Plenty of new music to be had this week from Laetitia Sadier and Storefront Church, Six Organs of Admittance, Able Noise, Yui Onodera, SML, Clinic Stars, Austyn Wohlers, Build Buildings, Zelienople, and Lea Thomas, plus some older tunes by Farah, Guy Blakeslee, Jessica Bailiff, and Richard H. Kirk.
Lake in Girdwood, Alaska by Johnny.
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Marisa Anderson has quietly been one of the most reliably excellent solo guitarists around for years, slowly amassing a fine discography of limited releases that occasionally get a well-deserved reissue. The handful that I have heard, however, do not quite capture the full extent of Anderson's powers, as it has historically been very easy to lump her in with the overcrowded post-Fahey milieu. On Cloud Corner, her Thrill Jockey debut and most high-profile release to date, she simultaneously celebrates and transcends her folk/blues origins, drawing in Spanish and Taureg influences and fleshing out her sound with a host of effects, added instrumentation, and overdubs. It is remarkable how much difference making full use of a studio can make: Anderson's virtuosity and gift for strong melodies remain as delightful as ever, but her work has never sounded quite this vibrant, varied, and evocative. Cloud Corner is definitely Anderson's finest release to date (and occasionally also the best album that Six Organs of Admittance never recorded).
The album opens in remarkably lovely fashion with "Pulse," as Anderson unleashes a brightly rippling cascade of arpeggios that leave a shivering cloud of lingering harmonies in their wake.She also makes wonderfully stealthy and effective use of electric piano, weaving a languorous trail of quivering, liquid tones in the background to add further color and depth to the haze of overtones.While "Pulse" is just one of many stylistic threads that Anderson explores over the course of this multifarious album, it does set the tone for the overarching aesthetic that runs throughout Cloud Corner: vibrant and vivid melodies that dissolve into gently hallucinatory ghost trails.To her credit, Anderson seems to have found the perfect balance between casual virtuosity, psychedelia, brevity and songcraft.Cloud Corner never feels consciously flashy or indulgent–instead it feels like Anderson is playfully embellishing her favorite melodies in a magical forest where sounds embark upon a spectral second life rather than decaying into silence.Anderson covers a lot of varied territory within those enchanted confines though.For example, "Slow Ascent" is a droning and serpentine Eastern blues piece enlivened by tumbling flurries of pull-offs, while the following "Angel's Rest" is a radiant and tender reverie.The title piece that follows is then something completely different altogether, taking the shape of a lively, breezy bit of folk guitar that combines a strong melody with some quietly dazzling interplay between the underlying arpeggios.On the latter two pieces, Anderson proves to be especially adept at dabbling in major keys without sounding lightweight or saccharine.She also has a real knack for ending songs at exactly the right time, as none of these ten songs ever comes close to overstaying its welcome.
Anderson returns to Eastern-tinged psych-folk with "Sun Song," though she perversely eschews effects, opting instead to unleash an acoustic tour de force that sounds like Ben Chasny might if he became extremely enthusiastic about Spanish guitar music and grew a few extra fingers.The sun-dappled "Sant Feliu de Guíxols," on the other hand, seems to be Spanish in name and inspiration only, beautifully recapturing the warmth and momentum of the earlier "Cloud Corner."Amusingly, it was partially inspired by a fan who lamented that Anderson only plays "sad songs."She seems to have taken that observation very much to heart, as it feels like Cloud Corners is composed of far more light than shadow.In fact, Anderson only truly delves into darkness with "Lament," a gorgeously winding and elegiac slide guitar and electric piano piece inspired by images of Syrian refugees.The electric piano takes a more prominent role in the desert blues of "Surfacing," beautifully winding through an otherwise straightforward piece like a lysergic, shimmering stream.The album then closes with its most unusual piece ("Lift"), which seems to be the album's leftfield single of sorts (there is a video for it).I do not foresee it making much of a commercial impact, sadly, but it is appealingly strange and lovely.It is also quite minimalist, as it is built from an endlessly repeating ascending melody that is rhythmically washed over by a slow tide of shimmering electric guitar chords.
