19 August 2018

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Albums and Singles

Newly reissued on Sacred Bones, The Voice of Love (1993) was Cruise's second and final album with the singular songwriting team of David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti. I suspect it did not sell particularly well upon its release, as I found my copy in a cut-out bin and it was Cruise's final album for Warner Brothers, but it has since rightly attained the cult stature it deserves. It is admittedly a bit uneven compared with its more illustrious predecessor (1989's Floating Into The Night), uncannily mirroring Lynch's own changing fortunes, as Night featured music from Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks while Voice features pieces from Wild at Heart, Fire Walk With Me, and Industrial Symphony No. 1. Still, a significant amount of that initial magic lingered and continued to blossom, as The Voice of Love fitfully captures some of the finest work of Cruise's "ghostly chanteuse" phase. It may be an imperfect classic album, but it is a classic album nonetheless.

Sacred Bones

Without question, Julee Cruise has had one of the more strange and improbable careers in pop music, as she was the daughter of an Iowa dentist who studied French horn and performed in children's theater productions in Minnesota before she met Angelo Badalamenti (the two met after Cruise moved to NYC to pursue a career in musical theater).Around the same time, Lynch was unsuccessfully attempting to secure the rights for This Mortal Coil's "Song to the Siren" cover, leading to his suggestion that Badalamenti try to compose a similarly rapturous and dreamlike replacement.Badalamenti tagged in Cruise as a possible vocalist and she took to the role like a duck to water, launching a brief yet iconic career as a recurring and surreal presence in David Lynch's work.A malleable, Midwestern muse, if you will.That background is crucial in understanding both this album and the rest of Cruise's career, as The Voice of Love was not exactly Julee Cruise's vision–Lynch and Badalamenti were the primary architects and she was the actress talented and versatile enough to bring their shared vision believably to life.The wounded, somnambulant songbird of Cruise's Lynch albums is not the real Cruise.The real Julee Cruise is the one who made Latin-tinged trip-hop albums, sang showtunes, and was a touring member of the B-52s.That is not meant to disparage her role in her own career, but to explain that Floating Into The Night and The Voice of Love are essentially David Lynch's hallucinatory vision of a pop diva made flesh and turned loose in the real world.As such, the weaker moments on Voice, such as the Enya-esque "Friends for Life," fall squarely on Lynch's shoulders, as Cruise was implored to "sing like an angel" over toothless, sleepy dream pop and she did exactly that.

The trio are at their best when they stick to the familiar territory of vaguely nightmarish and noir torch songs or hypnagogic re-imaginings of ‘60s girl-group pop innocence.In the latter realm, both the smoky, slow-motion reggae of "This Is Our Night" and the lushly sensual "Movin' In On You" stand as two of the album's most blearily gorgeous pieces."Up In Flames" is another gem, as its walking bass line, sickly synths, and blurred siren wails approximate a sultry and seductive cabaret of the damned.More than any other song on the album, "Up In Flames" nails the haunted, twilit unreality of Lynch's best work.The rest of the album is often quite good as well, but it is an extremely precarious balancing act that lives or dies on the strength of Badalamenti's compositions.That is a fundamental peril with the trio's distinctive dream pop aesthetic: most of the heavy lifting is done by the underlying music, as Cruise is eternally relegated to being a floating and spectral presence.In the right context, her cooing vocals are sensuous and dreamily vaporous, but they can feel weightlessly pretty or just playfully kooky ("Kool Kat Walk") when she is not given substantial enough material to work with.Badalamenti tries to overcome that hurdle in some interesting ways over the course of the album, such as adding quasi-industrial percussion to "Until The End of The World" or twanging guitars and a smoky saxophone solo in "Space For Love."He finds the most success when he just subtly curdles his languorous, soft-focus idyll with passing dissonance, however, as he does with the murky synths and smeared, lingering decays in "She Would Die For Love."

