- Anthony D'Amico
- Albums and Singles
This long-running solo project from Posh Isolation co-founder Christian Stadsgaard has gradually evolved from its modest minimal techno beginnings into a vision that inventively blurs the lines between harsh noise, ambient, and contemporary classical. While he has certainly kept one foot firmly rooted in the noise scene with collaborative releases with Merzbow, Evil Moisture, and Government Alpha, the overall arc of the project has mostly been towards striking the perfect balance between beauty and violence. His most notable success in that regard before now was probably the static-gnawed ambiance of 2024’s The Night Has Passed Already, but The Vanity Project feels like another big creative breakthrough, as the more beautiful elements have a more timeless/sacred feel this time around that puts some significant distance between Stadsgaard and his peers in the contemporary ambient milieu. Also, both Merzbow and Government Alpha turn up to help ensure that Vanity Productions’ sharper edges remain every bit as visceral and snarling as ever.
The opening “Hoarfrost” provides an especially haunting and sublime introduction to the album, as a brief haze of whines and brittle piano fragments unexpectedly blossoms into lush organ drones that subtly warble and shimmer in pleasantly trippy ways. It gets even better from there, however, as a looping two-note “dial tone” melody fades in to provide a haunting, unconventional, and short-lived melodic hook before the piece evolves into a killer final stretch that sounds like a warmly beautiful organ mass with a seething and enigmatic undercurrent of tape loop noise squall.
- Creaig Dunton
- Albums and Singles
Constructed from field recordings and found sounds and mutated into collages further refined via live performances, Andrew Anderson’s latest album is a final construction of these elements that have gone through multiple stages of processing and abstraction. Although most (but not all) of the building blocks that make up Thresholds have been modified into something completely different, it is the times in which these identifiable sounds bleed through that make the record even more unsettling but continually engaging.
The field recording elements of Anderson’s work are apparent from the very opening of "Until My Blood Contains All" with squealing brakes cutting through open spaces, all surrounded by rain drenched in reverb. He blends in reversed shimmers, with the various sounds drifting between what sounds like environment, and what sounds like music. The overall looping structure enforces the latter, and a clear intensity increases throughout. Again, as a balance, Anderson joins fuzzy, crunching noise with some stretched, almost musical sounds slipping through. The piece clearly transitions from being environmentally focused to a structured, musical one. A gentle melody is extended under sputtering, collapsing sounds and fuzz drenched broken radio layers.
- Anthony D'Amico
- Albums and Singles
This is the first time that Oberland (Oiseaux-Tempête) and Moumneh (Jerusalem In My Heart) have recorded together as a duo, but the two politically minded artists are long-time friends who have been collaborating in various forms for years. The pair initially began working on pieces together in Montreal back in the summer of 2023, but the project got understandably derailed by the Palestinian genocide, which left Moumneh with “a complete artistic block and the inability to articulate what people are living through.” In the summer of 2024, Oberland invited his friend to Paris in the hopes of reawakening his creative spirit and the two worked “day and night” to shape a new vision together. Notably, Oberland often “took the lead” in steering the album, which was a bit of a pattern-breaking role-reversal for Moumneh (who co-runs the Hotel2Tango studio with members of Godspeed You! Black Emperor in addition to his central role in JIMH). The resultant album is quite a freewheeling creative explosion that pushes each artist into compelling and unexpected new terrain.
The most surprising pieces are definitely the first two, as Moumneh’s lead vocals are digitally harmonized in a way that arguably resembles a melancholy robot. While I tend to loathe anything resembling auto-tuned vocals, that bold decision actually serves both pieces quite well, as their melodic vocal hooks provide a nice counterbalance to their more dirge-y/doom-y elements (roiling tremolo-picked guitars, slow-motion drums, distorted bass). Notably, both two pieces are arguably also the most stylistically indebted to Oberland’s Oiseaux-Tempête work, but “Dagger Eyes” in particular blows up that template with a killer mutating synth motif and a structure that blossoms into something resembling futuristic synth-driven Arabic emo. Elsewhere, “The Serpent” is a completely different left-field bombshell, as a buzzing bass throb propels a driving techno groove that unrelentingly snowballs in intensity beneath Moumneh’s digitized and chant-like vocal laments.