As much as I have enjoyed Anderson's previous work, I was kind of blindsided by how dramatically her art has expanded and evolved with Cloud Corner.In one sense, it feels like a wonderful compilation featuring four or five guitarists with different cool aesthetics.In a more crucial sense, however, all of the different threads seem to feel completely natural and like they all belong together as essential elements of this lovely whole–like different stages of a long and meaningful journey with a very conscious and purposeful arc.I cannot think of anyone else who could have made an album quite like this, as these pieces feel steeped in a reverence for traditional music, yet adventurous and experimental enough to feel like something fresh.It is no small feat to embrace and transcend traditional music at the same time, especially without seeming like one is self-consciously trying too hard to make an important statement.Cloud Corner instead feels natural and comfortable.This is simply a fundamentally transcendent album in nearly every significant way, transcending stylistic boundaries, cultural boundaries, my own expectations, and the (normally) limited appeal of solo guitar albums.Of course, while all of that is true, it feels uncomfortably like hyperbole for such a lovely, understated, and lived-in batch of songs.Perhaps it is better to merely say that Cloud Corner feels like making a new friend that I feel like I have known forever.It is not a toweringly grand and ambitious masterwork, but it is easily one of the most enduring and instantly endearing albums that any guitarist will release this year.
SURE, EVERYTHING IS ENDING, but not yet. Ever since David Tibet's Current 93 sung its birth canal blues back in the early 1980s, there's been a smell of apocalypse in the air. As the American author of horror novels Thomas Ligotti put it, Tibet has over the years presented us with words and images that are "portentous in a literal and most poetic sense."* No matter how great or small, Tibet's visions has sustained a sense of urgency throughout his many, many projects and towering work. 35 years on, as dark clouds once again are gathering on the horizon, his syncretic tale of the fallen empire inside us all seem to be as pertinent as ever. Arise for bad times.
Enter Zu93, the effectively named collaboration between Tibet and the ever-changing Italian group Zu, centered around Massimo Pupillo and Luca Mai. Seven years after the collaborators first met in Rome, the most beautifully apocalyptic city of all, they can finally present Mirror Emperor, mixed and produced by Stefano Pilia. If last year's Create Christ, Sailor Boy, the startling Hypnopazūzu album Tibet made alongside Youth, the legendary producer and Killing Joke bassist, was "a transformative union," the imperial ghost music presented on Mirror Emperor marks a return to their earth, a tour amidst the ruins: Gentle guitars, weeping cellos, the occasional rumbling bass and soft percussion, are melted and gently poured into the sepulchral engine. Despite a few electric swirls or the odd metallic screech Mirror Emperor moves seamlessly and comes across as surprisingly grounded and subtle, yet anticipatory, foreboding and at times even pastoral and Arcadian. The sound of a magical chamber orchestra or Cæsar Legions? Well, Mirror Emperor does echo pivotal moments from the respective catalogues of its creators, most urgently akin to Zu's acoustic explorations on their 2014 collaboration with Eugene S. Robinson of Oxbow fame, The Left Hand Path, leading up to last year’s brilliantly metamorphic Jhator. For others the album will come as a gift from the blazing starres, more than hinting at a stripped down Current 93 of the 90s, perhaps in the same way as 2010's Baalstorm, Sing Omega or Myrninerest's 2012 album, 'Jhonn,' Uttered Babylon at times did.
"The album is the closing of a long circle for me," comments Massimo Pupillo. "I've been following David's work since the early days and count Current 93 as one of the main inspirations behind my work with Zu. For me his poetry and music is like a light in the depths of human experience, a soundtrack for one's personal descent into the unconscious fields." "Zu made something very beautiful and very powerful for me to skip into. I love this album," Tibet says. Mirror Emperor adds another chapter in his ever-expanding oblique vision: personal, dense and hallucinatory. A voice through a cloud, indeed. On Mirror Emperor, the demiurge of our demise hides in the cracks of a broken world, beneath stones and moss, among the comets, in tears and things and on "BloodBoats," as if a "cosmic melancholy" (Ligotti) is being articulated. More mourning than light. Tibet explains:
We all carry different faces, different masks, and all of them will be taken from us. We were born free, and fell through the Mirror into a UnWorld, a Mirror Empire. In this Mirror Empire we are under the Mirror Emperor, and there are MANY Bad Moons Rising. At the final curtain there is scant applause.