Although it is not my favorite song on the album, "She Would Die For Love" is an especially illustrative example of Badalamenti and Lynch's otherworldly alchemical genius, as it uses the most non-threatening tools imaginable (jazzy piano chords, lyrical sax solos, and fretless bass noodling) to weave something improbably pregnant with simmering menace.Obviously, there are some excellent songs on both this album and Floating Into The Night, but the appeal of both albums arguably lies even more in the sustained atmosphere that the three artists create when their disparate yet complementary aesthetics combine.The Voice of Love is fascinating and distinctive precisely because it is such weird and singular juxtaposition that seems like it should not work: David Lynch's unabashed love of classic pop music collides with broodingly cinematic synths, noirish jazz, and a vocalist who elusively floats through it all like a sleepy ghost.Somehow, however, everything is necessary and it all fits together beautifully.Given their accomplished careers, it is deceptively easy to credit Lynch and Badalamenti as the driving forces behind Cruise's two great albums, as hazy, reverb-swathed female vocalists are hardly unique, but I sincerely doubt any other vocalist could have played her role so seamlessly and hauntingly.On The Voice of Love, Cruise shows herself to be a master stylist, elegantly and enigmatically blurring the lines between angel, lovesick diva, and seductive Siren.

• This Is Our Night
• Movin' In On You
• Up In Flames

 

 

19 August 2018

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Albums and Singles

Released on Projekt back in 1993, Lovesliescrushing’s debut remains one of the great underappreciated shoegaze albums of all time, as Scott Cortez and Melissa Arpin took the deliciously warped guitars of My Bloody Valentine and stripped away all the rock elements to leave only a churning ocean of fuzzed-out bliss. With their later albums, the duo smoothed out their rough edges a bit and became a bit more focused on crafting more structured songs, but the more frayed and experimental nature of Bloweyelashwish has made it an enduring favorite of mine. In a perfect and just world, Scott Cortez would be a fixture in any conversation about the most inventive and compelling guitar stylists of the last two decades and this album would be held up as the irrefutable evidence of that.

Projekt

The sequencing of Bloweyelashwish is quite unusual, thoughtful, and effective, as the album's more substantial pieces are interspersed with brief music box-like vignettes of chiming harmonics.Those gorgeous interludes, such as "Butterfly" and "Teardrop," tend to last barely a minute each and occur roughly every other song.Within that loose format, however, the interludes can be quite varied and unpredictable, both in length and aesthetic.For example, "Fur" twists that formula into something that resembles strangled and warbling feedback, as if Cortez took one of his fragile and pretty motifs and fed it into a ring modulator to transform it into a gnarled and shrill grotesquerie of itself.Elsewhere, the gauzy shimmer of "Plume" unexpectedly erupts into a roiling reverie of languorous, breathy vocals and sizzling guitar noise.Despite being one of the shorter pieces, "Plume" has much more in common with the album’s more fully formed pieces, as they similarly tend to feel like a dam just burst to unleash a hallucinatory and churning torrent of lushly layered and beautiful noise.Curiously, both the long and short pieces are equally likely feature the duo’s finest work, as I get the sense that Cortez had been building up a vast backlog of four-track experiments for years and only had time to turn some of them into real songs.Rather than save all those great ideas for the next album, he poured them all into this one to weave a beguiling and kaleidoscopic dreamscape of glimmering, snarling, and shivering bliss.As such, Bloweyelashwish is a dazzling cascade of highlights with the only real caveat being that some of them end far too soon for my liking.