- Anthony D'Amico
- Albums and Singles
This latest opus from the Brooklyn-based composer/puppeteer is the second part of a planned trilogy that began with 2023’s Tin Iso and the Dawn. Notably, that last album absolutely floored me and was easily one of my favorite releases of the year, so my expectations for this next installment were quite high indeed. Happily, Osni the Flare is yet another stunner, but it feels like a bit more like a score to a larger work than it does a stand-alone album. That makes sense, as it is exactly that, yet the same was true of its predecessor as well—the music and visual elements just seem to be more intimately intertwined this time around. That is perfectly fine by me, as Allen’s concise self-description of their art as “building a world with music & puppets” is a literal (if understated) fact that wildly undersells the sheer magic and wonder of this expanding mythology brought to life through a virtuosic ballet of music, marionettes, and light.
It is fair to say that I am not normally the target demographic for either puppetry or self-created mythologies unless they are coming from an endearingly unhinged outsider art direction. However, I am eternally drawn towards artists with a bold and singular vision like a moth to a dragon’s ember and Allen certainly fits the bill in that regard. Unsurprisingly, the execution of that vision is yet another crucial consideration, as everyone knows someone who can make the most mundane anecdote seem absolutely mesmerizing and someone else who can make even the most dramatic events seem punishingly dull. Allen is very much one of the former rare souls who can seemingly make anything seem beautiful and poetic. Moreover, telling this particular story has consumed the last decade of Allen's life and it absolutely shows. This project feels like both a life’s work and a genuine labor of love painstakingly chiseled to perfection. In fact, I was genuinely amazed that this album only took three years to make given that Allen played every instrument while simultaneously crafting the hauntingly surreal puppet world that the album inhabits (and there was plenty of sound design involved as well).
- Creaig Dunton
- Albums and Singles
Looking over his discography, Conclusio marks the first solo work from Asmus Tietchens since 2022’s Schatten Ohne Licht, which is quite a significant stretch for him. He has been consistent with his collaborations, but solo material has been less frequent in recent years. Compared to the previous album, Conclusio is less sparse in its construction, and instead is rather dense, focused, and quite intense, while consistently displaying Tietchens’s careful crafting of sound.
One consistent thing on the 12 individual pieces that make up the album, all of which are traditional song length, is Tietchens's employment of drastic shifts in volume and dynamics, with occasionally shocking results.
- Anthony D'Amico
- Albums and Singles
This is the debut release from the duo of Brian Foote (Nudge/Kranky/Peak Oil/False Aralia) and Paul Dickow (Strategy/Community Library), but the two artists have been collaborating off and on for roughly a quarter century now. Notably, however, there is absolutely no stylistic carryover from the duo’s previous projects together (Nudge and Fontanelle), as High Cube is the musical equivalent of an ‘80s Trapper Keeper featuring a bitchin’ camaro, palm trees, and the word “California” in bright pink neon letters. I suppose the same could be said of any number of forgettable vaporwave artists, but Foote and Dickow also bring serious production chops and some more eclectic influences to their bleary and simmering post-modern dance party as well. My best attempt at describing their shared vision is “it sounds like contemporary dubplates of ‘80s Japanese ‘city pop’ infected with subtle strains of early techno and hip-hop,” but the vibe is what truly matters here and High Cube beautifully evokes nothing less than an imagined and hypnagogic late-night drive through ‘80s Los Angeles with the top down and the breeze in my hair.
