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.
Low Distance is Deaf Center´s third full-length studio album and perhaps the most focused effort by the Norwegian duo to date. After their last record Owl Splinters (2011) was quite an eclectic endeavor, Erik K Skodvin & Otto A Totland draw their sound back into something more quiet and minimal.
The record starts with a piece of sweeping analougue electronics. It is a spacious, yet dynamic opener that leads directly into the static tones and piano motifs of "Entity Voice," which balances a new sense of abstraction with the classic Deaf Center sound. It's warm and close while sounding like it's set in the outer horizon. Overall Low Distance feels both alien and familiar with its atonal synths, close pianos and drowned-out noises.
After meeting in studio for the first time since 2011, the recordings came out of a 3-day session in 2017. It was then mixed at both EMS Stockholm and at Erik's home studio over a longer period to create a blend of deeply layered as well as stripped-down pieces. Both Erik & Otto have been active individually since their last meeting as Deaf Center: Otto released 2 solo piano albums, while Erik has furthered his descent into musical abstraction both under his own name and as Svarte Greiner. It is long overdue to hear them connect their personalities into something new. Low Distance is a welcome return replete with beauty, mystery and uncertainty.
As the conclusion to his Same Animal, Different Cages project, Brooklyn composer David First has again chosen to use an instrument with more limited applications than the first installments two (guitar and synth). The sitar has a very distinctive sound and specific cultural associations (which First discusses his struggle with in the liner notes). Aware of this, he pushes the boundaries of what a single instrument can represent, and also showcases his exceptional skills as both a composer and performer.
Knowing the instruments these four records would be based around beforehand, I had similar initial feelings about this one that I also had about the third volume, Civil War Songs.The first two albums, built from acoustic guitar and analog synthesizer, seemed easy enough, since both instruments are prevalent enough and part of so many genres of music that First limiting himself did not seem like that much of a stretch.The latter two, the aforementioned harmonica album (Civil War Songs) and this one seemed a bit more challenging, with both using very distinct sounding instruments.Civil War Songs succeeded; in no small part to First’s conceptual framing of the album as a modernized take on traditional Americana.Sitar Music of North Brooklyn, however, is a more of a purely experimental work.
First addresses how he struggled with the cultural connotations of the sitar in the liner notes, and concerns of his autodidactic approach to the instrument would be disrespectful of Indian music in general, as well as fears of cultural appropriation.The final work clearly demonstrates First's compositional dedication to experimental music while retaining the traditional sound of the instrument in a unique way, one that expands the possibilities of the sitar while still remaining faithful to its significant legacy.
Both "Sitar Solo 1" and "Sitar Solo 2" are an amalgamation of different playing styles that result in a distinct, yet unconventional sound.At times, especially on the former, it sounds as if First is playing the instrument as he would a conventional guitar, resulting in a traditional sounding playing stylethat results in non-traditional sounds.During other sections, it becomes less about the playing of the instrument and more about the treatment:moving frets and adjusted tuning pegs result in wobbling strings and off-kilter tones.The two compositions are similar, but "Sitar Solo 2" is less frenetic overall, allowing the sounds to expand and breathe more.
Like my initial trepidation with Civil War Songs, I was concerned Sitar Music of North Brooklyn would simply be too much of the same thing, and while the former was presented in a strong conceptual context, this one is solely about the music.David First's ear and ability as a composer, however, provide enough variation to sustain an entire album’s worth of pure sitar, and honestly he could have continued on with even more material.It makes for a fitting conclusion to a fascinating quadrilogy of albums that just impressed me more and more with each installment.
As fitfully brilliant as they can be, the Matmos of recent years has been more of a project that I respect and occasionally find fascinating than a project that I genuinely love. At the risk of torpedoing whatever experimental music cred I might have, I fear they might genuinely be a bit too far out for me…or at least too constrained by their passion for focused conceptual themes and unusual materials. Nevertheless, I am always quite happy to investigate whatever kitschy and perverse lunacy they have cooked up with each fresh album, as the results are never boring. In the case of Plastic Anniversary, Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt gleefully embark upon a morbidly funny celebration of all things plastic, assembling an arsenal of toilet brushes, breast implants, police shields, synthetic human tissue, and some hapless Bread records to make a host of bizarre and colorfully cartoonish sounds. As usual, Matmos' sheer ingenuity and resourcefulness is second to none, but the most compelling innovation of all was the duo’s decision to enlist Deerhoof drummer Greg Saunier and a high school drumline from Montana.
