15 July 2018

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Albums and Singles

"One of electronic music's most interesting new voices." FACT

Born Again In The Voltage is an astonishing collection of electro-acoustic pieces for Buchla 200 system, cello and voice composed and produced by Caterina Barbieri at Elektronmusikstudion (SE) between 2014 and 2015.

Cello by Antonello Manzo. Images by Giovanni Brunetto. Photography by Angelo Jaroszuk Bogasz. Layout by IMPREC. Mastering by Giuseppe Ielasi.

Music produced by Caterina Barbieri between August 2014 and August 2015.

Recorded and mixed at EMS (Elektronmusikstudion) in Stockholm (SE).

Buchla 200 modular synthesizer + vocals + cello.

Cello by Antonello Mostacci.

More information can be found here.

15 July 2018

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Albums and Singles

Newly reissued on Kranky, Haunt Me, Haunt Me Do It Again was Tim Hecker's remarkably fine debut album under his own name (he had previously been releasing techno as Jetone). Revisiting it now as a long-time Hecker fan, I find it still stands up as a great album, yet there is surprisingly little about it that presages the visionary career that would follow in its wake. At the time of their release, both Haunt Me (2001) and its follow-up (Radio Amor) merely felt like a couple of the better albums to emerge from a thriving generation of glitch-inspired, laptop-wielding artists centered roughly around Mille Plateaux. As such, Haunt Me was very much an album of its time, but that time was truly a golden age of experimental music: this debut was just one of many enduring gems from a period where it seemed like the flood of crucial albums from Fennesz, Colleen, Jim O'Rourke, Oval, Ryoji Ikeda, Alva Noto, and others was never going to end.

Kranky

It was interesting to go back and read about how Haunt Me was initially received upon its release, as it feels quite bizarre in hindsight to view Tim Hecker as a techno producer or an experimental guitarist.Nevertheless, he was both of those things and there are some overt shades of each swimming around Hecker's warmly stuttering and skipping drone bliss.The opening three-part "Music for Tundra," for example, sounds very much like the dreamily indistinct thrum of E-bow drones.While Hecker's background as a guitarist is certainly responsible for the enveloping, soft-focus heaven of languorously sustained chords at the album’s core, the true magic of the album lies in how he disrupts and manipulates that idyll with an ingenious arsenal of hisses, crackles, crystalline bubbles of synth-like tones, and a host of more aggressive and gnarled intrusions.There is also a very free-wheeling and kaleidoscopic sense of experimentation that runs throughout the album, as if Hecker had a rough idea of how he wanted to sound, but was still testing the boundaries of that vision.For example, the third part of "Arctic Loner's Rock" sounds like an ephemeral radio transmission of a pop song that that has been stretched and reversed by mysterious atmospheric forces.Elsewhere, "Border Lines (Part Two)" resembles a time-stretched fire alarm that gradually gets consumed by a chorus of alien insects.On the opposite end of the spectrum, Hecker nods to his techno roots with an understated beat in both "Boreal Kiss" and "Night Flight To Your Heart."Notably, it is the same beat each time, which illustrates another curious feature of Haunt Me: extremely unusual sequencing.There are multiple song suites that seamlessly segue into one another and motifs from one piece often resurface again elsewhere.That sense of looping familiarity adds nicely to the album's fever dream atmosphere.

Most of Haunt Me's highlights come in the middle of the album, the best of which is the sole piece that is not part of a song suite: "The Work of Art in The Age of Cultural Overproduction."Clocking in at over seven minutes, Hecker's wry Walter Benjamin homage is the album's heart and centerpiece in both duration and inspiration, transforming the album’s usual drones into something more viscerally churning, roiling, and machine-like.Rather than feeling like another gently lysergic meditation, it instead resembles a rumbling and lumbering juggernaut that keeps relentlessly moving forward despite its individual components constantly splintering, skipping, and dropping out.Hecker continues that hot streak with the gorgeous two-part "October" that follows, in which a lovely, shimmering, and submerged-sounding loop slowly wends its way through a sea of tape hiss.The following "Ghost Writing" is similarly beautiful, as warbling and indistinct snatch of melody lazily drifts like smoke until it gets transformed and obliterated by something resembling an electromagnetic storm (albeit one featuring an unexpected cameo from Regis Philbin).While those pieces are the most memorable ones to my ears, Haunt Me does not feel like a series of discrete pieces so much as a sustained, flickering, and dreamlike spell.Moments of sublime beauty continue to surface throughout the entire album–the aforementioned handful of pieces just happen to stand out because the album's hallucinatory flow reaches a crest around the halfway point.

