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.
From Here to Eternity is the first full length album from Canadian composer Kyle Bobby Dunn since his 2014 long play, Infinite Sadness.
The use of processed guitar and his passion for cinematic swells reaches new realms that are markedly more ominous and dense than his previous long play. Kyle Bobby Dunn also recruited prominent ambient composers and a handful of his favorite musicians to arrange their own instrumentation for several works on this release that add multiple layers of mystery and intrigue of the human mind and heart. Artists that contributed to this effort are: Benoît Pioulard, Simon Scott, Loscil, Pan-American, Wayne Robert Thomas, Isaac Helsen, Mark Nelson, Robert Donne, Maryam Sirvan, and Michael Vincent Waller.
Kyle Bobby Dunn wanted this album to be very much about the eternal conflict with all human emotions and life circumstances and to somehow go even further than the concepts left behind on Infinite Sadness. The moods and sounds range from angelic choral elements to motion picture soundtrack epics; permeating the skeletal system of the listener with a sense of boundaries and mortality. There are also moments that capture the dynamics of the artist performing in the live setting perfectly and were engineered meticulously by Matt Rogalsky and Kyle Bobby Dunn himself. Truly a difficult album of unending loss, confusion, pain, identity, disease and even death, but also some of the most reflective and warm moments of his career to date.
Sebastian Banaszczyk's sound recycling project Bionulor's recent works have been part of larger multimedia projects such as theater, but for A. S., he has returned to a purely audio format. He maintains a thematic unity to the album, however, making it as conceptual as any of his prior works. For this one, his starting point was the work of Russian composer Alexander Scriabin. Banaszczyk strikes that perfect balance between creating something new while allowing the source material to be recognizable throughout.
This equilibrium is apparent from the onset with "Rêverie."Lightly surging electronics are blended with transient piano notes that meld the sensibilities of classical and modern composition together, with a bit of light distortion added to give texture.For "Nocturne," Banaszczyk again utilizes some infrequent piano samples, shaped into distinct loops.The sounds of plucked strings are added, solidifying the piece as a deconstructed series of classical loops that sound great, even if the piece is not quite as dynamic as some of the others here.
While Banazczyk never entirely processes Scriabin's work into pure abstraction, there are moments where he pushes the source material a bit further into abstraction.For "Ballet Acoustique," he bends the traditional instruments into something more reminiscent of synthesizers or other electronics.Here they take on a metallic clang, blending some plaintive tones with ping-pong echoing electronic sounds for a disorienting combination.The short "Poème 2" again features Banazczyk in clanging electronics mode, with the final product sounding like a purely electronic piece.
Banazczyk ends the album on a strong note with "Noir Camomille."Encapsulating most of the album’s themes into one piece, it is a slow and spacious piece built on a wobbly piano sound and a heartbeat like pulsation.With these differing elements and ample time for the composition to build, the result is a dynamic and ever changing work that ends appropriately with some sampling noises arranged into a rhythmic coda.
Just like his other releases, Sebastian Banazczyk has created something distinctly Bionulor while remaining faithful to the original source. A. S. is exemplary in the way he uses this audio clay to sculpt something unique, and after eight albums and ten years of work, he continues to impress me with each release.
Mark Solotroff’s contributions to harsh electronic music cannot be overstated. Beginning with the adult bookstore sleaze of the 1980s power electronics project Intrinsic Action into the present day psychologically disturbing noise of Bloodyminded (which, in a live context, becomes the perfect deconstruction of rock performance) and the doom metal tinged Anatomy of Habit, he has been an influential force for the past 35 years. This does not even take into account his multitude of solo and side projects, such as these two recent cassettes. All of his work is joined together by a single, distinct thread: a love of analog synthesizers that borders on the obsessive. Here those synths are used to create the perfect soundtrack to city isolation.
One of Solotroff’s most ambitious projects of the past was Super Eight Loop:100 hours of just the rawest analog synth improvisations possible.Completed over the span of 25 years, albeit with a ten year hiatus thrown in there, it is a perfect distillation of his obsessive love of the instrument. Super Eight Loop was intended to capture the New York City of old, the one full of seedy movie theaters and an omnipresent sense of danger.His latest work follows this same line of abstract soundtracks for urban spaces, but reoriented to the contradictory sense of loneliness and isolation that arise from a large, heavily populated city, in this case his current home of Chicago.Symmetrical Spaces of Communication and Social Objectives are the two most recent installments this series of recordings joined by themes of the intersection between sociological theory and distinct urban spaces.
