We have finally cleared out the backlog of great music and present some new episodes.
Episode 711 features music from The Jesus and Mary Chain, Zola Jesus, Duster, Sangre Nueva, Dialect, The Bug, Cleared, Mount Eerie, Mulatu Astatke & Hoodna Orchestra, Hayden Pedigo, Bistro Boy, and Ibukun Sunday.
Episode 712 has tunes by Mazza Vision, Waveskania, Black Pus, Sam Gendel, Benny Bock, and Hans Kjorstad, Katharina Grosse, Carina Khorkhordina, Tintin Patrone, Billy Roisz, and Stefan Schneider, His Name Is Alive, artificial memory trace, mclusky, Justin Walter, mastroKristo, Başak Günak, and William Basinski.
Episode 713 brings you sounds from Mouse On Mars, Leavs, Lawrence English, Mo Dotti, Wendy Eisenberg, Envy, Ben Lukas Boysen, Cindytalk, Mercury Rev, White Poppy, Anadol & Marie Klock, and Galaxie 500.
Skolavordustigur Street in Reykjavík photo by Jon (your Podcast DJ).
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As Die Stadt's brilliant reissue campaign nears its end (it looks like about two more remain in the 18 disc series), this double disc compilation covers the first and fourth collaborations Asmus Tietchens had with UK artist Terry Burrows, the first album from 1986 (Watching the Burning Bride) and its 1998 reworking (Burning the Watching Bride). The earlier album is perhaps the most fascinating, as it clearly captures both Tietchens' early synth-heavy rhythmic style (the Sky and Discos Esplendor Geometricos eras), and heralds the more abstract direction his work would soon take.
Watching the Burning Bride is the first of four thematically linked works, with volume two being Tietchens’ Abfleischung (a previous release in this campaign) and the third Burrows' The Whispering Scale, all of which shared similar artwork and shared source material and instrumentation.The collaboration that produced this album is one rarely needed these days:postal mail.The two would record their own parts as source material, and then ship off to the other to rework.The contrast between the two artists is also a major facet:by this point Tietchens had been recording for around two decades and had built a rather technologically advanced studio with Okko Bekker, while Burrows was young and early in his career, producing most of his recordings on an 8 track in his bedroom.
The final product of these two very different working conditions is a seamless blend, however.Some of the songs clearly show the mark of Tietchens' early 1980s sense of rhythm:"Bride 2" (each piece was originally represented by an abstract symbol, here they are numbered) is a short bit that builds up to the industrial-ish sound he cultivated on his releases on Esplendor Geometrico's label before falling apart very quickly."Bride 10" also features this similar sense of rhythm, lurking more beneath a reverberated sci-fi soundtrack sound that heralds the more abstract works that Tietchens would later be involved in.
Some of these pieces also bring up directions that Tietchens and Burows could have gone in, but did not.On "Bride 4," heavily featured is Burrow’s then-new DX7 synth and, surprisingly enough, drums.The song comes together almost like a very strangely produced John Carpenter or Goblin soundtrack that is painfully too short, with the following piece running with these elements and putting them together in a more abstract, more disturbing framework."Bride 12" is similar in mood, but not in approach:a collage of rattling spring reverb and metallic clanking that somehow gels into a strangely melodic piece.
There are a few bizarre moments to be had on this album as well, and I mean that in the most positive of ways.For "Bride 7," Tietchens’ vintage drum machine and synths form the basis, with the addition of dubby bass guitar and actual vocals from Burrows, although limited to the span of only two minutes.Tietchens himself is responsible for the addition of some female vocals (a tapeloop of "some hippies singing" according to the liner notes) on "Bride 6," giving a bit of unlikely humanity within the distant clanking and distant, droning space.Two bonus songs are appended to this disc, "Torso 1" and "Torso 2."Apparently these are some of the untouched source materials used, and they are rather strange combinations of noisy orchestra hits and cheap MIDI drum programming.
Burning the Watching Bride appeared some twelve years later, with each artist taking one side of the album and reworking the material based on the newer technologies available to both artists.Burrows’ side, "Bride 23" (the numbering continues from disc one) takes the form of a single 23 minute composition that utilizes all of the elements from the album, with some tasteful processing and treatments.The final product is in some ways reminiscent of a "megamix," keeping some elements original while adding new sounding effects, but it comes together like a completely consistent composition.
Tietchens' half of this album is closer in structure to the original, being a sequence of five shorter, more diverse sounding works."Bride 18" is rather consistent with his later 1990s work:swirling electronics and hints of dark ambience, peppered with the occasional beep or reverberated noise, but otherwise solid and sustained.Both "Bride 20" and "Bride 21" keep these elements but Tietchens allows more of Burrows' original FM synth work to come to the forefront, at times buried under a nice filtered drone.The fourth especially showcases them, again taking on a more soundtrack-like feel that balances sound and space exquisitely.
