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.
A 4-hour work recorded at Steamroom (O'Rourke's studio) between 2017 and 2018.
Detailed and delicate electronic layers, processed instruments, and ambiguous field recordings come together in a slow-moving, fascinating kaleidoscope with multiple reflections and wrong turns, always in constant state of flux. The finely crafted art of subterfuge.
To Magnetize Money and Catch a Roving Eye: four CDs – a hypnotic, multi-faceted, labyrinthine piece which flows as slowly as a river while speeding back through memory, and shows all the talent of Jim O'Rourke.
Fifty years after his debut release, Bill Fay – one of Britain's most enigmatic and celebrated singer-songwriters – returns with a new album, Countless Branches. Countless Branches will be released January 17th on CD, LP and Deluxe 2xLP, featuring artwork by Benjamin A Vierling.
Sounding more sparse and succinct than his previous records, Countless Branches collects compositions drawn from the trove of material Fay has amassed over 40 years. Unfinished songs emerge with newly written words and melodies on Fay's recurring themes – nature, the family of man, the cycle of life and the ineffable vastness of it all – as if they had been lying in wait to find their place in our current zeitgeist. The resulting ten songs are as pointed and poignant as anything he has ever recorded.
His third release for the label, alike previous acclaimed recordings Life Is People (2012) and Who Is The Sender? (2015), was produced by Joshua Henry – with the cast list slimmed down from previous sessions. Guitarist Matt Deighton remains as Fay's trusted MD and the musicians have mostly all played on Fay's albums in the past. But both Henry and Fay thought that, this time, there should be more of Bill on his own at the piano, or with minimal accompaniment.
It's at the piano, alongside some rudimentary home recording equipment, where Bill has been composing music in the intervening decades between his first and most-recent album at every chance he could get. His newest material retains the awestruck, inquisitive feel of those early songs. They often evoke landscapes, ancient and sacred places, as their author traverses the outdoors to marvel at it all. And he is doing it all from that corner of his room at the piano, while the word about his work continues to grow and spread like so many branches. For decades now, Bill Fay's songs have been his ambassadors. While still reluctant to play live or make public appearances, Fay's resolve and his purity shine through the work and make him a special artist, finding his wider world from that corner of the room – and long may he continue to do so.
"Mechanosphere is Cam Deas' abstract yet poignant second album exploring ideas of rhythmic dissonance and head-spinning proprioceptions for The Death of Rave. Following directly from his cultishly-acclaimed mini-LP Time Exercises, which was surprisingly deployed in Richie Hawtin's recent "CLOSE COMBINED - LIVE" mix and hailed as "Holy F#ck-What is This?!?" by Brainwashed, his new album applies rich polychromatic colour to his signature rhythmic constructions with a greatly heightened emotive traction and broader appeal while only going deeper on his radical ideas about the fundamentals of sound and composition. Big recommendation if you're into Autechre, Xenakis, Ligeti, Rashad Becker.
Using a computer-controlled modular synth, Cam takes the simple idea of layering pitches in multiple tempi to Nth degrees, resulting in a sensational and warped sense of temporality and gravity-defying physics. Effectively placing pitch on a scale in a similar way to Conlon Nancarrow's player-piano programming or even Ligeti's famous metronome experiment, Cam explores solutions to the problem of grid-locked linearity, or at least perceptions of it, by effectively ripping the rug from under electronic music convention to make his music appear as though in perpetual freefall, or a process of omnidirectional contraction/expansion that never quite resolves - always the same, ever different.
In Mechanosphere listeners effectively navigate through the music by a loose means of pattern recognition, picking out accentuated kicks and hits that pierce thru Cam's incredibly dense swells of endless metallic tone. But where his Time Exercises LP was unreservedly abstract and emotive in an alien sense, his follow-up practically sounds as though aliens have developed a form of 3D midi folk-jazz or court music for bacchanals and spiritual reasons.
From the vertiginous scale of "Ascension," thru the the jaw-dropping hyper stepper "Slip," to the controlled chaos of "Reflect, Deflect," and ultimately the deeply solemn yet discordantly lush finale of shearing metallic pitches in "Solitude," Cam offers an often shocking and ever fascinating grasp of electronic music’s potential to relate hard-to-communicate but intuitively felt ideas to the body and emotions. It's a sober but incredibly wondrous sound, and only confirms that Cam's seismic stylistic transition this decade from preeminent, post-Takoma 12-string guitar player to visionary synthesist was certainly worthwhile."
