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.
I am embarrassed to say that I naively thought last year's stellar split with Wayne Robert Thomas might be the dawning of a new era, as Dunn's "The Searchers" was a brilliantly distilled masterpiece of focused, sublime beauty. While there is at least one piece on this latest release that attains a similar degree of dazzling, dreamlike perfection, Dunn's flair for grand gestures has returned with a vengeance for From Here To Eternity (an album that is every bit as characteristically infinite as it is characteristically sad). On one level, I dearly wish Dunn would stop burying his brightest moments in overwhelming double- or triple-album avalanches of ambient drone. On another, however, the sprawling scope of this album offers its own pleasures, as immersing myself into a three-hour reverie of billowing, soft-focus suspended animation is quite a quietly lovely and meditative way to spend an afternoon. To Dunn's great credit, however, there are also some menacing spectres of unexpected violence and dissonance lurking within his fog of drones, revealing that the seeming tranquility is a fragile veneer that conceals simmering tensions and enigmatic depths.
Much like Celer's Will Long, Kyle Bobby Dunn is a prolific and beloved figure in the contemporary ambient drone scene with a strong predilection for floating, soft-focus melancholy.While the two diverge in significant ways (Dunn is bitterly droll and fond of epic, monolithic releases), they share a very similar problem: it is extremely hard to make each new batch of elegantly blurred, slow-motion dreamscapes seem different and distinct from previous batches, especially when working with a very constrained, minimal palette.On From Here to Eternity, "Years Later Theme" is probably the most archetypal example of that particular palette, as gently shimmering swells of processed guitar languorously twist together to weave a blissful reverie. I expected to find a lot of such fare scattered through this opus given its extreme length, but Dunn proves to admirably inventive at finding fresh variations upon that familiar template (and he sometimes departs from it almost entirely).For the most part, those twists tend to involve a boiling or grinding undercurrent of harsh guitar noise, though there are also some occasional moments of almost beatific radiance, such as "Boul. Gouin" and "The Flattening."The endlessly shifting contrast and tension between the album's lighter and darker moments is an intriguing framework, as the album feels like a series of heartfelt attempts to recapture the elusive lingering impressions and half-remembered scenes from a lifetime of emotional peaks and valleys.During the most lovely pieces, it is very easy to imagine a flickering, soft-focus film loop that blurs the boundaries between childhood home movies and the sweeping romanticism of Hollywood's golden age.
Though I have no doubt at all that Dunn could have easily assembled an album this massive entirely on his own, he opted to try something a bit different with this release and invited a talented cast of collaborators to flesh out some of these pieces with their own arrangements.Notably, that list includes a murderers' row of artists from Kranky's golden age, as like-minded representatives from loscil, Pan American, Labradford, and Benoit Pioulard all make appearances.Curiously, however, all of their contributions blend quite seamlessly into Dunn's own vision, so it is quite easy to forget that they were even involved.In a few cases, however, Dunn's guests manage to assert themselves in more striking ways.The most impressive example is "Triple Axel on Cremazie," as Michael Vincent Waller's delicately twinkling and achingly beautiful piano motifs transform the warm, gently churning drones into the album's haunting centerpiece.Elsewhere, Josh Barsky adds some lovely organ to the hiss-soaked thrum of "Zendel Holiday Hangover Toccata," while Maryam Sirvan likely had a big hand in the howling and grinding crescendo of the album's closer "Eternity, the Stars & You."With the exception of "Triple Axel," however, Dunn still burns brightest on his own–particularly on "La Stationnement de Finders," which sounds like "The Searchers" being played back on a slightly murky and slowly disintegrating tape.Elsewhere, I was quite fond of "From Over to Wendover," which makes very poignant use of a movie sample for an understated crescendo (a woman's voice breaks through the bleary haze to plead "wait for me!").
I feel comfortable stating that From Here To Eternity is probably Dunn's strongest full-length to date, but he is still basically doing the same thing that he has always done and he has been quite good at it for a long time.The only real difference is that has become a bit more focused over the years.In fact, Kyle Bobby Dunn albums remind me of Haruki Murakami novels: no matter what the ostensible premise might be, Murakami is always irrevocably and obsessively drawn back to the same themes again and again.It feels like he is endlessly chasing an elusive vision and will not stop returning to it until he finally gets it exactly right (or, more likely, dies trying).If I had to guess, I would say that Dunn's own quixotic obsession is a desire to replace the cold harshness of the outside world with an appealingly warm, blurred, and poetic cinema of bittersweet memories.He is admittedly quite adept at conjuring that beautiful and sustained illusion on a grand scale, but it is a precarious edifice and this album in particular reveals an omnipresent darkness gnawing at the edges of that idyll.While the strongest pieces tend to be the ones where the light and dark attain a sort of fragile and temporary internal balance, the true depth and artistry of From Here to Eternity lies in the cumulative power of the whole rather than in its individual moments.
