestures of the performance, thus enhancing its transcendental power.
That night Maurizio Opalio (self-made double-bodied wooden string instrument, pedal effects, bell), Roberto Opalio (wordless vocalizations, bodhran, Alientronics, electric guitar, space toys), Jean-Marc Montera (table top guitar, pedals, little gong), and Lee Ranaldo (vocals, electric guitar, bells) moved through still unexplored and unheard music territories.
This music is a pure ecstatic revelation, a unique, powerful and spiritual experience all of its own. Listening to this album we are offered a true epiphany just as uniquely gifted genius improvisers/composers of the past would grace our ears and souls.
Faitiche is delighted to present a new album by Andrew Pekler. Sounds From Phantom Islands brings together ten tracks created over the last three years for the interactive website Phantom Islands - A Sonic Atlas. With his 2016 album Tristes Tropiques, Pekler created a highly unique cosmos of ethnographic sound speculations. Sounds From Phantom Islands continues and simultaneously expands this concept: finely elaborated chordal motifs float like fog over fictional maritime landscapes. A masterpiece of contemporary Exotica.
Phantom islands are islands that appeared on historical maps but never actually existed. The status of these artefacts of European colonial expansion from the 15th to the 19th century oscillates between cartographic fact and maritime fiction. Sounds From Phantom Islands interprets and presents these imaginations as a quasi-ethnographic catalog of music and synthetic field recordings. The pieces on this album are based on recordings made for Phantom Islands - A Sonic Atlas, an online interactive map developed with cultural anthropologist Stefanie Kiwi Menrath.
January 24, 2020, Unseen Worlds will release Robert Haigh’s new album Black Sarabande on LP/CD/Digital worldwide via Secretly Distribution. The first single “Ghosts of Blacker Dyke” will be released 12.06.2019 alongside the album announcement.
Black Sarabande expands upon pianist-composer Robert Haigh’s beguiling debut for Unseen Worlds with a collection of intimate and evocative piano-led compositions. Black Sarabande expands upon pianist-composer Robert Haigh’s beguiling debut for Unseen Worlds with a collection of intimate and evocative piano-led compositions. Haigh was born and raised in the ‘pit village’ of Worsbrough in South Yorkshire, England. His father, as most of his friends’ fathers, was a miner, who worked at the local colliery. Etched into Haigh’s work are formative memories of the early morning sounds of coal wagons being shunted on the tracks, distant trains passing, and walking rural paths skirting the barren industrial landscape.
The album opens with the title track — a spacious, plaintive piano motif develops through a series of discordant variations before resolving. On ‘Stranger On The Lake,’ sweeping textures and found sounds lay the foundation for a two chord piano phrase evoking a sense of elegy. ‘Wire Horses’ is an atmospheric audio painting of open spaces and distant lights. ’Air Madeleine’ uses variations in tempo and dynamics to craft the most seductively melodic track on the album. ‘Arc Of Crows’ improvises on a single major seventh chord, splintering droplets of notes as ghostly wisps of melodic sound slowly glide into view. ‘Ghosts Of Blacker Dyke’ is a melancholic evocation of Haigh’s roots in England’s industrial north — intermingling dissonant sounds of industry within a set of languid piano variations. ‘Progressive Music’ is constructed around a series of lightly dissonant arpeggiated piano chords which modulate through major and minor key changes before resolving at a wistful and enigmatic refrain. In ‘The Secret Life of Air’, a nocturnal, low piano line slowly weaves its way through the close-miked ambience of the room, nearly halting as each note is allowed to form and reverberate into a blur with the next. The ambitious ‘Painted Serpent’ calmly begins with drone-like pads and builds with the introduction of counterpoint piano lines and an orchestral collage of sound underpinned by a deliberate bass motif. ’Broken Symmetry’ and ‘Lady Lazarus’ highlight Haigh’s gift for blurring the line between dissonance and harmony - opaque piano portraits of moonlight and shadows glancingly evoke the impressionistic palettes of Harold Budd, Debussy and Satie.
