03 June 2018

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Albums and Singles

Polish label Zoharum take a very deep dive into Justin Wright’s exquisite solo guitar psychedelia with this sprawling 2xCD collection of various limited Expo '70 releases. For the most part, these extended pieces have a very drone-based and cosmic bent, but the two 2009 collaborations with Umberto's Matt Hill are legitimately transcendent and entrancing epics of slow-burning space-rock nirvana. Giving those two pieces a well-deserved second life is unquestionably Mother Universe's raison d'être, so the remaining pieces are more for devout fans and completists (though they are also quite good in their own right). The various physical formats all compensate for potential Expo '70 overload in their own ways, however, making it very easy to alternate between experiencing Mother Universe as a concise distillation of some of Wright's finest work or as an immersive and extended lysergic plunge.

Zoharum

Every couple of years, I go through a phase in which I quixotically make yet another concerted (and doomed) effort to like Hawkwind.I generally love the idea of Hawkwind, but I suspect their actual music will always be too heavy-handed and indulgent to fully connect with me: the gulf between what I want them to sound like and what they actually sound like is just too wide.The reason that I bring that up is that Wright has uncannily managed to replicate the imaginary Hawkwind that exists only in my mind with the 22-minute title piece that opens this album (it originally appeared as a CDr on Mother Tongue). Of course, Matt Hill deserves a lot of the credit for that success as well, as his wonderfully rolling and propulsive bass line provides the perfect foundation for Wright to gradually build up a gorgeously rippling and elegant swirl of shimmering arpeggios and understated soloing that dissolves into a lingering vapor trail.Structurally, the piece is essentially just an extended vamp, but "Mother Universe" easily transcends any limitations that may suggest, organically ebbing and flowing through rhythmic shifts and occasionally sounding like it is on verge of being sucked into a greedily whooshing black hole.The following "Ostara," on the other hand, feels like it was sucked into that black hole and spat out the other end as a pulsing and splintered ghost of its former self.In lesser hands, "Ostara" would probably linger forever in that state of hallucinatory deep-space suspended animation, but here it gradually evolves beyond mere ambience into a queasily roiling fantasia of cosmic dread worthy of Andrei Tarkovsky.While that is quite a wonderfully immersive illusion, Wright still has one last trick up his sleeve, as the final moments of "Ostara" sneakily re-cohere into something approaching a song…before dissolving again into an eerie coda that sounds like a broken reel-to-reel machine endlessly repeating the same tape snippet at the wrong speed.

The remaining four songs are taken from the Woolgatherer Visions and Mechanical Elements tapes on Norway's Gold Soundz label and date from roughly the same period.They are either relegated to a second disk or a supplementary download, depending on physical format, which I suppose makes them bonus tracks to some degree."Tropical Trip Through Acid Clouds" initially sounds like fairly standard Expo '70 fare, unfolding as a delay-heavy riff beneath a trippy haze of looping and blurred improvisation, but then it unexpectedly gives way to a pulsing and futuristic-sounding soundscape evokes the flickering corridors of a damaged and abandoned space ship.That eventually becomes the backdrop for some more soloing, which illustrates the key difference between these four pieces and the previous two: these feel like good ideas in raw form that have not yet been edited to perfection.Sometimes that more spontaneous approach still works wonderfully though.The following "Hexed By A Devil in the Cemetery," for example,is a darkly throbbing drone piece that Wright beautifully embellishes with an unsettling arsenal of echoing, spectral scrapes and uneasily quavering synth coloration. Elsewhere, "You and Your Dreamcatcher Should Take a Hike" is a foray into buzzing and meditative minimalist synth drone, while "Neither Here Nor There (A Study)" takes a similar theme and uses it as the backdrop for a dreamily meandering flow of looping, intertwined guitar patterns.Of the four, "Hexed," "Dreamcatcher," and "Neither Here Nor There" all stand out as understated gems, with the latter two evoking sublime, trancelike states through languorously shifting waveforms or gently buzzing and swaying clouds of echoing accumulated loops.

