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.
In 1997, the independent music business was thriving worldwide, musical acts were reaching new audiences via the World Wide Web, and the economy was booming. Brainwashed.com was a year old, and we had not even begun to start conduction Annual Readers Polls. However, we began expanding the domain to host sites for independent labels and distributors like Kranky, Thrill Jockey, Happy Go Lucky, RRRecords, and World Serpent Distribution along with the multitude of sites we were hosting for musical acts.
It has been a pleasure to revisit the music of 1997 and we appreciate all the time and effort put in by the readers to make your opinions known.
Album of the Year
Godspeed You Black Emperor!, ""F# A# ‚àû"" (Constellation)
Spiritualized, ""Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space"" (Dedicated)
Autechre, ""Chiastic Slide"" (Warp)
Labradford, ""Mi Media Naranja"" (Kranky)
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, ""The Boatman's Call"" (Mute)
Stars of the Lid, ""The Ballasted Orchestra"" (kranky)
Nurse With Wound / Aranos, ""Acts of Senseless Beauty"" (United Dairies)
Mogwai, ""Young Team"" (Chemikal Underground)
Matmos, ""Matmos"" (Vague Terrain)
Stereolab, ""Dots and Loops"" (Duophonic)
The Legendary Pink Dots, ""Hallway of The Gods"" (Soleilmoon)
Panasonic, ""Kulma"" (Mute)
Squarepusher, ""Hard Normal Daddy"" (Warp)
Mouse On Mars, ""Autoditacker"" (Too Pure)
The Legendary Pink Dots, ""Chemical Playschool 10"" (Soleilmoon)
Mouse On Mars, ""Instrumentals"" (Thrill Jockey)
Current 93, ""In A Foreign Town, In A Foreign Land"" (Durtro)
Scott Walker, ""Tilt"" (Drag City)
Third Eye Foundation, the, ""Ghost"" (Domino)
Yo La Tengo, ""I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One"" (Matador)
He Said Omala, ""Catch Supposes"" (Origin)
Pan•American, ""Pan•American"" (Kranky)
Biosphere, ""Substrata"" (All Saints)
GusGus, ""Polydistortion"" (4AD)
Keiji Haino, ""So, Black is Myself"" (Alien8)
Jessica Bailiff, ""Even in Silence"" (Kranky)
Scala, ""Beauty Nowhere"" (Touch)
Main, ""Deliquescence"" (Beggars Banquet)
Amp, ""Astralmoonbeamprojections"" (Kranky)
Songs: Ohia, ""Songs: Ohia"" (Secretly Canadian)
Elliott Smith, ""Either/Or"" (Kill Rock Stars)
Robert Wyatt, ""Shleep"" (Hannibal)
He Said Omala, ""Matching Crosses"" (Origin)
Mark Van Hoen, ""The Last Flowers From The Darkness"" (Touch)
Locust, ""Morning Light"" (Apollo)
Squarepusher, ""Burningn'n Tree"" (Warp)
Download, ""III"" (Subconscious)
Sigur Rós, ""Von"" (Smekkleysa)
Christoph Heemann, ""Days Of The Eclipse"" (Barooni)
Dead Voices On Air, ""How Hollow Heart... [Live]"" (Invisible)
Light In The Attic's Japan Archival Series continues with Kankyō Ongaku: Japanese Ambient, Environmental & New Age Music 1980-1990, an unprecedented overview of the country’s vital minimal, ambient, avant-garde, and New Age music – what can collectively be described as kankyō ongaku, or environmental music. The collection features internationally acclaimed artists such as Haruomi Hosono, Ryuichi Sakamoto and Joe Hisaishi, as well as other pioneers like Hiroshi Yoshimura, Yoshio Ojima and Satoshi Ashikawa, who deserve a place alongside the indisputable giants of these genres.