"Andy Stott's first release since 2016 and first EP since 2011, It Should Be Us is a double EP of slow and raw productions for the club, recorded this year and following on from a series of EPs that started with Passed Me By and We Stay Together early this decade.
Recorded fast and loose over the summer, these 9 tracks (8 on the vinyl) harness a pure and bare-boned energy, melodies subsumed by drum machines and synths; slow, rugged abandon. It is all about rhythmic heat and disorientation, pure dance and DJ specials rendered at an unsteady pace, from percolated house and percussive rituals to moody tripped-out burners.
There will be a new Andy Stott album in 2020, but in the meantime... this one’s for dancing."
Sound In Silence is happy to announce the addition of Astatine to its roster of artists, presenting his new album Global Exposure.
Astatine is the solo project of Stéphane Recrosio, based in Paris, France. For about two decades Recrosio is better known as member of the post-rock/slowcore band Acetate Zero with whom he has done several sublime releases on labels such as Arbouse Recordings, Intercontinental, Claire’s Echo, Drumkid Records and others, and shared the stage with The Album Leaf, Encre, Empress, Rothko, The New Year and Chris Brokaw, among others. Since 2011 Astatine has released numerous albums, EPs and singles on labels such as Cotton Goods, Cantos Propaganda, [A…]UTOPROD, Éditions Vibrisse, Doubtful Sounds and Recrosio’s own labels Orgasm and Fissile.
Global Exposure, Astatine’s new full-length album and first for Sound In Silence, features twenty new compositions with a total duration of something more than 46 minutes. Utilizing fuzzy electric guitars, delicate acoustic guitar arpeggios, mumbled and distorted vocals, minimal bass lines, rough drums, heavily processed found sounds, loops of abstract noises and field recordings, Recrosio creates one of his finest works to date. The album also features Laurent Box, Recrosio’s bandmate in Acetate Zero, who contributes on two tracks, while George Mastrokostas (aka Absent Without Leave) expertly did the mastering, highlighting the album’s lo-fi sounds, balanced by the tape hiss of old 4 and 8-track recorders. Bringing together influences from lo-fi, post-rock, shoegaze and experimental, Global Exposure is an album full of noisy soundscapes and ambient interludes, reminiscent of Acetate Zero and the early works of Hood, Sebadoh and Guided By Voices.
Sound In Silence is proud to welcome Memory Drawings to its family, presenting their new mini album Phantom Lights.
Memory Drawings is an Anglo/American collective led by Minneapolis-raised, Casablanca-based hammered dulcimer player Joel Hanson (Judgement Of Paris), alongside guitarist/multi-instrumentalist Richard Adams (Hood, The Declining Winter, Western Edges), violinist Sarah Kemp (Lanterns On The Lake, Brave Timbers), pianist Gareth S Brown (Hood) and multi-instrumentalist Chris Cole (Movietone, Manyfingers). Since 2012 they have released three albums and two EPs, all praised by critics, on labels such as Second Language, Hibernate Recordings, Zozaya Records and their own Signal Records.
Phantom Lights, originally self-released by the band last year as a very limited tour CD and now getting a wider release by Sound In Silence, is a short form album that moves on from the marvellous sweeping The Nearest Exit album with a pick and mix example of what this band are good at. Memory Drawings continue to manipulate their dulcimer, guitar and violin sound into inventive new shapes and on the title track create their most vibrant moment yet. As on their latest album, the band's sonic palette is more expansive and unpredictable than their first two albums and after the addition of the polyrhythmic drumming and extra instrumentation from Chris Cole, they are now also joined by Yvonne Bruner (Big Hat) who provides some ethereal vocals on the last track of this mini album. Phantom Lights consists of six tracks with a total duration of about 25 minutes. Four of them are new and unreleased, one is getting a release in physical format for the first time, as so far it was only available as a download on an older digital EP, and as with all their previous releases a remix is also included, this time from brilliant Bristol-based electronic composer Barnaby Carter. Carefully mastered by Antony Ryan (ISAN) in Denmark, Phantom Lights is a perfect mix of post-rock, folk and modern classical, highly recommended for devotees of Pygmalion-era Slowdive, Hex-era Bark Psychosis, Tortoise, Rachel’s and of course mid period Hood recordings, Brave Timbers and Manyfingers.