Passageways is John Daniel's most personal work to date. An ode to his childhood home - a secluded apartment complex in Cleveland that his parents managed - Passageways refer to the various connecting hallways running between rooms as much as it refers to the way the passing of time overtakes our perception of spaces that seemed to be endless corridors into discovery and imagination. Passageways is full of submerged melodies, gentle pulls of surging tonal shifts that arc, shimmer and fade into the dark purple hue of the album's shifting overtones. The album rides the line of decaying drones that recall the best of Basinksi or Belong's October Language.
From John:
Passageways is a record about my childhood home.
The "passageways", in this case, are partially referring to hallways.
I grew up in a unique environment - a quiet and secluded 3-story apartment building in the west suburbs of Cleveland. My parents managed the building so our family had two apartments, eventually right next to each other. As a young kid I would adventure around the apartment building and its surrounding property, thick woods and greenery were behind the building and felt like an endless backyard. I attribute much of my early imagination and creativity to this place. My folks will be moving away in the next few years as my Dad plans to retire, so I'm planning on leaving a copy of the record with the building, hidden somewhere. I had lived in that building since I was 4 years old - the idea of your home no longer being there is strange, but change is necessary. This home was simply a "passageway" into the life that I live now- I believe it was instrumental in becoming an artist.
This is my folk record in a way. It is not musically obvious, but more in terms of how I approached the writing: A sense of sentimentality about home, about a place and time.
My first instrument (outside of the drums) was an acoustic guitar, and that's how I started out making solo music. I eventually learned that I wasn't a guitarist and sought more minimal, simple ways of making sounds. But that's really where things started, so I've always felt a connection to that type of music, even in these days of electronic music. I also think there's an idea about electronic music being a bit evasive or emotionally inaccessible at times, or lacking personal transparency. I wanted to challenge expectations of an ambient record by framing it how I would have 10 years ago. This is a development in a side of Forest Management that I've only recently begun to feel, and am doing my best to roll with it.
With the demise of the group Wire in 1980, founder members Bruce Gilbert and Graham Lewis joined forces to create Dome. With the assistance of engineer Eric Radcliffe and his Blackwing Studio, Dome took the ethic of "using the studio as a compositional tool" and recorded and released three Dome albums on their own label in the space of 12 months: DOME (July 1980), DOME 2 (October 1980) and DOME 3 (October 1981). A final fourth album, WILL YOU SPEAK THIS WORD: DOME IV was released on the Norwegian Uniton label in May 1983.
These albums represent some of the most beautifully stark and above all timeless exercises in studio experimentation from early 1980s alternative music scene.
Previously issued in the out of print DOME 1-4+5 box set in 2011. Now available as standalone LP with download card.
Anthony Burr and Charles Curtis present this collection of curated compositions from Alvin Lucier and Morton Feldman. Two Lucier pieces, "August Moon" and "Trio For Clarinet, Cello & Tuba" are presented here for the first time. Liner notes are excerpted from a lecture on Morton Feldman given by Alvin Lucier.
"For Feldman, dynamics serve an acoustical function. When he mitigates a piano attack he reduces that spike of noise that’s at the onset of every piano sound leaving only the sinusoidal pure after-sound. It’s as if he invented electronic music with the piano." Alvin Lucier from liner notes.
"Lucier manages to hear a layer of acoustical physics in Feldman’s music that perhaps no one else would hear. He’s hearing something in Feldman that is actually coming from his own musical world; in a way, hearing his own music in Feldman’s, and drawing inspiration from that."
"Kukangendai is a kick ass rock trio from Kyoto (Tokyo transplants). When I first hear this band live I was instantly transfixed by their minimalist yet illusory primitive, polyrythmic and structural, memory evoking rock narratives. Their energy is completely and transparently palpable yet handled with restraint of the pleasure of a disciplined form dealing with time and articulation. They are a power trio of bass, drums and guitar but the music they play is as much the limbic system of a forest than it is a geode. They started in 2006. They left Tokyo to Kyoto and started the cult venue Soto ("Outside") "to listen to music they hadn’t heard yet" a few years later. They collaborated with Ryuichi Sakamoto last year. They reminded me of James Brown on a heavy binge of Bastro–there's a deep current of both archaic musical tastes and the human desire for articulating that archaism in there, but you shake your ass and get the shouting in… in a punk basement … 13th century version of Breadwinner, the bare soul version. I'm honored and proud to work with this tribe, and to count them amongst friends."