Plastic Anniversary is an album with a very intriguing and deliberate arc, unfolding a bit like a fun house that slowly transforms from the cartoonish and the slapstick into something considerably darker and more visceral.Naturally, that journey roughly corresponds to an escalating conceptual heft that mirrors humanity's dying love affair with all things plastic (this is a Matmos album, after all).The opening "Breaking Bread," however, captures the album's aesthetic as its most unapologetically kooky and light, as Schmidt and Daniel concoct a blocky, plonking, and squelchy groove "built entirely out of the plucked and twanged fragments of broken vinyl records by the Seventies soft rock group Bread."By the second piece, however, the album has already gone quite far off the rails sanity-wise, as "The Crying Pill" is something resembling a manically fragmented mash-up of cheery fanfares, lysergic synth-like melodies, and skittering percussion.It is admittedly endearing that it came from an exercise ball, a jockstrap, and an "amplified DNA kit," but it feels like being trapped in the head of someone with extreme ADHD trying to replicate marching band music with a cheap '80s synthesizer.For me, "The Crying Pill" is quite a rough endurance test, an experience similarly replicated by the "cod-medieval martial drums and horn fanfares" of the benignly radiant title piece.I doubt I would have continued much further if it were not for the early presence of "Interior With Billiard Balls and Synthetic Fat," which beautifully approximates the sickly and smeared synths of Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works II with some pool balls, some dominoes, and an artificial corpse-replacement tissue used at medical schools.
Fortunately, the album's second half has a considerably higher hit rate than the first, culminating in the brilliant centerpiece "Collapse of the Fourth Kingdom."The title is a reference to plastic's early and optimistic projected future as a new kingdom beyond the animal, the vegetable, and the mineral ones and Matmos give its collapse a hell of a raucous farewell party, unleashing the Whitefish High School Bulldogs drumline at their full percussive fury (along with a crazed cacophony of whistles and duck calls).Aside from its explosive physicality, the piece is also quite an impressive tour de force for Matmos' production talents, as it morphs into a simmering, submerged-sounding, and duck call-centric groove at one point, then later warps all of the horn-like sounds into a deflating grotesquerie.Elsewhere, "Thermoplastic Riot Shield" is a fitfully violent eruption of psychotic squelching, gnarled textures, and pummeling percussion.The delightfully creaky and shuffling "The Singing Tube" is a more minor gem, unfolding as a polyrhythmic vamp conjured from PVC pipes, toilet brushes, and plastic pellets called "nurdles."The are a few other similarly pleasant rhythmic vignettes on the album as well, the best of which is the skewed exotica of "Silicone Gel Implant."I also quite like the heavy, ringing groove of "Fanfare for Polyethylene Waste Containers," though it is undercut by its more musical aspects (it sounds like someone trying to play New Age music with a plastic tuba).
Fittingly, the album closes with three minutes of windblown desolation, evoking a post-apocalyptic wasteland left by "the oceans of garbage that now choke our world."Unsurprisingly, that morbidly prophetic "field recording" is also a product of plastic, painstakingly assembled from the manipulated sounds of bubble wrap, straws, and plastic bags. It is quite a poetic conclusion to a very strange, disorienting, inventive, and unique album.I suppose all of those same adjectives could apply to nearly every Matmos album to some degree, but Schmidt and Daniel made a major creative breakthrough with Plastic Anniversary’s "it takes a village" approach.While no one surpasses Matmos at dreaming up a host of weird and vaguely disturbing sounds, that deranged and hallucinatory palette works best when it has a strong melodic, harmonic, or rhythmic foundation supporting it.In the case of Plastic Anniversary, Matmos' vision is elevated to a new plateau when Saunier and the Bulldogs are turned loose.For my taste, that does not happen quite enough, making Plastic Anniversary kind of an uneven album peppered with flashes of genuine inspiration and brilliance.Sometimes I wish Daniel and Schmidt were more drawn to the appeal of writing great songs than the appeal of "can we make an entire song with just a salad bowl?" (answer: yes, they can and they did), but I suspect the road that leads to a masterpiece like "Collapse of The Fourth Kingdom" could have only been built from restless experimentation, toilet brushes, and breast implants.