Compared to the Super Eight Loop works, there is less aggression and filth to be had, but instead replaced with sounds of corrosion, decay, and isolation."Ego Machine", on Symmetrical Spaces opens with an industrial grind and acidic, rust laden electronics slicing through concrete decay.Eventually Solotroff arranges the sounds into a sustained drone, not unlike a humming power generator or far off airplane passing through.He does an exceptional job at capturing bleakness, casting out cold sheets of sound like frigid rain falling in a vast, deserted space.
On the other side of the tape, "Achievement Society" features Solotroff keeping the same isolated mood and cold concrete spaces, but here awash in echo and hollow drone.Non-specific rumbles appear far away, just far enough out of focus to be forceful.At times, he blends in what almost sounds like a bit of melody distant in the mix:an appropriately desolate bit of delicate beauty in the otherwise cold and inhospitable mix.Even amidst all of that bleakness the melody adds in that tiniest bit of hope, as remote as it may seem.
In comparison, Social Objectives exemplifies a bit more of Solotroff’s noisier tendencies.For "Emotive Issues", he sets his synths up to just below the noise threshold, keeping things to a shimmering burst blended with a duller mechanical hum.He again captures the sense of despair via distant echoes and lower register, haunting tones.There may be a lingering sense of harshness, but he keeps the mood much more to depressive than anything on the violent end of the spectrum."Population Advisor" is less textural in comparison, but is instead an excellent approximation of the dull noise of the city.The whole of the piece is a nicely dull machinery hum, with passages approximating the sounds of power lines, florescent lights, or other malfunctioning equipment.There may be the occasional fragment tone that passes through, but as a whole the piece is the perfect audio accompaniment to being alone in a city late at night.
Solotroff has been extremely active as of late, digitizing and remastering older works (including the aforementioned Super Eight Loop project), releasing some archival performances as Bloodyminded all the while working on a new album, and keeping up with his other projects.Even with all of this other activity he has still found time to indulge in his analog synthesizer fetishism.The long form pieces on these tapes never meander or drag on, but instead make for the perfect imaginary soundtracks to the urban landscapes that inspired them.Even spread that thinly across his multitude of projects, this work is obviously a labor of love.The sound is grey, bleak, and isolating, but in the most fascinating and beautiful of ways.
As Ellen Fullman can likely attest, one of the downsides to inventing your own instrument with 100-foot-long strings is that it definitely limits the number of possible venues for your performances. Another is that Fullman's Long String Instrument takes roughly five days to install and tune, adding yet another level of amusing inconvenience to the endeavor. Fortunately, an optimal situation surfaced in 2016, as John Chantler's First Edition Festival was given access to Stockholm’s Performing Arts Museum while it was being renovated. Given the limited "pure drone" nature of her instrument, the success of Fullman’s work can be heavily dependent on finding an appropriately sympathetic foil who can add vivid splashes of color and new layers of emotional depth to that rich harmonic backdrop. In that regard, Fullman could not possibly have hoped for a more talented and amenable collaborator than avant garde cello virtuoso Okkyung Lee.
Unsurprisingly, the idea for Fullman's Long String Instrument initially came from her exposure to Alvin Lucier’s Music on a Long Thin Wire in the early ‘80s.At the time, she was a young sculptor, and she set about creating her own version, initially using a bowl of water as a resonator.Like Lucier's instrument, the Long String Instrument was initially only one string, but departed from his work by making it a more tactile and acoustic phenomenon (Lucier's wire was "played" by an oscillator).Over the ensuing three decades, however, Fullman greatly improved upon her original prototype, using wooden resonators that behave like guitar bodies and expanding the number of strings to as many as fifty-six (a maximum dictated by the span of her arms).Fullman plays the instrument by slowly walking between the two sets of strings, dragging her rosin-covered fingers along them to produce sustained and buzzing metallic drones.In essence, it is like a massive tambura and naturally lends itself to creating dense, harmonically vibrant reveries in the vein of Indian Raga.A tambura usually only has four strings, however, so Fullman's invention opens up significantly deeper and more layered vistas of heavy drones and slowly blossoming clouds of accumulating overtones.In short, it is the ideal instrument for drone music, allowing Fullman to achieve both a palpable physicality and a degree of nuance that was previously not possible.