As the music fades out, we hear a whispered "awake." “Every time I heard this final call to awakening while working on the album, I found myself deeply moved," Pupillo says. "Awake. If this was the last word to come out of Zu, I would be a happy man."
What we're left with is a dreamlike suite, created under a murderous moon. Perhaps that is all we ever hoped for. Hey, was that the Apocalypse?
Zu93 is: David Tibet, Massimo Pupillo, Stefano Pilia, Luca Mai, Luca Tilli, Andrea Serrapiglio, Sara D’Uva.
– Tore Engelsen Espedal, March 2018
*Quoted from Thomas Ligotti's "Will You Wait For Me By the Dead Clock?," the afterword in David Tibet's collection of lyrics Sing Omega (Spheres, 2015)
The latest project of Madeline Johnston of Sister Grotto. Together with collaborator Tucker Theodore, Midwife creates dreamy songs that confront raw emotions, haunted soundscapes that get stuck in your head. Following their acclaimed 2017 debut Like Author, Like Daughter, their new Prayer Hands EP delves further, bringing more reverb-drenched anthems of loss.
Carsten Nicolai and Ryuichi Sakamoto have a fairly lengthy history of collaborations, but this is an especially fascinating (if brief) one: an improvised performance in Philip Johnson’s legendary Glass House that coincided with the opening of a Yayoi Kusama installation. A lot of the appeal unsurprisingly lies in the duo's process, as they used the house itself as an instrument, contact mic’ing the walls and rubbing them with rubber mallets. However, Glass is also quite beautiful as a pure listening experience, striking an absorbing balance between ghostly ambiance and a crystalline and glittering rain of slow-motion glass fragments.
Nearly any good site-specific work of sound art is going to evoke a strong sense of place, particularly if the site is one as unique as The Glass House.The early moments of Glass, however, evoke something very different than a serene and pastoral masterpiece of modern architecture.Instead, it feels like I am in the subterranean depths of a vast and deserted parking garage in the middle of the night.I can hear the distant hiss of traffic, yet the most prominent sounds are disconcertingly loud and echoing drips, along with an ominous and steadily strengthening hum.As that hum becomes louder and more layered, it feels increasingly supernatural, as if flickering phantasms are quietly emerging from the walls and shadows to encircle me.It is hard to quite put my finger on the exact moment when things change, yet my surroundings seem to seamlessly dissolve at some point into something that feels even more haunted, but more otherworldly and futuristic.It is a lot like waking up from a nightmare only to realize that I am actually in a different nightmare, like a Russian nesting doll of uncomfortable dreams.I recognize that I probably reference Tarkovsky more than is healthy, but the lion's share of Glass feels like I have awoken in the world of Solaris and my sanity is being steadily gnawed away by escalating hallucinations and a dawning sense that my orderly, sterile surroundings are actually fluid, illusory, and potentially malevolent.
Of course, in order to experience the absorbing and creepily revelatory beauty of this album, I first had to realize that Glass is an album that necessitates extreme volume.If I listen to it casually at a normal level, it sounds like a likeable spectral drone album enlivened by an occasional flurry of crystalline processed crotales or an unexpected blurt of tormented synth.Experienced more immersively at heightened volume, however, the subtle details spring to vivid life and Glass coheres into a purposeful and haunting arc.At its best, it feels like a dazed walk through endless brightly lit corridors that eerily bend, warp, blur, flicker, and reshape themselves like they are disturbingly alive.There is definitely an otherworldly beauty to the dreamily blurred drones and the twinkling, falling icicle-like interludes, yet there is a rising darkness and slowly dawning horror that curdles the piece into something like a grotesque caricature of an angelic choir: unnerving dissonances creep into the harmonies, drones slowly undulate like phantasmal serpents, and an occasional tormented squeal cuts viscerally through the fog. The steadily massing and darkening miasma of blurred and ghostly tones casts an absolutely beguiling spell–the role of everything else is merely to inject life, contrast, and unpredictability into its slow yet inexorable intensification.I am not sure how much of the piece was improvised and how much was planned in advance, but Glass feels like a very deliberate and organically building piece precisely because the central theme is so simple and perfect and all of the peripheral textural flourishes are executed with an impressive lightness of touch.Even the more cutting and structured moments feel like they are ephemerally emerging from an enchanted mist that will soon reclaim them.
