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.
It would be great if there was some simple way for casual Celer fans like myself to easily distinguish Will Long's major statements from the ceaseless flow of minor releases, but there seem to be glaring exceptions to every system that I have attempted to devise. In the case of Xièxie, however, Long helpfully took the guesswork out of the matter, as this might be the most heavily promoted album that he has ever released. Happily, his instincts have proven to be well-founded, as Xièxie definitely ranks among the upper tier of his overwhelming oeuvre. I would probably stop short of calling it a start-to-finish masterpiece or my personal favorite Celer album, but I would be hard-pressed to think of anyone else churning out ambient/drone music as enveloping and sublimely lovely as Xièxie's bookends.
It is admittedly a bit redundant to mention that Xièxie ("thank you") is an album inspired by bittersweetly beautiful memories of a specific time and place, as transforming lingering memory fragments into lush, soft-focus dreamscapes has been Will Long’s stock-in-trade since Celer's very beginnings.However, I definitely appreciate the poetic reminiscence that Long wrote as an album description.For one, it establishes a lovely and evocative context: two lovers once took a train trip from Shanghai to Hangzhou, a period that is now distilled to a series of flickering images of neon lights, rain, birds, and blurred scenery seen through the window of a speeding train.Moreover, that literary component is vital to understanding and appreciating the full scope and depth of this project: without it, it is very easy to view Celer's oeuvre as a vast ocean of similar-sounding releases.To be sure, Long is quite good at what he does, so even a run-of-the-mill Celer album can be enjoyable, but there are a lot of relatively interchangeable albums for every landmark release.One could argue that the latter is only possible through Long's seemingly obsessive work ethic, but one could also argue that those less exceptional moments could have simply been kept in the vault rather than released.However, that would undercut the larger vision (or at least what I imagine that vision to be): Celer is like a vast impressionist diary or novel unfolding in real-time.Some chapters are certainly more vivid and memorable than others, but they are all integral parts of the whole's gradually unfolding arc.
Much like the work of William Basinski, most Celer albums religiously adhere to a distinctive template of simple loops repeated into infinity–the biggest difference between the two artists is primarily one of scale, as Long traffics in a kind of slow-motion, widescreen grandeur.In that respect, Xièxie is textbook Celer, as each piece is an elegiac procession of dreamlike, billowing chords that beautifully approximates massive clouds lazily rolling across a vast horizon.The tone is almost always one of sublime melancholy, but Long has proven himself to be a master at articulating different shades of that narrow emotional range by deftly manipulating lightness and density.The midsection of Xièxie is populated with one lengthy and archetypal variation of that aesthetic after another, though they are interspersed with brief interludes of field recordings made during the trip.Each substantial piece meets Celer's usual high standard of quality, but the subtle divergences from the formula that open and close the album stand out as the most compelling and distinctive pieces.In the case of the opening "Rains Lit By Neon," Long simply allows the field recordings and his music to bleed together so that his heavenly chord swells slowly fade into a collage of street sounds.It seems like the most obvious thing in the world, but it very effectively creates an illusion of added depth.
The twist is similarly minimal and effective on closing "Our Dream to be Strangers," as the central theme sounds like a fragment snatched from an especially majestic bit of synth-centric '70s space music or prog.It still ultimately sounds a hell of a lot like a Celer piece though, as the loop seems to leave a lingering and hazy vapor trail that obscures it more and more with each repetition.The moral here is that it does not take much innovation at all to make a Celer song stand out from the pack.Of the two excursions, however, I am most fascinated by the artful collage of field recordings overlapping those first few minutes of "Rains Lit By Neon," as I do not understand why Long does not make that a recurring, defining trait of his work.Given that he is an expat living in Japan, his field recordings certainly seem unique and interesting to me as a listener.Also, from an artistic standpoint, it seems like Celer's entire aesthetic is an abstract evocation of specific places and moments.As such, it would make perfect thematic sense to include the actual sounds of those places for added texture and enigmatic meaning.Goddamn it–now it sounds like I am complaining about an album that I genuinely enjoy: the important thing here is that Xièxie is an excellent album.Its flashes of greater inspiration unavoidably remind me that Long is a visionary artist who too often disguises himself as a solid ambient composer, but I am damn grateful that those flashes of inspiration exist.