I have always favored Asmus Tietchens' 1980s work that was not far removed from the world of industrial the most, so I cannot help but love Watching the Burning Bride most, although admittedly the short, vignette style of song was at times frustrating, since I felt they ended too quickly.In some ways Burning the Watching Bride ends up being a victim of its time, since those early Protools style experiments and processing lack the same level of innovation and humanity as the older, more primitive works have.It is still a very strong album though, even if I prefer its predecessor, and pairing the two together makes perfect sense.Not to minimize Terry Burrows' extensive role in these recordings, but the set makes for an excellent snapshot of what Tietchens had been doing in the past, and what he would continue doing in the future.
LCLX is a rather fast follow-up to this Texas duo’s other recent work, Kruos, but by no means does it seem rushed or hurried. Alex Keller and Sean O'Neill again have produced a work that is both familiar and alien, through careful use of field recordings and understated processing to capture the world around them, mixing the mundane with the uncommon to create environments that sound much more unique then they likely were in the first place.
The lengthy title piece that opens LCLX is actually a reworking of material Keller and O'Neill utilized for their first performance together in 2015.The nearly 16 minute work is based solely on recordings captured at the Charles Alan Wright Intramural field in Austin, Texas, with little or no discernible processing or treatment to the sound.A heavy droning bass and complementary buzzing noise are immediately apparent from the start, apparently capturing the field’s bright lighting that is as sonically distracting as it apparently also is visually.
Alongside this somewhat abrasive sound is the recordings I would expect in this sort of location recording:passing vehicles, the occasionally disruptive motorcycle revving by, or car honking to add to the feeling of audio pollution.The same recordings also capture more pleasant moments, such as the chirping of birds and other wildlife.Somewhere in the middle of natural beauty and the sonic ugliness of industry lies the occasional snippet of conversation by passersby.
The remaining five pieces that make up this album come from less clear pedigrees, but all revolve around field recordings captured in urban and rural areas, and all manner in-between.Some of these are perversely enjoyable:I would hate to have to listen to the jackhammering captured on "Ununbium" against my will, but captured on record there is revealed an almost musical quality to it, emphasizing nuances to the sound I would have otherwise ignored.
In a more natural mood, "Ununpentium" is the classic sound of a rainstorm.The pitter-patter of raindrops both near and far from the recording device is a rather peaceful bit of wet, muggy sound.The added rumble of thunder that appears later on adds to that "enjoying nature" feel, but the passing airplane makes for an intentional distraction.The ten minute "Ununquadium" mirrors "LCLX" in its complexity, bringing in a series of sounds that are in this case not overly recognizable, but work well alongside one another.Distant rumbles and near static bursts act as the core, with the occasionally overt bit of bird chirping showing up.Later on a rhythmic clattering appears that could be studio treated with reverb and echo, or perhaps completely natural in their source.This ends up being mixed with a series of other unspecified mechanical sounds, resulting in a piece that lies in somewhere between the purity of nature and the sonic pollution of mankind.
Special note should be made of the CDs unconventional packaging.Folded within a piece of heavy paper and even heavier stamped fabric, it has that tactile, handmade quality to it that was so prevalent in the 1990s noise scene (such the G.R.O.S.S. label run by the late Akifumi Nakajima/Aube) that too many releases lack these days.Like Kruos, LCLX is another example of the intricacy and nuance possible from just using everyday field recordings.Alex Keller and Sean O'Neill are, at least superficially, just capturing the world around them as it happens, but the difference lies in their recording techniques and the final presentation.It is that use of the familiar and the unfamiliar that makes these works so engaging, and is an exemplary example of the art form.
We're excited to welcome New York City-based composer and performer Lea Bertucci back to NNA for a brand new full-length LP, Metal Aether. Lea’s early 2017 cassette release All That Is Solid Melts Into Air focused on her role as a composer, with a hand-picked selection of talented musicians performing her minimal compositions. Metal Aether instead showcases her role as a performer, revealing four pieces that represent approximately 3 years of ideas and gestures for alto saxophone and magnetic tape.
Much like the recordings of her previous NNA release, Metal Aether continues to explore Lea’s acute interest in the nature of acoustics and the harmonic accumulation of sound, with its four pieces having been recorded in Le Havre, France in a former military base, and in New York City at ISSUE Project Room. With her horn, Lea produces pulsing minimalist patterns, transcendent drones, and upper register squalls that envelop these spaces in waves of overtones, microtones, and psychoacoustic effects. Tracks like "Accumulations" explore evocative, ancient-sounding melodic figures, while tracks like "Sustain and Dissolve" relish in the microtonal relationships between overlapping sustained notes. Aside from the saxophone, Bertucci further interacts with physical space by fortifying these pieces with manipulated field recordings from diverse locations, ranging from Mayan pyramids to NYC subways. Other instruments such as prepared piano and vibraphone can be heard on this album, processed through tape to unite melody and texture together as one. Lea displays a firm grasp of the inherent possibilities of sound manipulation to maximize her music’s power through the recording process itself, mixing conflicting fidelities to achieve a deeper, more organic form of expression.