The album is divided into two separate halves of roughly twenty minutes each, but the two sections are essentially variations on the same theme, so their differences are largely academic.It is possible that the original performance was a single long piece that has been edited to fit the vinyl format, but the second half seems to start anew rather than picking up where the first half left off.The foundation of each, of course, is the languorously undulating and buzzing swells of Fullman's vibrating strings.That backdrop can be quite compelling in its own right, as the shifting metallic thrum can be quite sharp at times and produces quite an unpredictable array of harmonics and harmonies as the sustained tones interact and collide.During her more subdued moments, Okkyung Lee produces her own undulating drones that intertwine with Fullman's to achieve a heaving and simmering baseline intensity, but the most striking passages are those in which a fresh cello theme vividly blossoms into sharp relief.It can be a truly dazzling performance at times, as Lee seems to effortlessly conjure a wide array of vibrant sounds from her cello.Naturally, there are plenty of visceral howls, moans, scrapes, and shudders that are essentially the cello equivalent of free-jazz flame-throwing, but Lee thoughtfully times her eruptions to yield a coherent arc of well-earned crescendos rather than a nerve-jangling and exhausting one-dimensional assault of cacophony.In the spaces between her more fiery passages, Lee delves into some rather striking and inventive territory, sometimes mimicking speech; sometimes wresting deep shudders, swoops, and rattles from her instrument; and other times evoking a wildly fluttering bird.She also fluidly cycles through an atypically rich palette of emotions, eschewing anything resembling melancholy to convey a kaleidoscopic swirl of passion, tenderness, sensuality, calm radiance, and something approaching the ecstatic.
This unusual and fitfully fascinating album was quietly released near the end of 2018 on the small New Orleans-based Pinkbox Teleport label. INRA are themselves based in Berlin, yet The Content Consuming Its Form sounds very much like it was partially birthed in a bleak and blighted late-'70s industrial area, favorably recalling the UK’s finest art-damaged dystopian experimentalists of the period. While I probably would (guiltily) enjoy an album that was essentially straight-up Throbbing Gristle worship, INRA merely recapture the intelligence, low-budget futurism, and deep sense of post-modern alienation that defined the milieu of the era. Stylistically, they reanimate the formula with fresh blood in the form of kinetic drumming and nods to the heavier side of the dance music underground. While not every song gets the balance of murky mood and skittering, propulsive rhythms exactly right, the ones that do are a deliciously inventive feast of post-industrial collage done beautifully.
Both guitarist Adam Ben-Nun and drummer Philipp Rhensius were involved in various noise/drone/experimental projects before they began collaborating as INRA, but it is Rhensius's broader passions that propel the duo’s work into something unique.For one, he is a writer, and the physical releases of The Content Consuming Its Form combines the album with a brief book.I do not have that book, but the impressionistic poetry that I have seen from the pair displays an appealingly sardonic and subtly scathing sensibility ("a tired painter with 703 Facebook friends was doomed to fail with the Greek idea that love is expressed through illusions and compassion").The album's lyrics fall within similarly elliptical and aphoristic territory, though they are frequently obscured by effects and feel like a textural element rather than a focus.Much like identifying himself as a poet, Rhensius's passion for club music is similarly something that could have been a catastrophically bad idea if poorly executed.It actually works quite beautifully though: the pair have an intuitive genius for using Jungle-esque drumming and muscular bass lines as mere tools to add well-placed splashes of color and visceral heft to their crackling and hallucinatory collages.That choice of focus is important.While it may not sound like a big deal on paper, it is an absolutely crucial detail in separating "evocative soundscapes enlivened by cool percussion flourishes" from "atypically murky dance album that will sound dated almost immediately."To their credit, INRA consistently and decisively avoid the latter fate.The strongest example of that perfect balance is "I Don't Have Feet," in which a miasma of machine-like hums, distorted voices, and abused guitar sounds is unexpectedly joined by a thick, rolling bass line that immediately imbues everything with a muscular physicality and welcome sense of forward motion.
My other favorite piece is the title track, which opens with a distorted, semi-robotic voice speaking over a burbling backdrop of flanged tribal tom-toms.It all feels very cruddy and lo-fi, which is a nice touch: it would be so easy to sound convincingly like an actual robot with the technology available today, but choosing instead to sound more like "Hamburger Lady" gives the piece a pervading sense of ruin and sadness.That sense does not persist for long, however, as Rhensius's drums suddenly spring vividly to life and the piece coheres into a wonderfully clattering and bass-heavy groove.Elsewhere, "She is Like the Silence in Ingmar Bergman Movies" goes in the opposite direction, weaving a dreamlike spell of hazily ghostlike ambience, submerged snatches of distracted vocal melodies, and enigmatic crackles and scrapes.As it progresses, the piece becomes steadily more phantasmagoric and haunting, as buried melodies start to emerge, textures fray and sizzle, and the vocals sound like they are being dragged into a black hole.The album is rounded out by three more pieces: an ominous reverie of echoing, disembodied voices ("5 Likes After 7 Minutes") and the two percussion-heavy bookends ("The Last Summer Before Web 2.0" and "Free Power Snacks in the Co-Working Space").All are admittedly quite good in their own way, but INRA are at their best when they blur the lines between those two separate poles of their vision.