While the broad strokes of Haunt Me's aesthetic have lingered throughout Hecker’s career and make it instantly recognizable as his work, it is quite a bit less distinctive than his later fare.The reason for that has a lot to do with scale and heft, as the understated Haunt Me aesthetic of gently skipping ambient warmth resembles an established milieu far more than the blown-out, sensory overload onslaught of his more recent work.There is nothing remotely as harrowing as Virgins or as rapturous as Love Streams on Haunt Me–just the quiet pleasures of sublimely shimmering and ephemeral dronescapes.As such, Haunt Me is kind of a curious entry in Tim Hecker’s discography, as it is classic of a genre and is frequently hailed as a Tim Hecker classic as well (primarily because it was most people's first exposure to his work), but it is arguably a mere shadow of the more staggering albums that came further down the line.Or maybe not, as plenty of people prefer this more vaporous and haunted side of Hecker's work and miss its lightness of touch (art is subjective as hell, it seems).In any case, Haunt Me is a stellar album and I am genuinely thrilled to see it back in print.While Hecker's ambitions were considerably more modest back in 2001, his intuitive genius for harmony, texture, mood, emotional depth, and craftsmanship were present right from the start.

Samples can be found here.

15 July 2018

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Albums and Singles

First released on Play It Again Sam back in 1987 and newly reissued on Metropolis, Any Day Now is one of the jewels of The Legendary Pink Dots' '80s discography. Sadly, I was far too busy scouring Circus for Guns N' Roses news to notice it when it first surfaced and only started to delve into the Dots' catalog in the mid-'90s. As a result, Any Day Now was already 25 years old by the time I eventually heard it as part of the Dots' ambitious remastering campaign a few years back. In some respects, I suppose Any Day Now felt a bit dated in places when I finally heard it, but I was far more struck by how vibrant and fleshed-out the band sounded as a six-piece (the violin of Patrick Wright is especially delightful). I am hesitant to say that The Legendary Pink Dots once "rocked," but the full-band aesthetic of that era was certainly quite a different experience than the more distilled and Ka-Spel-centric fare of recent years. Both eras have their share of highlights, certainly, but Any Day Now captures The Legendary Pink Dots at their most lively, playful, and hook-minded, largely excising all of their most indulgent tendencies to craft an incredibly endearing suite of psych-pop gems. This is a legitimate classic.

Metropolis

The overall aesthetic of Any Day Now is quite a fascinating and unusual one, resembling a cross between an ambitious prog rock concept album and an unnervingly creepy children’s book, evoking a wide range of characters and scenes that seem to weave a strange and elusive narrative.I have no idea what it all means or if any of the individual pieces are intended parts of larger story, but it is certainly feels like colorful, dramatic, and surreal journey regardless.For example, the violin-driven waltz "The Gallery" feels like a charmingly foppish bit of cabaret with amusingly wobbly fretless bass, while the brief "The Peculiar Funfair" resembles a glimpse of a manic and nightmarish circus.Elsewhere, the album's most tender and nakedly lovely piece, "Laguna Beach," is a delicately twinkling bit of chamber pop balladry that sounds plucked from a fairytale.Lurking among all of those anachronistic divergences are a number of songs that are very much of their time, however, embodying a particularly eccentric blend of the era's pervading art-pop tropes: big electronic drums, sliding fretless bass, saxophone solos, and proggy instrumental breaks.There is even a brief and amusing flourish of slapping and popping funk bass at one point.On pieces like "Strychnine Kiss" and "True Love" that aesthetic can certainly feel dated, but it at least feels dated in a very charming way: it still sounds unmistakably like The Legendary Pink Dots, but it feels like The Legendary Pink Dots crashing some '80s pop gig and doing an impromptu set on borrowed instruments.Also, several of the more '80s-sounding pieces are more than strong enough to transcend such quirks.In particular, "Neon Mariner" stands as an especially striking highlight, balancing out its booming drums and awkwardly funky bass with wonderfully moody keyboards, lovely violin countermelodies, tight songcraft, and an impressively strong chorus.