Sarah Davachi’s tireless campaign to subvert expectations with each fresh release shows no signs of slowing down, as the label-hopping composer's latest opus partially revisits her formative years as an aspiring pianist. While it would be fair to characterize Pale Bloom as "neo-classical" and a logical progression from 2018's Gave in Rest, Davachi has never been content with pastiche, reverent homage, or returning to previously covered territory. Instead, she seems like an artist increasingly unfixed in time, drawing from the past to give her forward-thinking experiments in harmonies and overtones a foundation that feels temporally ambiguous and self-assuredly independent of contemporary music trends. While there is not any particular piece on Pale Bloom that makes ittower above any of its predecessors, it is unquestionably a uniformly strong collection of new work that studiously avoids the familiar and hints at intriguing new directions to come.
I sometimes feel like I bring up Erik Satie too much, as his work is an enticingly easy and effective reference point for simple, melodic piano miniatures.To be fair, however, he definitely cast quite a large and long-lasting shadow, as his style was accessibly anti-virtuosic and has aged extremely well.Consequently, it yielded a hell of a lot of descendants and it is hopeless to pretend otherwise.Davachi is not a particularly pure example of those spiritual children here, as the mood of the opening "Perfumes I" is a bit more elegiac and loosely structured than classic Satie fare, but she certainly shares the Parisian iconoclast's penchant for elegant simplicity, space, and unhurried languor.While that aesthetic is a fundamentally likable one, the true beauty of "Perfumes I" unexpectedly blossoms forth around its midpoint, as Davachi’s melancholy sonata plunges into considerably more compelling harmonic territory when backwards melodies start swelling and streaking through the piece.The two other parts of the "Perfumes" trilogy that follow are similarly grounded in a meditative, loosely structured procession of minor chords, yet each offers its own particular twist on that theme.The more ambitious and unexpected of the two is definitely "Perfumes II," as intertwining and overlapping classical vocals twist and float over the piece in a kind of sensual lament.It is a hauntingly melancholy piece, but the mood lightens a bit for the more modest third act, as the tender somberness of the piano is warmed by some rich organ drones.Sadly, Davachi did not have a third rabbit to unexpectedly pull out of her hat, but "Perfumes III" is quite lovely nonetheless, as the sustained organ tones blur together into some gorgeously shifting harmonies.
The album's second half continues that neo-classical bent, but takes it in quite a different direction, as the epic "If It Pleased Me To Appear To You Wrapped In This Drapery" is built from a shifting bed of sustained tones.It recalls some of the more experimental and abstract fare from Gave in Rest, but it is a considerably more expansive and sophisticated iteration of that aesthetic, as a slow-motion flow of differing timbres smears and bleeds together to yield a host of oscillations and uncomfortable dissonances.The album's description curiously mentions Eliane Radigue and La Monte Young as touchstones, which makes some sense given that "Drapery" is a longform minimalist drone piece.However, the overarching mood is a very far cry from the work of either, as Davachi uses a battery of strings and other instruments to weave something uniquely timeless, impressionistic, and uncomfortably queasy.The overall effect seems akin to experiencing a visionary glimpse of transcendence at a medieval mass, then having it quickly curdle into a sickly and nightmarish grotesquerie.As such, it is quite an interesting (if difficult) piece that is far darker than what I have grown to expect from Davachi.I suspect it is entirely possible that future occult historians will point to "Drapery" as the first hint that she had begun to fall prey to an unusually evil and tenacious bout of demonic possession.