This is exactly the kind of compilation that I dearly wish there were more of in the world, as some artists are just far too prolific for me to be able to keep up with the volume of their output (Wright, Kevin Drumm, Jim O'Rourke, etc.).Consequently, it is quite nice to have record labels around who are keen to sift through it all and illuminate great work that might have otherwise fallen into obscurity.At best, I can keep up with Wright's major LPs, so I definitely would have missed all of the comparatively minor and considerably more limited releases assembled here ("Ostara" is from a CDr on Small Doses, incidentally).Obviously, some of these six pieces are better than others, but they cumulatively provide a condensed overview of quite a year-long hot streak that most fans either only got a small taste of or missed altogether.As such, Mother Universe makes a fine and varied entry point into Wright's work.It is a body of work well worth getting acquainted with too, as Justin Wright at his best is kind of a Zen master of all things psychedelic, absorbing a wide spectrum of Eastern drone, krautrock, and heavy psych influences and distilling them into a wonderfully unhurried and understated psychotropic reverie.Mother Universe provides a strong argument that the golden age of bands like Popul Vuh and Ash Ra Tempel never fully ended–it just took a bit of a nap before unexpectedly reawakening in Missouri.

31 May 2018

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Albums and Singles

You can see what you want to see when you stare in to the world of The Myrrors, and to some degree, you can also hear what you want to hear on their expansive, extraordinary new album, Borderlands – an album that nominally references the collective boundaries we draw, all the while offering a soundtrack for setting forth strategies that either ignore or erase our self-made barriers.

If you see The Myrrors as the dust-caked disciples of a specific strain of desert-drone mysticism, there's little on Borderlands, their fourth full-length Myrrors album released in as many years, to dissuade you from that vision. Instead, there's only confirmation—an intoxicating combination of outlook and output that clarifies and crystallizes the band's many sonic strengths throughout the album’s fantastically unfolding forty-plus minutes.

Often ominous in its ambience, Borderlands begins with an appropriately Albert Ayler-ish blast of "Awakening," which serves as a short, slumber-shattering introduction to "The Blood That Runs the Border." Here, The Myrrors sound somewhat haunted and heartbroken, while nevertheless driven and determined. It's a crestfallen crusade of sanguinary sound that spreads across the album as a whole, an impression powered in no small part by the echoes of dervishes danced by Sufi mystics in centuries-old efforts to open other borders, as it were. This dynamic dance of conflicting emotions finds its contours on tracks like the meditative "Biznagas" and the propulsive "Formaciones Rojas," which, for all of their otherworldly-ness, wouldn’t be tremendously out of place if described as an outtake from Dylan's Desire, recalling the genius contributions of one Scarlet Rivera.

However, for sheer atomic mass, the beating heart of Borderlands must be the album's final, twenty-one minute excursion to the center of the territory that The Myrrors seek to map—namely, "Note From the Underground," a Dostoyevsky-referencing drone that wordlessly reflects on that book's less-than-optimistic tone:

"In any case, civilization has made mankind if not more blood-thirsty, at least more vilely, more loathsomely blood-thirsty … now, we do think bloodshed abominable and yet, we engage in this abomination, with more energy than ever. Which is worse? Decide that for yourselves."

Decide for yourself what you want to see in The Myrrors.

More information can be found here.

27 May 2018

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Albums and Singles

This album, Dalt's sixth, is my first exposure to the iconoclastic Colombian's work and it feels like an ideal entry point, as it is quite a beguiling album that is universally hailed as a major creative breakthrough. Due to its stark and unusual futurist aesthetic and constrained palette of primitive-sounding electronics, Anticlines definitely calls to mind both classic Chris & Cosey and minimal wave fare, yet Dalt's vision is transcendently bizarre enough to feel like something radical and new. Her desiccated and industrialized Latin/South American rhythms are certainly a part of that, but the real brilliance of Anticlines lies in Dalt’s lyrics and vocals: on songs like "Tar," she resembles a sexy cyborg, bloodlessly and seductively intoning breathy, cryptic poetry that feels like it alludes to vast depths of hidden meaning and feeling.

RVNG Intl.