Netlabel Vulpiano Records is celebrating its 10th anniversary with a cassette tape compilation as a benefit for nonprofit digital library Internet Archive (archive.org). Limited to 100 copies and featuring exclusive and favorite tracks from the label's international roster of artists from Australia, England, France, Italy, Japan, Portugal, Russia, Spain, and the USA. Each cassette is hand-numbered and comes with either a holographic tarot card (78 copies) or an Artist Trading Card collage on a playing card (22 copies), selected randomly. The genre-spanning release celebrates the musically diverse and collaborative spirit of the long-running label with selections in drone, folk, electronic, and more.
For a label founded on a Creative Commons ethos, Internet Archive has long been an indispensable host for Vulpiano: a place for our artists' work to be free to download, share, copy and redistribute.
The tape features drone / folk duo Natural Snow Buildings' first track since the 2016 release of Aldebaran: "Charles Thomas Tester". (Cassette exclusive)
Vulpiano Records logo art by Solange Gularte of Natural Snow Buildings.
Album layout and logo edit by Marilyn Roxie.
Playing card collages by Dan Shea and Marilyn Roxie.
Michael Gira may have announced that Leaving Meaning would feature Swans continuing in a different form after closing the book on The Glowing Man in 2016. The change has been comparably more subtle than the stylistic shifts of the band throughout their nearly 40 year career, but the progress is distinct. This record draws not only from the recent albums, but also Gira's work with the interim Angels of Light project as well. The album is the perfect blend of the past and the recent, but looks direction to the future as well.
The most significant difference between this album and the recent Swans catalogue is essentially Gira dialing back the intensity both in arrangements and performance.This is abundantly clear on a song such as "Annaline":shimmering accents drift above sparse piano and acoustic guitar, with Gira's vocals front and center.The sound is rather consistent with what he was doing with The Angels of Light in the early part of the 2000s:stripped down folk-y ballads with an experimental undercurrent throughout.On "What is This?," Swans go a bit further, melding those folk elements into an almost 1960s pop number that is brilliant, and somewhat out of character.
The folk sound should not come as a surprise, because many of the band members from Angels of Light are present.The core band here is Kristof Hahn on guitars (a member of Angels of Light as well as recent Swans), drummer Larry Mullins, who played with Angels of Light, and bassist/keyboardist Yoyo Roehm.There are also a significant number of guest appearances, and while this is nothing new for a Swans record, the list is particularly expansive.Most notably is a slew of Angels of Light and Swans collaborators:Thor Harris, Christopher Pravdica, Dana Schechter, Phil Puleo, Paul Wallfisch, and Norman Westberg, who still contributes some guitar.Both Anna and Maria von Hausswolff supply choral vocals, and "The Nub" is a completely different line-up, featuring The Necks and Baby Dee on vocals.
Structure and composition is another point where Leaving Meaning departs from the recent works.For one, a quick scan of the song lengths show that Gira has reined things in a bit compared to The Glowing Man.There are no near-half hour songs here, and the longest ones max out around 12 minutes.This change also impacts the song structures themselves.I likened the other recent albums to a rock take on Hermann Nitsch's compositions:long, extended periods of repetition culminating is pummeling, intense outbursts of sound.
The repetition is still all over this album, but here in the more restrained context it feels more pleasantly hypnotic than tension building.At times it seems like Gira is intentionally toying with expectations of this.The reworking of "Amnesia" from 1992's Love of Life transforms the song from its original vaguely goth rock/industrial sound into an acoustic ballad.There is a symphonic build just before the chorus, but extremely short lived and quickly falls away, never giving the visceral relief it hints at.
At other times, the line between the other recent material is a bit more direct."The Hanging Man" has that oddly funky, blues lurch and mechanical repetition so prominent on The Glowing Man and The Seer, but the intensity held back a bit, even when Gira goes into full "speaking-in-tongues" mode.The same style permeates "Some New Things," which is a hypnotically repeating but conventionally rock sounding piece."Sunfucker" is another song that calls back to the last few albums, but with the von Hausswolff's choral backing vocals and Gira's layered chanting vocal delivery, the feel starts to drift into snake handling religious revival territory.
