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The witching season is upon us.
This podcast episode features all new music from Gwenifer Raymond, Zola Jesus, Plug, claire rousay and zander raymond, Al Cisneros, Kin Hana, and the newest Hallowe'en Special from The Legendary Pink Dots, plus older music from Al Chem, Eleanora, and Nurse With Wound.
Keith sent this picture of Manhattan from Long Island City (Queens), NY.
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This fascinating and ambitious boxed set is a star-studded celebration inspired by a trove of previously unpublished cut-up works by William S. Burroughs unearthed by Burroughs scholar Alex Wermer-Colan in 2015. The project’s other central figures are composer James Ilgenfritz, poet Anne Waldman, and Thurston Moore (albeit mostly in spoken word mode). Notably, this is Ilgenfritz’s second major work devoted to Burroughs, as he previously composed a video opera for The Ticket That Exploded back in 2011. While Ilgenfritz’s Anagram Ensemble returns again here, The Travel Agency Is On Fire is otherwise a VERY different animal than its predecessor, as it features guest contributions from a number of NYC avant-garde luminaries (Jim Thirlwell, Zeena Parkins, Elliott Sharp, etc.) as well as an entire disc in which many of those contributions are compellingly chopped up and recontextualized by Ilgenfritz. While Burroughs is ostensibly the star here (for the first two discs, at least), this collection’s best moments transcend the original objective entirely and feel like nothing less than an immersive and impressionist sound collage that drops listeners directly into the heart of NYC’s mid-20th century avant-garde golden age.
Like many radical and unconventional art concepts, the cut-up has its original roots in the Dadaist movement of the 1920s, as Tristan Tzara composed spontaneous poems at a rally from random words pulled out of a hat, then later published his cut-up instructions as “How to Make a Dadaist Poem.” Unsurprisingly, Tzara was a bit ahead of his time and the technique did not catch on until it was rediscovered by artist Brion Gysin in the 1950s when he accidentally cut through some newspapers with a razor blade. Fatefully, he introduced his friend Burroughs to the technique at Paris’s Beat Hotel and the idea gradually blossomed into something much larger, as the two soon expanded the technique to include audio recordings.
It may have taken a decade or so, but Liz Harris’s wonderful indie/jangle pop throwback trio have finally resurfaced with their follow-up to 2015’s The Original Faces. Notably, I had always figured that Helen was destined to be a one-off event, so their return is quite a pleasant surprise in general, but Linda’s Head is also a pleasant surprise in some stylistic ways as well. For one, the noisier and more raw shoegaze-inspired guitars of Helen’s debut have been largely replaced by punchy fuzz- and jangle-pop delights that recall the heyday of the great regional indie pop scenes in the Pacific Northwest, New Zealand, and Scotland. The even bigger surprise, however, is that Linda’s Head also features a handful of songs that feel like glimpses of an “alternate timeline” version of Grouper that veered a bit more towards hooks and warmth than hushed, nocturnal intimacy and shadowy atmospheres.
Harris and her bandmates come out of the gate in impressively hot fashion with two absolutely gorgeous and perfect pop gems in a row. In the all-too-brief “Faraway,” Scott Simmons’ melodic bass motif provides a simple and lovely backdrop to an absolutely swoon-worthy, sensuous, and bittersweet masterpiece of heartache and heavenly vocal harmonies. The following “Starline” is more of a driving, fuzzed-out rocker with strummed bass and power chords, but it unexpectedly contains a brief and poignant spoken oasis at its heart. Elsewhere, “endless Sky” is similarly rocking and fitfully calls to mind Jesus and Mary Chain’s blown-out repurposing of sunny ‘60s-style pop melodies, but Jed Bindeman nearly steals the show with his slippery and clattering drum heroics. Bindeman is similarly explosive on otherwise moodier, more languorous, and Grouper-esque “darkblue,” as his visceral frenzy of fills and crash cymbals gives everything a wonderfully raw and volcanic energy. The album’s first half is then wrapped up with an upbeat strummed acoustic number (“Dead shark”) that could pass for a classic lo-fi jangle pop hit if the vocals were not buried low in the mix and swathed in reverb.
I was quite a big fan of this Swiss pianist’s solo debut (2022’s Keemuun), which is rather fortuitous because this latest album is both the spiritual and literal descendent of Keemuun’s swirling and delirious prepared piano workouts. More specifically, Figuren’s source material comes from ten intimate studio performances of pieces from Keemuun that have now been unrecognizably transformed through “deconstructed melodic elements, isolated individual tones, and extracted resonances.” While some reworkings from that process apparently surfaced on Loher’s previous album (the more dissolved and hazy Hug of Gravity), they have since undergone yet another radical transformation, as Loher ran fragments of melody through a Revox B77 tape machine and “subtly altered their pitch before digitizing and reshaping them once again.” The result feels akin to a cool tape loop album, as repetition and distressed tape effects transform Loher’s melodies into a beautifully broken, haunted, intimate, and otherworldly soundworld of lingering dissonances.