Of Pale Bloom's four pieces, I am most fond of the comparatively modest "Perfumes I," as it is a masterfully understated triumph of elegant simplicity and ingenious symmetry.However, it is definitely the more ambitious "Perfumes II" and "Drapery" that make this album a memorably singular entry in Davachi's discography.While the latter could perhaps portend the dawning of a new phase of malevolent minimalism, it is the former that offers the most intriguing possibilities, particularly since Eduard Artemiev's score for Solaris is name-checked as one of the album's inspirations.I do not particularly see much overt similarity to that myself, though Pale Bloom certainly shares some of the actual film's sense of existential dread and ghostly unreality.That said, "Perfumes II" does seem like the kind of strange and striking work that an iconoclastic filmmaker might be drawn to (like Brady Corbet was to Scott Walker's ouevre), so it is quite possible that Davachi might have a bright future as a soundtrack auteur.Perhaps not though, as her career is increasingly characterized by restless flux and creative evolution.As such, it is difficult to imagine her staying in one place long enough for her vision to ever become a tightly defined and easily graspable one.Fortunately, the silver lining to that is that trend is a steady stream of inspired reinventions and bold stylistic experiments like this one.
Drift is a free fall album consisting of three compositions invoking a sense of hovering expansion. Deeply spacious yet tightly compacted sound movements create holding patterns that slowly shift and evolve. Cycles fall in and out of sync while atmospheres envelop time, appearing on the periphery before being subsumed back into space.
The compositions utilize modified alto saxophone with spring reverb attachment, synthesizers, percussion, field recordings and electronic processing. The saxophone is played with an acoustic spring reverberation preparation to produce multiple feedback tones, pitch beating and metallic distortion. Using sampling and pitch shifting techniques, the instrument and its presence of breath act as the glue that binds the pieces.
Bio:
Rosalind Hall is an Australian musician and composer who creates performances, compositions, installations and soundtracks. Rosalind’s spatial and expansive work explores the physicality of sound through the use of amplification, microtonal movement, beating frequencies and reverberations. Using acoustic and electronic sound technologies such as modified saxophone, synthesizers, percussion, field recordings and processing software, Rosalind extends her sound sources by sampling and processing to create pieces that invoke a sense of claustrophobic infinity.
Luke Younger returns to PAN with an eight-track album of his most direct work to date. Composed alone at NO studio in the Essex countryside, to start an album with a piece called "Capital Crisis (New City Loop)" seems an intentional misnomer. Long, sustained periods in the rural studio setting see Younger working with an array of fragmented, disassociated sound sources to build upon 2015’s Olympic Mess. It shares a similarly inclined vision of the urban environment, but here Chemical Flowers makes reference to paradoxical notions of authenticity and creative practice by way of questioning the structures around us. Collages are assembled and dismantled, temporal and spatial boundaries fluctuate and movement is an overarching theme.
Surrealist drowned world atmospheres sculpted far enough away from the source of inspiration leave plenty of room for ambiguity. The nocturnal nature of the recording process is self-evident, and pieces like "Leave Them All Behind" tap into a deep psychedelic undercurrent.
Confused narratives, emotions and aleatory hallucinations ebb and flow throughout. "I Knew You Would Respond" evokes murky soundtrack terrain with eerie repetitive strings and ambient respite, disrupted periodically by brief bursts of granular noise. It's one of the records most unnerving moments, possibly as it's one of the most recognizably human.
The album navigates dense passages with recurring signifiers. Hollow percussion, modulating delay and curious field recordings come and go, maintaining a perpetual state of flux where nothing stays the same for long. The drowned world theatricals return on the swamp-like "Lizard in Fear" whilst string rhythms creep in on the penultimate track to incite momentary electroacoustic harmony. Floating synthesis slowly washes over and the title track unfolds - five minutes of reverb-laced portamento, visions of decay and Editions EG influenced world-building. Movement is key.
Releases May 17, 2019. More information can be found here.
Over the last decade, M. Geddes Gengras has released an enormous catalog of wide-ranging, synth-focused music in both solo and collaborative settings. He has participated in influential experimental groups like Sun Araw, Pocahaunted, Robedoor, and Akron/Family. Along with Sun Araw's Cameron Stallones and Alex Gray, and a host of Jamaican singers and artists, Gengras continues to blur the boundaries of dub and electronic music under the name Duppy Gun – a project which crystallized with an acclaimed collaboration called Icon Give Thank (RVNG, 2012) with roots reggae legends The Congos.