In the 1970s, the concepts of Brian Eno's "ambient" and Erik Satie's "furniture music" began to take hold in the minds of artists and musicians around Tokyo. Emerging fields like soundscape design and architectural acoustics opened up new ways in which sound and music could be consumed. For artists like Yoshimura, Ojima and Ashikawa, these ideas became the foundation for their musical works, which were heard not only on records and in live performances, but also within public and private spaces where they intermingled with the sounds and environments of everyday life. The bubble economy of 1980s Japan also had a hand in the advancement of kankyō ongaku. In an attempt to cultivate an image of sophisticated lifestyle, corporations with expendable income bankrolled various art and music initiatives, which opened up new and unorthodox ways in which artists could integrate their avant-garde musical forms into everyday life: in-store music for Muji, promo LP for a Sanyo AC unit, a Seiko watch advert, among others that can be heard in this collection.
Kankyō Ongaku is expertly compiled by Spencer Doran (Visible Cloaks) who, with a series of revelatory mixtapes as well as his label Empire of Signs (Music For Nine Postcards), has been instrumental in shepherding interest in this music outside of Japan. Together with Light In The Attic's celebrated anthologies I Am The Center and The Microcosm, Kankyō Ongaku helps to broaden our understanding of this quietly profound music, regardless of the environment in which it is heard.
In 2019 Croatian Amor returns with a new album, Isa.
Copenhagen's Loke Rahbek works in a wide variety of forms. His prolific rate of activity is best viewed through his and Christian Stadgaard's Posh Isolation label. Of Rahbek's many projects, his most eloquent and gentle is Croatian Amor.
2017’s single "Finding People" bloomed from Croatian Amor's previous album, the widely acclaimed Love Means Taking Action. These melancholic transmissions presented a kind of alien pop. For Isa, he has drawn on an impressive list of guests to realize a nauseating narrative of virtual communication and eschatological programming. The album's title invokes a messianic entity, and though it's hard to tell what's imagined or remembered anymore, the play that Croatian Amor is known for feels far more vivid today.
"Enhance photo to reveal a picture of Bird caught mid-flight; enhance again, the bird has a human face screaming."
Never pessimistic, Croatian Amor circles themes of tragedy and comfort to animate a sense of hope. His accomplices pluck details from his graphic scenes like a searchlight drifting over a starlit surface. Alto Aria, Soho Rezanejad, and Jonnine Standish of HTRK, each contribute vocals across the album, cloaked and kerned on Croatian Amor's inimitable stage. "Eden 1.1" and its accompaniment "Eden 1.2" feature the voices of Frederikke Hoffmeier and Yves Tumor, respectively. These are some of album's most delicate pieces, and where one may find respite from the helix of damaged rhythms that eddy across 'Isa'. Familiar faces from Copenhagen are solicited throughout, and perhaps the album's most endearing quality is the space for volatility that all of the collaboration has invited.
All the signals and timelines lead everywhere and back. Maybe it's only the myths that get us?
Hekla's music exists singularly. A one-off talent, emerging from no particular scene, ascribing to no particular rules.
As a creative tool, the theremin - bizarre, unique, and rarely heard - can be expressive, intuitive and highly adaptable. In Hekla's hands, her instrument covers an enormous range, from skittering birdsong of high frequency chirrups and chirps, to grinding, tectonic sub-bass. We are given the throbbing, apocalyptic dread of "Muddle" and the baroque beauty of traditional Icelandic hymn "Heyr Himna Smi∂ur" in sequential tracks on the album's A-Side. Appropriately, she also writes that the album title - Á - is similarly multifaceted in her native Icelandic: "a river is an á and also it means ouch like when you hurt yourself, and also when you put something on top of something you put it á (on) something."
Disguised as the meandering outpourings of vacant thought and activity dialed simultaneously from zero and ten. Formed in the cauldron of a fevered mistake resolute. Surrounded by ignorance, dis-interest, and the attention of the carefully self-selected. Recorded and burned through a thousand galaxies of dust and doubt and endless infinite wonder, transforming both time and space. Forever exiled to the very bottom of the world to reflect on the struggling desperate pile above. Recognizing any contribution as minuscule and insignificant when placed within the greatness of the other, the dominant insolent preening satisfied, continually shouting the pre-eminence of the first world order.
Short Scenes came to life when working on a soundtrack with violinist Anne Bakker. Taking a series of her improvisations as the starting point, I started to edit and construct them into new songs - no preconceived plan, just being lead by these violin recordings. Still working in the "soundtrack modus operandi," the resulting tracks are short and concise. None of them ended up being used in a score, but from the very beginning I felt these little vignettes would form a darn fine album. And here it is.