That said, I do have a handful of favorites, some of which hit me the first time I ever heard the album and some which slowly crept up on me over the years.My current favorite, "Darkglassdolleyes," falls into the latter category.In many ways, it is a relatively characteristic piece, as Arpin’s swooning, reverb-swathed vocal melody floats over a slow-moving progression of quavering, hissing, and roiling chords, but it unexpectedly transforms into something far more messy and blown-out sounding around the halfway point.As the song sputters and rumbles along in that newly ravaged state, an insistently repeating feedback motif appears that sounds like a haunted amplifier desperately trying to communicate with the physical world.It is quite a striking and otherworldly bit of guitar sorcery.The closing "Halo" achieves a similar feat, as a churning bed of drones births a heavenly nimbus of seesawing feedback warble.Elsewhere, "Charm" is an absolute stunner, as a deep, warm fog of heavenly vocals and glistening guitars is repeatedly torn apart by grinding squalls of noise.On a more modest scale, the simple and brief "Glimmer" is a gorgeously dreamlike haze of pulsing, seesawing guitars and floating, angelic vocals.There are also a few songs that feel like would-be singles, such as the droningly lovely and vocal-centered "Youreyesimmaculate" and the opening "Babysbreath," which gushes from the speakers like a choir of angels awash in a warm sea of swirling and sputtering hiss and distortion.Unusually for the album, "Babysbreath" even has a hook of sorts, as an odd, descending synth-like melody repeatedly bursts through its hymn-like haze.

The only arguable misstep on the album occurs when Cortez takes over the vocal duties on "Iwantyou," a piece that is also unique for being kind of a fitfully rumbling and rhythmic assault rather than a densely immersive fog of warmth and beauty.Both the (subdued) violence of the guitars and the plaintive edge of Cortez’s voice feel out of place, unintentionally illustrating the crucial role that Arpin plays in the duo's aesthetic.It is all too easy to take her contributions for granted, as her vocals are basically blurred and processed to the point where they almost feel like just another layer of instrumentation, yet they provide both an essential counterbalance and a foundation for Cortez's guitar wizardry.There is probably something wise and insightful that could be said about Lovesliescrushing's seamlessly blending of male and female energies, but it is just as accurate to say that Arpin's simple and pure melodies are the unbroken thread that holds the album together and gives it its tenderness and human warmth.The obvious metaphor is that of a Siren luring me through a deep fog, but that does not quite fit, as it is clear that there is no malevolent undercurrent in Arpin's lovely, floating vocals.Instead, it would be far more apt to say that she is akin to an angelic voice guiding me towards the white light as a hallucinatory landscape erupts, crumbles, and transforms all around me.In short, Bloweyelashwish is an absolutely beautiful album.That was not necessarily what drew me into it in the first place, as I could listen to gnarled guitar experimentation all day, but the elegant arc, deep beauty, and enveloping vision of the album certainly makes it one that only grows more compelling with repeated listens.

19 August 2018

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Albums and Singles

Much like their previous, self-titled album on the Holodeck label, Austin’s Sungod—the duo of Michael C. Sharp and Braden Balentine—completely ignore any sort of traditional genre demarcations and instead produce a sprawling instrumental work that covers a little bit of everything, musically speaking. From gigantic, boisterous jam sessions to restrained, intricate compositions, Wave Refraction is an expertly composed, diverse work with an exceptional sense of style and panache.

Holodeck

Admittedly, the album is a bit heavily front loaded with the opener "Little Gold Mouth," one of the most captivating songs on an already strong record.This is a perfect statement of purpose for Sungod because it draws from all of their stylistic touchstones.The vintage, lengthy synth moments are soon met with pounding drums and squalling guitar.Once it solidifies with some dramatic synth pads, it takes a very kraut-ish turn, with just the right level of 'rocking out' before it becomes too much or too pretentious.The synth noodling that rises to the surface in its latter moments hints at some of the more prog-like turns the record will take.

The progressive turn becomes most pronounced about mid-way through the album, with "Birth & Speed Merging" being built largely around a fluttering flute passage and some complex drum-solo like percussive layers.This continues into the following "Dream Sequence": an appropriately named loose narcotic haze of structured flute melody surrounded by heavily processed and tremolo drenched guitar in full improvisation mode.

It is not all woodwind Tull-isms though:"Hypnotism" has the duo slow things down, blending gentle guitar strums and shimmering synths into a slower, more pensive pace.The tempo is kept down, but the mix is rather complex, with both keyboards and guitars shifting roles as the primary focus."Wave Refraction" is more of a straight 1980s tribute, however.The pulsating electronic sequences and clean, melodic guitar is a pleasant nod to some of the lighter synth pop moments of the era, but the complex, intertwining arrangement results in a far more complex, and captivating, sound.

