Once again thanks to everyone for your passion, perseverance, participation, and patience. Without further adieu, we present the readers poll winners for 2024.
We return to having a guest on the podcast this week.
David J. Haskins has a new book and album due out on June 6th. Rhapsody, Threnody & Prayer is a new book of poetry published by Fonograph Media while The Mother Tree album will be released on LP and download through Erototox Decodings.
David discusses the new music, the book of poetry, his last book, Who Killed Mister Moonlight, as well as time in Love and Rockets and Bauhaus.
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This latest album from Guido Zen’s Abul Mogard alter ego marks both the debut of his Soft Echoes label and an interesting detour from his usual working methods, as he reworked unreleased material from past projects and texturally enhanced it with sounds culled from his late uncle’s collection of classical 78s.
As far as I can tell, little of the actual music from those dusty shellac platters made it onto the album, but Mogard certainly worked wonders from that rich palette of hiss and crackle. The opening “Following a dream” is an especially strong example of that alchemy, as the dreamy melancholia of the central synth motif is quite lovely on its own, but it is the cyclically crashing, slow-motion waves of static that provide both the hypnotically languorous rhythm and sense of raw elemental intensity.
This latest speaker-straining salvo from the duo of James Ginzburg and Paul Purgas was fittingly debuted at the Tate Modern to accompany “a large-scale survey of the global history of art and technology” entitled Electronic Dreams. I say “fittingly” because Dissever both feels like a uniquely visceral and violent strain of high art and some kind of massive and menacing industrial installation. I suppose both of those things can be said about some previous emptyset albums as well, but this one is unquestionably more aggressively minimalist and driven by machine-like repetition. Notably, the conceptual inspiration behind that move was an interest in the intertwined evolutions of “cosmic rock, minimalism and electronic music” and late-20th century advances in production technology, so the duo went appropriately analog/retro with both their gear and recording techniques.
Thrill Jockey
The results are impressively visceral and brutalist, as each piece is essentially an inventive transformation of a single pulsing note into a heaving and hulking industrial juggernaut using a primitive array of dynamic effects. In fact, much of Dissever amusingly suggests either 1) the No Wave minimalism of Glenn Branca’s early ‘80s guitar orchestra work if he’d swapped out his guitars for heavy industrial machinery and a deep passion for sound system culture, or 2) one of Ellen Fullman’s Long String Instrument performances if she had come from a doom/sludge metal background (or at least a building demolition one). My personal highlight is the title piece, as it sounds like a blown-out and overloaded sound system suddenly became sentient and decided to vengefully wipe out the entire dancefloor with an onslaught of seismic bass waves and slashing metallic textures, but nearly every single song is a throbbing and sharp-edged masterpiece of harshly grinding textures, cool tricks with overtones and oscillations, and relentless, heaving physically. This is definitely a strong contender for my absolute favorite emptyset album to date, as Purgas and Ginzburg have conjured quite an immersive display of earth-shaking elemental power from just a handful of notes (and some expertly wielded early hardware).
Listen here.
This latest opus from the Opalio brothers is a pair of single-sided art LPs devoted to two very different performances featuring the duo’s longtime collaborator Joëlle Vinciarelli (Talweg/La Morte Young). In classic Opalio fashion, The Secret of the Space Bubble was inspired by a vision that Roberto had of four astronauts performing in zero gravity. The lucky fourth astronaut in this case is Talweg’s other half (Eric Lombaert) and the combination of his virtuosic freeform drumming with Vinciarelli’s strangled flugelhorn partially steers things in a more Sun Ra-esque spaced-out free jazz direction than usual. There are, however, some other unique factors in play, as the Opalios exclusively used Vinciarelli’s collection of unusual and ancient instruments rather than their usual gear. Also, it was recorded using only two ambient mics to create a “vortex of sound” where all of the sounds and their reverberations were “centrifuged/blended together” to achieve the necessary “space bubble” effect.
Opax/Elliptical Noise/Up Against The Wall, Motherfuckers!
Even by MCIAA standards, it is quite a challenging and far out affair, as the aforementioned space jazz uneasily coexists with folk horror flutes, shimmering chimes, an inventively repurposed clock, and wordless vocals that resemble a bizarre experimental opera. At its best, it sounds like an antique clock shop has become possessed by the spirit of an alien gamelan ensemble, which is a quite mesmerizing environment to find oneself in. I especially loved the jangling and echoing metal sounds on this one. In fact, they almost make me wish that the individual sounds could be handed off to a team like Holy Tongue & Shackleton to be anchored to a heavy dub bassline, but that kind of accessibility is simply not on the alien agenda.
With these two releases (one of which is subscribers only and is still available as part of a full package), David Jackman concludes this monumental eight-part collection of what he deems as a single, unified work. Unsurprisingly, the sound of these two albums is drawn from elements and themes of the volumes that preceded, first in a dramatic culmination, then in a more restrained and mediative, befitting the concluding segments of such an expansive endeavor.