Originally released by Wounded Wolf Press as a limited release (only 100 cassettes were made) back in 2016, Loopworks finds Turkish visual and sound artist Koray Kantarcioğlu (Ankara, 1982) exploring the unlimited possibilities of databending. As source material Koray used samples he dug from Turkish records that were released in the 1960s and 1970s, creating this unique sound using various effects, such as reverb, echo and tempo.
Loopworks impacts almost instantly mainly because it shows some familiarity with the recent work of Leyland Kirby as The Caretaker, particularly because of the "haunted ballroom" effect. Kirby connects more with the idea of memory and its disappearance/transformation, Koray Kantarcioğlu explores the usage and the dynamic of these sounds as ambient music for different scenarios and the importance of a new-found life of the raw material he used to create these songs. The source material appear as enigmatic as these new sounds and activate a sense of discovery and constant wonder throughout Loopworks.
With the vinyl release of Loopworks we continue to manifest the importance of showing how technology and geography create different and original approaches to the standard western interpretation of field recordings and sound manipulation. Koray Kantarcioğlu’s work here is a strong manifestation of that and how "haunted music" can express myriad feelings and sensations.
Loopworks has a tremendous vision of the metamorphosis that's been occurring in ambient music during the last decade. Sometimes it is dreamy and calm as aquarium music is ("500606" or "22 47 91 Take 1"); surprising and infinite as "263 Loop," one of the few tracks with a voice, in this case a mysterious and transcendental one; or part of a John Carpenter & David Lynch film yet to be made ("Organ Extract KP 001").
A fantastic voyage, from earth to space, through time or simply as the most beautiful and peaceful dive into the ocean. Old music transformed into something new, unique. That's special.
Originally issued by Ascetic House as a small limited-run cassette release in early 2018, PLYXY's debut EP Gloryland will now be available on vinyl and digital formats by Hallow Ground.
Haunted by the pressing question, "What if?," the five compositions on Gloryland aim to create, in the words of the artist, Ros Knopov, himself, "a hyper-visual audio landscape of a world somebody listening can fall into and drown in."
The term "nostalgia" originally referred to the longing for a place. The nostalgia that informs Gloryland is PLYXY's longing for his cultural-geographic roots while feeling adrift in an alien environment. Born in Dnepropetrovsk, then the rocket-making capital of the USSR, Knopov immigrated to New York City as a child in 1989. In Gloryland, he dives deep into his uneasy childhood memories and their warped reflections. PLYXY marks the unreliability of his recollections by making it heard - the anthemic qualities of the five pieces are coated in an opaque layer of dream-like textures. From the elegiac opener, "It Will Be Beautiful," to the blaring rhythmic noise of "March of Youth," the greyscale picture painted by Gloryland becomes more and more refined below the surface.
PLYXY's search for a past is, however, less a sentimental journey, and more a radical confrontation with the politics of memory and the materials that serve as mnemonic devices. Gloryland draws on field recordings from Knopov's adopted hometown New York and Soviet films as well as performances from his collection of analog and digital keyboards, with the results filtered and re-textured through the producer's modular synthesizer setup acting as the final editorial layer in the creative process. The result is lush and warm throughout, but also demure and distant. While Gloryland might thus easily be pigeonholed as a hauntological record, it is one only in the term's most radical sense. After all, any "What if?" might turn into a "Why not?"
Etelin is the newest project from Students of Decay label head Alex Cobb, marking quite a radical break from the ambient drone of his previous oeuvre. That transformation stems largely from Cobb's frustration with the current experimental music scene, which has calcified into various genres and trends in recent years, losing much of the playfulness and actual experimentation that made the milieu so initially compelling. Obviously, Cobb is not alone in that feeling, as there are several outliers currently making groundbreaking and unique work (Cam Deas and Rashad Becker spring immediately to mind), yet Hui Terra is very much an unusual album that pointedly and willfully turns its back on the zeitgeist. At its best, the album hits some sustained passages of dreamlike beauty, but the bulk of Hui Terra is a bit more modest in its ambitions, unfolding like a more fragmented and hallucinatory re-envisioning of classic GRM fare.