The only questionable decision comes during the piece’s final third, as someone delves into something that sounds like a bleary melodica solo (I am guessing Sakamoto is the culprit, unless the supernatural power of the piece inadvertently summoned Augustus Pablo from the spirit world).While that solo gamely adheres to the piece’s floating and indistinct aesthetic, it nevertheless transforms the entire feel of the piece in a significant way.Pre-solo, Glass is a gorgeously eerie dreamscape ingeniously crafted from the sounds of glass.Once the solo appears, however, the illusion dissipates somewhat and the piece instead feels like a human musician improvising a melody over a particularly surreal and unconventional backdrop.Naturally, that has its appeal too (especially given the caliber of the artists involved), but it is enough to downgrade Glass from "sublime, understated masterpiece" to "a very interesting performance with flashes of genuine brilliance."I suppose that is unfortunate, as it is always the albums that come closest to greatness that break my heart a little, but it does not change the fact that Glass is still one of the most significant and inspired works of serious sound art that I have heard this year.
Mark Fell returns with an incredible album of rhythmelodic cadences performed with Drumming Grupo De Percussão on the Sixxen metallophone system: a set of six microtonally tuned instruments originally conceived by Iannis Xenakis in 1976.
The eight-part Intra stands out as one of Fell's most immediate and unusual releases; high in concept but also satisfying an obsession for complex polyrhythms as explored and developed by the likes of Beatrice Dillon, Don't DJ, and further out to augmented realities rendered by Kara-Lis Coverdale, Kassem Mosse and even Jlin.
Making use of a kind of conceptual future-primitivism, Fell probes the perceptive difference between ideas of simplicity and complexity by sending instructions to acoustic drummers via electronic triggers relayed through headphones, an idea he first explored on the Time and Space Shapes for Gamelan installation made in collaboration with Laurie Spiegel.
His ongoing interests in the classical Indian "Carnatic" music systems also play a big part here; its mathematical sound rules or Tala, have 35 possible combinations - many more than the usual Western structures of minor and major scales. It is this structure that imbues these recordings with such complex, propulsive and oddly pensive energies.
Concept aside, Intra is a beautiful piece of sound art which sidesteps convention and perceptions of music in a way that’s highly pleasurable, even strangely soothing in its stilted trickle of off kilter tones, revealing successive dimensions with each repeated listen.
Unsurprisingly, Long Trax 2 sounds like a direct continuation of the first album Will Long (Celer) issued in 2016. Self-described as a "house" album, Long’s interpretation of the classic genre takes some liberties with expectations as far as the style goes.  Sure, the rhythms are there and the primary focus, but Long filters the standard facets of the style through his minimalist approach to sound he established in the ambient space of Celer, resulting in a meditative album that is far more calm than club friendly.
House music was of course created with the dance club in mind, but Will Long's interpretation of it does not lend itself very well to that context.His arrangements are too hushed and quiet, and the drum machine is mixed a bit too soft to fill out a dance floor via pounding bass.Given his work as Celer though, I assume introspective listening is more the mood Long is going for with this project.He also acknowledges the political side of the genre, which is less focused on by those modern day practitioners of the genre, via political speech samples mixed in throughout this collection.
Like the original Long Trax he presents six songs, all of which sit near the ten-minute mark (this compilation was again also presented as a series of three 12" singles).The same building blocks are in play here as well:sparse, restrained synthesizer washes and notably understated production, all propelled by the stiff metronomic Roland digital drum machine.There is a similar sense of almost hypnotic repetition, where the pieces are varied slightly, but never dramatically shift in tempo or dynamics.