To intentionally defy expectations, Sharp and Balentine end the album on a very different note with "Von Innen."The rigid drum machine and sequenced synthesizers give a club oriented sheen to a song already that stands out oddly different than what preceded it.Once the guitar and piano is introduced it gives it a fitting prog edge, but as a whole it is a drastic departure than the five songs that came before, but one that still sits nicely with the remainder of the record.

Wave Refraction is an exceptional album from start to finish, with every song quite a bit different from one another, but still functioning as a single component of a unified overall work.My only complaint would be that, even though the flow is strong from one song to the next, the album hits its peak early on with "Little Gold Mouth," which I think would have been stronger as a centerpiece to the album.This is a minor nitpick of a complaint though, because Sungod have produced another album that captures the duo’s unique sound and sense of composition.

samples:

• Little Gold Mouth
• Birth & Speed Merging
• Von Innen

 

18 August 2018

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Albums and Singles

Musician, researcher, and author Thomas Bey William Bailey has been prolific in all of the disciplines in which he has worked, and La Production Interdite is an excellent entry in his musical body of work. Spread into two 30 minute pieces, one fully instrumental and one with spoken word vocals, Bailey succeeds in a strong piece of sonic, as well as conceptual art that comes together brilliantly with both distinct elements enhancing the other perfectly.

Elevator Bath

Bailey’s last work, the digital only A Desperate Expediency was centered on the concept of enhanced interrogation techniques, while this one is on the seemingly less disturbing and polarizing concept of autoscopy, or the visualization of doppelgangers or doubles of the self.Perhaps fitting then is the fact that the two sides are, musically at least, somewhat similar to one another, but they are different in more than just the inclusion of vocals.The sound is rather similar, but not quite the same, obscuring which version could actually be the ‘real’ one.

The instrumental half opens with a light, slightly noisy electronic drift, with small fragments of piano shining through the obscuring analog and digital electronics. Low fidelity glitch layers and crackling static appear, heralding the transition into icy, deep space expanses of minimalism.The piece has an unrelenting flow, evolving from falling tones into grinding static to frigid ambient space.The blend is exceptional, juxtaposing the light and dark elements of Bailey's sound, from thunderous crashes into cold shimmers.The final eight or so minutes heralds a distinctly darker transition though.The more dissonant elements take on a sharper, cold metallic sheen, as it eventually becomes a ghostly, empty space of dead air.

The vocal mix on the other side of the tape features many of the same sounds and sonic elements, but with a final product that differs from the other half of the tape.Opening with a more sputtering, noisy passage, the piece again settles into a mix of conventional piano sounds and rhythmic, glitch patterns, distorted into an understated grind.When Bailey's narration appears, relaying stories of doppelgangers and hallucinations, the backing track thins out and drops to accommodate his words, but never fades away too drastically.

Between the spoken passages, the music continues as deep space melodies and more distorted electronic bursts, at times devolving into chaotic noise but being kept under his control.The airy electronics and dirty crunch transition between one another nicely, as Bailey's narration sometimes sounds as if it is treated with the slightest amount of processing.The passages are spaced apart well enough to never overshadow the music but instead demand attention when appropriate.On the surface this would seem to be a lighter topic than the interrogation techniques of his previous release, but things still take a very dark turn in the narrative.

As a person who is not usually a spoken word fan, La Production Interdite still manages to work wonderfully in my opinion.The actual narration is compelling and nicely punctuated with the music, but also spaced out enough to maximize its impact, as well as to give the music an appropriate amount of attention.The compelling thematic elements, mixed with the complex and heavily varied electronic music that Thomas Bey William Bailey creates to complement the text-based work stands powerfully on its own as well.The final product, however, is enhanced by both halves and makes for a great piece of art.

samples:

• La Production Interdite (Instrumental Mix)
• La Production Interdite (Vocal Mix, Excerpt 1)
• La Production Interdite (Vocal Mix, Excerpt 2)

 

12 August 2018

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Albums and Singles

This duo of Sofie Herner and Sewer Election's Dan Johannsson is probably my favorite project to emerge from Sweden's flourishing underground in recent years. När, their third album, was originally released on vinyl back in 2017, but I believe it only became widely available in digital form this spring. While Neutral's aesthetic has certainly evolved over the years, Herner's idiosyncratic and oft-creepy lo-fi pop experiments and Johannsson's noisy textures always combine to form something stranger and more compelling than the sum of their parts. I suppose Neutral's closest kindred spirits are probably The Shadow Ring, but the best moments on När sound more like an surreal and intimate answering machine message or a ransom note delivered in the form of a blurry and distorted VHS tape.