Aside from being the birth of a new solo project, Hui Terra is also the inaugural release of a sister label to Students of Decay (Soda Gong) that will focus on work with "a sense of playfulness and a sort of willful naivety."Though it pains me to be driven to such a glib segue, I have to note that this album was partially inspired by another birth as well: that of Cobb's son.Much like Koen Holtkamp's new album recorded under similar circumstances, sleep-deprivation and being awake at odd hours were a major factor in the shaping the Etelin aesthetic.To his credit, Cobb took that disruption of his established patterns and ran with it, selling off much of his usual gear and starting anew with a digital synth and a sampler.Similarly, he made a concerted effort to approach music with fresh ears, using his son as kind of a sounding board for new ideas after noting that he responded most strongly to the textures and dynamics on albums by Bernard Parmegiani, Luc Ferrari, and Nuno Canavarro.While none of these pieces are conspicuously derivative of those artists, Cobb is definitely fond of "early electronic music" sounds, as the foundation of Hui Terra is generally smeared, woozy synth tones and textures that sound like a lysergic vibraphone.
I was completely unaware of this Italian sound artist's work until only recently, but he seems to be having quite a big year, as his duo with Roberto P. Siguera (Luton) released their bleakly lovely debut on Lost Tribe Sound and now there is this leftfield gem of a solo album. While I am sure comparing one underheard artist to another is quite a quixotic endeavor, there have to be some people out there who remember Talvihorros's Descent into Delta album and Novellino does something similar here: A Conscious Effort feels like a sustained and immersive plunge into the mysteries of the mind. In keeping with the ambition of its apparent conceptual inspirations, the music is a shape-shifting and kaleidoscopic fantasia that seamlessly blurs together roiling drones, viscerally snarling feedback, skipping loop experimentation, and even an occasional eruption of pummeling, slow-motion doom metal. Naturally, I prefer some threads more than others, but the entire album flows together beautifully and evocatively.
The opening "Conceptual Experience of the Body" slowly creeps into being like a mysterious fog, as murky drones, shuddering strings, and running water glacially and unexpectedly cohere into a warm cello theme courtesy of guest Alex Vatagin.It is an intriguing and deceptive entry point, blossoming into nakedly lovely chord swells that suggest the start of something epic and Romantic.Instead, the album immediately plunges down a buzzing and roiling rabbit hole of hallucinatory darkness with "False Self Cage" and only sinks deeper into that dark spell from there."Cage" is one of the more viscerally striking pieces on the album, as its strangled and squealing strings blossom into a heaving and seething sea of stuttering loops, hiss, and shimmering noise.Even at this early point in the album, however, it is quite clear that the boundaries delineating individual pieces are largely irrelevant, as A Conscious Effort unfolds like a single, unbroken nightmare that gradually becomes more dense and more real.Each new "song" seamlessly segues into the next and the overall effect is like sinking deeper and deeper into an immersive dreamscape that seethes with vague menace and vibrantly kinetic textures.While there are plenty of striking passages throughout the album, they feel like they either blossom forth from a roiling morass or unexpectedly snap into focus from churning entropy.
Part of the beauty of A Conscious Effort lies in how seamlessly Novellino and his bevy of collaborators are able to transform their aesthetic time and time again, like some kind of fluidly shifting and phantasmagoric hydra.It is often easy to spot Novellino's influences, but it is impossible not to be impressed with how masterfully he channels each of them and integrates them all into a coherent whole.In "Boundless Hope, Boundless Illusion," for example, the stuttering warm chords of early Tim Hecker transform into a lush, widescreen crescendo in the vein of Popul Vuh's Aguirre soundtrack.That piece is then followed by a grinding, swirling, and throbbing eruption of guitar noise that would make Kevin Shields smile ("The Anatomy of Envy").Later, Novellino's love of noisy guitars surfaces again in the insistently pulsing "Satan is Always Happy," which marries the roaring unison notes of Sonic Youth or Glenn Branca with obsessively stuttering loops à la classic Oval.The last highlight, "Perceptual Experience of the Body," is a full band effort that does not recall anyone in particular, yet dives wholeheartedly into doom territory as a squall of snarling feedback and grinding noise rolls over the top of clattering tribal toms and sludgy, blown-out bass tones.It is admittedly a bit disorienting to encounter such varied tour of underground subgenres on one album, yet somehow it all works and cumulatively snowballs into a very coherent and satisfying arc.