Given the relatively short time between Michael Gira's announcement of the reconfiguration of Swans and this newest release, it is not surprising that the sound is not too far removed from the sprawling trilogy of the most recent albums (The Seer,To Be Kind, The Glowing Man).The shift may not be as drastic as it was transitioning from Children of God to The Burning World, or Soundtracks for the Blind into My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky, but it is clear that Gira does not want to fall into a creative rut.Those recent records were great, but to have stylistically followed the same trend into a fourth double album would have been a bit too much.Leaving Meaning manages to brilliantly retain the sound, but change things around to make it sound familiar, yet entirely new and revitalized and thankfully seems to hint at more to come.
Justin Broadrick and Kevin Martin founded Zonal in 2000 and, other than a very limited CDR release, saw the project falling by the wayside, surely impacted by the collapse of Broadrick’s Godflesh a few years later. During this time Martin reconfigured his solo project The Bug into a blown out dancehall/dub/grime project, collaborating with a multitude of different MCs and vocalists. However, the two decided to reactivate Zonal to specifically pick up where Techno Animal left off with 2001’s The Brotherhood of the Bomb. That lineage is clearly heard via the distorted beats and processed synths, and with vocalist Moor Mother joining them for the first half, it culminates into a brilliant and fresh, yet familiar sound that stands strong with any of the duo’s previous collaborations.
Guest appearances between the two aside, such as on The Bug’s Angels & Devils record, Broadrick and Martin did not collaborate at all during this post-Godflesh era, which was surprising given the number of projects they had together in the past:Techno Animal, Ice, Curse of the Golden Vampire, God, the Sidewinder, and Sub Species.It never seemed as if this was due to any bad blood between the two, simply that each of them busy with their own projects.So when it was announced that Zonal would be recording as the modern resurgence of Techno Animal, I was rather excited.
Techno Animal’s Re-Entry was a hugely impactful record for me.Starting from Godflesh early in high school, I navigated my way through as many Broadrick related projects as I could find in those pre/early days of the internet.Re-Entry was an important one, because it opened my eyes to how diverse and varied electronic music could be, beyond the Industrial/EBM stuff I had mostly been listening to and the dance music I did not care much about.The combination of styles and dense, unconventional production just clicked with me perfectly, and I still rank it among my favorite records nearly 25 years after its release.
Like most of the Techno Animal work that succeeded it, Wrecked is rather different.It retains the idiosyncratic production, but the density and distortion that was so prevalent on latter day Techno Animal is used more sparingly.The first half spotlights Moor Mother’s contributions, with Martin and Broadrick stepping back as producers.The full range of their styles is apparent here, with opening song "Body of Wire," featuring Moor Mother’s delivery more in spoken-word form, as the two construct expansive, ambient space in the background.Both vocals and music have equal billing, as a true collaboration should.
For both "In a Cage" and "System Error," that old TA feel is apparent immediately.The crunchy, snappy beats and grinding synths make it clear the duo have not missed a step.The former has a less structured and more experimental structure overall, while the latter is a bit denser and almost, at least in construction, along the lines of more conventional hip-hop.Throughout both Moor Mother’s vocals are exceptionally strong, effortlessly sliding from spoken word, passages of singing, rapping, and even a bit of reggae toasting."Catalyst" has a slow, open sound that feels nicely aquatic, like a nod back to their collaborations with Porter Ricks.As rich and diverse as the music is, Moor Mother’s combined sung/rapped vocals of gender politics and intersectionality are never overshadowed.
Overall, the second half of the record does not differ drastically even though it consists exclusively of instrumentals, with the most significant difference being more frequent shifts in structure that would have otherwise been overshadowed by vocals.The title piece builds strongly from a filtered crunch and what sounds like a broken drum machine keeping the beat."Debris" leads of with alien static and haunting tones that lurk below a slowly paced, but metallic tinged rhythms.The pacing and production makes me think dub, but the final product is quite far removed from the expectations of that label.
Just as on the first half, one of Zonal’s greatest strengths is that, even amidst all of the distortion, effects, and processing, they construct very catchy, memorable songs that subtly develop as they go on."Black Hole Orbit" is a thick mass of buzzing synths, filtered rhythms, and heavily treated electronics that nod back to latter day TA.However, even with all of these messy elements it is an extremely catchy bit of music that shows the songwriting that actually goes on here.The noise and distortion is right up front on "S.O.S." and the multiple layers quickly stack up into one of the most grimy, dense compositions on here.However, it quickly becomes apparent that there is a pleasant, lush melodic undercurrent buried under all of the dirt, which makes for a perfect counterpoint.