Black Truffle present the premier recordings of two recent works by legendary American experimental composer Alvin Lucier.
Lucier has been crafting elegant explorations of the behavior of sound in physical space since the 1960s and is perhaps best known for his 1970 piece "I Am Sitting In a Room." He has written a remarkable catalog of instrumental works that focus on phenomena produced by the interference between closely tuned pitches, often using pure electronic tones produced by oscillators in combination with single instruments. Demonstrating the restless creative drive of an artist now in his 80s, the two recent works presented here both feature the electric guitar, an instrument Lucier has just recently begun to explore.
In "Criss-Cross," Lucier's first composition for electric guitars, two guitarists using e-bows sweep slowly up and down a single semitone, beginning at opposite ends of the pitch range. The piece exemplifies Lucier's desire not to "compose" in the conventional sense, but rather to eliminate everything that "distracts from the acoustical unfolding of the idea."
In this immaculately controlled performance of "Criss-Cross" by Oren Ambarchi and Stephen O’Malley, for whom the piece was written in 2013, a seemingly simple idea creates a rich array of sonic effects — not simply beating patterns, which gradually slow down as the two tones reach unison and accelerate as they move further apart, but also the remarkable phenomenon of sound waves spinning in elliptical patterns through space between the two guitar amps.
In the comparatively lush "Hanover," Lucier draws inspiration from the photograph on the cover, an image of the Dartmouth Jazz Band taken in 1918 featuring Lucier's father on violin. Using the instrumentation present in the photograph, Lucier creates an unearthly sound world of sliding tones from violin, alto and tenor saxophones, piano, vibraphone (bowed), and three electric guitars (which take the place of the banjos present in the photograph). Waves of slow glissandi create thick, complex beating patterns, gently punctuated by repeated single notes from the piano. The result is a piece that is simultaneously both unperturbably calm and constantly in motion.
This is the first album that I have encountered from Jo Zimmermann's long-running and amusingly titled Schlammpeitziger project (the unwieldy pseudonym is borrowed from a fish that apparently breathes through its anus). The general lack of Schlammpeitziger in my life before now is mostly because the bulk of his oeuvre has been released exclusively on German labels, aside from a retrospective of his early years released on Domino back in 2001. I am delighted that he has finally crossed my path though, as I am endlessly fascinated by outliers and iconoclasts and Zimmermann is a prime specimen. He is also a bit of an erratic pop genius, albeit a gleefully absurd and sometimes self-defeating one. At its best, Damenbartblick is a glimpse of what a slightly tipsy Kraftwerk might have sounded like if they were joined by Steven Stapleton in an extremely whimsical mood. Regrettably, Zimmermann only rarely reaches such heights, but they are wonderful while they last (and the remainder of the album is a pleasant enough batch of bubbly synth-pop instrumentals).
I was not sure what to expect from this album, so I was completely blindsided by the opening "Ekirlu Kong," a bombshell that captures Zimmermann at the absolute height of his powers.It begins with an almost cartoonishly gurgling bass line and a host of jabbering animal noises, but almost immediately coheres into a wonderfully burbling and hook-filled masterclass in idiosyncratic electronic pop.While Zimmermann makes it all seem effortless, the layered complexity is dazzling to behold, as he deftly juggles synths of several different (and delightful) textures while casually tossing off one great melodic hook after another.Also of note, "Ekirlu Kong" is one of the few songs where Zimmermann decided to "sing," which adds a whole new level of appeal, as his droll, deadpan monologue oozes equal parts snarky charisma and wrong-headed derangement.At its core, "Ekirlu Kong" is a charmingly bubbly and sweet love song, but that is not the complete picture, as it is wryly undercut by the perverse absurdity of lines like "your farts smell like the breath of a rainbow unicorn."On paper, that admittedly sounds somewhat infantile and needlessly scatological, but works beautifully in context, injecting some charming subversion into Zimmermann’s gorgeous pop confection.Lamentably, Damenbartblick never quite reaches that level ever again, though the later and considerably more hostile "Angerrestbay" happily comes somewhat close ("Hey stupid man–your brain is a dick").The rest of the lyrics are similarly provocative/ridiculous, of course, but the strangely rolling, dragging groove and funky clean guitars make for another fun and winning formula.