Lucrecia Dalt's life and career have had a rather singular trajectory, as she was once a geotechnical engineer, then had some success as an indie synthpop artist.At some point, Dalt moved to Berlin, and her music gradually became increasingly radical, experimental, and abstract.To some degree, Anticlines feels like an inspired synthesis of Dalt's pop side and her more cerebral, outré impulses, but it also feels like she just added a whole new level of playful experimentalism to her existing aesthetic with her poetic word craft.  That is an impressive and rare feat, as Dalt has simultaneously deepened and expanded her art and shaped her vision into an incredibly listenable "pop" album (of sorts).Also, Dalt seems to be almost supernaturally gifted at filtering and diffracting incredibly disparate influences through her distinctive vision, as she drew inspiration from everything from poetry (Alice Fulton) to phenomenology (Dylan Trigg) to Robert Ashley to Aaron Dilloway.She also collaborated with two artists, Henry Anderson and Regina de Miguel.I am sure shades of all of those folks appear here, but I would be very hard pressed to identify any of them after everything has been distilled to just a simple synth pattern and Dalt's voice.Put glibly, I could probably say that Anticlines sounds like Daphne Oram aggressively remixed Songs of Love and Lust and totally gutted most of Chris Carter's contributions, and be stylistically quite close to the mark, but there is too much depth and subtlety in Dalt's work for any comparison to be truly apt.Dalt is making very forward-thinking art, yet her extremely simple arsenal of a compact synth and an effects processor unquestionably harkens back to an earlier era of electronic music: these songs are almost all crafted from repeating patches and little more.Anticlines does not feel kitschy or retro though–it instead feels like Dalt is making something vibrant and sophisticated from relatively rudimentary tools.The simplicity makes these pieces feel direct and undiluted by unnecessary artifice.

Unsurprisingly, the strongest pieces are ones with the best hooks (I like hooks), particularly the album's lead single "Tar."As with every song on Anticlines, the musical component is extremely minimal, but "Tar" is a bit more rhythmic than the other pieces, marrying a sultry and burbling Latin rhythm to little more than woozily passing synth coloration and some eerily seductive vocals ("we have touched…as only atmospheres touch").The vocals predictably steal the show completely, but Dalt also displays a vivid talent for creating a disorienting sense of unreality, as the simmering pulse sounds like digitized dripping stalactites and strange sounds irregularly flutter into the piece like confused electronic birds.  The album's other "pop" highlight is the opening "Edge," as Dalt announces that she is "gathering up skins and blowing them up like balloons" and wonders aloud "how long does everybody last without organs?" over a chirping and squiggling backdrop of electronic bloops and beeps.I am also quite fond of the more inhuman and hostile-sounding "Analogue Mountains," which combines a relentlessly repeating chromatic spew of synth tones with rather cold and distant vocals."Errors of Skin" is similarly robotic, creeping into Throbbing Gristle-esque territory with its mélange of clock-like rhythm; chilly, processed vocals; and warped, sickly intrusions of "melody."The rest of the album is also quite interesting, but the remaining pieces are considerably more abstract and nakedly experimental, unfolding more as a series of hallucinatory interludes than distinct, memorable songs.The best of the lot might be the dreamily slow-motion and clanking fugue of "Glass Brain," which feels like one of Dalt’s catchier songs has been stretched and corroded beyond recognition.Other pieces, like "Axis Excess" and "Indifferent Universe," feel like shards of actual songs that blossomed into something stranger when decontextualized.Elsewhere, Anticlines resembles everything from the ambient sounds of an abandoned space station ("Antiform") to a chopped and alien-sounding gospel choir ("Eclipsed Subject").

My sole caveat with Anticlines is that it is heavily front-loaded with Dalt's most inspired and fully formed songs (the voice-centered ones), which I suppose makes a great deal of sense from a sequencing perspective: Dalt drew me in with her catchy avant-garde pop fare, then expanded into increasingly experimental and obtuse fare once I was ensnared.While I do enjoy the many strange instrumental vignettes that populate the second half of the album, it is the comparatively accessible songs like "Tar" and "Edge" that stand out as memorable and capture Dalt at the height of her powers as a visionary avant-pop auteur.Anticlines is leaner on such moments than would be ideal and would be better if the last part of the album were broken up by another hook-filled gem or two.That said, the album does otherwise have a very distinctive and coherent aesthetic, an effective dynamic arc, and a sense of constant forward momentum, as Dalt is always doing something appealingly unusual and never lets a piece overstay its welcome. Anticlines maintains an unbroken and evocative retro-futurist spell from start to finish.More importantly, Anticlines' minor flaws are easily eclipsed by the magnitude of its success, as Dalt has achieved something quite wonderful and singular: she has conjured up a perversely sensuous futurist dystopia that feels refreshingly simple and intimate.Given all of its conceptual and cerebral themes, this album is unquestionably Serious Sound Art, yet Dalt has found a way to imbue her more challenging impulses with soul, dark eroticism, and DIY charm.