It is quite a rare and improbable event for a self-released debut to amass so much buzz and acclaim upon its release, but All My People is quite a deserving recipient for such good fortune. For better or worse, Somerville's work is likely to draw superficial comparisons to Carla dal Forno or Liz Harris, as she is quite fond of simple drum machine patterns, reverb-swathed vocals, and minimal musical accompaniment. At its heart, however, Somerville's vision is a fresh and unique one, as that stark template is an unlikely framework for a delightfully eclectic and unabashedly pop-minded suite of songs (albeit pop in the classic sense, a la Pet Sounds). In that regard, the achingly gorgeous centerpiece "Dreaming" is the album's biggest draw, but Somerville is just as adept at the production side of the equation, taking these seven pieces in some delightfully inventive and unusual directions.
The opening "Eyes Don't Say It" is initially a deceptively subdued and hazy introduction, as a bittersweet ascending melody slowly creeps into a landscape of buried, heartbeat-like kick drum and blurrily impressionistic dreampop guitars.That languorous, navel-gazing lead-in proves to be kind of an ingenious bit of songcraft magic though, as the song blossoms into swooningly romantic and vivid color when the first chorus arrives and essentially remains there for the rest of its duration, steadily amassing more warmth and deeper harmonies as layers of breathy vocals pile up.It is quite a beautiful song and it would be a strong template for the rest of the album to follow.To Somerville's credit, however, she never goes back to the same well twice, gamely imbuing each of these seven songs with their own quirks and character.For example, the following "All I Ever Wanted" is a bit of suave and sensuous art-pop in the vein of Stereolab, but stripped down to little more than a breezily shuffling groove.It is quite a likable song in general, but the touches in the periphery are a masterpiece of sexy, subtle psychedelia, as bleary Theremin-like melodies, woozy washes of guitar, and a wandering, chorus-heavy bass line gradually build up to a hallucinatory crescendo of distant voices.The title piece pulls off a similarly delicious feat of psych-pop transformation, opening with a cavernous house thump and a ghostly haze of uneasy drones before being unexpectedly joined by a pretty, floating vocal melody that sounds like an a capella rendition of a traditional Irish folk song.It is a truly bizarre convergence of threads, as it feels like two radically different pieces of music mashed together, albeit in a pleasing (if disorienting) way.Gradually, however, a host of buzzing drones and other subtly lysergic elements fade in until the song fully takes shape as a coherent whole.
On the more unrepentantly hook-heavy side, the aforementioned "Dreaming" is the album’s unquestionable zenith, calling to mind a hypnagogic reincarnation of classic Patsy Cline (or at least an especially great song by underappreciated 4AD alums Tarnation).In lesser hands, such a piece would be dragged down by melancholy, but Somerville sounds like a wide-eyed ingenue sensuously crooning her favorite love song at a karaoke bar in a David Lynch film: surreal textures gnaw at the edges and the song occasionally threatens to dissolve into the ether, yet it never stops being an innocently warm, sincere, and absolutely lovely piece at its core.The closing "Brighter Days" is yet another dose of pure pop bliss, but it is a bit more straightforward, as a trebly, ramshackle drum machine beat cheerily lurches forward through murky major chords and dreamy vocal melodies.Much like "Dreaming," it feels like the pop of a simpler time when almost every song was about love and a great hook was everything.To an uncanny degree, Somerville is singularly skilled at channeling classic country or '60s girl group songcraft without a hint of irony or heavy-handed pastiche, coming across as heartfelt and reverent while still managing to make these recordings sound like they were dubbed over a badly worn Enya tape found in your childhood bedroom.