Consequently, I dearly wish Zimmermann sang more on the album, as his vocals are one of the magic ingredients that makes Damenbartblick something to get excited about: it is like an especially smart, funny, and precocious friend made a party album that deliberately mistranslated many lines into amusingly awkward and baffling pronouncements ("You got a perfect health care system–I got 18 seagulls flying in circles in my room").As entertaining as that impish piss-takery can be, it would probably get old quickly if Zimmermann were not also something of a synth wunderkind/studio wizard.The latter probably explains why so few of these songs feel like the fully formed synth-pop gems they could be, though Zimmermann is probably also reluctant to wear out the welcome of his limited vocal talents.Given that this is a one-man endeavor, it must take an enormous amount of time to tweak something like "Ekirlu Kong" to glistening perfection, so trying to conjure up an entire album in that vein would probably grind Schlammpeitziger's output to a standstill for a couple of years.No one wants that.I am also curious about who the expected audience for Schlammpeitziger might be, as it is entirely possible that Zimmermann is largely content just making skillful, upbeat Kraftwerk pastiches, but also likes to throw in a few curveballs every now and then to amuse himself.If that is the case, I guess I just love the curveballs.More objectively, however, the instrumental pieces that comprise the bulk of the album lack the character of the vocal ones: they are pleasantly likable rather than great.I do not have any particular aversion to instrumentals, but there is nothing to fill the charisma void left by the disappearance of Schlammpeitziger's human element (more animal noises would be a good start, incidentally).
Of course, I bet I would appreciate Zimmermann’s instrumentals much more if my vague expectations had not been completely blown to pieces by such a stellar opener.Consequently, it seems unfair to say that this is a flawed album, as any grumbling feels like the whining of a spoiled child.The best analogy that I can come up with for Damenbartblick is that it is like an enchanted vending machine that unexpectedly gave me a freshly prepared dish of great chicken tikka masala rather than, say, a candy bar.On one level, it would be disappointing if most of the time it reverted back to giving me the expected result, but the more significant bit is that something truly amazing happens every now and then.In fact, that is the perfect summation of Schlammpeitziger: something truly amazing happens every now and then, so I would be a fool not to wait around to see what happens next.I suppose that makes Zimmermann more of a "singles artist" rather than an "album artist," but he is at least a damn great one: Schlammpeitziger has my unwavering attention now.
Released back in early 2017, Frequency is the underheard debut full-length from the duo of Coil/Cyclobe alum Mike York and Mark Pilkington (from Strange Attractor Press). Given that singular and occult-tinged pedigree, it is no surprise that something novel and wonderful emerged from their union. I suppose Coil’s more hallucinatory and amorphous late-period work is a solid touchstone, but it is also a mere jumping-off point, as Teleplasmiste descend even deeper into lysergic drone territory. At its best, Frequency is like a psychoactive depth charge dropped straight into my unconscious, exploding into a disorienting and almost vertigo-inducing swirl of colors and texture. While some of these swirling, smearing, and buzzing synth invocations admittedly strike deeper than others, the album as a whole is a tour de force of hypnotic, slow-burning, and reality-dissolving wave- and frequency-manipulation.
In many respects, the opening "A Gift of Unknown Things" is the perfect and representative harbinger of the droning psychedelia to come, as it is built from densely buzzing and sustained synth tones that slowly swoop, swell, and oscillate in a sustained reverie.Gradually, a strangely hollow and plinking percussion motif appears, but the piece does not feel like an evolving composition so much as it feels like I was dropped in the middle of a strange and disconcerting sound world that eventually grows more complex texturally.It is not quite a brilliant enough illusion to fully transcend its likely improvisatory origins, but it is still an appealingly immersive and phantasmagoric place to linger.Later, "Mind at Large" returns to roughly the same territory, though it casts a deeper spell, as the central motif is embellished by a wonderfully queasy and gently fluttering periphery of blurred tones and buried subterranean plunges.That "densely buzzing and slowly swooping drones" template is reprised once more in the epic "Radioclast," albeit this time with an undulating undercurrent of feedback/harmonic-like ripples. I like all three pieces, but they are all very much cut from the same cloth and do not do much to establish Teleplasmiste as a unique and formidable entity.Given the intriguing body of work that both artists have behind them, I was hoping that Frequency would be more than just an atypically strong synth album that draws upon some especially cool influences.The pieces mentioned above admittedly are a bit more than that, as they creep into deep trance/altered state territory, but they are not quite the visionary break from the current synth milieu that was expecting.