I have always found Portland’s Ilyas Ahmed to be an elusive and enigmatically unusual artist, though I have recently realized that I am basing much of that opinion on his 2005 debut (Between Two Skies). That album remains a cult favorite in some circles, as it exists in murkily melancholy and ghostly shadow realm between free folk and drone. The varied work that Ahmed has released in between that minor classic and this latest cassette has only made it more difficult to pin down his strange and shifting aesthetic, but it also feels as if no time has passed at all: Behold Killers returns once more to the blurry, diffuse gray area where structure, improvisation, drone, and experimentalism precariously coexist and bleed together. However, while the fluid approach to structure on this release is not a far cry from Ahmed's early days, the execution has improved considerably, as Behold Killers explore far warmer and more nuanced emotional territory than much of his previous work. I still find some elements of the album perplexing, of course, but it is anchored by a couple of excellent longform pieces.
The first side of Behold Killers is devoted entirely to one of its strongest pieces, "Pass No Jazz."It also kind of an archetypal Ahmed composition in its unusual trajectory, as it opens as kind of a straightforwardly melodic classical guitar piece, yet gradually erases all traces of that original theme as it slowly blossoms into something quite different.Moreover, the path from the initial motif to the final destination in far from a linear one, as "Pass No Jazz" takes a series of detours that follow a kind of dream logic.Some of those detours are quite beautiful, such as the quavering, shimmering, and throbbing synth reverie that follows the disappearance of the acoustic guitar.After that fades, however, the piece becomes a sleepily tender vocal piece that unfolds over a simmering bed of guitar noise and synth drones.Gradually, however, sharper-edged swells emerge from the fog and cohere into swaying and swooning dance of sustained feedback-like tones.Then that dissolves to make way for a gently rippling final coda of wobbly, chorus-heavy arpeggios embellished with percussion that sounds borrowed from either a Tibetan Buddhist ritual or an ancient Japanese court.Throughout it all, I have no idea what is coming next and no ideas ever seem to overlap or repeat, which is a very strange and abstract compositional technique.On one level, it kind of sounds like five brief, unrelated pieces that have been loosely stitched together, yet they amount to a weirdly satisfying arc nonetheless.Still, I cannot shake the sense that at least two of those pieces could have been even better if they had been expanded and allowed to stand on their own.
Given that jarring conclusion to the album's most perfect piece, I definitely feel like I am no closer to understanding how Ahmed's mind works, yet Behold Killers has at least brought me much closer to understanding the appeal of what that mind can produce.If I did understand where Ahmed was coming from, I would hypothesize that pieces like "Pass No Jazz" are simply collages of unrelated improvisations and unfinished ideas or that he has some perverse urge to aggressively deconstruct and subvert all of his best motifs in service of a fragmented, non-linear flow.The focused and lovely "Wild Violet," however, seems to indicate that Ahmed is perfectly happy to linger on a single theme sometimes (until he runs out of tape, anyway).Given that, there is definitely an element of exasperation to this album, but I can only be exasperated if I actually like something in the first place and I do like this album: Ahmed does an excellent job combining biting, ravaged textures with passages of tender, fragile beauty.The catch is just that those delightful sounds and lovely interludes never quite stick around long enough to amount to a complete, fully formed piece.I have no idea if that is a mere stylistic idiosyncrasy or a sign that Ahmed's compositional talents are not yet on the same level as his ideas and I think I will just have to resign myself to that nagging ambiguity (if I haven't figured him out after 15 years, odds are strong that I never will).In any case, I enjoyed this tape–Behold Killers is a puzzling and flawed experience at times, but it is a frequently compelling one as well.
This NYC-based composer has long been a bit of a curious enigma to me, as he seems to travel primarily in experimental music circles, yet seems unwaveringly devoted to making very traditional and melodic classical music. In a quietly subversive way, however, composing simple, elegantly lovely piano pieces in 2019 is a radical act in its own right. That is where Waller (mostly) arrives on Moments, his third album and most minimal, distilled statement to date. That approach suits him well, though I am not necessarily sure he needed go more minimal than he did with 2017’s excellent cello/piano album Trajectories (released on Sean McCann’s always interesting Recital Program imprint). To some degree, Moments feels less like complete statement than its predecessor, resembling instead a kind of expertly curated mixtape of different piano composers unified by a knack for lyrical melodies and a sort of warm, wistful Romanticism. Some are among the most beautiful pieces that Waller has composed to date though, which makes Moments akin to a strong (if improbable) "singles album" of sorts. At times, it also feels like the beginnings of a major creative leap forward.