Long lays out the blueprint right from the start on "Nothing's Changed":elongated keyboard pads are stretched around the rigid beats, peppered with samples of early Barack Obama speeches throughout.Slowly he adds additional elements to the rhythm, switching the bass drum pattern up and throwing in hand claps at the end.Structurally "You Know?" is similar with its synth swells and slow rhythmic development.Here though he mixes things up, sticking to the drumstick and shaker preset sounds on the machine, with the final product having a nicely sleepy, somnambulist drift to it.
"We Tend to Forget" features a more traditional house sounding organ sound, but processed and distilled to its most basic features, although here he is emphasizing the kick drum led rhythms more than anything else.The beat is modified as the song goes on, but for the most part he treats the synths as a subtle accent more than a melodic centerpiece.For "The Struggles, The Difficulties" he uses a similar tactic, keeping the synthesizer low and instead emphasizing the insistent beat.The samples are sparse and the rhythm is mixed up as it goes on, but again there are not drastic changes.
Long Trax was a polarizing release, one that many felt was too understated for what Will Long was attempting to do via a new style of music, and its follow-up is no different.I found it engaging, however, but being a Celer fan beforehand, I listened to these songs as an ancillary project to his work there, and in that context it is an excellent fit.They may not be club bangers, but they are gentle and spacious ambient works that nicely lulled me in, sometimes drifting off to the background but never becoming forgettable or easily ignored.It is an idiosyncratic approach to beat-driven electronic music, but an excellent one.
Ester Kärkkäinen’s 2016 debut as Himukalt, Conditions of Acrimony was an extremely impressive release that featured some excellently dark moments within ambiguous noise compositions. For her first vinyl album, Knife Through the Spine, she has fully embraced the early 1990s power electronic scene, creating a dark, disturbing, and at times extremely aggressive record that has a tighter, more specific focus in its sound. However, her unique take on the style, as well as her nuanced approach to creating music results in a fresh, unique release that sounds like no one else.
The commonalities with artists such as the Grey Wolves and Con-Dom are apparent immediately on this record, not just on the sound but the art and presentation as well.Kärkkäinen's use of malfunctioning photocopying technology as a visual artist results in an aesthetic that is nicely consistent with those harsh post-industrial albums on labels such as Tesco Organisation.However, the overall feel of Knife Through the Spine is distinctly different.Rather than intentionally confrontational political ambiguity or serial killer worship (both of which are beyond trite at this point), Himukalt's sound is more personal and any sense of violence is more self-inflicted in nature.The depressive mood is akin to Maurizio Bianchi's early work, and the more violent outbursts are complementary to the bleaker, harsh moments in Atrax Morgue's discography.
"I'm Afraid" gives a clear power electronics feel from its immediate pulsating electronics and shrill grinding noises.The rhythmic, yet heavily distorted backing nicely complements Kärkkäinen's vocals:a manic, heavily processed and flanged outburst that gives a nicely old school feeling while being almost completely indecipherable.However, her balancing of the harsher moments with some ambient and nearly silent passages adds an additional sense of depth and variety that makes it a stand out.
"Social Anxiety #1" is another example of this, with her mangled voice and power drill like crunch piercing through loudly amidst desperate, heavily treated voices.It comes together as an unsettling, organic cascade of heavy electronics and rumbling subbass.The complementary "Social Anxiety #2" continues the bad feelings via ripping buzz saws and droning, sinister electronics.Again the final result is an uncomfortable, unsettling mass of unpleasantness that congeals perfectly.
Himukalt’s work also excels due to her sense of dynamics and variation.Instead of just a dull, punishing roar from beginning to end, the shifts are more manic depressivein nature.Squelching electronics and buzzing harsh rhythms punctuate "Staggered, Crushed", but her blending of these harsher outbursts and tenser, less explosive sounds make for an excellently unsettling pairing."Be Sure of Your Diagnosis (Version)" is another example of this, with shimmering noise explosions cutting through a hollow industrial din.Sputtering vocals help give even more depth to the whiplash stop/start structure of the piece, and as chaotic as it may seem, there is a clear sense of structure and organization.