Notably, Play It Again Sam's 1988 CD reissue of Any Day Now appended the Under Glass EP, which has remained attached to the album ever since (to some fans’ chagrin).I think those fans can be safely dismissed as absolute lunatics though, as the three songs from Under Glass definitely make the album significantly better and more substantial.Normally, I too tend to be hostile to the idea of expanding a classic album with bonus tracks, as most bonus tracks generally fall into that category precisely because they were not good enough to make the album.While I could give or take the driving rocker "The Plasma Twins," the thumping and pulsing electro-pop of "Under Glass" is one of the single most perfect pop songs on the entire album.More importantly, "The Light In My Little Girl's Eyes" is one of the most gloriously weird and creepily erotic songs in the entire LPD canon.I cannot think of anything else quite like it, as it combines some of Ka-Spel’s finest and most unnervingly perverse lyrics ("Are you feeling dirty?Yes, but also very pleased") with an unexpectedly propulsive and wild instrumental backdrop.There is even some light cannibalism at the end (something for everyone, really).I never expected to write that the Dots had a killer rhythm section, but the band was legitimately firing on all cylinders in this case and bassist Jason Salmon and drummer Tony Copier deserve a hell of a lot of the credit for that.Even the guitar and violin solos are great.Rarely have I heard the Dots tear it up quite like they do here.In a perfect world, the album probably would end there, but Any Day Now is further augmented by one final song, "Gladiators (Version Apocalypse)," which comes from Stone Circles but was recorded during the same sessions as this album.As such, its inclusion makes sense, but its proggy jamming does not hit nearly the same heights as "Little Girl’s Eyes."

It is kind of amusing and fascinating to travel back to a time when Ka-Spel and The Silverman still had identifiable influences, as they have long since transcended that and seem far more like a (super)natural phenomenon that is only influenced by itself these days.I mean that in the best possible way, of course, as the duo have plunged so deeply into their lysergic rabbit hole at this point that Ka-Spel seems more like an impossibly wise psychedelic shaman than an unusually literate frontman of a cool rock band.I certainly have room in my heart for both.My only real caveat with Any Day Now is that it captures The Legendary Pink Dots at their most catchy, accessible, and (comparatively) straightforward, which is a contrast to the deeper, more intense, and more experimental fare that the band is generally known for.That has caused some fans to view it is one of LPD's more lightweight releases, but it does not feel that way to me at all.While Any Day Now is certainly not heavy psychedelia by any means, it is far from a watered-down or toothless version of the band.Instead, it feels like they just had an unusually great batch of songs and executed them with atypically sharp focus, resulting in quite a bright, vibrant, listenable, and (again, comparatively) fun album.As such, Any Day Now is easily one of the most essential releases in the band’s entire overwhelming discography and an ideal point of entry for the curious.

08 July 2018

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Albums and Singles

The latest work by Thanasis Kaproulias, like 2016's Sirens, is the audio component of a larger, more multimedia focused piece of art. The other half, a film by Isaac Niemand, is not included this time around, however. These two distinct audio pieces are unified and based on field recordings in two very different locations, the first being the natural climate of Iceland, and the second from New York City. Even with the different sources, both pieces fit together wonderfully, with a harsher first half and a more pensive second.

Self-Released

The first half is based on nature recordings from audible and processed inaudible phenomena.Right from the beginning Kaproulias weaves together some crackling distortion and cleaner, underlying tones into a blast of sound that occasionally teeters into gratingly harsh.The noise is shrill and panned side to side, occupying the higher frequencies and at times becoming quite unpleasant, especially at high volumes.Eventually he reigns in the static, allowing the low drone to morph into something more pleasant and melodic.By altering the frequencies and dynamics, Thanasis rearranges the work into something more inviting warm, compared to how it began at least.