One bit of intriguing trivia about Michael Vincent Waller is that he seems to be the only person who has ever studied with La Monte Young that did not become a drone artist, become obsessed with Just Intonation, build bizarre installations, or compose radical operas.Instead, he has devoted himself to the "Western classical music tradition in its most archetypal forms," which is a bit like discovering that Norman Rockwell apprenticed for years with Salvador Dali or Marcel Duchamp.Curiously, Waller also studied with Bunita Marcus, which seems to have left more of a stylistic impact: one of the album's brief vibraphone pieces ("Love III. Images") favorably recalls Morton Feldman's penchant for queasily dissonant harmonies and lingering decays.For the most part, however, Moments seems most stylistically indebted to Erik Satie, as that name will be invariably evoked for all eternity whenever a piano composer is drawn towards simplicity and melody.Unseen World's description of the album presciently anticipates that comparison, but notes that Waller's more Romantic and emotionally driven work diverges from Satie's "blank canvas" approach.I do not necessarily agree, as I find some of Satie's work to be incredibly moving, but it is fair to say that Moments is a very purposeful, heartfelt, and melodic collection of pieces that could not be mistaken for ambient or "furniture music."At its heart, Moments is kind of an impressionistic diary of warm or bittersweet memories shared through a series of evocative vignettes.Every piece on the album seems to be inspired by a specific person or moment from Waller’s life and the album is anchored by two multipart suites entitled "Love" and "Return From LA."
Any attempt to make stylistic generalizations about Waller’s aesthetic on Moments beyond "simple" and "melodic" is a fundamentally doomed endeavor though, as the album is divided into tenderly lovely piano miniatures (played by R. Andrew Lee), impressionistic vibraphone interludes (played by William Winant), and outliers that elude either category.Uncharacteristically, I am most drawn to Waller's more straightforward classical fare.In particular, I love the lazily tumbling "For Papa," as the underlying arpeggios seem to hang in a state of suspended animation as the melody slowly cascades and ripples.Elsewhere, both "Return From LA-IV" and "Nocturnes-No. 1" feel like archetypal Satie melancholia, but either would likely be ranked Satie's finest work if he had written them himself.Much less understated is "Jennifer," which is an elegantly controlled storm of dramatic intensity.More importantly, Waller does some beautiful things with lagging, stumbling melodies that fleetingly break free from the central pulse to take on a life of their own."Return From LA-I" is yet another highlight, albeit a more Impressionism-inspired one, evoking a flickering, sepia-toned film reel of a magical realist Paris from a hundred years ago.For the most part, I tend to prefer it when Waller keeps things understated, which he does for most of the album.There are some exceptions though.The best of them is the closing "Bounding," which gradually blossoms into an impassioned crescendo of descending melodies that streak across the underlying chord progression like falling stars.
As much as I like to think I have developed a deep understanding and appreciation for the nuances of music, there are still some things that seem like absolute sorcery that I will never fully comprehend.For example, I could never replicate a good Merzbow album even if I had infinite time and all of the same gear.Similarly, I will never grasp how someone like R. Andrew Lee is able to look at some pieces of paper and make it feel as though he is effortlessly and fluidly conveying the delicate emotional shading and unusual timing flourishes that Waller had conjured up in his head.More specifically, I do not understand how some of the melodies in "Jennifer" could possibly be notated and replicated, as they seem to wind like tendrils of smoke independent of time signature or beat.As such, "Jennifer" and "For Papa" are the pieces that fascinate me the most on Moments, as Waller is able to make melodies dance and twist is a way that feels sensuous and natural (a very different achievement than dexterously playing with unusual time signatures in an ostentatious way).Those pieces are also the ones that make me feel like I have only seen the beginnings of what Waller’s vision will ultimately evolve into, as he has absorbed a impressive array of eclectic and radical influences, but they are only slowly, subtly, and seamlessly being assimilated into an aesthetic that is fundamentally grounded in melody and increasingly focused on making a direct, human connection.While it is no secret that I love wild ideas and ambitious experimentation for their own sake, the best albums tend to be the those that manage to tether those impulses to a center that has soul and strong hooks.To his credit, Waller seems to intuitively grasp that, though for now his feet are planted mostly on the side of melodicism.