Samples:

• Edge
• Tar
• Analogue Mountains

 

20 May 2018

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Albums and Singles

Three years after his eclectic and excellent solo debut, Bourbonese Qualk founder Simon Crab is back, albeit in radically transformed fashion. Crab's eclecticism certainly remains intact, yet Demand Full Automation is a bit of a tough album to wrap my head around: it kind of sounds like Crab started composing a similarly fine follow-up, then got commissioned to soundtrack some kind of neon-lit impressionist urban noir film…then took a break and time-traveled back to the '90s to do a DJ set at the Haçienda.  Unsurprisingly, those disparate threads make very strange bedfellows indeed, yet the enigmatic logic of Crab's overarching vision is countered by some sizable leaps forward in his craftsmanship. While I admittedly miss the homespun charm of After America a lot, Demand Full Automation is quite a likable (if sometimes quizzical) album in its own right, as it is a considerably tighter, more beat-driven, and more hook-filled affair than its predecessor.

Klanggalerie/Bandcamp

This album is quite an unusual convergence of curious artistic choices, unexpected anachronisms, and seemingly contradictory impulses roughly united by Crab's vision of Automation as a "futurist narrative" that "anticipates our world at a crossroads where either machines liberate the working class to pursue meaningful tasks, or automation is used as yet a another tool to subdue."In practical stylistic terms, Demand Full Automation is an album with very high production quality, as each song has been painstakingly polished to vibrant, crystalline clarity.There is also a very conscious mingling of organic instrumentation, modern electronics, deep human emotion, and exacting precision, albeit not always an entirely seamless one.While the glittering, crisp production is by far the most immediately striking surprise that Automation offers, Crab's restless genre-shifting is yet another unexpected curveball: in the past, Crab has assimilated a wide variety of disparate influences in a relatively distinct (if ever-evolving) aesthetic.He achieves that with Automation a few times as well, but more frequently chooses to completely give himself over to different aesthetics like a master spy trying on various disguises.That approach is where the album loses me a bit, as I would much rather hear Crab focusing his formidable talents on his own vision rather than crafting a series of skilled pastiches.  Occasionally, however, Crab's oddly retro pastiches can be quite good, as the opening "E11" is a lovely throwback to late '90s techno that marries burbling synths, a charmingly blooping melody, and a big, straightforward beat to great effect.The opposite end of the spectrum is the title piece, which sounds like a lost early '90s New Order instrumental (the height of their "dance" phase).Similarly flummoxing is "According to Plan," which sounds like an ABC remix recorded during New Jack Swing's brief window of popularity.

Fortunately, there are a number of legitimately excellent and inventive pieces lurking throughout Automation's kaleidoscopic trajectory as well.My favorite is the gorgeously elegiac "Drop," which beautifully embellishes a twinkling descending melody with dreamily blurred steel drums.The following "I Asked" is another stunner, as Crab is joined by guest vocalist Ksénia Lukyanova–Emelyanova and percussionist Milo Fell in crafting a piece that sounds like something that would be playing in a futuristic S&M club.While those two pieces are definitely the upper tier, the album is peppered with several other unique delights as well, such as the bizarrely lurching, burbling, and broken-sounding dub-techno experimentation of "Dark Harvest."  Elsewhere, the languorously lovely "The Long Days" feels like a warmer, slower variation on "Drop," as its plinking strings and wobbly steel drums weave a bittersweetly blissful spell. There are also some intriguing pieces that are a bit harder to categorize or seem like the complete antithesis of Crab's anarchist/anti-materialist worldview."Kubark," for example, is a very stylish and evocative blend of swooning melody and retro-sounding electro funkiness that would not seem at all out of place in a high-end cosmetics commercial or a fashion show.Elsewhere, the delicate and nakedly pretty "Permanent Emergency" sounds like an intricately rippling web of layered music boxes, which could not possibly be further from Crab's ultra-political cassette underground roots.Interpreted charitably, I suspect Automation can be viewed as a particularly evolved state of post-modernism in a world where rebellion has been commodified and reduced to a mere aesthetic–if overtly resembling revolutionary/countercultural art is ineffectual posturing in the face of late capitalism, then nothing is stylistically off-limits.The machine does not care whether you are using the Crass font or making pristine techno confections, as both will be commodities in the end.