Thankfully, that visionary break comes elsewhere on the album, as "Gravity is the Enemy" succeeds admirably in realizing the duo's stated objective of "blurring vintage synthesis and contemporary electronics with acoustic pipes to create a transcendent reverie that exists on a wavelength beyond both retro fetishism and modern-day machinations."At its foundation, it shares a densely throbbing bed of synth drones with everything else on the album, yet that is merely the framework, as York unleashes a sinisterly dissonant maelstrom of gnarled pipes over it to harrowing effect.There is also an added textural layer of odd crashes and hollow drips that imbues the piece with an otherworldly sense of place.I feel like I am about to be a human sacrifice for some kind of malevolent ancient ritual in Teleplasmiste’s time-traveling trance cave, which is definitely not a sensation I can get elsewhere.That is unquestionably the album's zenith as far as establishing a mesmerizing new niche is concerned, yet the following "Astodaan" is no less stunning.This time, however, the achievement is more of a compositional one, as the swirling haze of shimmering heaven in the periphery creates the feeling of an evolving chord progression quite different from the usual floating stasis.That is not the only innovation, however, as the central drones take on a far more visceral and snarling character and it is absolutely glorious.It also nicely illustrates the difference between a good Teleplasmiste song and a great one: one sneaks its tendrils into my consciousness and pulls me towards some kind of blurry and alien dream state and the other does that AND hits me on primal, seismic level.
The album is curiously rounded out by "Fall of the Yak Man," a haunting earlier piece that diverges significantly from the rest of the album in a couple of key ways (it has a melody and it lacks a heavy drone backbone). It has an ageless and elemental menace to it that I rather enjoy, but I think York and Pilkington’s intuitive move away from such composed-sounding fare was ultimately a good decision: Teleplasmiste are at their best when they erase all trace of themselves and just set about trying to dissolve mundane reality.Some pieces admittedly succeed more than others, but that is to be expected: York and Pilkington are like two necromancers trying to find the runes that will summon exactly the demon that they want–sometimes they do not get the ideal result, but that is because they are trying to do something that no one else can do in largely uncharted territory.That said, this is still a fine and absorbing album by any standard.Still, I am hoping that this is just a formative first step and that York and Pilkington will keep traveling this arcane path, as "Gravity" and "Astodaan" lay the groundwork for a second phase that could (and should) put Teleplasmiste on the same level as York’s iconic previous projects.
Snapshots of an abandoned city. Fragments of song drifting out of basements and across alleyways, muffled conversations. Scrutinized, the "music" disappears – maybe paracusia? Brass Orchids, Anne Guthrie’s second full-length album for Students of Decay, is an entrancing collage of new and old sounds drawn from a variety of beguiling sources. Posthumous contributions from the artist’' grandfather, a jazz pianist; obsolete media palimpsests (some vanity, some necessity); tap dancing on a peeling floor… An unsettling and strangely beautiful album – akin to something on the tip of your tongue, which, before you can name it, slips away into forgetting.
Brainwashed and Holodeck Recordings are proud to premiere "Fandeath," from Austin, Texas duo LACHANE’s self-titled debut. "Fandeath" captures the debut’s slow, lurching pace punctuated with heavy, industrial strength beats, rich synthesizers, and sinister guitars. Vocalist and producer Melissa Cha's beautiful vocals glide through the funereal backing track as guitarist Ryan Garl delivers a wonderfully distorted performance that adds just the right amount of organic grime to the complex electronic arrangements.
The self-titled debut LACHANE will be released on cassette and digital on Friday, February 9th.
The wonderfully unsettling and playfully creepy The Gag File deservedly got a lot of attention last year, but Aaron Dilloway also quietly released another excellent album on a small Dutch label in the late fall. While less audacious and considerably less intent on evoking some kind of sad, wobbly, and hissing nightmare world, Switches is still a wonderfully bizarre, distinctive, and obsessive-sounding album. In fact, the sickly, frayed, and hypnotic locked groove-style loops of Switches almost feel like a perverse prelude to The Gag File, relentlessly repeating gnarled and disorienting snatches of half-melodies to peel away the last vestiges of sanity to prime me for the malevolent and Ligotti-esque funhouse to come.
The opening piece, "Switch 2," sets a very clear tone for the album: for the most part, Switches is a very cryptic, inhuman, and "industrial" affair, resembling the work of a battery of squelching and clanking machines.There is a quite a bit of variety and character to be found in Dilloway's mechanized lunacy, however."Switch 2," for example, sounds like a pile-up of manically repeating tape loops of loudly sputtering belts and pulsing presses.There are a number of layers to Dilloway’s artistry, however, as Switches is far more than some ingeniously collaged field recordings, as tapes have an unwavering tendency to wind up considerably more erratic, jabbering, and ragged-sounding than they did before Aaron got his hands on them.In this case, for example, Dilloway evokes a factory where all the rusted, weary, and struggling machinery unexpectedly wrests itself from its moorings and turns on the workers.The following "Switch 17," however, is considerably less abrasive and hostile, unfolding as an endlessly repeating snatch of echoing backwards melody.That motif certainly has an appealingly eerie beauty, but that is only part of the picture, as Dilloway devotes most of his energies to the textures: it sounds like a skipping record being played through a malfunctioning receiver and blown-out speakers.The first side of the album is closed out with the starker and more percussive "Switch 15," a throbbing and pummeling rhythmic miasma of hollow pulses and visceral, distorted snarls.The overarching theme throughout the entire side is that of tape loop experimentation gone sick and wrong, albeit in a unexpectedly listenable way.I suspect no one picks up an Aaron Dilloway album in search of haunting piano melodies, but they turn up here anyway.