Steadfast, credited to D. Jackman (even with the series completed, I still am no closer to understanding the choice of artist name used for each of these discs), is two discs, while Scilence (as just Jackman) is the subscriber only final volume. Disc one of Steadfast still features this work in its most intensive form. Immediately an organ-like roar and what sounds like layered, digital delay feedback is an immediate hit to the senses. A down-tuned gong or bell appears early on, and the result resembles all of the elements he has been working with in the series tightly compacted into a single piece. Prominent low frequency tones and shifting delays added to the piece alternatingly resemble a swirling vortex of noise and the roar of a jet engine.
Two of Upstate New York’s prolific artists, Mike Griffin (Parashi) and Eric Hardiman (Rambutan) have both been responsible for a slew of tapes, vinyl, and CD/CDRs of work that can never be easily predicted. Either on their own or in collaborations, their work runs the gamut from harsh noise to complex abstract spaces and sometimes dabbling into more conventional musical realms. This split double disc set features each on their own, with the albums sounding rather different from each other, but with a clear artistic consistency and intent between the two.
Griffin’s album, Wave Function Collapse, features him flirting with conventional musical features and structures, while still drifting into more cosmic abstractions. "Red Plague" is a mass of ghostly electronic whispers, propelled by an overdriven bass. His upfront, although lightly processed vocals give it the vibe of a deconstructed song. It becomes more pronounced as he shifts the bass sound to a more conventional one slips in a largely untreated guitar. "Swim in Petrol" is similarly musical in nature, pairing lo-fi style acoustic guitar and vocals relatively low in the mix, awash in reverb.
Scott Morgan has been quietly and steadily releasing beautifully crafted and fog-veiled grayscale ambient-dub excursions for over a quarter century now so I was not expecting a huge creative leap forward this deep into the game, but Lake Fire may very well be the strongest loscil album of his career. Morgan’s breakthrough doesn’t sound like it came easily though, as this album was assembled from the reworked ruins of an aborted suite for electronics and ensemble (though one brooding and blackened piece from that suite (“Ash Clouds”) did manage to survive the culling). Notably, literal ash clouds were quite a significant inspiration this time around, as Lake Fire is something of an impressionistic road trip diary from a drive through the mountains of British Columbia while sky-blackening wildfires raged in the distance. In fact, the album cover is an actual photo of those smoke-obscured mountains that Morgan himself took from a rowboat on a lake.
Obviously, veiled & water-adjacent melancholy is nothing new for Morgan, but he brings a fresh intensity and an ingenious new approach to rhythm to his usual vision on pieces like the brilliant opener “Arrhythmia.” The insistent pulse of skipping loops suggests a malfunctioning amusement park wave machine that is furiously churning out waves of killer dub-techno fragments while its overworked pressure valves rhythmically vent bursts of steam. In fact, one of my favorite facets of this album is how masterfully Morgan creates rhythms with an unconventional palette of hisses, throbs, and subtle metallic textures rather than anything resembling a kick drum or cymbals.
It has been almost an entire decade since this project (or any project at all, really) last surfaced from dub-techno visionary Mark Ernestus, but I can think of few other artists who have played a more significant role in shaping my taste despite that lengthy hiatus (Rhythm & Sound, Chain Reaction, Maurizio, Basic Channel, and Hard Wax all loom quite large in my life). Notably, however, Ernestus’ previous mbalax-inspired recordings with Senegalese vocalist Mbene Diatta Seck and the Jeri-Jeri ensemble did not grab me as much as his other work, as it often seemed like Jeri-Jeri would have been just as compelling without his production expertise (albeit a bit less tight, crisply produced, and bass heavy). I like those earlier releases, of course, but they felt like a sharpening of an existing aesthetic rather than a fresh revelation. That said, Ndagga Rhythm Force is allegedly an absolutely killer live act, so maybe I would have been more enthusiastic in my appreciation if I had managed to catch them. In any case, I am definitely more enthusiastic now, as Ernestus’ vision has evolved considerably since 2016 and the first half of Khadim is on another level altogether.
The big difference is that Ernestus and his collaborators have ditched their guitars and it now seems like these pieces were collaboratively built from the ground up rather than being a mere remixed version of Jeri-Jeri. While I have no idea if that is what actually happened, these new pieces have been distilled to an aggressively minimal palette of only vibrantly rolling and clattering sabar drum rhythms, Mbene Diatta Seck’s soulful and dubbed-up devotional vocals, and subtle, well-placed electronic enhancements from Ernestus. The most perfectly distilled and executed example of this new vision is “Dieuw Bakhul,” as Seck’s ghostly vocals share “a Wolof tale of treachery” over a lurching rhythm gorgeously enhanced by Ernestus’ frayed and stormy dub-techno chords.
This release is (correctly) billed as the debut solo album from this Polish composer & multi-instrumentalist, but Markowska previously surfaced back in 2024 with a similarly fine EP (Thrills) and has recorded music for various art installations and soundtracks over the years. Given that this is a Miasmah release, the prevailing mood is often a bit of a dark and wintry one, but Markowska’s vision is otherwise quite distinct from most of her labelmates. While the main thread here can be roughly classified as “haunted Eastern European folk music,” Markowska’s darker “early music” inspirations are nicely balanced by ambient warmth, avant-garde techniques, and admirably exacting attention to the more subtle pleasures of texture and sound design.