While I certainly dig INRA's aesthetic, the true beauty of The Content Consumes Its Form lies in the details and the execution, as the duo largely avoid any false notes or heavy-handed gestures that might dispel their vivid vignettes of industrial decay, disconnectedness, and lysergic Holy Mountain-esque menace.I am especially impressed with Ben-Nun's guitar work, as he deftly sidesteps any conventional touches and instead uses the instrument almost like a paintbrush, crafting enigmatic and subtly textured scenes from a palette of blurred chords, scrapes, and strangled noises.I have since investigated INRA's debut (Suburbs of Utopia) and the difference between the two albums seems to be primarily one of focus: all the elements of The Content Consuming Its Form were in place from the beginning, but it took Ben-Nun and Rhensius a couple of year to master carving away any clutter or lulls that blunted their impact.Aside from that, this album shows a real talent for dynamics, expertly balancing the ravaged and sickly with the vivid and the visceral.If Throbbing Gristle can be said to be logical product of late '70s socioeconomic disillusionment and hopelessness colliding with affordable electronics and the revolutionary spirit of punk and post-punk, INRA can be said to be the logical product of their own time. The sense of disconnection and existential malaise remains, but there is now a numbing cultural oversaturation, and any genuine sense of revolution has been replaced by endless nostalgia cycles.Consequently, there is nothing here that anyone would find transgressive or civilization-wrecking, but it would feel wrong if there was, as INRA have taken their inspirations and artfully shaped them into a compelling reflection of their own late-capitalism point in history.
"Grouper's Liz Harris has today (February 8) released an album under a new moniker, Nivhek. After its own death / Walking in a spiral towards the house is out now on Yellow Electric.
Recorded using Mellotron, guitar, field recordings, tapes, and broken FX pedals, the album was developed during two residencies Harris spent in Azores, Portugal and Murmansk, Russia, as well as at her home in Astoria, Oregon."
Chasms was formed in 2011 by Jess Labrador and Shannon Madden. Following 2016's On the Legs of Love Purified and the recent "Divine Illusion" single, The Mirage pushes the band's ethereal sound into the murky depths of dub. Marking a sonic shift for the project, The Mirage finds the duo trading in chaotic bursts of noise for understated minimalism that's still characteristically melancholic and potent with emotion. Labrador's drum production is as deft as ever with an expanded range of electronic samples and tape-delay-induced polyrhythms. Layered with Madden's persistently dubby bass, Labrador's sparse guitar and gliding soprano float above a labyrinth of hypnotic sequences. These dub-laced dirges signify growth within the band, heard in their command of repetition, space, and effects to build a pervasive mood that's often utterly heartbreaking.
The duo’s second LP for the Felte label, The Mirage was conceived following major upheaval in the pair’s lives, including the loss of Madden's brother and a number of the band's friends in Oakland’s Ghost Ship warehouse fire in 2016. Compounded with the dissolution of a marriage, and leaving San Francisco after more than a decade to relocate to Los Angeles, the album is an exploration of grief and the multi-faceted heartbreak that follows such events. What we think we see, what we think we know to be true, how we think life will turn out, the plans we make – all reduced to an illusion when someone you expected to be alive tomorrow is gone, when plans fail, when the mask is removed, and you are left simply to be.
Mixed by Josh Eustis (Telefon Tel Aviv) and mastered by Rafael Anton Irisarri, The Mirage tells candid narratives of a heavy heart but does not wallow in despair. At times, the album even offers danceable moments as in the entrancing, textural "Every Heaven in Between" with its restless techno and house-inspired four-on-the-floor beat. Sliding guitar chords and a smoky bass line wade between rhythmic pulsing and a booming kick in the narcotic "Shadow." A transformative assemblage of songs, The Mirage is a powerful reflection on the events that shatter and shape our lives.
Akira Rabelais’ years-in-the-making new album CXVI features collaborations with Harold Budd, Ben Frost, Biosphere, Kassel Jaeger and Stephan Mathieu, among others. It unfurls a quietly breathtaking, dreamlike sequence of events where early music meets a prism of shoegaze, ASMR, classical and textural sound design - huge recommemdation if yr into Felicia Atkinson, the GRM, Morton Feldman, Stephan Mathieu, Deathprod, Harold Budd...