The album ends on an eerily lovely note, as a simple, blearily wobbling piano melody slowly becomes consumed by a passing cloud of distortion, then re-emerges for a tender and unadorned final coda.Notably, I was initially somewhat exasperated by how little I was able to find out about this album or Novellino in general, as the arc and shifting mood of A Conscious Effort feels like it must mirror something like The Inferno or some found diaries from a Victorian mental hospital: this album feels very much like an abstract interpretation of a novel or a Bosch retrospective.In hindsight, however, the matter-of-fact and modest statement "Attilio Novellino is a multi-instrumentalist with a very detailed view of soundscapes" is quite apt in conveying what he does, even if it undersells it quite a bit.The details and the craftsmanship are what elevate this album into something special.Novellino is considerably more than a talented chameleon: there is a larger and deeper vision at work here and Novellino executes it all masterfully, crafting a richly textured, thoroughly absorbing, and strikingly vivid sound world that becomes steadily more compelling as I am drawn further and further into it.Viewed a single piece of music, this album is a legitimate tour de force.If A Conscious Effort can be said to have any flaw, it is only that Novellino succeeds a bit too well in creating a dream state, as the shifting and elusive nature of the piece prevents it from leaving a deep mark on my consciousness after the last note fades.It is a hell of a beguiling spell while it lasts though.
Two decades ago the Annual Readers Poll began. The old version of the first annual readers poll can still be viewed online here, but we wanted to re-examine 1998 in the new system and get a broader picture of the music of that year. Perhaps these are truly the releases that have withstood 20 years of listening or the readership demographics have changed in 20 years. Either way, thanks to all who participated. Look for a 1997 recount nomination round coming soon and the 2018 Annual Readers Poll to follow.
Album of the Year
Coil, ""Time Machines"" (Eskaton)
Tortoise, ""TNT"" (Thrill Jockey)
Current 93, ""Soft Black Stars"" (Durtro)
Boards Of Canada, ""Music Has The Right To Children"" (Warp)
Autechre, ""LP5"" (Warp)
The Legendary Pink Dots, ""Nemesis Online"" (Soleilmoon)
Edward Ka-Spel, ""The Blue Room"" (Soleilmoon)
Meat Beat Manifesto, ""Actual Sounds + Voices"" (Play It Again Sam)
Pan•American, ""Pan•American"" (Kranky)
Windy & Carl, ""Depths"" (Kranky)
Dirty Three, ""Ocean Songs"" (Touch and Go)
Gastr Del Sol, ""Camoufleur"" (Drag City)
Mouse On Mars, ""Glam"" (Thrill Jockey)
Chris Watson, ""Outside The Circle Of Fire"" (Touch)
Jim O'Rourke, ""Bad Timing"" (Drag City)
Pole, ""1"" (Kiff SM)
Gas, ""Königsforst"" (Mille Plateaux)
Matmos, ""Quasi-Objects"" (Vague Terrain)
Irr. App. (Ext.), ""An Uncertain Animal, Ruptured; Tissue Expanding In Conversation"" (Errata In Excelsis)
Bedhead, ""Transaction De Novo"" (Trance Syndicate)
Vainio Väisänen Vega, ""Endless"" (Blast First)
Al Jabr (Richard H. Kirk), ""One Million And Three"" (Alphaphone)
The Body Lovers, ""Number One of Three"" (Young God)
Belle and Sebastian, ""The Boy With The Arab Strap"" (Jeepster)
Trans Am, ""The Surveillance"" (Thrill Jockey)
Richard H. Kirk, ""Knowledge Through Science"" (Blast First)
Jessica Bailiff, ""Even In Silence"" (kranky)
Co–Ω, ""Enter Tinnitus"" (Rastermusic)
Cyclobe, ""Luminous Darkness"" (Phantom Code)
Lisa Germano, ""Slide"" (4AD)
Dead Voices On Air, ""Piss Frond"" (Invisible)
Stars of the Lid w/Craig McCafferty, ""Per Aspera Ad Astra"" (Kranky)