This latest release from Sean McCann picks up right where 2018's excellent Saccharine Scores left off, striking a lovely balance between stretched, blurred, and fragmented orchestral music and distracted, surreal snatches of spoken word. In the best way, McCann's recent work feels like eavesdropping on his subconconcious mind (though it is thankfully a subconscious mind with all of the boring bits edited out). Much likeits predecessor, Puck is a series of warmly beautiful reveries swirling with mental detritus that feels meaningful, yet those impressions elude any connections or context that might illuminate what that meaning possibly could be. As a result, Puck is frequently quite moving in a profoundly ineffable way. McCann proves himself to be remarkably adept at mimicking how memory works, as we do not get to choose what lingers and what disappears: mundane scenes, fleeting impressions, and legitimately important moments all jumble together in a weird stew and there is no predicting what will bubble up to the surface next (or why). In lesser hands, an album in this vein would probably feel like a self-conscious attempt to blow my mind with wild surrealist juxtapositions, but McCann largely gets the tone and the execution exactly right: Puck is a beautifully casual, organic, fragile, and intimate album. It is quite possibly McCann's best as well.
It is very tempting to describe Puck as essentially Saccharine Scores, Vol. II, as the two albums are very similar stylistically and even feature some of the same source material.However, that glib description would not do justice to McCann's subtle and ingenious evolution over the last year, as Puck feels like an even deeper plunge into his subconsciousness and soul, blithely cannibalizing and recontextualizing older work into something compellingly novel and even more poignant.That is especially true of the album's first half, as the three-part "Folded Portraits" suite is primarily sourced from rehearsal recordings made for "Portraits of Friars" in Stockholm last year.Collaged into those recordings, however, are a number of other pieces ranging from 2018's "A Folded Rose" to snatches of much earlier recordings dating from as far back as 2008.In essence, McCann has seamlessly blurred together his solo home recordings with his recent ensemble compositions to weave something hauntingly elusive, shifting, and emotionally resonant. The album's scrawled, handwritten liner notes provides a loose road map to unraveling which earlier pieces surface in which new context, but the blurring of lines in these collages is so seamless that the lineage of any individual fragment is more or less irrelevant: all of those disparate threads decisively belong here now (it just took some of them many years to reach their proper destination).
While the opening "Nightfall" beautifully transforms from a haze of echoing voices and sensuously swelling strings to a swirling, richly textured crescendo of string loops and twinkling piano, the strongest pieces on the album are the more longform works "Broth" and "Puck."The former falls into the "Portraits of Friars"-derived suite and gradually blossoms from a delicate piano piece into a swooning, heavenly crescendo of massed strings and female voices.Further enhancing the experience are some very feral-sounding vocals from McCann himself, which he describes as "recordings of me gagging and yowling in my car."While that admittedly sounds jarring on paper, it is actually perversely beautiful in execution, as McCann weaves a gorgeous and immersive spell from a host of "false starts and stops and tests," yet makes it seem like all that beauty is a merely a veil concealing something far more ragged and primal.
Functioning as a preview for a work-in-progress record, the two songs that make up An Exercise in Defascination (which will appear as different mixes on the album proper upon its completion) herald the theme of deconstructing giallo films that will appear there. Drawing from film soundtracks, as well as the overall themes of that specific style of horror film, Contrastate distill those very essences into a brief teaser of terror and surrealism perfectly.
Giallo has always occupied its own niche of horror film due to some general stylistic consistencies:mystery and detective plots, over the top violence, and soundtracks that draw heavily on prog, hard rock, and jazz styles.With a healthy mix of supernatural tinges and mental illness, it is a distinct type of film and, like the predominantly American slasher films they inspired, are often extremely similar to one another and perhaps not the most unique of movie experiences.
Contrastate capture this right from the cover:yellow (which is what giallo translates to, referencing a type of pulp novel with yellow covers) with blood red, and a sickly yellow record contained within.The band wastes no time setting the stage on the title piece:haunting synth strings, creepy echoes, and unsteady tape effects make for an entirely unsettling start.From there the soundtrack references are immediate:pummeling drums, jagged guitar stabs, and decaying keyboards appear at times, sounding like a deconstructed and cut up take on Goblin’s scores, with the addition of some scraping blades and what sounds like power drills to add a bit of Foley work to really drive the point home.