In just two years Ester Kärkkäinen has demonstrated impressive growth and change to her Himukalt project.Knife Through the Spine demonstrates some clear influences, but she takes the dark, harsh sounds in a different, more personal direction.Power electronics is a style I have been a fan of for a while, but I find it is often stale, and heavily focusing on the same, often juvenile, sense of provocation and controversy.It may sound like a callous statement, but Kärkkäinen's inner demons make for a more captivating experience on the listening end.
I still optimistically cling to the hope that Marc Richter will someday release another masterpiece in the vein 2009's Alphabet 1968 or 2014's Black to Comm, but his Jemh Circs project seems to be sticking around for the long haul and is proving to be quite an intriguing diversion in the meantime. Much like the first Jemh Circs album, (untitled) Kingdom is a deranged and fractured rabbit hole of cannibalized and re-purposed YouTube clips, though it feels like Richter has gone a bit deeper down that uniquely post-modern path this time around: this is very much a disorienting and lysergic playground of gleeful experimentation and deconstruction from start to finish. As such, much of (untitled) Kingdoms' appeal lies in its sheer otherworldly mindfuckery. However, the album's second half occasionally allows some unexpected vistas of alien beauty to break through Richter's stuttering and kaleidoscopic fever dream.
If I had to describe the overarching theme that defines (untitled) Kingdom and possibly Jemh Circs in general, I would probably choose "obsessiveness," though the project is also a place where Richter allows himself the freedom to let his weirdest impulses go unchecked.That is not to say that (untitled) Kingdom is unfiltered or lazily edited though, as it is definitely neither of those things.However, it would be fair to say that most (if not all) of these 24 pieces are each constructed from just one or two small details unrecognizably excised from Richter's found YouTube footage.Also, the source material has a curiously unpredictable feel, as if Richter deliberately chose clips at random and challenged himself to make something compelling from whatever fell in his lap.Sometimes, those clips inspire something that feels like the warm, woozily dreamlike beginnings of a Black to Comm piece ("Lac Dali"), yet Richter’s mercurial muse is equally likely to steer him towards something that brain-fryingly resembles a demonic herd of extra-dimensional cows ("20/20").Both directions have their appeal, obviously.It is the latter that feels more like Jemh Circ's raison d'etre, however: this is the place to go if I want to hear Richter contort and recontextualize the mundane into something truly challenging and alien.Another fine example of such a plunge into the unknown is "PG/YY/A," which feels like I have been transported to a whimsical cartoon world, but I am damned to experience it from the inside of an active washing machine.Elsewhere, "SFW/ii" feels like a queasily broken hip-hop banger recorded by a bunch of drugged, incoherent elves."CRISPR/Cas9" is yet another manic mindfrazzler, resembling a mangled VHS copy of an aggressively cheery children's show that only plays at the wrong speed and constantly skips.
While being playfully wrong-footed again and again is certainly a welcome treat for my jaded ears, Richter's psychotropically chopped, stretched, and stuttering fantasia also coheres into some striking passages of otherworldly heaven.My favorite piece, "Milch," takes a page from classic Oval, building a sublime chord progression from obsessively skipping micro-loops, but augments it with a bleary haze of floating harmonies that almost feels like an avant-garde orchestral work.Soon after, Richter makes an especially unexpected detour into weirdly soulful territory with "Doyg," marrying a tender and twinkling piano melody to a decontextualized yet heartfelt "ooh" sample.It is definitely one of Richter's more fascinating feats on the album, as he manages to evoke the essence of a great soul ballad, but turns that experience into something quite disorienting and novel: the piece seems unable to ever move forward, damned to endlessly stumble over the same phrase as hallucinatory snatches of crowd noise gradually bleed into the periphery.On the other end of the spectrum lies "Gn0sis," which sounds like a Portrait of Dorian Gray-style perversion of the Black to Comm aesthetic, transforming heady drones into something sickly, gnarled, shrill, and confused. Another particularly unusual piece is the closing "Persian Knives," which takes a lovely motif of gently wriggling and dreamlike synth tones and steers it into a surreal fog of crackling and cacophonous radio transmissions.