I Am The Last of That Green and Warm-Hued World, Gengras’s first release with Hausu Mountain, follows in the more ambient- and drone-focused vein of his work, as explored on recent releases with labels like Leaving Records, Umor Rex, and Room40. The album stretches through an 80-minute program of layered synth mosaics and expanses of serene drift that continually shift and reconfigure themselves into networks of interlaced harmonies and electronic textures. At any given moment, huge foundations of low-end drift swirl beneath angelic pads and soaring, quasi-melodic leads, as layers of environmental foley drip into view around the margins. Synth tones evoke the timbres of human vocal formants, stuttering digital glitch, or unidentifiable hand drum percussion. Mixing disparate sounds and moods in his palette, Gengras paints a mental journey through diverse emotional zones: quiet meditation under the desert sun at noon, ego-destroying tidal wave swells slamming onto the beach, confused wandering through hostile territory under the cover of night.
I Am The Last of That Green and Warm-Hued World came into existence after M. Geddes Gengras's father appeared to him in a dream and suggested that he read Stephen King’s The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger. The vivid, post-apocalyptic locales visited in the book, which range from mountain ranges to atomic water pumping stations to interdimensional portals, directly inform the auditory spaces that Gengras draws into life with this album. While ambient music often reaches the listener with a host of external signifiers meant to ground the music in some semblance of the physical world (see: oceanic album art, song titles that evoke specific images), Gengras’s music achieves a rare degree of topographical intricacy by virtue of his wide, dense mixes and the contrasting textures presented by his interlocking tiers of synthesis. Over the course of five extended sessions that range from 11 to 22 minutes each, the album sinks into passages of near-complete stasis and crests into segments animated by intermittent bursts of melody and muted, techno-adjacent drum tones, settling into discrete atmospheres that percolate at different degrees of rhythmic complexity. All the while, M. Geddes Gengras allows individual elements to generatively interact and twist around each other to the point that no two moments present the same exact sounds. A far cry from willfully repetitive, loop-based ambient music, I Am The Last of That Green and Warm-Hued World extends before the listener as a fluctuating, self-contained biome, with the components of each composition carefully stacked together and charged with their own trajectory through time and imagined physical space.
Dirk Serries - guitar Eric Quach - guitar Tom Malmendier - drums
This is an improvisational set by three musicians who came together at Christuskirche Bochum. The result is a 41-minute-long track with an epic structure of drone, noise, ambient, experimental sounds and freejazz elements.
Reynols started in 1993 in Buenos Aires and is famous amongst many things for its unique Down's syndrome drummer/vocalist Miguel Tomasín, who is the band's spiritual architect. Reynols is also known for its musical diversity, which spans everything from cosmic free-rock and lo-fi drone electronic music, to conceptual sound art and social/political/esoteric observations. The world of Reynols is a universe completely of its own, and inhabits so much that even an extensive box like this only scratches the surface.
Although Reynols have worked with an open-process DIY philosophy and been the subject of multiple documentaries, the band has still managed to sustain an element of mystery, so the release of Minecxio Emanations 1993-2018 marks the first time the band has allowed an extensive overview of their work to be made. Fans of the band will also be happy to learn that most of the material is previously unreleased, including two albums from the early 2000s that were completed but never issued; the earliest recordings from 1993; collaborations with artists Acid Mother's Temple and Pauline Oliveros; conceptual pieces; and more. There's also a DVD with 90 minutes of videos.
This boxed set shows the full range of Reynols. It has been six years in the making and is the most extensive boxed set project ever to be released by Pica Disk.
Maryanne Amacher (1938 - 2009) was a composer of large-scale fixed-duration sound installations and a highly original thinker in the areas of perception, sound spatialization, creative intelligence, and aural architecture. She is frequently cited as a pioneer of what has come to be called "sound art," although her thought and creative practice consistently challenge key assumptions about the capacities and limitations of the genre. Amacher's work anticipates some of the most important developments in network culture, media arts, acoustic ecology, and sound studies, yet due to its expansive interdisciplinary nature it has rarely been documented. Following two CDs for Tzadik and her inclusion in the monumental collection OHM: The Early Gurus Of Electronic Music (1948-1980), this publication of Amacher’s 1991 piece "Petra" marks her first commercially available instrumental work.