Despite being an incredibly varied and occasionally puzzling album, Automation is a remarkably well-crafted whole in which each song flows seamlessly into the next.As far as songcraft and craftsmanship are concerned, this album is unquestionably the high-water mark of Crab's career, as almost nothing about Automation feels meandering, improvised, exploratory, or cluttered: nearly every piece is a stylish, masterfully executed gem of perfect focus.If Automation has a flaw, it is only that Crab's muse is quite a mercurial and enigmatic one.This album is like a tank being operated by someone prone to uncontrollable hallucinations: it is sometimes quite hard to guess why a particular target was chosen, but Crab definitely makes a significant impact at whatever winds up in his quixotically unpredictable crosshairs.Crab's newly polished and clean production aesthetic, combined with his baffling compulsion to craft anachronistic mainstream-sounding pop makes this album a bit of a baffling enigma, yet all of his weird decisions are beautifully crafted and enjoyable. Demand Full Automation is a lot like watching a great auteur direct a genre film or an installment of some long-running franchise: the result is stylish, skillfully executed, and quite good, but it just is not what that auteur will be remembered for. As such, I prefer After America and some late-period Bourbonese Qualk to this particular direction.Demand Full Automation's stellar execution and wealth of hooks would have been quite amazing if it had been in service of a more distinctive vision though.Hopefully, that convergence will someday come.Until then, Demand Full Automation is yet another strong and unusual album in a uniquely unpredictable career.

Samples:

• Drop
• I Asked
• Demand Full Automation

 

17 May 2018

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Albums and Singles

Kali Malone's sophomore LP Cast of Mind investigates the use of harmony as a force of psychological impact through the exclusive use of the Buchla 200 synthesizer in combination with acoustic woodwind and brass instruments.

The record begins as a cascade of battle calls from the wind instruments that shift ephemerally between triumphant and anguished howls upon each exhale. While the other pieces pull from the septimal harmonic framework of the title track, they extract a more confined palate to depict their sonic identities indicated by the song titles. "Bondage To Formula" weaves synthesis, trombone and bass clarinet in a delicate pattern, conjuring an ambiguous assimilation of the acoustic and synthetic. Dominated by columns of sawtooth waveforms, "Arched In Hysteria" unravels as a sharp and sober harmony perched on the border of violence, ringing in paranoia amongst a foundation of low beating oscillators. The record concludes in the rapture of "Empty The Belief," swollen with undulating bassoon striving to intonate to the towering stability of machine-generated harmony.

Using justly tuned synthetic and acoustic instrumentation, Cast of Mind's rich harmonic textures emit a distinct emotive hue serving to generate a static and captivating depth of focus.

Kali Malone (b. 1994, Colorado) is an American artist living and working in Stockholm, Sweden since 2012. Her solo works implement unique tuning systems in minimalist form for analog and digital synthesis often combined with acoustic instrumentation - such as pipe organ, string and wind instruments, lute and gong. Malone's 2017 debut LP Velocity of Sleep was released on her own label XKatedral following tape releases put out by Ascetic House, Bleak Environment and Total Black. She is active in the groups Sorrowing Christ, Swap Babies and Upper Glossa with Caterina Barbieri. She has performed most notably at Berlin Atonal, Moogfest and Norberg Festival.

More information can be found here.

17 May 2018

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Albums and Singles

Time Exercises is a complex study in amorphous polymetric rhythms by Cam Deas for The Death of Rave. His first album composed solely for modular synths and computer, Cam's follow-up to the acclaimed String Studies for Luke Younger's Alter label marks a headlong tilt from acoustic to electronic spheres with a staggering effect resulting from meticulous research and process. It sounds as advanced as Xenakis or Roland Kayn superstructures, with the rhythmic displacement of FIS or Autechre, and with a grasp of slippery, mind-bending timbral dissonance comparable to Coil and Rashad Becker records.