The hazy, neon-soaked, and vaguely retro-futurist world of High Cube was apparently a deliberately chosen “narrative mood,” which is quite an unusual wavelength for two artists to share, but I have no idea how often Foote and Dickow improvised together before they ultimately found this direction. I bring that up because the duo specifically note that the album’s direction was not defined by their gear choices. Despite that claim, however, the pair’s gear and working methods did loom large in this album’s conception in other ways, as they worked with strict, self-imposed constraints: “five machines, a one-hour timer, and a total ban on overthinking.” While Foote and Dickow do note that High Cube takes a “drier, sparser, and decidedly chunkier” approach than their previous work as a result of those decisions, the most significant impact from their newly constrained working method was that it forced them out of familiar patterns and allowed something new to organically grow as “an accident of chemistry.”
- Anthony D'Amico
- Albums and Singles
This wild second collaboration between French producer Simon Aussel and Egypt-based singer/poet/trumpeter Abdullah Miniawy is the latest installment in Dekmantel’s UFO series championing “ranky darkwave funk and industrial textures, jagged body music and overall destructive energy from the world’s most talented and tenebrous souls.” Notably, very few of those descriptors overtly apply for most of this particular album, as Dying Is The Internet feels like a bit of Trojan horse in which auto-tuned vocals, accessible songcraft, and big hooks transform subversion into a series of Arabic club-friendly bangers. That curious approach seems to fit the album’s philosophical intent appropriately, however, as the two artists envision the album as “reflection on the nature of club culture and digital fatigue” in which the internet has become “less about sharing ideas and more about surviving in a digital business ecosystem." While I unsurprisingly have absolutely no idea what Miniawy is singing about as a functionally monolingual American, he certainly brings a visceral intensity to Simo Cell’s endlessly inventive and cutting edge techno visions.
The press release for this album describes Simo Cell as “a leading light in contemporary leftfield club music, twisting up adventurous rhythms and flamboyant production in pursuit of a perpetual freshness for the floor,” which feels accurate to me as a casual fan of his shapeshifting “bass-heavy minimalism” over the last few years, as the only real constants seem to be continually reinvention and a talent for razor sharp sound design. Abdullah Miniawy, on the other hand, is a bit of an enigmatic chaos element for me, as he is known as a singer, poet, trumpeter, author, and actor and his musical output has largely been a varied series of freewheeling and eclectic collaborations that blur the lines between techno, jazz, and Arabic music. On Dying Is The Internet, he is most prominently a vocalist, lyricist, and trumpeter, but he is also credited with composing the beatless, hallucinatory, and hazed out instrumental “Tear Chime.”
- Anthony D'Amico
- Albums and Singles
This latest opus from the eternally evolving Cécile Schott continues her recent fascination with synth-centric compositions, but the resemblance to any previous Colleen releases begins and ends there, as these five pieces feel like a bold leap into challenging and surprising new territory. The album’s title (“Free before the ending”) alludes to Schott’s 2024 decision to learn to swim again after three decades of water phobia, which is an exceptionally rich metaphor about navigating an “unstable environment…its discomfort, the doubts about your abilities and the reality of facing your own limitations.” In keeping with that theme, the sea is itself an excellent metaphor for this album, as Schott casts aside familiar melodies and patterns to plunge into a vision that is churning, alive, unpredictable, and uncharacteristically visceral.
It is not surprising that Schott’s uneasy relationship with water loomed large in her life in recent years, as she moved to Barcelona in 2019 and notes that “the sight of the Mediterranean Sea made me feel this limitation more and more acutely with each passing year.” Alert readers may note that the world as a whole started to go to shit in greatly accelerated fashion soon after that, so Schott’s dread of the seemingly infinite, unknown, and unpredictable expanse eternally lurking on her horizon mirrored an increasingly threatening and unpredictable era for humans in general. The trigger for Schott’s transformational life event came during a performance in the Azores (her 250th live show, coincidentally), as she was struck by the dolphin-filled natural beauty of her surroundings and realized that she needed to “stop making excuses” and get in the fucking water. Unsurprisingly, her triumphant return to the sea proved to be a revelatory experience that “catapulted” her into a more physical and active life and she considers the album “an ode to movement, to the body, to water, to urgency; to repairing old wounds, overcoming personal blocks and starting all over again.”