While "Dreaming" is already a lock for one of my favorite songs of the year, one immortal song does not necessarily make for a great album (it just makes for a great single).All My People comes very close to being a great album though, as the only real caveat is that its impressive cavalcade of sublime and ghostly pop gems is a bit too brief to amount to a completely satisfying whole.That said, I genuinely appreciate the perfect, uncluttered brevity of Somerville's catchiest songs: she can pack a lot of beauty, inspiration, and depth into a mere three minutes and wisely never sticks around longer unless she has a cool idea for an outro.On a deeper level, however, much of her brilliance is of the intuitive and intangible variety.Obviously, lo-fi bedroom recordings have been an indie pop trope for years, yet Somerville has that magic touch that transforms "hiss-soaked and sketchlike" into "intimate and undiluted."She also has a knack for making prettiness feel pregnant with hidden depth rather than lightweight, as well as a real genius for making for her more experimental flourishes feel like natural, organic elements that were gently coaxed out of their hook-filled hiding spots.Everything is done with an unerring lightness of touch and an endearing fluidity.Artists like Somerville are a true rarity: a gifted and soulful songwriter who is also effortlessly idiosyncratic enough to appeal to someone as cranky and jaded as me.All My People is a legitimately remarkable debut.
Both Stephen Vitiello and Taylor Deupree are seasoned collaborators. Each new collaboration is a new context, a new conversation and a unique opportunity to learn. Vitiello has worked with musicians such as Scanner, Steve Roden, Ryuichi Sakamoto and Machinefabriek. As an artist often represented in galleries and large scale sound installations he has also had the frequent opportunity to work with visual artists from the likes of Tony Oursler to Julie Mehretu and Joan Jonas. Deupree has a long history of collaboration including early works with Christopher Willits and Richard Chartier as well as Marcus Fischer, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and Bon Iver’s S. Carey. Fridman Variations is Vitiello and Deupree's third release together and continues their tradition of exploring their unique form of experimental improvisation.
Stemming from a live performance at NYC's Fridman Gallery, Fridman Variations was co-produced by the gallery and will remain as part of the gallery’s publications. Fridman Gallery is a visual exhibition space that also boasts a unique dedication to experimental music through their annual New Ear Festival, at which Vitiello and Deupree performed and recorded the main piece for this album.
Side A of Fridman Variations is the live recording, edited for vinyl while side B contains two pieces made with some of the same source material as the live performance and intended to be related, but entirely new, works. Guitar, modular synthesizer and a small tape synthesizer are at the heart of these songs. The improved layers draw on buried melodies and hint of field recordings and found textures. Not overly melodic, not overly noisy, Vitiello and Deupree like to find the edge between the pretty and the obscure, often suggesting more than laying their intentions bare. This type of sound is one that the duo often explores as an opportunity for Deupree to adventure beyond his melodic comfort zone and for Vitiello to work and experiment with new instruments and how they interact with his signature guitar.
One of the biggest inspirations to the artists for this work was the hushed and dreamy state of the audience during the performance. The late-night ambience added to the immersive quality of the surround speakers and helped to channel creativity and a sense of sharing.
Both artists feel that recording live performances is an opportunity to capture a unique moment that simply won’t happen again. Despite a performance’s flaws or imperfections the energy and interaction is a special moment in time for the performers and audience. The opportunity to not only document it for the listeners who were present but also to be able to share the moment with those who weren't there is a positive one. To further be able to expand on the ideas in the controlled studio environment serves to enrich the experience and further the communication.
Nodding God were formed 666 years ago by Andrew Liles, David Tibet, and The UnderAge Shaitan-Boy in a Boys-Only preparatory boarding school in Babylon, since shut down by unfortunate events that took place there, in the night, in the dark.
Their first album, Wooden Child, is released on House Of Mythology in May 2019. Sung 93% in Akkadian by David, who has studied this language for many years, this New Baby God Who Nods—a Nodding God, a Godding Nod—Wooden Child is powered by Stars and Cuneiform and Pop and Drop and One Thousand Liles In One Thousand Axes.
Additional cryptic information can be found here and here.
As we approach the 20-year anniversary of the breaking of ground on the "Playthroughs" systems, I have begun performing the piece again on request, first at the Kranky 15th Anniversary party in Chicago, then at l'Auditori in Barcelona, finally picking up again for a trio of performances in late 2018, two of which are presented here in their unexpurgated states, exactly as they were performed & intended, with the "live to semiconductor" signals mixed with their in-situ environmental ambiances.