The second half of album keeps the rhythmic momentum going, yet takes it in a more somewhat more playful direction…at first.The lengthy "Switch 11-12" initially opens with a surprisingly light pinging and skipping "locked groove" motif, but it slowly becomes increasingly bolstered with mechanized heft and winds up as a shuddering and crunching juggernaut that moves tirelessly forward like a tank.It is hard to say exactly when "Switch 11" segues into "Switch 12," yet the piece gradually takes on the visceral and vaguely hostile feel of a power electronics performance, as a dense mass of oscillating machine noise takes over and Dilloway occasionally delves into reverberating metal percussion and something resembling distorted vocal howls.That show of force proves to be ephemeral though, as the bulk of the piece is devoted primarily to making subtle shifts in the massive, shuddering industrial rhythm (as well as some not so subtle ones).Basically, Dilloway treats a cacophony of looped machine noise like a techno producer would juggle high-hats and kick drums in a bangin’ new party jam (only Dilloway is not trying to fill a dancefloor so much as he is intend on finding new ways to grind and lurch).The album comes to an uncharacteristically melodic close with the piano-based "Switch 1," which beautifully blurs together a looping harp-like arpeggio with backwards bass tones to weave something weirdly hypnotic and phantasmal.It feels like I am watching a flickering scene from a '50s horror movie (most likely one featuring a haunted castle or a haunted island), yet the projector has gotten stuck and the image is endlessly skipping and starting to burn.By the end, the piece has deteriorated into utter unrecognizability, which is the only appropriate way for this album to end: a slow fade of gnarled, sickly sounding reels played on a dying machine that is increasingly unable to maintain even a semblance of the right speed.
Naturally, any album assembled from distressed and wiggly snatches of tape is destined to have a constrained palette, which is probably the sole caveat here: Dilloway's vision is undeniably driven by his choice of tools.I personally do not consider that a problem at all, as Dilloway has constrained himself quite squarely in my (dis)comfort zone.As far as tape loop-based experimentation is concerned, Dilloway's recent work is easily among the most entertaining and inventive fare that I have heard.Also, obsessively repeated looping patterns are exactly the sort of thing that I am drawn to like a moth.There are a number of folks that have made stellar work in that vein (Jason Lescalleet, William Basinski, The Loop Orchestra, Tape Loop Orchestra, etc.) and they all bring something unique to it.Dilloway's uniqueness lies in his deeply and intuitively deviant sensibility: this is arguably noise, but it is much more absorbing and fun than noise tends to be.An appreciation for the finer points of ugliness, decay, and black humor are such a fundamental part of Dilloway’s character that he can eschew raw power entirely and dwell instead on nuance and atmosphere without losing any bite.Switches is not a threat to unseat The Gag File as Dilloway’s definitive artistic statement of the year, but that is only because its lacks the gleefully macabre thematic hook of its predecessor.Viewed solely on the strength of the material, Switches is almost every bit as essential.
Billed as Skelton's most ambitious composition to date, Towards a Frontier is a 66-minute epic that is part of larger multimedia project assembled during three trips to rural East Iceland. Characteristically, this is an album very much shaped by the natural environment that Skelton was immersed in as this piece was gradually conjured into being. More specifically, Towards a Frontier draws its primary inspiration from the changing seasons as experienced from an Icelandic mountain range. While less instantly gratifying than some of Skelton's other recent works, this album has a masterfully paced slow-burning majesty and mesmerizing elemental power that gradually reveals itself with repeated, attentive listens. Notably, nature does not seem particularly benign here, but Skelton keeps the mood intriguingly ambiguous as the piece unfolds, hinting at the primal, cosmic horror of our insignificance while simultaneously evoking something akin to religious ecstasy.