On the other side, "Spasmo" features Contrastate working with traditional spooky organ sounds at the onset.With fragments of vocals and prominent bass guitar (anyone who has seen Dario Argento's classic of the genre Deep Red knows how integral the instrument is to the mood of that film), the overall sound lies somewhere between synth soundtrack and noir blues.Compared to the other side of the record, there is more space and a tense, though less terrifying mood throughout.
As Gog, Michael Bjella has developed a rather expansive catalog of bleak, heavy music, largely centered around guitar, noise, and extremely dark moods. On 2015’s collaborative record with Robert Skrzyński, Black Box Recordings, he shifted his focus to more abstract, noisier fronts. For his debut release as Distance Machine, he has mixed up the plans a bit more. Things are still oppressively dark for the most part but in a subtler, ambient context that reference classic works of the style while still showing Bjella’s own spin on it.
Throughout this self-titled tape, Bjella chooses to work largely from a palette of sampled strings and bassy electronics, coming across in many ways as a throwback to the early days of dark ambient.Hints of early Lustmord and solo works from Mick Harris and James Plotkin emanate from poorly lit cavernous walls of sound that Bjella is composing from within.
Slow, bowed strings sounds open "The More Severe the Initiation the More Sacred the Dance," solidifying the sound into a very dramatic one.Bjella layers strings on top of one another, building into a dense film score like atmosphere that is a little too commanding to function in that capacity.He uses the full 16+ minute duration to allow the darkness to unfold.Strings are pared with swirling electronics and more abstract, unrecognizable bits that eventually closes on a haunting, ghostly note.
The mood does not stay as monochromatic throughout, however."Lorri & Tess" features him stripping back some layers of the mix, allowing a bit more room to breathe amidst the heavier tones.Overall though, there is not as much darkness to be had here, with some actual gentle, delicate moments that pass through.By no means is it a relaxed piece of music, but it does show a drifting, less oppressive approach to Bjella’s style.
The final piece, "Send Us More Chuck Berry," in some ways is like a hybrid of the two preceding compositions.Throughout a span of 18 minutes he reintroduces the darker tinges, more understated and weaved throughout pleasant building waves of sound.The heavier bits are present, but restrained, and as the sound becomes denser, this gloom becomes more pronounced. He also takes multiple opportunities to pause, and then restart the piece with a slightly altered arrangement.It becomes a repetitive, yet captivating motif throughout.
There are certainly similarities in Distance Machine to Michael Bjella's other work under his own name and as Gog, but the shift to dark ambient sounds makes for a distinct identity.The feeling is entirely contemporary, but I certainly felt some influence (direct or indirect) from the short lived isolationism genre in the mid to late 1990s.As a fan of that from its inception, which was during my formative high school years, there was a warm bit of nostalgia for me throughout the bleak layers of sound.Even without my personal bias, however, it is an excellent piece of music from beginning to end.
The Students of Decay label has had an impressive run of being way ahead of the curve over the years, as Alex Cobb’s imprint was responsible for the first major US releases from artists like Sarah Davachi and Natural Snow Buildings. The latest artist to be welcomed into that pantheon is Sante Fe-based composer Theodore Cale Schafer, making his vinyl debut after a handful of cassette releases and a very bizarre spoken word/conceptual album on Spain's Angoisse label. Cobb describes the album as "diaristic" and prioritizing "spontaneity and ephemerality," which seems as apt a description of Schafer's fragile, hiss-soaked vignettes as any, as the aesthetic of Patience is definitely an elusive and impressionistic one. When Schafer hits the mark just right, however, the results are strikingly beautiful, achieving a rare balance of simplicity, intimacy, and soft-focus unreality.