- Anthony D'Amico
- Albums and Singles
This latest release from the seemingly endless Muslimgauze archive is a bit of an enigma and a surprise, as it was apparently “assembled posthumously” from “previously unreleased material.” Admittedly, that half-true claim could reasonably be made about A LOT of archival Muslimgauze album releases that have surfaced in the years since Bryn Jones’ untimely passing in 1999, but the difference is that this album was assembled by Staalplaat rather than being one of the many “finished” albums that had previously only surfaced in a limited edition or simply got shelved and forgotten about due to the staggering pace with which Jones churned out albums in his lifetime.
In the world of Muslimgauze, however, normal distinctions between albums and eras are blurred into meaninglessness, as at least three of these pieces have previously been released in relatively similar form elsewhere. If normal rules applied, such obvious recycling would definitely annoy the hell out of me, but these eight pieces feel right together and capture some of the more killer grooves of Muslimgauze’s mid-’90s Indian/Bhangra-inspired work.
- Creaig Dunton
- Albums and Singles
Seemingly a post-script to David Jackman's subscription series of CDs that were conceptualized as a single piece, these two 7" records both continue the themes of the eight albums that preceded them. With one as Organum Electronics and the other under his own name, one of the singles is an extension of what had come before, but the other seems to venture into new spaces, which I suppose may or may not be indicative of a future direction in Jackman’s work.
Available individually to the public, or in a colored vinyl double 7" old school gatefold package for the subscribers, the construction of these two singles is aligned with Jackman's history of presenting two slightly different variations on the same sound. "Fiire," as Organum Electronics, is the one that is most representative of the discs that made up the subscription set. Taking that almost-but-not-quite harsh noise blast sound that has been consistent with his use of that name, the relative brevity adds to the intensity. Over the two sides, I can almost detect some of the elements of his non-electronic work (bells, ravens, etc.) bleeding through the jet engine blast, but that could be entirely a figment of my imagination. Like the long form works, however, the endings of the pieces are just as jarring as the openings.
- Anthony D'Amico
- Albums and Singles
Back in 2022, Bill Orcutt released his excellent Music for Four Guitars album, which led to the formation of a killer touring quartet featuring fellow avant-guitar luminaries Shane Parish, Wendy Eisenberg, and Ava Mendoza. Orcutt clearly found that experience inspiring, as he later started a similarly formidable trio with Sonic Youth’s Steve Shelley and Comets on Fire’s Ethan Miller. In keeping with that theme, Music in Continuous Motion is yet another album composed for a quartet of guitars, but this one “pointedly steps away from the cut-and-paste constructivism” and “discrete, mechanistic precision” of its predecessor to embrace a more melodic, human, and performance-driven aesthetic. While Orcutt himself impishly summarizes this latest direction as “a bridge pickup record more than a neck pickup record,” my own take is that it feels like a spiritual descendant of the best bits of Glenn Branca, Gang of Four, Built to Spill, and Archers of Loaf with a distinctly Orcutt spin. Unsurprisingly, it also feels like yet another great album from one of the most reliably compelling and singular guitarists around.
To my ears, the opening “Giving unknown origin” is the piece that best captures Orcutt at the height of his powers, as it features a bright and memorable melody, an incredibly cool and intricate central motif, and plenty of snarl, bite, and obsessive repetition. He also makes incredibly effective and dynamic use of the stereo field, which makes it possible to discern how all of its masterfully interwoven moving parts are evolving and interacting. While I certainly dig the various riffs and melodies and the shifting dynamics, “Giving unknown origin” is also an excellent showcase for some of the more general aspects of Orcutt’s vision that I love, such as the way he balances machine-like pattern repetition with more viscerally slashing elements. The best bits feel like a duel in both a literal sense (staccato rhythmic interplay) and a more profound and abstract sense (beauty vs. violence, order vs. chaos, etc.). Also, I would be remiss if I did not also note that I was surprised to discover that Orcutt can unleash taut, angular, and urgent-sounding riffage as well as any ripping post-hardcore band, which is not something I would have guessed from his previous work.