The settings of these two improvised performances; specifically, the Modern Art wing of a European Museum, then an outdoor floodplain in rural Western Japan flanked by mountains in all directions, couldn't have been any different, and so these two stagings, specifically, run at opposite sides of the possibility-sets of the piece: placid, calm, measured (Nantes) then wild, risk-enabled, chaotic (Naeba).
In addition to the two continuous performances, each broken up into three indexed "episodes", I'm including 10 still images taken during the time surrounding the performances, to give you further context on the music & its whereabouts.
Few contemporary industrial acts are spoken of in such highly reverential terms as Alberich, the solo project of underground super-producer Kris Lapke. While Lapke himself may best be known for his production and mastering work, both for such diverse sounding acts like Prurient, Nothing and the Haxan Cloak to his audio restoration work for Coum Transmissions and Shizuka, Alberich has achieved a cult on par with many of the legends he works with.
Lapke's diverse contributions as a producer are recognizable for the perfect balance of maximalist and minimalist electronics that Alberich has relentlessly authored. Since Alberich's 2010 masterful and highly collectable 2.5 hour NATO- Uniformen album, he has become a powerful force of modern industrial music. With only a series of limited tape and split releases, fans have been waiting with bated breath for a true follow-up album. The first full-length Alberich album in almost a decade, Quantized Angel will be released April 12, 2019. In the intervening years between albums, Alberich has grown more nuanced, creating atmosphere and tension on par with Silent Servant's classic Negative Fascination LP in regards to production and attention to detail.
The results create a newly polished but no less intense vision of modern industrial music. Over the course of the album’s eight tracks, Alberich demonstrates a vision of ruthless existential electronics, a sound both commanding yet questioning in introspective spirit.
Consisting of two thirds of the band Ars Phoenix, namely Jonn Gauntletier and Caitlin Grimalkin, it is not overly surprising that there are a lot of similarities between the bands. Both are equally synth heavy and rife with memorable hooks. However, the two are distinct projects, with Pass/Ages mining somewhat darker, distorted territories in comparison to the slightly more up beat Ars Phoenix work. Never are the moments of catchiness far off, however, resulting in a tape that is rough and experimental, yet as memorable as any pop record out there.
The tape opens on a high note with "As It Rises".Lead by a distorted, dirty synth and pleasantly rigid drum machine, the melodic elements that are added contrast perfectly.With the rhythmic section offset by ghostly synth pads, wobbling leads, and Grimalkin's vocals, the blending of light and dark is perfectly achieved."When the Sky Ignites" is a similar blend, with the vocals treated more and the addition of some excellent throwback syndrum passages.
"Materialize Me" is another great example of the somewhat harsher tendencies of Pass/Ages.The drum machine is bombastic and distorted, and the vocals are mixed to the front and less effected.With the addition of vintage string synth passages, the complete package is a great one.The mix may be sparser, but the thumping bass line of "Possession" balances out the 1980s keyboard leads that result in some extremely catchy melodies.
Other significant portions of this tape feature Pass/Ages opting less for distortion and more for heavy reverb as the primary feature.The ethereal layers of "Taken Underneath" and the complex melodic passages result in a splendidly executed bit of dark pop.There may be some prominent snappy rhythms on "How Much Did You Take?", but its hard to not focus on the beautiful electronic melodies and buried vocals just barely peeking out from the wall of reverb.On both "Asphodel" and "Cavalcade", the duo dial the tempo back into much lower BPMs, but in the process make for two dramatic, anthem-like works of lush production and big, rich synthesizer passages.
The influences on Pass/Ages are clear and rooted deeply in the 1980s, but one of the strongest things about Taken Underneath is how it sounds, from a production standpoint, entirely contemporary.Instead of an intentionally retro aesthetic, the duo takes the inspiration from the era, but no conscious attempt to mimic anything too specifically.  The production also has just the right amount of DIY grime though.By no means is it amateurish, but it lacks the unnatural sheen that would strip it of its unique sound.Taken Underneath is an extremely memorable, distinct album that is a fitting continuation of the Ars Phoenix legacy.