It is a bit too early for a definitive prediction at this point, but there is a decent chance that Theodore Cale Schafer has presciently tapped into an imminent new zeitgeist in experimental music.I am basing this entirely on the fact that Schafer independently wound up in roughly the same place at the same time as Sean McCann, whose Puck was just released this week.The two artists share a very similar vision of acoustic naturalism, drifting conversations, and distracted, diffuse beauty, though they are separated by a significant difference in scope: McCann composes for ensembles, while Schafer's approach has a much more homespun, "bedroom-recording" appeal.For the most part, the eight sketchlike soundscapes that comprise Patience sound like they could have been recorded on a four-track using just a guitar, a piano, and some effects pedals.There are also some moments that seem like they have been more deliberately shaped and processed, yet the bulk of the album seems rooted in loose improvisations that have been fleshed out a bit with an additional layer or two."Blue Fleece" is the only significant aberration in that regard, as Schafer combines an Oval-style skipping guitar figure with warm ambient drones and a surreal swirl of submerged-sounding field recordings.Far more representative is the opening "Gold Chain," in which fragmented and rippling guitar and piano motifs lazily intertwine in a slow dance while distant voices creep into increased prominence.
Though they sometimes take divergent shapes, all of the pieces combine to seamlessly weave an absorbing spell that feels like a dreamlike and poetic gallery of hazy memories and lingering emotional impressions.At its best, Patience evokes a languorous cascade of moments like sleepily watching swaying curtains and the play of sunlight from the comfort of a bed or blearily watching the blurred lights of a city at night from the windows of a train.I am at a loss for a memory to match Patience's most gorgeous piece, though, as "It's Late" evokes an altered state that I have yet to experience.If I had to guess, however, I would say it probably resembles being serenaded by comforting, but lysergically distorted, wind chimes after I have just collapsed in front of a remote cabin in a feverish delirium.It is an absolutely perfect and sublime piece of music and I cannot think of anyone who has done anything similar nearly as well as Schafer does it here.
The album’s other near-masterpiece is the enigmatically titled "No Piano," which weaves a gently tumbling reverie from a warmly lovely melodic fragment that woozily loops and overlaps with itself.I would not necessary describe the remaining pieces as a significant step down in quality, as they do a fine job at sustaining the album's languorous and lovely reverie, yet they tend to be a bit less distinctive.Or they merely fall short of achieving the illusion of a lazily cascading flow of memory fragments that just organically sprang into being without the intervention of instruments, amps, pedals, or tapes.In the former category, I would place the quavering ambient haze of the closing "Hinoki."The latter is best represented by "IWYWCB," which kind of resembles a lo-fi Andrew Chalk: disjointed and pointillist guitar figures bleed together and intertwine over a field recording that sounds like a train slowly approaching a desolate seaside town in the dead of night.It is a likable piece, but a fundamentally limited one: the guitars are relatively unprocessed and the central theme eventually fades away without ever evolving into anything more.  
That "unpolished spontaneity" approach is the album's only real flaw, as Schafer's endearingly loose, organic, and casual aesthetic occasionally errs on the side of undercooked: it is very easy to imagine a better version of "IWYWCB" made from the exact same notes in the exact same places, but with added processing or effects employed to wring out a bit more texture and depth.Based on the more composed and meticulously constructed work from 2017's Debt//Duet tape, however, that simplicity and lack of embellishment was very clearly a conscious decision rather than a lack of skill.It is certainly a curious decision though.I am also surprised at how understated the non-musical elements are on this album, as field and voice recordings were the primary focus of some of Schafer's earlier releases.After hearing FaceTime (2017), Patience almost seems insufficiently diaristic: Schafer went from being extremely intimate to presenting decontextualized audio fragments of his life in a very veiled and cryptic way.Somewhere between those two poles lies the kernel of more emotionally resonant album.That said, while I have some minor issues with the details of the execution, I have none at all with Schafer’s overall vision.In fact, I kind of love it, particularly "It’s Late," which is as good anything anyone has released this year (to my ears, anyway).When he is at the peak of his game, Schafer explores an extremely precarious space between form and formlessness (and chance and intention) with unerring intuition and lightness of touch and it is a damn impressive achievement.As such, Patience is an impressively strong release with some genuine flashes of brilliance.
"Steven Stapleton;s iconoclastic Nurse With Wound project now enters its fifth decade, marked with this lavish boxed set of all-new music titled Trippin' Musik. Consisting of three vinyls in dayglo orange, yellow and green, the collection comes with no tracklisting and no indication of what order in which the listener ought to listen to it."