Omlott

Neutral's approach to songcraft is quite a fascinating one, particularly when I factor in that both Herner and Johannsson are also involved in the Jandek-ian outsider folk of Enhet för Fri Musik.During the more gnarled and dissonant passages, the overlap between the two projects makes perfect sense, but some of Herner's songs sound like sultry bedroom soul that made a catastrophic wrong turn on its way to being seductive.The opening "Du" very much falls into that category, as Herner intones a breathy monologue over a bubbling synth hook.In fact, there is even a chorus.If those components were handed over to a professional studio, I suspect a credible pop song could probably emerge.Naturally, Neutral have the opposite plan in mind.For one. Herner sounds like she is singing into a boom box.Also, an intrusively oscillating and pitch-shifting drone makes the piece feel vaguely feverish and hallucinatory.Clearly not satisfied with their destruction, the duo then steer the piece into a murkier second half entitled "Ater" that rides pulsing drones into a crescendo of snarling guitar noise.No one would mistake the following "Köldgatan" for a pop song, however, as it is little more than a ghostly haze of drifting vocals and warbling feedback over a wobbly tape of a primitive drum machine beat.The first half of the album is then rounded out by "Inte Vara Rädd," which combines a woozily chorused bass line with erratic snatches of very conversational-sounding vocals.It sounds a lot like a would-be Slits or Raincoats classic that has been sucked dry by a vampire, then ripped apart by searing squalls of guitar noise.

The album's second half opens with "Berg 211," a piece that I find to be weirdly and perversely brilliant.As far as the actual sounds are concerned, it is straight-up noise, but it somehow also feels haunting and rather beautiful by the end.For the first half, Herner distractedly chats away over a throbbing and stuttering squall of white noise, but the storm unexpectedly gives way after a few minutes to leave a languorous blown-out bass groove amidst a hissing sea of tapes and screeching treble.Despite all the grinding dissonance, the piece somehow holds together as Herner shares a sultry monologue in Swedish that is punctuated by conversational asides and laughter as well as vaguely eerie recurring passages (in English) about the springtime in the back of her mind.The following "Brott/Bellevue" then returns to the inscrutable pop-like formula of the opener, as Herner confessionally whispers in Swedish over a slow-motion chord progression of wobbly organ chords.Again, there are snatches of something resembling a chorus, as well as some surprisingly melodic organ soloing.At the halfway point, however, it becomes slowly engulfed by a rumbling, hissing, and cryptic tide of field recordings courtesy of guest Matthias Andersson.  När then comes to end in characteristically enigmatic fashion, as "Rastplats" is a brief, melodic, and structured organ piece that is smeared into something blearily hallucinatory by Johannsson's genius for tape distress.

I suppose "Berg 211" is the only piece on När that truly hits the mark for me, but I am very much intrigued by Neutral's shifting, corroded, and precarious aesthetic.I suppose this album scratches roughly the same itch as some of the better Croatian Amor albums, in that both projects involve noise artists finding a way to merge melody, tenderness, and warmth with chopped-up tape experiments and a healthy dose of entropy.Of the two projects, however, Neutral is definitely the more unknown quantity, as both Herner and Johannsson each seem to bring a strong vision to the project and there is no telling what will emerge each time they collide anew.Hell, Herner by herself seems equally likely to whip up a cacophonous firestorm of guitar noise, make a bedroom soul album, front a great No Wave band, or wander off into a deep forest to make a ritualistic folk album.That is what hooks me, I suppose: I have no real idea of where Herner and Johannsson are going with this project at all, but I know it will likely pass through some unique and memorable terrain every time it surfaces. The world is full of reliably great artists, but it is the outliers like Neutral that keep music exciting for me.