Hot on the heels of his appearance on last year's In Death's Dream Kingdom, Abul Mogard returns to Houndstooth with a collection of his work as an unlikely remix artist. Of these five lengthy pieces, I was only familiar with the one from Fovea Hex's The Salt Garden II, as his reworkings of songs by Nick Nicely and a pair of Houndstooth artists (Aïsha Devi and Penelope Trappes) somehow eluded me. The beguiling centerpiece of the album, however, is an entirely new work that reimagines Cindytalk/Massimo Pupillo's sublime Becoming Animal project. All of the chosen pieces suit Mogard's aesthetic beautifully though, adding up to an album that is more like an unexpectedly strong and song-based follow-up to Above All Dreams than a collection of one-off works that were never intended to coexist. Naturally, this is easily Abul Mogard's most accessible release to date, but I was pleasantly surprised to discover that it is also one of his best too.
I would love to someday hear an Abul Mogard remix that enlivens a beautiful Fovea Hex song with frenetic breakbeats and party horns, but Mogard in remix mode is almost indistinguishable from Mogard performing his own work at this stage of his career: everything he touches is elegantly stretched into a warmly languorous reverie of blurred and frayed chord swells. For the most part, nearly all of these songs fell quite close to that territory before Mogard even started working his signature magic, so his sorcery largely lies in transforming traits that already existed into something a bit more expansive, radiant, and subtly hallucinatory.The sole exception to that trend is the unexpected opener, which is a somewhat radical overhaul of a piece from Aïsha Devi’s 2015 debut album.Notably, Devi's DNA Feelings was all over "best of 2018" lists last year, but Mogard was apparently into her years before that, which is very amusing and endearing if his purported identity as a retired Serbian factory worker is true.The original version of "O.M.A" is a warped, distinctive, and fairly experimental twist on soulful and seductive dance music.The remixed version, on the other hand, is almost unrecognizable, as Devi's voice melodically floats through lush, billowing chords like a beckoning Siren's song.Also, Devi's voice is arguably not even the focal point of the piece, as it drifts in and out while a slow-moving and spacey synth motif establishes itself as the heart of it all.It is a truly lovely piece of music, but so is everything else on the album."O.M.A" just happened to travel a bit further to get to its final destination than the rest of its peers.
Amusingly, the one piece that I already knew and liked quite a bit before hearing the album (a reworking of Fovea Hex's "All Those Signs") turned out to be the least of his remix achievements, though it is an appealingly understated and intimate performance.At its core, "We Dream All The Dark Away" is a fundamentally rapturous piece of music, as Mogard marries Clodagh Simonds' simple, lovely vocal melody to a similarly simple and lovely organ motif, elevating the piece into an even more sublime work of tender beauty.Unfortunately, the piece then sprawls out and meanders for over twenty minutes, greatly diluting its impact.Hopefully someone will someday do a remix of the remix, isolating and expanding upon its early brilliance (though it would admittedly take some serious guts to leave Brian Eno’s choral contribution on the cutting room floor).That said, it is still an intermittently gorgeous piece–I just did not expect to be blindsided by so many pieces that were even better.Aside from the remarkably high standard of quality, And We Are Passing Through Silently is also a bit of a revelation for so seamlessly transforming Mogard's heavenly drones into something approaching pop music.The addition of vocals to his vision feels perfectly natural, organic, and right and absolutely none of the crucial essence is sacrificed in the process.With pieces like "London South" and "The Sky is Ever Falling," Mogard makes it seem like he has been doing remixes forever and that it is exactly what he was supposed to be doing all along.
This Australian trio first appeared on my radar with 2015’s somewhat polarizing and aptly named Severe album, which stripped away all of the more conventional post-punk elements of their sound to leave only a beautifully chiseled and pummeling strain of minimalism. I suppose most My Disco albums have been a bit polarizing though, as the band have undergone a series of transformations since their early days as a math-rock band and not every fan has wanted to stick around for the next phase. With Severe, however, it felt like My Disco had finally found a truly distinctive niche that felt like their proper home. Environment happily continues to explore that same vein, yet takes that aesthetic to an even greater extreme, replacing surgical brutality with an ominous, simmering tension and dissolving any last traces of the band’s more "rock" past.  It is hard to say if Environment quite tops Severe, but it is very easy to say that it is another great album from an extremely compelling band.