The only caveat with (untitled) Kingdom is the obvious one: Jemh Circs is where Richter's most absurd and whimsical impulses live and thrive (his more majestic and essential work lies elsewhere).That said, Jemh Circs is still an intriguing entity in its own right and it is not impossible to imagine that some people might genuinely prefer this endearingly chaotic and unpredictable vein.There is certainly a lot of naked experimentation for the sheer joy of discovery, yet for all of its candy-colored lunacy, there is a deep, coherent, and thoughtful vision that runs throughout the entire album.It is almost forensic in a weird way, taking an extremely focused and exacting dive into our ceaseless torrent of instantly forgotten pop culture detritus in a sincere attempt to find and isolate elusive snatches of real beauty and wonder.Perhaps an even better analogy would be to say that Richter is like a quixotic lepidopterist attempting to rescue rare butterflies that somehow wound up in a blinding blizzard: there is absolutely no telling what the hell is going to find its way into his net, but the results of his efforts can be improbably lovely and exotic when he gets what he is after.
Shumoto & The Byrde, the duo of guitarists Austin Hatch and Jefferson Pitcher have collaborated before, but their shared connection with Pauline Oliveros, with Hatch being been a fan of her work, and Pitcher studied under her at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute helped to motivate this collaboration. With eight pieces spread across two records, all improvised live with a small amount of overdubbing when necessary, the duo have created a beautiful and fitting tribute to one of experimental music’s luminaries.
Some of the pieces contained within these four album sides are more specifically guitar-centric in their concept and instrumentation."Opening/Leaving", for example, is largely a pairing of two guitars playing complementary clean note progressions, melding together in a complex, mournful tone that eventually takes a turn for the more dissonant.Bent strings, elongated sounds and shifting pitches give a different sheen to the piece.The guitar stays overt but some of the other sounds do not, eventually culminating in a wild western ghost town ambience that ultimately doubles back to the conventional melodic progressions that opened the song.
"Entropy" has Shumoto & The Byrde retaining the same melancholic mood, with lots of open space punctuated by sparse, pure guitar chords.The mood is similar to "Opening/Leaving" but the entirety of the structure has a different, looser, more free improvised feel to it overall."Beneath Boat" also sees the duo retaining more traditional guitar sounds as the focus, but with a greater frequency of incidental string noises (scrapes, vibrations, plucks, etc.) that contrast the more sustained droning backgrounds.
Never does The Sea Will Carry Me fully eschew the guitars, but their conventional sounds are not always the focus."For Pauline", recorded upon the night of her passing, is a melding of wobbly tones and tonal spaces as opposed to more conventional resonating chords.Layers drift in and out and a cavernous, distant chug give the piece a distinctly different color.Greater abstraction, along with the scraped and bowed strings, makes for a darker, somewhat bleaker piece."Engine Room Monastery" is also less centered on standard guitar sounds and instead is a conjuring of noisy spaces, groans, and hollow scrapes.The two create more of a shamble than a flow, and the monastic like chanting that eventually appears just adds to the mood.
The final piece of this double album, "Mountain Above Sky", brings the proceedings back to how it began and is perhaps the most heartfelt tribute to the Oliveros.Sparse chords and sung duet vocals make for the focus, balancing the large and small sound dynamics perfectly.The performance matches the mood in a sad, beautiful, and intimate way that, by its conclusion, features accordion in a final, appropriate tribute to her.
Pauline Oliveros may not be associated with the guitar as an instrument, but Jefferson Pitcher and Austin Hatch have clearly taken on her methodology to sound and art and translated it to their respective instruments.Like her own works, Shumoto & The Byrde encourages deep listening and give the space for that to happen throughout this heartfelt, powerful record.The Sea Will Carry Me is the result, in the form of a loving, fitting tribute to Oliveros and her work that I am sure she would be extremely proud of in every possible way.