Matthew Sage is a composer, producer, label owner, and publisher based in Chicago, IL. Since his earliest recordings, Sage has carefully considered and crafted each of his various approaches to experimental music. His debut LP A Singular Continent was an endless epic that charted imaginative aural cartography and seemed to soundtrack actual worldbuilding. Now, after five years personal changes and growth, Sage returns with his tried and true sonic trademarks, but with a noticeably liberated approach to his brand of experimental studio music.
Catch a Blessing shows Sage in a much more impulsive light. Where past work existed in space that was cerebral, meditated, and composed, the music here is more natural, playful, and effort-less.
Opting for chance and the unknown rather than rules and conceptual rigor, Sage "practiced" an amorphous technique that led to profound moments of accidental, unplanned beauty. And the perks were plenty. As Sage explains: "Learning to know less and to just feel more about what I am making has become important to me. I like, or am learning to like, the possibility of that openness, that uncertainty. Not knowing. It is uncomfortable, but it is nourishing."
Recorded over a summer in a tiny room on the second floor of a 120-year-old apartment in Chicago, Catch a Blessing is the result of and the meditation on the exquisite exhaust and lavish lushness of his crumbling (and rebuilt) locales.
Presented as a collection of ornately expressionistic portraits of Chicago, Sage approached the album more as paintings or sculptures than musical compositions. Album opener "Avondale Primer Gray" unfurls a calm but vibrant quasi-melody that dissolves into a blur of found sonic objects both familiar unknown. "Lions to Baffle" is a semi-synthetic symphony of muted, sax-laden alien jazz, while "Elevator Straffing" maintains a whirling, glittering hum of echoed dissonance. "Claiming Air Rights" could be the literal sound of a piano floating through space, levitating despite an impossible weight. "Michigan Turquoise" brings an exquisitely eerie hymn with the same ghastly grace of Sparklehorse. Album centerpiece "Window Unit +Three Flat" is an open-ended epic of texture and ambiguity, immediately followed by the warped and trickling elegance of "Polish Triangle." "Wolfe Point Fog" closes Catch a Blessing with peculiar focus, departing with an open-ended and wholly optimistic focus.
The moods and modes are constantly, entirely at odds with themselves: private vs. public, abject vs. profound, rural vs. urban(e), and so on. Where other players of experimental studio music take a more high-minded, often stuffy approach, Catch a Blessing floats in airier, more refreshing modes. It’s endlessly lush but sincerely marked by decay. This is naturalism in the truest sense.
Glottal Wolpertinger was initially conceived as a radio installation for documenta 14, the world's most renowned event for contemporary arts, with each of the tracks broadcasting individually over the course of ten weeks and culminating in a convergence of all eight tracks at a performance in Athens. The pieces consist of microtonally tuned feedback, multispectral drones which Werner modulated and filtered with a purposeful, and indeed vocalized, emphasis given to the different frequencies and textures used. By naming the individual frequency bands, Werner defies traditional tuning systems and instead centers the piece on collaging variable elements. Sonic elements churn and sprawl across the tracks in constant motion. Their drones, combatting for space, entangle one another and oscillate into overtones that shift, build, and wither with fluid motion that blurs the line between consonance and dissonance.
Glottal Wolpertinger's incarnation as a recording is no less potent than its preceding forms, but serves as a continuation of the project's evolution as a distinct listening experience. Werner's apt title for the project embellishes the ambiguity and cognitive dissonance inherent with the work, as the wolpertinger is a creature of European myth which is said to be the mutated result of different species breeding under special circumstances in the Alps. Glottal intonations are those produced by the guttural and throat region of the body, the center of organic sound. According to Werner, the wolpertingers are "bastards, collaged freaks who exist in the grey zone of nature’s perfect plan," the same grey zone in which his pieces live.
Jan St. Werner is a critically acclaimed and internationally recognized sound innovator. In myriad ways – as a solo artist, a collaborator, through his group Mouse On Mars, as a producer, as a lecturer at MIT, or as a professor of Dynamic Acoustic Research at the Academy of Fine Arts, Nuremburg - Werner has challenged traditional approaches to creating and experiencing music. The sixth installment of his "Fiepblatter Catalogue series," Glottal Wolpertinger endeavors to transcribe the phenomenon of sound as anarchic and highly sensitive material. His multilayered presentation of the project highlights the ways in which sound and music can fluctuate and re-constitute depending on context all within one consistent work. In keeping with the series' collaborative nature, the pieces include contributions from guitarists Aaron & Bryce Dessner of The National.