"Petra" was originally commissioned for the ISCM World Music Days in Switzerland. Written for two pianos, the piece is a unique example of Amacher's late work, a direct extension of her working methodologies for electronic composition taken into an acoustic realm that alludes to the music of Giacinto Scelsi and Galina Ustvolskaya. "Petra" is a sweeping, durational work based on both Amacher's impressions of the church in Boswil where the piece was premiered and science-fiction writer Greg Bear's short story of the same name, in which gargoyles come to life and breed with humans in a post-apocalyptic Notre Dame.
This solemn interpretation of "Petra" was recorded at its 2017 American premiere at New York's St. Peter's Episcopal Church with pianists Marianne Schroeder, who originally performed the piece alongside Amacher in 1991, and Stefan Tcherepnin, who performed it alongside Schroeder in 2012 at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin. Weighing tranquilizing passages of glacially-paced serenity against stretches of dilapidated, jagged dissonance, the recording illuminates a crucial node in the constellation of Amacher's enigmatic oeuvre.
Artistic director of the Giacinto Scelsi Festival in Basel, Marianne Schroeder is a Swiss composer and pianist specializing in the interpretation of New Music. She has collaborated with and premiered work by John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Dieter Schnebel, Anthony Braxton, Morton Feldman, Pauline Oliveros and Giacinto Scelsi, with whom she studied. She is currently a professor at Hochschule der Künste Bern, and has also taught at the International Summer Courses in Darmstadt.
Stefan Tcherepnin is an American electronic music performer, contemporary artist, and composer in fourth generation, continuing the family heritage of his great-grandfather Nicholas, grandfather Alexander, and father Ivan Tcherepnin. As a family friend of Amacher's and a student of hers at Bard College he is uniquely qualified to navigate the labyrinth of Amacher interpretation.
I wish there was a way to say this that does not sound like an ambiguously back-handed compliment, but it feels like Fennesz devoted an unusual amount of time and focused attention to this album.On previous masterpieces like Endless Summer and Venice, he had a strong, coherent vision and shaped variations upon each theme into an immersive and thoughtfully sequenced arc.Needless to say, that approach worked extremely well, so there was no real need to change it anytime soon, yet Agora takes quite a different shape than its illustrious predecessors.In fact, it almost feels like four self-contained mini-EPs: they certainly all feel like they belong together and complement one another beautifully, but each seems like it could have easily been the kernel of its own distinct album instead.While I suspect at least three of those hypothetical albums would have been absolutely wonderful, I do not have any nagging sense of missed opportunity with Agora, as each of these pieces (all clocking in just over ten minutes) feels like a perfect distillation rather than a tantalizing glimpse that begs to be expanded upon.In particular, the album's two bookends stand as particularly striking examples of Agora's divergent stylistic threads.Of those two poles, it is the aptly titled opener ("In My Room") that best represents the beating heart at the core of the larger song suite.
There is almost an actual beating heart in the piece as well, as a subterranean throb slowly pulses beneath its warmly hissing and undulating reverie of dense, buzzing drones.While those slow-moving sustained tones are certainly the raw material, it would be a stretch to call "In My Room" a drone piece, as it feels more like a landscape of gently shifting tectonic plates bathed in the light of an ascending sunrise: subtly amassing streaks of warmth and color quietly start to eclipse the underlying drones as the piece inexorably moves towards a gorgeous crescendo.The two pieces that follow stick to roughly the same aesthetic of quietly lovely ambient drone that ultimately blossoms into something more structured and powerful, though "Agora" does not pull off that feat quite as well as its neighbors (primarily because it starts from a colder, more formless place).The title piece is still quite likable in its own right though, as its floating, slow-moving clouds of blurred and hiss-soaked chords are blissfully meditative–it just has the misfortune of being surrounded by three slow-burning epics of focused intensity.