Cam's six "Time Exercises" form both a bold break with - and an extension of - the avant, folk, blues and outernational traditions that he's worked to deconstruct and fluidly syncretise over the past decade. In the past four years he's stepped away from the guitar as a compositional tool, turning to electronic hardware in a focussed effort to consolidate myriad tunings and meters with a precision that had previously eluded him in the acoustic sphere.

Severed from the tactility and sentimentality of instrumental inflection, Cam's disembodied music plays out a thrilling dramaturgy and syntax of alien dissonance and disorienting rhythmic resolution. Harmonic shapes as densely widescreen as those in Roland Kayn's Cybernetic Music roil in unfathomable fever dream space, where massed batteries of synthetic percussion swarm like an orchestra of Cut Hands in viscous formation, and where polychromatic mentasm figures converge like cenobites laying siege to Rashad Becker’s utopia.

On Time Exercises, Cam articulates a synthetic musical language that speaks to the listener in myriad, quantum tongues awaiting to be deciphered by keen ears everywhere. It's an outstanding record for lovers of forward-looking but deeply rooted electronic music.

More information can be found here.

17 May 2018

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Albums and Singles

The fifth LP by English guitarist Jon Collin is also his first U.S. release. Jon first came to our attention when he started the Winebox Press label. This fairly nuts project involved choosing a wooden object (like a wine box or door) from which to create cases (some of them quite complex) for cassettes he released. The size of the edition was determined by the number of the packages he was able to create from the original object, and the label's creations were pretty amazing.

Some of his early bands, like Whole Voyald Infinite Light and the Serfs were documented, along with artists like the Hunter Graccus, Chora and Taming Power. Eventually he began to issue solo recordings, and they sounded as brilliant as they looked. This led to occasional U.S. tours, interest from other labels and a worldwide explosion of all things JON COLLIN. Well, that’s not all really true. But the basics are.

Collin is a wonderful player, incorporating the distentions of Loren Connors alongside the blues figures of Jack Rose and the lyrical melodicism of Robbie Basho. He can also throw in blurts that are pure Derek Bailey to throw the punters off, but that's his business.

This new album (which will be followed in a few months by Volume 2) is a lovely example of his most evolved beauty-moves, riven with hairs and rivers of discord, but generally dedicated to expanding (rather than collapsing) the head of anyone who will take the time to listen.

Make time for it. You will be copiously rewarded.

More information can be found here.

17 May 2018

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Albums and Singles

Our last Big Blood release was the idiosyncratic Ant Farm (FTR 241), Colleen and Caleb's collaboration with the late composer Elliott Schwartz, which presented music designed for a museum installation. With Operate Spaceship Earth Properly, Big Blood return to the vast universe of strangeness they explore inside their own skin. Now fully incorporating the vocals and guitar of their daughter Quinnisa (previously a "secret weapon" unveiled mostly at live shows, as the Dictators once did with Handsome Dick Manitoba), Big Blood sound nutsier and wilder than ever.

Spaceship Earth is a massively psychedelic investigation of science fiction, science fact and the mythic spot where they reconcile. Specifically referring to the work of writers such as Octavia Butler, Ursula K. Le Guin and Buckminster Fuller, the music mixes the thunder of riff-thuggery with vocals beamed in from planet Comus and beat-slaps equally indebted to the Purple Revolutionary and the Neue Deutsche Welle. The combination is headspinning and gloriously original, but will be immediately identifiable as Big Blood by anyone who knows the band's music.

I mean, it's so freaking Strange and so freaking Maine, who else could it be?

-Byron Coley, 2018

More information can be found here.

13 May 2018

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Albums and Singles

Gnod’s previous full-length, 2017's Just Say No..., was a feast of gloriously thuggish and focused brutality, but it was bit of an outlier for the shape-shifting psych collective from Salford. Consequently, I was a fool to expect Chapel Perilous to continue along the same lines, as Gnod is an entity in a constant state of explosive reinvention. There are a couple of lingering shadows of Just Say No's aesthetic in Chapel Perilous's lengthy bookends, however, as this album partially took shape as Gnod were touring in No's wake. For the most part, Chapel Perilous is a completely different animal though, deconstructing the band's more hostile side into something a bit more seething, sprawling, indulgent, and experimental. That makes this release more of an uneven, fitfully inspired detour than a great album, but it still manages to kick open a few new doors in decisive fashion.