Set to be received as Rabelais' magnum opus, CXVI finds the Hollywood-based composer challenging his usual working methods, pushing himself to refresh binds with longterm collaborators such as Harold Budd and Stephan Mathieu and forge new relationships with like-minded craftsmen such as Geir Jenssen (Biosphere), while also finding a new vocal muse in Karen Vogt of Heligoland, and also coaxing the recorded debuts of his friend Mélanie Skribiane, and filmmaker/photographer Bogdan D. Smith. The result of their time-lapsed endeavours is a record of divine subtlety and poignant patience, rendered with a mirage-like appeal.
Opener "Which Alters When It Alteration Finds," beautifully segues from a prickly bouquet of keys and lovebite-distortion penned with Ben Frost to a reverberant, spine-freezing piano coda from Harold Budd, before "Which Alters When It Alteration Finds" smokily gives way to the sylvan shadowplay of the album's masterful centerpiece, "Star to Every Wandring Worth's Unknown," where Mélanie Skribiane reads from Max Ernst's "la femme 100 têtes" against an exquisite veil of strings and keys realized by Akira with the GRM’s Kassel Jaeger a.k.a. François Bonnet.
The 3rd part of the album only becomes more sparse and isolationist, as Karen Vogt's plainsong gives way to the tremulous, icy timbres of Akira's processed guitar strokes, originally written for Cedrick Corliolis' Tokyo Platform soundtrack, before the final side of "If Error and Upon Me Proved" finds Akira pushing Geir Jenssen’s (Biosphere) synths into the red, emphasizing a romantic soreness that turns into crushing noise, before Bogdan Smith's whispered vocal melts into an ancient, arcane air inscribed to 78rpm vinyl by Stephan Mathieu and then sweetened, re-incorporated by Akira as the album's stunning closing passage.
Riddled with bedevilling detail and utterly timeless in its scope, CXVI is a disorientating opus you’ll want to undergo over and again, for our money one of the great quiet albums of recent years.
Nihiloxica's highly anticipated new EP featuring 4 new tracks of Bugandan percussive experimentation. Comprised of four percussionists, one kit drummer combined with an analog synth player. Recorded live in single takes at Boutiq Studios in Kampala, Uganda between October- December 2018.
The CDr contains a 46 minute track ("The π Key") which will not be available for download. This item is released in an edition of 25.
3.) The π Key - Deluxe Edition
WOODEN KEY + ANTIQUE 6" RECORD HOUSED IN SIGNED AND NUMBERED BESPOKE COVER + CDR + 23 TRACK DOWNLOAD
Each individual CDR is unique to each order as it contains the 46 minute track ("The π Key") plus the two tracks from the 6" record included in your package. This item is released in an edition of 23.
The Geometry of Social Deprivation is constructed from samples and manipulated sounds garnered from twenty-three 6" shellac records from the 1920's.
Each track contains a blend of loops and sampled fragments constructed from one record using the sound found on both the A and B sides. Each track is created from a different record. No additional instrumentation has been added.
This sometimes soft and ambient but challenging and abstract 8-hour suite of crackling, dusty and forgotten sounds of yesteryear has been designed to be played as a functional piece of music, to while away the hours as you go about your daily routine... a faint drone in the background or a suffocating, all encompassing sonic assault. Equally it can be utilized as an aid to spend your evenings "researching" a field of your choosing.
Sound In Silence is happy to announce the addition of Tim Linghaus to its roster of artists, presenting his new album entitled About B. (Memory Sketches B-Sides Recordings).
Tim Linghaus is a musician and composer based in Cuxhaven, Germany, who creates his compositions blurring the lines between modern classical and ambient soundscapes. Since 2016 he has released an EP in 2016 on Moderna Records and an album in 2018 on Schole and 1631 Recordings.
About B. (Memory Sketches B-Sides Recordings) is a wonderful collection of thirteen new unreleased tracks in conjunction with four reworked versions of tracks from his highly acclaimed debut album which was released last year. It is in line with his debut album as all tracks were recorded around the period of the Memory Sketches sessions, trying to preserve particular personal memories in form of music. The album’s instrumentation is centered on wistful piano lines, warm synth arpeggios and layers of swirling drones, enhanced by cello, violin and saxophone performances by Sebastian Selke of CEEYS, Jean-Marie Bø and Tobias Leon Haecker, while field recordings and other sounds, like vinyl crackles and subtle electronics, perfectly fill the background atmospherics. Mastered by George Mastrokostas (aka Absent Without Leave), giving an intimate warmth to its sounds, About B. (Memory Sketches B-Sides Recordings) is an album full of gorgeous textures and stunning atmospheres, highly recommended for fans of Nils Frahm, Ólafur Arnalds and Max Richter.