In "Rainfall," for example, Fennesz revisits the languorous drones of "In My Room" with unexpectedly vivid and visceral heft, launching an oft-brilliant and churning assault of shuddering, sizzling chords and cascading, overlapping motifs.It is essentially classic Fennesz writ large and it is absolutely wonderful.The closing "We Trigger the Sun," on the other hand, is almost entirely unrecognizable as a Fennesz piece at first, resembling the sort of deep space '70s synth music that would be perfectly at home in a cinematic mindfuck like Mandy.Gradually, however, the heavy cosmic vibes dissolve a bit to make room for more traditional Fennesz-esque touches like washes of hazy guitar chords.It is quite a wonderful convergence of unlikely threads, resembling something like a blurred, stretched, and deconstructed Popul Vuh without sacrificing any of the grandeur.
While I sincerely doubt anyone needs to be reminded of it, Agora beautifully reaffirms why Christian Fennesz remains one of the most vital and compelling figures in experimental music: his more challenging impulses and his formidable production genius are always grounded in a strong melodic sensibility.In an abstract way, he is a legitimately fine songwriter, despite the conspicuous lack of anything resembling conventional structures, hooks, melodies, or vocals (though the latter does exist in obscured form on a pair of pieces).As such, Agora would probably be an enjoyable album even if Fennesz were not a textural sorcerer and arch-deconstructionist.Happily, however, he is both of those things and he makes full use of those powers to transform the tender, fragile beauty of his central motifs into dazzling vistas of ragged, sizzling, and artfully corroded heaven.It is certainly fair to say that Agora continues Fennesz's lengthy hot streak and is yet another great album from a master, but that actually undersells the true scope of his achievements a bit.Fennesz has not just made a string of excellent solo albums–he has managed to do so while continually reinventing himself and making each fresh release feel like a legitimate event that opens up fresh territory for others to explore in its wake.
There is an ancient Indian parable about a group of blind men trying to describe an elephant–predictably, they all wind up with very different impressions of what an elephant is like, as they are each only experiencing one small part of something very large (tusk, a snout, a foot, etc.). I mention this because I feel like I am in a very similar situation whenever I try to wrap my head around Nigel Ayers' idiosyncratic and sometimes visionary career: I have roughly ten Nocturnal Emissions albums and feel like I have barely scratched the surface of his many curious and fascinating activities over the years (both musical and otherwise). Despite that intimidatingly vast ouevre, there are a handful of universally acknowledged landmark albums within his sprawling discography and Spiritflesh (recently reissued) is one of them. In fact, it is arguably the best of lot (depending on who you ask, of course). For better or worse, it is well-known for its influential role in shaping the dark ambient genre, but it is far more earthy, vibrant, and willfully experimental than any of the gloomy drones that followed in its wake and too unique to have many true kindred spirits. More than thirty years after its release, Spiritflesh's visionary collage of traditional instrumentation and field recording still sounds remarkably fresh and timeless.
I generally believe that if an album is legitimately great, it can be enjoyed without knowing anything at all about its background or original context, as time has a way of unavoidably eroding and blurring both the cultural nuances of an era and the artist's original intentions.However, knowing a bit about an album’s origins can certainly unveil additional layers to appreciate, as Spiritflesh was a considerably more radical statement than just a classic ambient album (which it can easily be mistaken for these days, as its striking singularity has been blunted by everything that came after it).For example, prior to Ayers' late-'80s immersion in increasingly primitivist and ritualistic themes, Nocturnal Emissions had a lengthy run of beloved noise and skewed synth pop albums.The transition into Spiritflesh territory was not a completely abrupt one though, as Ayers and Caroline K had already started to blur the lines between the two worlds quite a bit with 1987's The World is My Womb, which incorporated both bird songs and processed recordings of Indonesian gamelan performances.With Spiritflesh, however, the break with electronics and technology was complete and definitive, as Ayers limited his instrumental palette to just harmonium, chimes, and a music box.Moreover, those instruments are mostly relegated to just background drones and coloration, as the foreground of these ten pieces is almost always devoted to field recordings of the natural world.It is also worth noting that Spiritflesh was recorded during the ascension of acid house, which means that Ayers was wandering around the London Zoological Gardens and Derbyshire Dales with a microphone while many of his post-industrial peers were flocking to clubs and embracing dance music.Very iconoclastic move (and it aged well too).