Sound In Silence is happy to announce the addition of MIS+RESS to its roster of artists, presenting his new album entitled Dispellers.
MIS+RESS is the ambient solo project of Brian Wenckebach, based in New Jersey, USA. He is also known as one half of electronica/shoegaze duo Elika, experimental/electronica duo Thee Koukouvaya and lately as member of Measured, a new collaboration project along with Evagelia Maravelias, the other half of Elika, and electronic producer and latter-day Tangerine Dream member, Ulrich Schnauss. To date MIS+RESS has released an album on Somewherecold Records in 2017 and a self-released EP in 2018.
Dispellers is Wenckebach’s second release on Sound In Silence after the, already sold out, mini album Witches’ Jelly by Thee Koukouvaya, his other project along with John O’Hara, back in 2015.
Dispellers is a gorgeous collection of eight calming compositions, centered on ambient atmospheres and dreamy soundscapes. Utilizing mesmerizing melodies and blissful layers of delayed guitars, loops of ethereal textures, heavily processed with reverb and a variety of other effect pedals, Wenckebach creates one of his finest works to date. Dispellers is a wonderful album of nostalgic and emotional content, highly recommended for devotees of Michael Brook, Daniel Lanois, The Durutti Column and July Skies.
Sound In Silence is proud to welcome Western Edges to its family, presenting his debut album Prowess.
Western Edges is the new ambient/electronic solo project of Richard Adams, founder member, alongside his brother Chris, of the legendary Leeds band Hood. Since Hood went on hiatus in 2005, Richard Adams has recorded his music under the moniker of The Declining Winter, either solo or with help of friends such as Martin Cummings (Northerner), Paul Elam (Fieldhead), Mick Harrison (Prolapse, National Screen Service), James Yates (Seamajestea), Barrie Cummings, Joanne Ellis and many others, having released several sublime albums, EPs and singles on labels such as Home Assembly Music, Rusted Rail, Monopsone, Mobeer and Rural Colours, amongst others. He is also member of several other projects such as Memory Drawings, Great Panoptique Winter and Northern Exchange, along with friends such as Joel Hanson (Judgement Of Paris), Sarah Kemp (Brave Timbers, Last Harbour), Gareth S Brown (Hood), Chris Cole (Manyfingers, Movietone), Jason Sweeney (Panoptique Electrical) and others.
Prowess is Adams’ third release on Sound In Silence after two highly acclaimed albums in 2015, Wildness by Great Panoptique Winter and Endless Scenery by The Declining Winter.
Prowess is made up of eight electronic tracks, of blissful ambience and shimmering electronics. These tracks were made to soundtrack the feelings Richard Adams had about the area where he lives in Saltaire, West Yorkshire and the Aire valley, while each one was inspired by a different photograph of the area. Adams skillfully blends together elements of soothing ambient, lo-fi electronica and minimal techno, creating an impressive album full of warm soundscapes, ethereal textures, washes of lush pads, drifting synth layers, hypnotic drones, deep bass lines and minimal beats. Expertly mastered by George Mastrokostas (aka Absent Without Leave), Prowess is a delicate album which appeals to all fans of beatless Boards Of Canada, Aphex Twin, bvdub and late-period Hood.
Recorded live at St. John's Church, Gdansk on Oct 25th 2002.
I Am Angie Bowie (Sine Waves)
The Last Rites Of Spring
'Hammersmith' Deceivers
A Warning From The Sun
The Universe Is A Haunted House
Ostia (The Death Of Pasolini)
I Don't Want To Be The One
Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)
Are You Shivering?
Mixed in 2019 from the original multitrack recordings, this exclusive release is available only from Thighpaulsandra.co.uk.
IMPORTANT: The original limited edition has sold out, but due to high demand we are offering a regular edition of this release, which does not contain either the stickers or the signed certificate. This is a pre-order; these are expected to ship from the end of April 2019. Strictly one copy per customer (although it is indeed possible to add multiples of this item to your cart, any additional purchases will be refunded).