The epic scope of Towards a Frontier unexpectedly took me some time to get fully acclimated to, as it seems to unfold at a glacial pace more akin to a geological time scale rather a human one.For example, it takes roughly two minutes before the slowly swelling and blurry drones finally cohere into form (in this case, the languorously see-sawing pulse of an endlessly repeating two-chord progression).If listened to casually, it initially feels like Skelton is on autopilot and is simply treading water with his melancholy string swells.If I pay closer attention, however, it become immediately apparent that there is considerably more happening, as the two chords gradually start to bleed into one another and the underlying thrum steadily darkens and grows more menacing.In fact, much of the brilliance of this piece lies in how imperceptibly Skelton changes the mood and amasses increasingly complex and dissonantly oscillating harmonies: the snowballing power builds so subtly that it is impossible to pinpoint the moment where Frontier stops feeling like business as usual and starts feeling transcendently heavy and mesmerizing.What was initially a distinct and constant pulse sneakily becomes something quite different altogether: a distended and slowly churning simmer.Even the crests of the initial chord progression begin to submerge at a certain point, leaving a tense and murky river of mingled drones that gradually births a bleakly elegiac melody of sorts.
That feat of production prestidigitation alone would be enough to make Frontier a compelling and distinctive addition to Skelton’s sprawling discography, but the piece unexpectedly breaks open into a whole new vista around the halfway point, as Skelton's shivering melodic swells begin to overlap and intertwine to cast a spell of quivering, epic melancholy.Soon afterwards, an even more dramatic transformation occurs and the contrast between the various textures intensifies: the droning backdrop takes on a harsh, almost icy tone while the strings become deeply groaning and immediate, like they stopped being a bleak abstraction and suddenly became an actual human somberly bowing a double-bass just a few feet away from me.That is the point where Towards a Frontier makes the leap into something truly magical, as the cold washes of sound begin to swirl together with moaning bass swells and a warm haze of flute-like tones. Once reaching such a lushly immersive heaven of rich textures, complex harmonies, and heavy pulses, Skelton wisely decided to stick around: this section is Frontier's big centerpiece and would be a wonderful place to linger indefinitely.Eventually, however, the piece moves on, revealing that Skelton improbably had yet one more trick remaining up his sleeve.I suspect this begins the "spring" portion of the seasonal voyage, as the piece takes on a somewhat brighter tone, albeit one disrupted by some surprisingly harsh and howling crescendos.
Curiously, there is also a pointillist motif of brass (or woodwind) whimpers and pulses, which takes the piece's final act into quite an unexpected place indeed.In fact, it sounds a lot like one of Philip Glass’s Errol Morris soundtracks (Fog of War?), albeit slowed waaaaay down and torn apart with viscerally grinding snarls (nature, unlike Philip Glass, is not mannered and meticulously ordered).It is different enough to not feel at all derivative, yet similar enough to feel like Skelton has repurposed the modern classical aesthetic into something more primal, physical, and raw.That crescendo is probably the most radical and striking passage in Towards a Frontier, as well as a fascinating convergence of some of Skeltons many guises.In fact, the entire piece feels like a seamless and unhurried trip through much of his recent evolution, touching on deep drones, vibrant bowed acoustic strings, heaving displays of immense elemental power, and soundtrack-like gradual shifts in mood and atmosphere.
If Towards a Frontier has a weakness, it is only that the first third seems deceptively uneventful as Skelton slowly and quietly sets the stage for the piece to blossom into epic and achingly beautiful full bloom.As a result, this album asks a bit more patience and sustained attention from listeners than much of Skelton's other work, but the long, slow build makes the sustained pay-off feel both well-earned and hugely satisfying–this album could have taken no other shape.To my ears, Towards the Frontier is easily one of the more essential releases in Skelton’s oft-stellar canon, as it is both a unique entry compositionally and a wonderfully substantial, powerful, and absorbing tour de force.This feels like the sort of album that an ascetic hermit would obsessively compose (or, more likely, channel) over a frantic, sleepless week after witnessing the face of God in the clouds (presumably dying from exhaustion/rapturous joy seconds after recording the final note).
After a bit of a lengthy hiatus, Jack Dangers has returned with quite a bombshell of a new Meat Beat album. Self-described as resembling "an MC Escher optical illusion that spirals around and around and never seems to end," Impossible Star feels like a deep and hallucinatory plunge into a dance club in a dread-filled, dystopian near-future. Everything I would expect from a new Meat Beat album is certainly present (vocoders, cool samples, infectious grooves, deep bass, vintage synths, etc.), yet Impossible Star feels like a large and unexpected leap forward. While Dangers has historically always been near the vanguard of fresh evolutions in dance and electronic music, this album is perversely backward-looking in a way, seamlessly synthesizing the best of MBM's previous directions into something fresh like a post-industrial magpie. As a result, Impossible Star does not feel like a definitive (and unavoidably ephemeral) representation of electronic music in 2018 so much as it feel like something much more ageless, prophetic, and deliciously warped.