Unlike the work of Richard Skelton, however, Spiritflesh does not seem to be inspired by a deep love for any specific place, as Ayers had no problem incorporating non-purist elements like windshield wipers, African birds, or chimps.Instead, he seemed focused on creating his own place altogether, evoking a timeless vision of rural England that lies somewhere between the pastoral and a hallucinatory dreamstate.While Ayers was pointedly anti-technological in his choice of source material, that constraint did not apply to the production side of the equation, as the various sounds were collaged, looped, and processed into a variation of reality that feels ancient, shimmering, and unfamiliar.The predominant compositional aesthetic here is definitely the tape loop/"locked groove" school of alternately obsessive and hypnotic repetition, which certainly contributes to that effect.For a number of pieces, such as "Cloud Can" and "Ape Chimes," Spiritflesh is ambient in the true sense of the word, as Ayers weaves a surreal and absorbing environment of warm minimal drones, bird song, blurred wind chimes, and a discreet host of other sounds that endlessly loops and overlaps in pleasantly disorienting fashion.In a few cases, the distance between Ayers' vision and present reality is a bit more striking though.For example, the hiss-soaked "Ch'i Sea" sounds like the gentle churning and lapping of a subterranean lake in a hidden grotto, while the rumbling percussion of "Boneshaker" feels like a field recording of an exotic tribal procession (an ethnological forgery that would have pleased Can, no doubt)."Raindance," on the other hand, would have probably delighted a young Rashad Becker, as it sounds plucked from a darkly lysergic imaginary jungle.
Curiously, Ayers only stretches into more conventionally structured and melodic fare once, with the gorgeously haunting and otherworldly "Acres of Gold," making that piece the album's undeniable centerpiece.Part of me wishes he had been similarly ambitious with some other pieces as well, but that one glimpse of sublime brilliance admittedly provides a very effective and alluring gateway to the more nuanced pleasures of the rest of the album.Speaking of nuance, I would be remiss if I did not also mention that Spiritflesh is a masterfully uncluttered and understated album from start to finish, displaying a lightness of touch that was very much in opposition of the pervading '80s cultural zeitgeist.In fact, absolutely everything about Spiritflesh makes me think that Ayers looked at the world around him and empathically said "no thanks," then set about creating a better one.And while Spiritflesh is admittedly just an album, I do think Ayers succeeded in that grand, quixotic objective, as he essentially created a modest and makeshift portal into an immersive world of mystery and beauty where normal temporal and dimensional boundaries are considerably more porous (and there are no cars or nearby people).As such, Spiritflesh's place in the ambient canon is a well-deserved one, but I think it deserves at least an honorable mention as a significant work of 20th century avant-garde composition as well, offering an inventively naturalistic inversion of the musique concrète aesthetic.
Jamaican-style dub music has been around for more than half a century at this point, yet new artists continue to emerge who miraculously find new ways to twist and evolve upon the form. The latest example of that phenomenon comes in the shape of this new project from Orphan Swords' Yannick Franck, who ingeniously carves up vintage ska, rocksteady, and skinhead reggae to yield a suite of wonderfully soulful and hallucinatory collages. In some ways, The Caretaker is perversely the closest kindred spirit here, as Franck is a similarly "outsider" deconstructionist: he does not have a treasure trove of master tapes from legendary Kingston studios that would enable him to easily isolate a bassline or vocal melody, yet he inventively turns that disadvantage into an asset. In transforming whole cloth recordings into something of his own, Franck has created something that bears almost zero structural similarity to traditional dub or reggae, but manages to translate its core essence into challenging and playfully experimental abstract art. When he hits the mark just right, the results can be quite brilliant.