This sprawling double CD of extended harmonium performances was my first real exposure to the solo work of Sylvester Anfang II's Glen Steenkiste and it is quite a curious introduction. The closest kindred spirits are probably La Monte Young's "The Second Dream of the High Tension Line" or Stars of the Lid at their most pastoral, as Steenkiste devotes his energies to crafting deep, meditative drones that strain towards lightness and transcendence. Hellvete's work is not nearly as harmonically adventurous as the just intonation/Pandit Pran Nath-inspired milieu, but Steenkiste compensates somewhat with an unusual feel for time and a willingness to blur together music, ritual, and chance intrusions from the natural world. The less inspired passages tend to feel like sustained and halcyon suspended animation to me, yet Droomharmonium occasionally transforms into an entrancing bit of magic and wonder when Steenkiste is joined by some curious birds or the harmonium disappears to make way for some eerily twinkling bells.
The opening "Droomharmonium V" starts the album in appealingly disorienting and unpredictable fashion, as a brief flourish of mass-like harmonium is quickly cut off to make room for a sublime passage of deep gong-like tones, chirping birds, and gently buzzing strings.It is quite a lovely interlude, establishing a very clear sense of place and striking a perfect organic balance between nature and art.In fact, tt does not feel like Steenkiste is performing so much as it feels like he is masterfully and quietly framing the contributions of his avian collaborators.Gradually, however, the harmonium reasserts its supremacy and blossoms into an improvisation that sounds simultaneously Middle Eastern and medieval.I am always a fan of temporal dislocation, so I enjoyed the ephemeral illusion of being transported to an ancient Persian palace.The Middle East is actually an extremely apt reference point for this album in general, as it is akin to a vast desert of sustained harmonium drones that occasionally blossoms into ephemeral mirages of something deeper and more vibrant.I specifically chose "mirage" rather than "oasis," as Droomharmonium's shifting sands only converge into more complex structures precariously and fleetingly–everything beautiful is damned to dissolve into a faint memory as the all-consuming thrum inevitably re-establishes its dominance.
That aesthetic perversely makes Droomharmonium an intriguingly challenging and ambiguous listening experience.In an uncharitable interpretation, it can be viewed as an overlong and indulgent release with lengthy lulls separating all the good parts.Alternately, Droomharmonium can be viewed as a meditative ritual that requires me to slow down my consciousness to meld with its glacial flow and languorously swaying pulse.When I am able to adapt to Steenkiste's slower-than-human timescale, I am rewarded with a deep sense of serenity punctuated by occasional glimpses of something more deeply beautiful and mysterious.Curiously, those sublime passages of something more compelling than radiant, gently undulating drones often tend to occur near the beginning of these four pieces rather than as any sort of culmination, which I suspect is necessitated by Glen's purist, overdub-free approach to these performances.He might set the scene with a gently hallucinatory dreamscape of twinkling bells ("Droomharmonium VII"), but once he gets serious about building up his sun-dappled mass of shifting harmonium tones, he is unable to focus on anything else (Steenkiste has a finite number of hands, sadly).That is unfortunate, as those ephemeral tastes of other instrumentation provide some welcome textural variety, though I suspect Steenkiste views their all-too-brief lifespans as a necessary casualty in his larger struggle to create something deeper and more profound than mere music.
Having heard some of Hellvete's non-harmonium work on Nachtwacht, I can say with certainty that Steenkiste is a talented multi-instrumentalist with a gift for strong melody and a solid intuition for pacing, so Droomharmonium's improvisatory hyperminimalism is very much a deliberate and consciously experimental choice.As such, I would describe Droomharmonium as a mixed success that I have conflicting feelings about.On a purely gut level, these pieces are simply too one-dimensional to fully connect with me and I prefer Hellvete's more conventionally musical fare.Particularly nagging is the fact that most of the elements of a more compelling, multilayered work are present, but are unable to linger once the harmonium kicks in.On another level, however, I very much appreciate that Steenkiste had the ambition and vision to cast aside everything he knows and attempt to construct a monolithic temple of transcendent drone.That transcendence did not quite bridge the gulf between performer and listener for me, but such a grand, quixotic undertaking certainly got my attention and respect.For better or worse, this is a truly unique album.In fact, it is only an album in the most literal sense, as it would be far more accurate to describe Droomharmonium as a vicarious glimpse of one man's deep "om" as he dissolves his ego in slow-moving clouds of overtones.