12 August 2018

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Albums and Singles

Recently reissued in expanded form, A Turn of Breath was Ian William Craig's 2014 formal debut, though it was predated by a handful of digital-only and cassette releases. In fact, I am quite fond of his first two Recital Program albums, even if they betray a strong Tim Hecker influence. With A Turn of Breath, however, Craig made a major creative leap forward, casting aside any lingering derivative touches to establish himself as one of the most talented and distinctive sound artists in recent memory. Using just his voice as his primary instrument, Craig employs an arsenal of tape players to transform his simple, naked melodies into swooning and warbling dream-like bliss. He later expanded considerably on that aesthetic with the more song-based and shoegaze-inspired Centres, but that vision was already quite lovely and fully formed here–A Turn of Breath just happens to be a more fragmented, flickering, and hallucinatory incarnation of it.

Recital Program

For good reason, it is damn near impossible to find any description of A Turn of Breath that does not use the word "angelic."There is no word more apt for this album, so there is no point in going through linguistic contortions to find an alternative.Craig, a classically trained vocalist, certainly sings quite beautifully, yet the world is absolutely full of other classically trained vocalists and I generally have no interest in their recordings–a great voice is only a starting point.Fortunately, Craig had (and has) plenty of great ideas for how to use that voice.His work is special primarily because he has found an especially ingenious way to use tapes and has a singular compositional genius for transforming tape music into something warm, melodic, and lushly Romantic.At its best, A Turn of Breath sounds like the sublimely rapturous recordings of a heavenly choir…if a bumbling recording engineer tripped and the master tapes rolled off the cloud and fell to earth.That is only the first part, though, as it also seem like the tapes probably sat in the sun for a while before Craig found them.That last bit is especially crucial, as pieces like "Red Gate With Starling" and "Either Or" seems to retain a divine essence, yet transform that prettiness into something deeper, elegantly frayed, and vulnerable.While that summarizes the bulk of the album, Craig occasionally picks up his guitar as well, earning him several similarly deserved comparisons to a medieval troubadour (albeit one with access to some reverb effects).Admittedly, I am not quite as fond of that side of Breath, but pieces like "Rooms" and "A Forgetting Place" play an essential role in balancing out the vaporous and elusive nature of the more abstract pieces with some clear words and melodies.I am able to fully appreciate the gorgeous fog of this album precisely because there are occasional breaks in it.

The album's best pieces tend to be ones that blur the lines between those two poles, however.Only "A Slight Grip, A Gentle Hold" fully achieves that feat, but it is the album's two-part centerpiece and the two halves take achingly beautiful and divergent paths.For the first part, Craig weaves an unusually lush and layered backdrop of warbling, fluttering vocal loops that are quite gorgeous on their own.When the main vocals finally appear, it feels absolutely transcendent, like Craig is singing a simple and pure hymn as the heavens open up and cherubim flutter around the rafters.The second part boldly strips away all those underlying loops, reducing the piece to just the unadorned central melody, then adding layers of harmonies until Craig sounds like a one-man choir.It is great, of course, but it gets even better when it unexpectedly erupts into a shivering and lovely coda of lush organ chords and wobbly tapes.Speaking of the latter, I am also quite fond of "Second Lens," which sounds like the tape machine itself has become possessed with the divine spirit.There are still some lovely slow-moving clouds of harmonized vocals, but the real magic of the piece lies in the textural details, as it feels like all of the smallest mechanical sounds have been amplified to become a symphony of hiss, crackle, straining wheels, and flapping tape.