At around the midpoint, the piece transitions to its second half, largely constructed from recordings of bridge vibrations in New York City.Oddly enough this is, at first, a more conventionally tonal work.The sounds are processed and treated to almost resemble strings, layered and piled atop one another.Kaproulias keeps these largely calm and tonal, but soon the noise begins to creep back in.Soon he adds in a sample of a Bosnian woman mourning her children at a funeral, and unsurprisingly this heralds a change to darker, more depressing realms of sound.

As the voices appear Kaproulias brings in noisier layers and passages to exacerbate the depressive turn that the piece takes.The build is gradual, but steady, and it ends up getting rather ugly overall.This is especially pronounced in the final few minutes where the noise is pushed far into the red, ending the piece at painful, deafening layers that could potentially damage playback equipment (and ears).It is a fitting conclusion that brings things around to where he started with the work.

Even divorced from the visual element, International Internal Catastrophes is an exceptionally nuanced, at times painful and challenging work.Again Thanasis Kaproulias is consistently showing his developing skill and ability as a composer, attempting new approaches without becoming stagnant. I have found some of his previous works to be somewhat difficult (in a positive way), and this one is definitely up there, especially in its bleaker, more aggressive second half.

samples:

• International Internal Catastrophes (Excerpt 1)
• International Internal Catastrophes (Excerpt 2)
• International Internal Catastrophes (Excerpt 3)

 

08 July 2018

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Mark Van Hoen's latest album is the result of a series of live performances with other Touch luminaries, such as Simon Scott and Philip Jeck, that he participated in all throughout 2016. This experience manifests itself in a somewhat different than expected way on Invisible Threads, because this final result is purely a solo work. However, it was these previous collaborations and performances that lead to Van Hoen approaching the record from different perspectives and with a variety of instrumentation, resulting in a diverse, yet overall uniform sounding album.

Touch

While he intentionally avoided using one of his staples on Invisible Threads, vintage analog synthesizers, Mark did utilize modular synthesis throughout the record.Right from the opening of "Weathered" this can be heard:a rich bed of layered electronics set the stage as he patches in some occasionally shrill tones and a pleasantly dissonant crunch, but with a tasteful level of restraint.For "Opposite Day," he follows a similar pattern, blending mostly elegant ambient electronics with just the right amount of heavy low end vibration.

Even some conventional piano sounds appear on "Aethēr," culminating in a melodic progression that continues and builds throughout the piece.The combination is one that, once a bit of dissonant ambience comes in as a contrast, makes for a rather conventional, song-like sounding piece of music.The shimmering, sustained electronics that are the focus on "Dark Night Sky Paradox" also have a nice pleasantness to them, and fits in with Van Hoen's experience doing sound design for films given the end result’s film score mood.Later, a bit of drama comes from the heavy electronics that enshroud "Flight of Fancy" and, with the piece’s dense and brittle electronics have a cinematic quality as well.

Like any good album, however, Invisible Threads has some more sinister moments to balance out the more pleasant light ones.The varied electronics and processed field recordings on "The Yes/No Game" make for a different sounding piece of music, one punctuated by a sense of bleakness in its light drift.Compared to many of the others here it is a more sparse mix, but what is there carries a significant amount of emotional weight.The album closer "Instable" also especially stands out with its ghostly haunting sound.There are some large electronic swells throughout, but Van Hoen blends transient layers throughout like passing spirits, resulting in a spectral, ghostly closing to the album.

There does not seem to be any specific conceptual theme linking the seven pieces of Invisible Threads, other than his intentional use of different instrumentation, but Mark Van Hoen's latest work definitely has a cohesive feel to them sonically.As an album, it has a great sense of variation and diversity from song to song, with a strong blend of pleasant, ambient electronics and heavier, darker passages.Consistent from beginning to end, Invisible Threads is an excellent record of electronic music.

samples:

• Weathered
• Aethƒìr
• Instable

 

08 July 2018

Administrator

Albums and Singles

It was quite an unexpected and delightful surprise to get a new Abul Mogard full-length, as the unprolific Serbian composer seems to only record one or two new pieces each year (ones that get released, anyway). Apparently, Above All Dreams took three years to make though, so I guess that fits with Mogard's extremely considered approach and rigorous quality control. Characteristically, Dreams is yet another absolutely wonderful release, but it is a bit of a departure from what I expected in some ways and it took me several listens to fully warm to it: Dreams feels more like an immersive, slow-burning epic than a batch of instantly gratifying individual highlights. As such, this release is probably not the ideal entry point to Mogard's vision for newcomers, but devotees will find a lot to love about these transcendent reveries, as this album packs a lot of quiet intensity once its depths are fully revealed.