Considering the fluid nature of the Techno Animal project since its inception, from the industrial pummel of Ghosts to the dual hip-hop and ambient sounds of Re-Entry, the techno heavy Babylon Seeker, and then the progressively noisier beats that followed, I had no worry that they were simply going to tread old ground.Which is something they certainly do not do on Wrecked.The extremely varied talents of Moor Mother’s vocals make for a strong, unique first half, and their perfect synergy as far as composition goes stands out perfectly throughout the entire record.For something as I was as hyped to check out as Wrecked, the final product was something even better than I had hoped.
As you lay on your back in the deep grass on a shadowy late-summer afternoon…tracing the outlines of patterns on the inside of your eyelids illuminated in translucense beneath the sun….ruminating, drifting in and out of sleep. Your dreams flirt with the irrational fears of the dark, of being left alone, of infinity…of being lost in corn fields reaching taller than the sky, of the comfort of feet dangling in a cold lake and splinters from running on a sun-dried summer dock. The world once felt new and alive…now through a haze, lost from the opacity of time.
Ohio is a new project from of 12k founder Taylor Deupree and long-time label-mate and collaborator Corey Fuller. The genesis of Ohio, besides the desire to work on a full album together, was them realizing they were both born in the US state of Ohio, not far from each other, and spent their earlier years crafting young memories there before moving away. This ended up being a simple, but interesting point of departure for the project because these early, hazy memories provided compelling conceptual roadmaps for the album as well as become inspiration for the song titles.
With no lack of irony the project started with a playful cover of singer/songwriter Damien Jurado's "Ohio." Deeply loved by both Deupree and Fuller, covering this song liberated them from working in their traditional "ambient" comfort-zone, challenging them with new structures and new directions. Their version of "Ohio" slowed the song down and explored acoustic and electric guitars, vocals, harmonies, pop-centric song structure, field recordings and a plethora of subtle studio fun (the looped clicking motor of a Roland RE-201 Space Echo being used as a "hi-hat" of sorts) and layers.
The project expanded from there and moved gradually as they very much felt working in the same physical space was important to its core. Writing, overdubbing, mixing and editing continued as the two found time to make the journeys between Tokyo and New York to share a studio. Each visit the songs would become more refined and be pushed into new and unexpected directions. A cathartic intensity found its way into the music echoing the intensity of life but at the same time remaining grounded.
The four years spent creating Upward, Broken, Always resulted in an album that engages the dichotomy between ambience and intensity. The hazy reworking of Jurado's "Ohio," or the duet for acoustic guitars recorded in the woods outside of Deupree's studio contrasts with the surprising, beautifully intense swells of overdriven guitar. Faraway drums and Fuller's ghostly vocals further expand the sonic image.
During one of their final editing sessions, with the accidental muting of musical tracks, the interludes at the end of each LP side were born. Fragments of preceding songs, stripped to a ghostly minimum like those distant Ohio memories.
Upward, Broken, Always is released in online formats and as a limited edition of 125 double 12” LPs. The LP art features an aerial photograph of the state of Ohio as well as the barn from Deupree's childhood home inside the gatefold jacket. There are 3 sides of audio on the release with Side D of the 2nd record being a full-side graphical etching of a topographical map.
Randall Taylor has quietly emerged as one of the most talented and distinctive tape loop artists in the world over the last few years, steadily releasing a prolific flow of cassettes on a variety of labels. Remarkably, however, Between Distant and Remote is his first vinyl release, which I suppose makes this an auspicious occasion career-wise. It is also the first time I have personally delved seriously into his oeuvre despite my general predisposition towards warbly loops and obsessive repetition. I suspect the reason Amulets has eluded me until now is that Taylor uses tapes as a compositional tool to craft warm, dreamlike reveries of processed guitar ambiance rather than making the tapes the focus. Of course, the tapes very clearly are the focus in Taylor's process, but the finished compositions that ultimately emerge could easily be mistaken for the work of an ambient-minded guitarist with a passion for lush layering. If Taylor were a lesser artist, that approach would disappoint me, but Between Distant and Remote scratches a similar itch to classic shoegaze-damaged drone artists like Belong (and it gets there in an impressively inventive way).