Curiously, it was only with the gift of hindsight that I was able to appreciate what a unique and wonderful album this is: Craig was great when he was just using self-built instruments (Heretic Surface), then he was great when he started singing into tape recorders.It did not seem like a big deal to me at the time, though it is now baffling to think that there was once a time when Craig conspicuously avoided singing.I needed the added context of Centres to grasp that a seismic shift had occurred.I suppose part of that slow realization was because Breath was still primarily composed of soundscapes rather than songs, though "A Slight Grip" is a dazzling exception.This album is far more like a beautiful mosaic rather than a collection of individual highlights–a structure that makes the expanded edition's inclusion of two additional EPs quite interesting.The Short of Breath EP is the less striking of the two, as it simply feels like a seamless extension of the parent album (there is even a third variation of "A Slight Grip").It is all good, but it is so clearly cut from the exact same cloth as A Turn of Breath that it just feels like the album got a little longer.The Fresh Breath EP, on the other hand, offers a glimpse of a slightly darker, starker, and more experimental album that might have been.It seems like it would have been a good one, but Craig's instincts were infallible enough to leave me with no regrets about the path he chose.To go back to my mosaic metaphor, what Craig left out of the album is just as important as what he left in: A Turn of Breath is not great solely because he had plenty of wonderful new material–it is also great because he distilled it all to its simplest essence and avoided diluting that by paring away absolutely everything that was not necessary.The extra material is nice, but A Turn of Breath was already an essential release without it.

• Red Gate With Starling
• A Slight Grip, A Gentle Hold (Part 2)
• 6 Years, 33 Million (For Bo) (from Fresh Breath)

 

12 August 2018

Administrator

Albums and Singles

"Electro-acoustic maestro and noted mastering engineer Stephen Mathieu commits a decade of spellbinding work to Radiance, collecting 12 album length discs (total: almost 13 hours!) revolving around the concept of stasis, the unfolding of time and sustained frequencies, deep listening, and immersive soundscapes. We've barely touched the sides with this one but, boy, it's a compelling, deeply immersive ride...

Completing Mathieu’s most significant cycle of work in his twenty year oeuvre, Radiance operates in a push and pull of reflection and absorption, using heat and light as metaphors for the synaesthetic qualities of sound, and how it is perceived by the listener not just thru ears. The title itself also connotes a vast scale of timelessness, but also one prone to fade away, decay, and its from these polysemous readings that Mathieu draws a remarkable spectrum of interrelated yet variegated compositions.

As ever, Mathieu is effectively dealing with the metaphysics of sound, using an array of electronics and electronic processes to divine new life in old instruments and samples, getting right down to their grain and accentuating their normally imperceptible peculiarities and latent spirits. In a sense he’s tactfully highlighting the lustre of his sounds, brining out their unique qualities for the ear to feel.That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s all shiny and seductive. Rather, the pieces' textures range from blingy to coruscating and every integer in-between, sharing a feel for and fascination with the infidelity of acoustic, mechanical, and electronic sounds perhaps only comparable with the likes of previous collaborators, Akira Rabelais and the GRM’s Kassel Jaeger, or Leyland Kirby, for example, within the contemporary field.

All 12 albums in the set were individually a year or so in the making, and thusly require patient, committed listening for full comprehension The time we've spent with it so far is enlightening, rendering truly sublime passages and moments in the multi-timbral shimmer of "Sea Song I," and likewise in the tantalizing, prickly haze of "The Answer VII," while the longer pieces naturally give broader room for his ideas to grow, and beautifully so in the likes of his heavy-lidded and keening drone panorama "First Consort," while "To Have Elements Exist In Space (GRM Version)" patiently and exquisitely evokes a state of weightlessness, and, at its longest, the hour long breadth of "Feldman" operates with deeply uncanny, surface level tonal reflections, which, as glib as it may read, recalls to us the magick of looking out a bus window at night, where the internal reflections and external street lights create refractive, illusory dimensions to get totally lost in.

The slow gaze is key to this amazing suite, as it purposefully pulls away from the time-constricted demands of contemporary music consumption to offer a wide, open space where time moves differently and perceptions are readjusted, becoming malleable in the process. It’s not quick fix music, but when applied properly, the results endure."

-via Boomkat

More information can be found here.