The piece that first drew me to this album is admittedly a bit of an outlier, as “Train ride home” is a gorgeously rippling (if somber) zither reverie over a sensuous and increasingly prominent backdrop of bowed string drones. My favorite bit is the way the chiming notes of the central zither melody leave behind a lingering haze of ghostly harmonies, which is a cool trick that surfaces throughout the album in varying forms. Amusingly, part of me thinks “Train ride home” overstays its welcome a bit in devoting 7+ minutes to a single theme, but another part of me thinks that the sharpness of the zither attack, the subtle variations in the melody, and the glacially shifting harmonies of the lingering afterimages would be a killer start to a much longer durational piece.
It took six years, but Maria Somerville is finally back with another album, her first for the iconic 4AD. That is certainly a fitting home for Somerville, as Luster’s best moments favorably recall the label’s Ivo Watts-Russell golden age. In fact, the album description specifically (and aptly) invokes the lush romanticism of Ivo’s own shapeshifting This Mortal Coil project as a key reference point, but the resemblance is not exactly a stylistic one. Instead, Luster feels more like the kind of album that would have resulted if Julee Cruise had been backed by a revolving cast of ringers from classic 4AD acts like Cocteau Twins. I suppose Somerville’s greatest song (2019’s “Dreaming”) already evoked 4AD luminaries Tarnation quite beautifully, but Luster is considerably more “dreampop” in focus than its illustrious predecessor All My People.
While I do appreciate the many cool influences on display that one would rightfully expect from an artist with a long-running NTS show, Somerville’s greater allure lies in her knack for crafting absolutely gorgeous singles and Luster features quite an impressive run of them. For me, the heart of the album is the one-two punch of “Projections” and “Garden.” Notably, the two pieces are quite similar in a complementary way: the former beautifully marries sensuously breathy vocals with a slow-motion guitar chug and a killer chorus hook, while the latter ascends to dreampop heaven with a more muscular, bass-driven groove and a beautifully understated maelstrom of swooning shoegaze guitar magic.
This is both the inaugural release for Becker’s Clunk label and his first new album in nearly a decade, but it stylistically picks up roughly where his brilliantly demented Traditional Music of Notional Species series left off (grotesquely gnarled and squirming synth hallucinations beamed in from an alien jungle). Intended as a “labyrinthine four-chapter pseudo-musical that reflects the flustering absurdity of the current era,” The Incident feels like the fruit of a Lovecraftian scenario in which Becker is plagued by recurring nightmares of an otherworldly city populated by slime-covered and tentacled horrors and wakes up each morning with a fresh batch of disturbing field recordings documenting his extradimensional travels.
Characteristically, the primary allure here is that Becker conjured up some truly ungodly sounds, as it sounds like he circuit-bent a modular synth to make everything sound as viscerally slithering, gibbering, and gelatinous as possible. Notably, he also happens to be one of the greatest mastering engineers on the planet, which further helped shape this album into an immersive headphone mindfuck par excellence. That said, there has also been some compelling evolution since Notional Species II, as Becker now seems to play with spatial dynamics a bit more and also seems to have picked up a fresh gamelan influence. The more gamelan-inspired pieces all fall on the second half of the album (“stunde null,” “sāʿatu alṣṣufri,” and a “puttering purgation”) and every single one is a highlight evocative of a remote, ruined, and overgrown jungle temple where something ineffably ghastly and otherworldly has just been summoned.
On its face, this smoldering debut from NYC-based jazz chanteuse Eliana Glass seems like quite an inspired outlier for the historically avant garde-minded Shelter Press, as the smoky, sensuous minimalism of these depressive torch songs resembles absolutely nothing else previously released on the label. I certainly cannot fault their instincts, however, as the allure of E is immediately obvious from the first notes. To my ears, these darkly beautiful piano and voice performances evoke the chills-down-my-spine intensity of the late, great Patty Waters (minus the more harrowing and extreme bits), but Glass’s vision was more explicitly inspired by Carla Bley, Annette Peacock, and Ethiopian nun Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou (all of whom are covered here).
There are also some unexpectedly leftfield details revealed in the album’s description, such as a fondness for vintage analog effects, subtly hallucinatory contributions from her brother (sound artist Costa Colachis Glass), a piece inspired by conceptual artist Agnes Denes, and the involvement of Francis Harris (one half of deep house duo Frank & Tony). Notably, the Agnes Denes piece (“Human Dust”) is one of the album’s two stone-cold masterpieces, as Glass’s languorous reading of a matter-of-fact post-mortem accounting of an artist’s life is a powerfully haunting and darkly funny meditation on mortality (“achieved 1/10,000 of his dreams,” “was misunderstand 3800 times when it mattered,” “was loved by 17 people including his parents,” etc.).