I have been listening to this album in fairly heavy rotation for about a week now and I have been wracking my brain for an apt and succinct way to summarize Franck's aesthetic with Mt. Gemini. Plenty of great words and phrases like "weirdly sensuous," "phantasmagoric," "obsessive," and "noirish" have certainly been fluttering around my head, but I ultimately came up empty-handed.There is a strong likelihood that my mind has finally grown weary of me and wishes I would focus my attention on my actual life, yet that is not the whole story, as these five songs are a deliciously shapeshifting and elusive fun house of surreal transfigurations that defy any general description.There is certainly a consistent thread of smoky, twilit unreality that runs through the album, yet its collision with the bright, melodic hooks of vintage Jamaican dancefloor grooves leads down some very eclectic and divergent paths (with varying degrees of success, of course).The most striking and immediately gratifying manifestations of Franck's bold vision happen right out of the gate with "Copy Cat" and "What Can I Do?".
In the former, a lazily shuffling groove appears and obsessively repeats like a woozy slow dance in a state of suspended animation.Soon, however, a much catchier and more upbeat sample barrels right through it and the piece blossoms into a swirling, delirious maelstrom of warped textures, tape hiss, and heady drones.It kind of feels like a classic rocksteady hit being sucked into a black hole and being ripped completely apart except for its tenaciously repeating chorus.My favorite piece, however, is the far simpler "What Can I Do?".The piece starts off as kind of a spectral, shadowy cousin to the heady dub excursions of Moritz von Oswalt's Rhythm & Sound project, approximating an incredibly worn cassette of slow, heavy reggae in which the "industrial" sounds of the struggling tape machine almost overpower the music.Gradually, however, a different groove starts to fade in that is every bit as corroded as the first, yet blossoms into a lumbering, blown-out juggernaut of hiss-ravaged rhythm.Throughout it all, an irrepressible falsetto whoop faintly loops over and over as a lingering vestige of human warmth at the core of something far closer to mechanized horror than reggae.
The next two pieces make even that extremely tenuous link to the original material seem like quite a lot, plunging deep into a rabbit hole of demented abstraction.For example, "Chicken Merry" sounds like a hallucinatory and obsessive loop of barnyard sounds being slowly engulfed in infernal, subterranean groans and throbs.A flickering semblance of a song eventually does emerge, but the surrounding music is too deranged for it to even matter at that point (though it is admittedly a nice bit of compositional sleight of hand).Elsewhere, "Just Like A River" sounds like a wobbly, ruined tape of massive, clanking machinery fed through a wah-wah pedal.The endearingly weird closer ("Long Shot Kick the Bucket"), however, unexpectedly returns to more human territory to end the album on a perversely radiant, dreamlike note, unfolding as a hypnotically looping and overlapping horn motif that fades in and out of focus.In its final moments, a sleepily warm bass line even takes shape to end the album with something that approaches genuine soul and beauty.
Notably, I think there are probably only twenty minutes of legitimately great music on this album, yet I am reluctant to describe it as flawed or uneven, as I am fundamentally delighted by Franck's vision and fascinated by his execution.Every single one of the pieces is a striking example of transformational wizardly, going beyond mere deconstruction to create something deeply lysergic that is light years away from the raw material that it was birthed from.Moreover, Franck is consistently inventive in his alchemy, studiously avoiding the temptation to repeat the same tricks or head in a direction that has already been explored: each piece is treated like a completely unique foundation for a new vision to organically grow from.It perversely reminds me of the hackneyed joke about Michelangelo sculpting David ("Oh, it was easy–all I did was chip away everything that didn't look like David.").Though it is intended as humor, there is a weirdly viable thought process at the heart if it and it feels like Franck exploited it here: I am sure making Just Like A River was not easy at all, but it does seem like he isolated pieces and fragments that fascinated him and allowed their individual traits to guide their ultimate journey to a significant degree.As far as music as entertainment is concerned, that strategy does not always lead to an optimal place, but it certainly proves to be fertile ground for challenging and occasionally revelatory sound art in the case of Just Like A River.