Listening to Environment, it is difficult to believe that My Disco were ever a band with clearly defined roles like "drummer" and "guitarist," as they seem very much like an entity that has almost transcended conventional instrumentation entirely.In the opening, "An Intimate Conflict," for example, the trio's palette is reduced to just a thick electronic throb and the sounds of scraping metal.Even Liam Andrews' vocals diverge from traditional territory, as his fitful and indecipherable monologue is enveloped in a squall of distortion and reverb.The insistently pulsing and brooding atmosphere actually calls to mind the power electronics milieu, but My Disco depart from that aesthetic by opting for deadpan cool and unresolved tension rather than misanthropic catharsis.A far more visceral and explosive side of the band certainly exists, but it has been completely exiled to the accompanying remix album, leaving Environment to exist as an unwaveringly focused tour de force of restraint and understated menace.It is also quite an intriguing experiment in stark minimalism, as "Hong Kong 1987" explores a similarly constrained palette of throbbing bass drone mingled with enigmatic metallic scrapes, though it augments that foundation with a ghostly ascending melody.The brief "Equatorial Rainforests of Sumatra" goes to an even greater extreme, taking away everything except for a bass drum and some ritualistic-sounding metal percussion.If I did not know that I was listening to My Disco and someone told me that it was a field recording from a Tibetan funeral or something instead, I would not question it for a second.
The best songs on Environment, however, are the ones where My Disco combine their arsenal of unsettling creaks and throbs with some semblance of consistent rhythm or sense of forward motion. The best of these more conventionally song-like moments is probably "Rival Colour," which augments a half-sinister/ half-sensuous bass throb with an "evil woodpecker" percussion motif that sounds like something I would expect to hear shortly before being murdered by cannibals in a dense, foreboding jungle.The closing "Forever" is a similarly brilliant feast of darkly seductive menace, as a tribal-sounding hand-percussion motif moves unrelentingly forward amidst drizzling rain and Andrews' hushed promises (or threats) that he will wait.Notably, it features the sole moment of volcanic release on the entire album, as there is a howling and gnarled squall of guitar noise shortly before the song dissolves entirely to leave only the lingering sounds of the rain in its wake.Given the quiet intensity and brutally spartan nature of album, however, any glimpse of violence or hint of an imminent eruption is impressively magnified in power.Consequently, I would be remiss if I did not single out "Act" as yet another highlight, which improbably manages to wrest a remarkable amount of brooding intensity out of a single densely buzzing tone that slowly flanges and snarls.I think there are at least three songs on this album constrained to a single repeating or sustained note and all of them are great.That is quite an impressive feat to pull off repeatedly.
As wonderful as it is, however, "Act" does highlight Environment's sole minor flaw: Andrews is a vocalist of very few words.In many cases, it feels like he is using simple repeated phrases in an ingenious way, evoking an unnerving obsessiveness and escalating sense of dread.Other times, it just feels like the lyrics were kind of an afterthought."Act" falls into that latter category.For the most part, however, Environment is a hell of an album and an extremely cool vision executed beautifully. I cannot think of many other bands that so skillfully blur the lines between artistic rigor, tight songcraft, and sounding like they would probably stab me with a broken bottle if I looked at them wrong.Late-period Disappears has also earned a place in that illustrious pantheon and they are probably the closest kindred spirit here, but Environment sounds like the blackened framework that would remain if someone set the Era album on fire.I mean that in the best way possible, as I cannot praise this album's high points enough.At their best, My Disco wield space absolutely brilliantly, creating a vacuum in which every single sound makes a deep impact.Moreover, the band do an incredible job at creating and sustaining a bleakly beautiful and unwaveringly heavy mood without a single lapse or misstep.Environment is the perfect negative image of a great post-punk album, draining away all the color and heightening the contrast to transform the previously familiar into something eerily spectral and nearly unrecognizable.