Rocket

Gnod is unquestionably one of the most exciting and reliably compelling bands around right now, but I have absolutely no idea what the hell they were thinking when they decided to record "Donovan's Daughters" and release it as the opening song on their latest album.Initially, however, it sounds like a very cool and slow-building extension of Just Say No's winning "scarier and more muscular Gang of Four" aesthetic: a throbbing bassline, skittering drums, slashing guitar chords, and an occasional dub-inspired electronic flourish.It sounds great, but starts to go a little south once the repetitive, snarling vocals come into the picture.Despite that, it boasts some wonderfully see-sawing guitar chaos and appealingly wild drumming, so it maintains enough heaviness and momentum to transcend some of its songcraft shortcomings…for a while, anyway.After about six minutes, the bottom drops out and it transforms into something resembling a roiling and pummelingly repetitive outro.If it ended with that, "Donovan's Daughters" would still be a fine song, but it instead morphs into something that lies somewhere between a perplexing White Hills pastiche and bad hard rock that turns the final five minutes of the song into an unlistenable slog for me.I have no idea what would possess a band to extend a good song into fifteen minutes by tacking on a completely different and significantly less enjoyable song.It feels like a perverse celebration of everything I hate about prog rock with none of the rewards: a very long song with multiple movements, yet little nuance, coherent sense of meaningful progression, or real depth.

Thankfully, Paddy Shine and company manage to right the ship with the following "Europa," a starkly experimental and eerie instrumental piece built from decaying bass pulses, moody guitar swells, lysergic dub touches, and an enigmatic vocal sample that repeatedly urges the world to go back to reason.To my ears, it is by far the most memorable and stellar piece on the album, but the remaining three pieces have their charm as well."A Voice From Nowhere" continues Gnod's mid-album dalliance with naked experimentalism, unfolding as a crunching and industrial-sounding percussion showcase nicely embellished by a complex miasma of crackling noise, echoing samples, buried feedback, and droning synths.If it had been allowed to steadily build and expand further, it probably could have been the album's centerpiece, but Gnod inexplicably decided to keep things relatively concise with that one, killing off their gnarled and clanking juggernaut after a mere six minutes.The following "A Body" is the final salvo into Chapel Perilous's abstract and experimental mid-section, marrying an echo-heavy spoken-word monologue to distantly thundering percussion and distorted guitar loops.That extended abstract interlude is violently shattered with the closing "Uncle Frank Says Turn It Down," however, as Gnod erupt into a churning catharsis of pummeling riffage.I like it a lot better than "Donovan's Daughters," but it is still something of a puzzling piece, as it sounds like the explosive climax of a song with all of the surrounding song excised.Somehow it works though, as it has a very cool dynamic arc that frequently sounds like it is stuck in a bulldozing locked-groove.It would certainly be better if it were attached to some kind of meaningful build-up, but it is still a hell of a wonderfully visceral show of force.

I was bit surprised to belatedly read that "Donovan's Daughters" and "Uncle Frank" were "two tumultuous tracks that [Gnod] had been honing and hammering into shape on the road," as Chapel Perilous does not at all sound like an album that has been chiseled to perfection and road-tested.Instead, it feels like a rather rushed and scattered release from a band that had plenty of good ideas, but not enough time to shape them into a coherent album.While that is admittedly disappointing after Just Say No, that album was the aberration and Chapel Perilous is kind of a return to equilibrium: Gnod is definitely not a linearly evolving band that is particularly concerned about releasing only their best material.Rather, they are like an uncontrollable chain reaction that is prolifically documented–each new release is a snapshot of where their restless creative drive has taken them at that particular moment.Sometimes, that snapshot captures a moment of sustained brilliance and sometimes it comes at a more transitional period.  Chapel Perilous falls more into the latter category, as it features a lot of great moments, yet they rarely cohere perfectly into great songs.That said, however, there is only one significant misstep on Chapel, even if it is the album's longest piece.Without "Donovan's Daughters," this album would make quite a strong EP, as everything else is quite good (particularly "Europa").