The opening "Process of Unlearning" is quite a beautiful and effective statement of intent, as it begins with a loop of an enigmatic squelching noise and slowly builds into a roiling sea of lovely soft-focus guitar noise.Plenty of other artists do guitar-based ambient drone quite well, yet Taylor shows a strong intuition for finding interesting and effective ways to make his work stand out as particularly distinctive.I am especially fond of the wobbly, stuttering tape sounds that become the heart of the piece, yet the more impressive mastery lies in the piece's thoughtful, subtle, and effective dynamic arc.To his credit, Taylor was not content to simply craft a pretty swirl of shimmering and quivering guitars, as an undercurrent of distorted, sizzling chords steadily drives the piece towards something that feels genuinely epic by the end of its four-minute duration.I cannot think of any other artists working in similar stylistic territory that share Taylor's knack for constant forward motion and endless subtle shifts in emotional shading, as there is a definite tendency in the genre to linger in a state of floating or submerged bliss.The latter unquestionably has its appeal, but it is refreshing to encounter such a lull-free addition to the canon.Moreover, that sense of unwavering purposefulness brings me to the most curious aspect of Amulets: Taylor essentially uses tape loops to make himself a one-man rock band and he does it very well.He also uses his tapes to give his sounds a warbling and frayed texture that I very much enjoy, but I am struck by how modestly he employs his arsenal of walkmen: almost every loop is designed to seamlessly blend into the quivering haze rather than assert itself.It feels like Taylor just wanted to make languorously lovely multilayered guitar music that he could play live and the tapes are merely the ingenious way he found to make that work.
While the whole album is quite good, I most prefer the pieces where Taylor balances dreamlike beauty with ragged edges and gnarled textures.In that regard, "North Coast, Falling" steals the show, as its lazily rippling arpeggios are embellished with a stammering and dissolving melodic loop that feels simultaneously grinding and strangled.And then a snarling and sputtering tide of guitar noise slowly rises up and threatens to consume everything.In less assured hands than Taylor's, that is exactly what would have happened, but the noise ultimately dissipates to make way for a tender and lovely coda.Elsewhere, "Where The Land Meets the Sea" casts a delicately lovely spell with a woozy two-note pulse and a chiming, music box-esque melody before erupting into a seismic crescendo of dense and sizzling power chords.The following "No Signal," on the other hand, largely eschews Amulets' usual beauty in favor of something that sounds like a howling and mournful guitar catharsis accompanied by roiling static and ringing buoys.It is quite a quietly incendiary piece, displaying a passion and rawness that I would not normally associate with either tape loops or guitar-based ambient.Remarkably, that hot streak lasts right up until the end of the album and each piece manages to have its own distinct character.In "Feigning Night," for example, exhalation-like washes of tape hiss and backwards melodies gradually blossom into a densely shuddering mass of layered guitars, rumbling bass drones, and distantly twinkling piano motifs.Later, the closing "Like Warm Air (We Rose)" feels like I just unexpectedly tuned into an angelic radio station as the earth shakes and burns around me.
As I listen to Between Distant and Remote more and more, I keep finding new details and nuances to love, so I am hard-pressed to find much to gripe about: there are seven songs on this album and every single one is wonderful in its own way.That said, I do wish Taylor had used non-musical loops a bit more frequently and prominently than he does, as some buried voices and environmental sounds would have made the album a more mysterious and complex experience.That is not exactly a shortcoming though–merely an observation about how a great album might have become a somewhat greater one.Truly iconic artists do not just make music that sounds good–they have something extra that gives their work an instantly recognizable personality and soul.For example, Ian William Craig works in similar stylistic terrain, but transcends other artists because his voice brings a human tenderness and vulnerability into his soundscapes.Taylor, for his part, transcends other artists through sheer craftsmanship and unerring songcraft instincts alone.For someone working in the experimental music milieu (and with tape loops, no less), he has a truly exceptional knack for hooks, concision, and textural dynamics.While it admittedly took me a few listens to fully appreciate the depth and vividness of the Amulets vision and see Taylor as a uniquely talented loop wizard rather than an unusually good ambient/drone artist, I got there eventually and can now fully appreciate Between Distant and Remote as the understated masterpiece that it is.This is one of the year's finest albums.