My fascination with the Sublime Frequencies and Nonesuch Explorer labels goes back many years, but it has been quite a long time since I have been properly floored by a revelatory feat of ethnological scavenging or scholarship. I was starting to worry that my ears had lost their capacity for wonder until this 2017 gem from France’s eclectic Akuphone label belatedly crossed my path. Unsurprisingly, the compiler (Vincenzo Della Ratta) previously surfaced on SF with 2016’s Kwangkay: Funerary Music Of The Dayak Benuaq Of Borneo and this album returns to a similar theme, swapping out the funeral music of Borneo for that of Bali. Only part of this album covers field recordings of Balinese funerals, however, as the other half is culled from some truly visceral and mesmerizing rehearsal space recordings of the more contemporary and visionary Dharma Shanti Orchestra. Both sides have certainly their appeal, but it is exclusively the Dharma Shanti material that makes the leap from "this is interesting and unique traditional music" to "this is what I desperately want the music of the future to sound like."
This album takes its name from the English translation of "gamelan beleganjur," which is the term for the processional gamelan orchestras common to government ceremonies, Balinese Hindu rituals, and (of course) war.I suspect that Balinese gamelan ensembles have not been inspiring glorious victories on the battlefield much in recent days, so that facet is absent from this collection, as The Gamelan of the Walking Warriors covers the more contemporary state of the form.In fact, that is exactly what interested Della Ratta in the project in the first place, as the bevy of traditional Indonesian gamelan albums available in the West predate the stylistic innovations and evolutions that have occurred over the last three decades.I am delighted to say that Della Ratta’s instincts were dead-on, as this album is quite unlike any other gamelan performance that I have heard.As he puts it himself, there is a more "melodious and meditative quality" that is "quite distinct from the spectacular and breathlessly frantic kreasi beleganjur that we are usually offered."I have no doubt that Della Ratta is right about that, but it does not quite convey the full appeal of these recordings: the reason that the Dharma Shanti recordings sound so revelatory is that they combine that entrancing melodic aesthetic with an impressive degree of sharpness and physicality.There is a violence and jaggedness to crashing, scraping cymbals and pounding drums that makes this a deliciously brutalist and ecstatic take on "meditative."
The opening "Pemungkah" is a perfect distillation of everything wonderful about these recordings, as it sounds like some kind of occult ritual of visceral, post-apocalyptic junkyard minimalism.The crux of the piece is a simple metallophone melody that hypnotically circles and loops, yet it stays compelling because its harmonic context languorously see-saws between two deeper sustained tones.It is weirdly beautiful in both its unhurried, trancelike repetition and its texture, which resembles a ramshackle collection of tin cans.The cymbals are what truly elevate the piece to a thing of genius though, as their scraping rhythm sounds like a roomful of people vigorously sharpening rusty knives in unison. That basic template repeats again and again for the four Dharma Shanti pieces, but the ensemble consistently manages to transform that hyperlimited palette into something wonderfully churning and organic through the ebb and flow of the pounding drums and slicing cymbals.
The second half of the album is a bit more varied and traditional, as Della Ratta recorded some actual ceremonies in the village of Peliang, unexpectedly trading the focused intensity of the first half for something considerably more shapeshifting and surreal.While some of the individual pieces are a bit too busy and cheery for my liking (resembling an out-of-tune music box that is playing too fast), they form a compelling and vivid whole,as the album stops being exclusively about the gamelan and becomes more of an impressionist tour of small village life.To some degree, the profound difference between the album's two halves makes it feel like two different albums have been bizarrely stitched together, yet that strange sequencing actually works in Walking Warriors' favor: I love the first half, but the aesthetic is probably too limited to sustain an entire album on its own without diminishing returns.
Amusingly, I first heard this album without knowing anything at all about its background or its participants and immediately assumed that it was the work of fringe-dwelling avant-garde iconoclasts like Alan Courtis or the Volcano The Bear milieu:it struck my ears as too radical and contemporary to be actual Indonesian gamelan music.Naturally, I felt like a cultural chauvinist jackass upon learning more about the album, but my error makes perverse sense, as Western experimental musicians have been appropriating ideas and themes from Eastern traditional music for so long that the distinctions between the two are not nearly as obvious as they once were.I guess I finally found the place where the mouth and tail of the Ouroboros meet.Aside from that, I was also struck by how much the aesthetic of the recordist and the quality of the recording impacts albums in this vein, as a tinny/naturalist "field recording" approach can make everything sound bloodlessly academic, while a more produced approach can turn vibrant performances into something that feels toothless and homogenized for Western consumption.To his credit, Dell Ratta managed to capture the Dharma Shanti Orchestra in a raw and explosively Albini-esque way that feels appropriately bracing and vital.The Gamelan of the Walking Warriors may not be a perfect and seamless collection, but the high points are wonderful enough to make that seem irrelevant.