Samples:

• Donovan's Daughters
• Europa
• Uncle Frank Says Turn It Down

 

 

13 May 2018

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Albums and Singles

Sarah Davachi's first album for Sean McCann's Recital Program imprint marks yet another intriguing stage in the evolution of her expanding vision, beautifully blurring the lines between drone, psychedelia, and neo-classical composition. Composed primarily for mellotron and electric organ, Let Night Come On often resembles a time-stretched and hallucinatory re-envisioning of a timeless mass or requiem. There are certainly some nods to Davachi's earlier drone-centered work as well, yet the most stunning pieces feel like achingly gorgeous classical works that wandered into an enchanted mist where time loses all meaning and all notes dissolve into a gently lysergic and lingering haze after being struck.

Recital Program

The lovely and elegiac organ reverie of "Garlands" opens the album in deceptively modest fashion, reprising Davachi's (relatively) characteristic aesthetic of dreamily layered sustained tones.It is not quite business as usual, however, as the shifting organ chords lend an almost religious gravitas to the central theme.Also, the woozily twisting nimbus of overtones and harmonics in the periphery seems to subtly billow and intertwine like living wisps of smoke.It is quite a heavenly piece that would have comfortably fit on some of Davachi's earlier releases, yet it is merely a brief introduction here, as the middle section of the album features three considerably more substantial and inventive pieces in a row."Mordents" is the most unusual of the lot, opening with a simple repeating motif that sounds like a massive glass harmonium being played underwater.That curious and unrecognizable instrumentation remains, yet the piece soon opens up into a bit of a freeform fantasia of slow-moving and intertwining arpeggios.Aside from the oddly submerged textures, it is not a particularly promising opening, as it feels a bit wandering and improvisatory.Soon, however, a droning backdrop of organ creeps into the picture and the piece slowly builds into an epic and delirious swirl of haunting organ harmonies that completely engulf the underlying chord progression.It is quite a masterful sleight of hand, as Davachi organically and sneakily transforms a somewhat structured and conventional neo-classical composition into a gorgeously warm and undulating fog of blurred organ chords and lingering vapor trails of dreamy overtones.

The following "At Hand" is yet another gem, unfolding as an angelic haze of floating organ drones and shifting harmonies.Unlike "Mordents," "At Hand" does not undergo any particular transformation, as Davachi is rightly content to just bask in ghostly minimalist heaven for several minutes.More than any other piece on the album, "At Hand" feels like an organ mass, but one that has just been raptured, ascending heavenward as pure light and soul.My favorite piece, however, is the melancholy and piano-centered "Buhrstone," which is how I imagine the next Elodie album would sound if Andrew Chalk were suddenly possessed by Erik Satie's ghost.Like Satie's immortal Gymnopédies, "Buhrstone" unfolds as a languorous and bittersweetly melancholy piano motif, but the real action occurs in the bleary periphery, as a gently hallucinatory mass of flute-like tones undulates and steadily accumulates a complex web of shimmering, haunting harmonies.It is an incredibly lovely piece, made even more so by its subtle transformation from sadness to something approaching ecstasy.The album winds to a close with a bit of a throwback to earlier days, as the lengthy "Hours in the Evening" is a radiant and gently billowing return to minimal drone.Even the moments when Davachi is reprising somewhat comfortable and well-traveled territory conceal a significant evolution, however, as she shows a prodigious talent for subtle dynamic shifts and small details.As a result, even the most static-sounding passages on the album are understatedly vibrant with undulating harmonic transformations, shifting layers of depth, and subtle emotional resonance.

Let Night Come On highlights a number of significant aspects of Davachi's career to date (some more obvious than others).For one, she has released such has released such an impressive run of great albums over the last few years that picking a favorite is damn near impossible.This one is certainly a strong contender though, as it features a handful of instant classics.More intriguing, however, is how different some of those albums are from one another, as each new release seems to open up a fresh stylistic vista while remaining distinctively and recognizably "Sarah Davachi."That intuitive gift for retaining a strong identity and coherent vision whether she is composing for unaccompanied voice, piano, vintage synthesizer, or cello is the hallmark of a formidable artist indeed.Similarly, I am struck by how Davachi is able to imbue even a single droning chord with personality and soul.I will never tire of any artist who is able to transcend the constraints of music distilled to its barest, hyper-minimalist essence.Even better, however, are the times when such an artist uses all the tools at their disposal and strains to elevate their work to an entirely new plane.With Night, Davachi achieves that feat repeatedly and in absolutely sublime fashion.

• Mordents
• Buhrstone
• At Hand