The brooding and claustrophobic opening piece, "ONE," is not a particularly representative glimpse of what is to come stylistically, yet it is perfect for establishing the disorienting and unnerving mood of the album: eerie synths ripple, shimmer, and dissonantly blur together and a cold, indistinct female voice appears that sounds like a looped intercom message reverberating through an abandoned concrete edifice.It feels like reality itself is evaporating into a deeply alienating and lonely dream.The following "Bass Playa" does not dispel that feeling of inhumanity and isolation much, but the sickly and skittering jazz-inflected groove that kicks in at least signals that the album has begun in earnest.It is not until the next piece ("We Are Surrounded"), however, that it becomes clear that Dangers has some truly inspired new material to share.I hate to compare Dangers to anyone, but "Surrounded" unavoidably calls to mind the thrill of classic Aphex Twin, as it mingles a wonderfully erratic, jabbering, and squiggling synth motif with a propulsive groove and a queasily uncomfortable progression of blurred chords.It instantly became my favorite song on the album, as the sputtering derangement of the synth "melody" is wonderfully unsettling, unpredictable, and visceral.Eventually, the groove collapses into an outro that sounds like a confused and gibbering computer alone in an abandoned control room.That outro illustrates the evocative and unusual sequencing that pervades Impossible Star, as it is strewn with a handful of dazzling and elaborate set pieces separated by interludes of bleak atmosphere (or interrupted by distorted rogue transmissions).
Aside from being one of the album’s best pieces, "Surrounded" also marks the beginning of an extended hot streak that consumes roughly the entire middle section of the album, as what follows is a feast of wonderfully squirming and burbling synths; robotic voice commands; blearily surreal smears of chords; eclectic samples; and relentless forward motion. As much as I love some of the beats and hooks, however, the true brilliance of Impossible Star lies in Dangers' skill as a producer, as he seamlessly juxtaposes textures and motifs to weave something that is both bracingly physical and a bit of an unreal mindfuck.Hallucinatory and disorienting textures and motifs are a bit of an obsession with me, but this album hits a sickly, feverish and vaguely curdled tone that I rarely encounter.Also, that lingering sense of disquiet and wrongness is rarely the focal point, instead existing as an omnipresent background haze to the sharply realized and dynamic grooves and vocoder hooks that consume the foreground.It is a delicate balancing act and Dangers handles it masterfully.
Also, aside from the more nuanced and detailed touches, there are some wonderfully overt feats of visionary sound design to be found as well.Naturally, the vibrantly squelching and jabbering synth hook of "We Are Surrounded" is one such highlight, but there are plenty of others.I especially enjoyed the brutally grinding high-hats that hit during the crescendo of "Unique Boutique," as well as the relentlessly scraping, crunching heaviness of the beat in "Nereus Rov."Also of note is the album’s 15-minute centerpiece, "Lurker," which is a tour de force of something resembling bleary and drugged robot funk.It sounds like a grotesque parody of a motorik groove, like some sort of futurist Neu! pastiche playing at the wrong speed on a distressed tape as I lose consciousness and plow my car into a tree.On the other end of the spectrum lies another aberration in the form of "T.M.I.," a lazily bouncing and rolling "pop song" of sorts.Again, however, something is slightly off, like a phrase that has been translated and re-translated across several languages.Or like a song that has been covered so much that it has lost its connection to the original piece (in fact, it sounds like Wire tried to mimic the sultry and languorous pop of Sade…and then a precocious robot tried to mimic that).
Dangers has appropriately achieved something with Impossible Star that should seemingly not be possible: evoking a paranoid, technological nightmare that is also a great headphone album masquerading as dance music.There is a depth and complexity at play that is quite compelling, yet it does not interfere all that much with the forward momentum of the beats.At its core, Star feels like a very crisp, precise, and expert trip through the last several decades of beat-driven electronic music that is competing with intermittent swells of loud ambient music or sound art happening in a neighboring room.Rather than sounding chaotic or messy, however, it sounds artfully disorienting–like it is meant to be there, but is just out of phase or slightly out of tune.That is not Dangers’ only trick though, as even his more straightforward motifs often have an element of funhouse-like disorientation to them: bass notes linger too long, textures are strangely corroded, and melodies feel too chromatic or random (like a code that got garbled by a virus).And sometimes it feels like the acoustics of Dangers’ studio were designed by a deranged German Expressionist, as motifs sometimes snarl or swim together in unusual ways.As much as I enjoy such details and moments, the larger reward of Impossible Star is only revealed when it is contemplated as a whole, as Dangers has woven quite a rich and evocative world: amidst his technologic dystopia, there are blissful snatches of old film scores alluding to better times, as well is crackling short wave radio transmissions that hint at darker ones to come.As such, Impossible Star is more than a collection of strong new songs: this is Jack Dangers' Blade Runner (or possibly his Neuromancer).