Ecstatic

It feels weird to bring up hooks when describing Abul Mogard's work, yet I am hard-pressed to think of a better or more inclusive term for the rhythmic, textural, and melodic elements that pervaded his earlier releases.There are not many of those elements to be found on Above All Dreams, which is a crucial point to address in understanding and appreciating how Mogard has evolved since his early days of trying replicate the sounds of a factory (according to lore, anyway).Since those oft-brilliant industrial beginnings, Mogard's vision has slowly blossomed into something almost rapturous and divine, at times more closely resembling a spontaneous natural phenomenon than painstakingly crafted human compositions.In fact, his career can almost be read as an endless march towards self-erasure.The opening "Quiet Dreams" is a particularly fine example of that, as is the following "Where Not Even," thought the two take very different forms.On "Quiet Dreams," it feels like a blood red sunrise is slowly burning through a mass of dark and brooding clouds."Where Not Even," on the other hand, resembles a woozily swooping and distorted deep space transmission that seems to feed back on itself and distort into something quite sinister (and also quite heavy in an understated way).In neither case is there much evidence of Mogard’s hand, though "Quiet Dreams" features a few well-placed sliding synth tones.Instead, both pieces feel like strange and vivid dreams that a machine might have (particularly "Where Not Even").If they feel like compositions at all, they certainly do not seem like ones that were created on a human time scale.

It is not until the third piece, "Upon The Smallish Circulation," that Mogard starts to creep into more musical territory (in this case, burbling deep space synth psychedelia a la prime Tangerine Dream).I suppose that makes it the closest thing the album has to a single, as there is structure and melody in its trance-inducing central theme, but it does not otherwise diverge from the album's aesthetic in any kind of significant way: the arpeggio pattern is cool, but it is still just a backdrop for alternately hollow and sizzling rumbles from the cosmic void.While the slow-moving and elegiac "Over My Head" briefly continues that melodic trend, the two lengthy pieces that close the album return to more dreamily languorous drone territory.The title piece captures Mogard at his most elegantly sublime, as his sustained synth tones feel like steadily massing and intertwining tendrils of smoke.Gradually, the piece builds to a somewhat conventional bit of whooshing, spacey ambient-drone, but Mogard displays some truly remarkable lightness of touch and harmonic ingenuity on the way, weaving a gorgeously swaying, fluttering, and oscillating cloud of overtones as the piece slowly coheres into its final shape.Mogard saves his finest moment for last, however.The foundation of "The Roof Falls" is a lazily winding and heavenly organ-like melody that drifts through a haze of drones.As the title suggests, however, that lushly beautiful idyll seems like it is taking place inside a vast building that is slowly collapsing, though the creeping ruin stays just far enough away to remain an omnipresent and threatening undercurrent rather than the focus. Still, some of the textures definitely take on a fried, corroded, and gnarled character as the piece unfolds, which adds some welcome visceral bite.

While no single piece quite recaptures the aching beauty or churning, mechanized heaviness of Mogard's best work, Above All Dreams nevertheless feels like a legitimate creative breakthrough of sorts (or at least an inspired lateral move–he certainly is not repeating himself).There has not been a change in quality so much as a change in compositional approach: Mogard's earlier work sought to distill his vision to glittering perfection while this release stretches and slows that vision into infinity (or at least an approximation of it).As a result, I am not floored, but I am entranced.There is a sense of total immersion and steadily building cumulative power here that makes this Dreams a unique entry within Mogard's oft-stellar canon: he casts a beguiling spell and sustains that dream state masterfully.

Samples can be found here.

08 July 2018

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Albums and Singles

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).

Thrill Jockey

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.

07 July 2018

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Albums and Singles

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)

More information can be found here.

07 July 2018

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Albums and Singles

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.

More information can be found here.

01 July 2018

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Albums and Singles

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.

Noton

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.

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