12 August 2018

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Building from a reputation of arresting live performances and critically acclaimed releases Puce Mary breaks new ground with The Drought, evolving from the tropes of industrial and power electronics to forge a complex story of adapting to new realities. Remnants of noise still exist, sustaining the penetrative viscerality offered on previous records, however, The Drought demonstrates an intention to expand on the vocabulary of confrontational music and into a grander narrative defined by technical and emotional growth.

Bringing together introspective examination with literary frameworks by writers such as Charles Baudelaire and Jean Genet, Puce Mary’s compositions manifest an ongoing power struggle within the self towards preservation. The traumatized body serves as a dry landscape of which obscured memories and escape mechanisms fold reality into fiction, making sense of desire, loss and control. The Drought presents both danger and opportunity; through rebuilding a creative practice centered on first-person narrative and a deliberate collage of field recordings and sound sources Puce Mary injects an acute urgency across the album seeking resilience.

"To Possess Is To Be In Control" makes use of lyrical repetition as an ambiguity of two selves, or a divided self, attempting to consume one another, while "Red Desert," named after Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1964 film, portrays the individual subsumed by surrounding environmental forces. The seven-minute epic "The Size of Our Desires" acts as the emotional tipping point of the record; amongst the ominous drone and dense feedback flutters almost-beatific melodies, while the lyrics reveal a romantic call to be swept up in the midst of an increasingly uninhabitable world.

Rather than escape, The Drought dramatises a metamorphosis in which vulnerability is confronted through regeneration. Noise and aggression no longer act as an affront to react against but part of a 'corporeal architecture' where space, harmony and lyricism surface from the harsh tropes of industrial music. The Drought chronologizes the artist's transformation through a psychological famine, new ways of coping akin to plant survival in a desert – to live without drying out.

More information can be found here.

12 August 2018

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Building from a reputation of arresting live performances and critically acclaimed releases, Puce Mary breaks new ground with The Drought, evolving from the tropes of industrial and power electronics to forge a complex story of adapting to new realities. Remnants of noise still exist, sustaining the penetrative viscerality offered on previous records.  However, The Drought demonstrates an intention to expand on the vocabulary of confrontational music and into a grander narrative defined by technical and emotional growth.

Bringing together introspective examination with literary frameworks by writers such as Charles Baudelaire and Jean Genet, Puce Mary's compositions manifest an ongoing power struggle within the self towards preservation. The traumatized body serves as a dry landscape of which obscured memories and escape mechanisms fold reality into fiction, making sense of desire, loss and control. The Drought presents both danger and opportunity; through rebuilding a creative practice centered on first-person narrative and a deliberate collage of field recordings and sound sources Puce Mary injects an acute urgency across the album seeking resilience.

"To Possess Is To Be In Control" makes use of lyrical repetition as an ambiguity of two selves, or a divided self, attempting to consume one another, while "Red Desert," named after Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1964 film, portrays the individual subsumed by surrounding environmental forces. The seven-minute epic "The Size of Our Desires" acts as the emotional tipping point of the record; amongst the ominous drone and dense feedback flutters almost-beatific melodies, while the lyrics reveal a romantic call to be swept up in the midst of an increasingly uninhabitable world.

Rather than escape, The Drought dramatises a metamorphosis in which vulnerability is confronted through regeneration. Noise and aggression no longer act as an affront to react against but part of a ‘corporeal architecture’ where space, harmony and lyricism surface from the harsh tropes of industrial music. The Drought chronologizes the artist’s transformation through a psychological famine, new ways of coping akin to plant survival in a desert – to live without drying out.

More information can be found here.

12 August 2018

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Originally published as a tour cassette in June 2017, the initial run of 100 hand-numbered copies sold out at the end of the tour. A second edition was published in July and that edition sold out soon thereafter.

Many people have asked about buying downloads so we've finally decided to honor these requests while also offering a hard copy available for collectors that enjoy seeing spines on shelves.

We hope you can appreciate that we've decided to make this album an unlimited edition here on Bandcamp instead of repressing the cassette for a third edition.

You may also notice the appearance of a bonus track taken from a live recording in June 2017. Please enjoy!

More information can be found here.