I was recently struck by how Loher’s solo piano work loosely parallels William Basinski’s career, as Basinski has spent years weaving magic from a box of old tapes while Loher has now released three albums distilled from solo recordings made while his main project (KALI Trio) was on hiatus during the COVID pandemic. The similarities do not end there, however, as Figuren also captures Loher at his most minimal, as these eight pieces are all composed of simple melodic fragments that resemble two or more tape loops that are sufficiently out of phase with one another that gradual and subtle transformations occur. Unlike Loher’s considerably more intense main project, however, these piano miniatures are never headed towards any sort of explosive crescendo or big payoff and instead seem to linger in a state of hypnotic suspended animation (a situation that I am perfectly ok with). In fact, Morton Feldman is probably the closest reference point, as Loher excels at transforming seemingly disjointed and pointillist clusters of notes into sublime reveries of uneasy dissonances and lingering decays.
The pipe organ has undergone quite a renaissance in recent years, as the instrument’s uniquely sonorous, room-filling sound understandably holds a lot of allure for many contemporary drone artists. However, French composer Maxime Denuc is something of an intriguing outlier in that regard. On this, his first release for Caterina Barbieri’s light-years imprint, Denuc wields a “hand-built Max/MSP sequencer” to precisely control the instrument via MIDI and unleash “dense clouds of impossible-to-play notes that ricochet backwards and forwards through history.” Notably, that last bit is a reference to Denuc’s ambitious efforts to imagine “a point of creative symbiosis between the Catholic church and the ecstatic dancefloors of the early '90s.” While blurring baroque music and progressive trance into a single unified vision is an admittedly cool trick, doing it in an entirely beatless way undeniably limits the idea’s potential a bit. Consequently, some of the strongest pieces on Club Imperial tend to be the less conceptually radical ones that nod to the more ambient/kosmische side of krautrock visionaries like Popol Vuh.
The opening “Hallucinogen” makes for quite a killer statement of intent, as Denuc kicks off the album with a rapid and flutelike arpeggio Ouroboros that gradually expands with celestial chords and deep bass notes to impressively delirious effect. While it is undeniably a clear album highlight, it is also one of the most perfect iterations of a template that recurs throughout the album, so the other highlights tend to be the pieces that either depart from that formula or add some kind of inspired twist to it. In “Atlantis,” for example, Denuc slows his lush and anthemic trance-inspired magic into a bleary ambient piece that slowly snowballs in intensity until it lands somewhere between an organ mass and the infinitely looping bliss of a great Celer piece. Elsewhere, “La Paloma” is the album’s finest variation on its rich central theme, as Denuc revisits the rapidly fluttering arpeggios of “Hallucinogen” with a bit more instability and the mid-song surprise of a vibrantly shimmering and smeary new layer.
I believe this is Andrew Chalk’s first release for Cincinnati's Students of Decay, which is a bit surprising given that the artist and the label have long shared a close stylistic sensibility. Fittingly, this auspicious occasion is celebrated with something of an unusual release in Chalk terms, as Mystical Obscurant is billed as “a rare opportunity to encounter the expansive character” of his sprawling oeuvre “in miniature.” Given how understated Chalk’s vision tends to be, however, that feature will likely be imperceptible to all but the most devoted heads. To be fair, there are certainly pieces here that recall various eras from Chalk’s four decades as one of ambient music’s most sublime and iconoclastic composers (“sacred guitar minimalism,” “smudged keys,” “environmental sound and loop-based constructions,“ etc.), yet the unifying theme has always been an unwavering devotion to quiet, simple beauty and that remains true again here.
There is a reason that Chalk himself always has little to say about each new release, as his career feels like an obsessive lifelong attempt to convey something profound and ineffable. Consequently, the only truly salient information anyone needs about Mystical Obscurant is that it is yet another fine Andew Chalk album, as he has quietly carved out a niche that is uniquely his own and almost every fresh dispatch from that niche is a tiny glimpse of heaven for the converted. For me, the piece that best captures the singular beauty of Chalk’s exquisite craftsmanship is probably “Against the Tide,” which is little more than a gently whistling, murmuring, and shimmering haze, yet it perfectly captures the magic of shifting patterns of light passing through gently swaying blinds on a sleepy summer day. That said, the opening “The Seed of Sorrow” is a sublime bit of sorcery as well, as Chalk’s palette is reduced to just a slow-motion melody of lazily streaking notes with long decays that form ephemeral harmonies with the dying embers of the previous notes.
This latest statement from this shapeshifting Oslo producer is quite a radically deconstructed foray into “decelerated, spectral dub.” The album borrows its title from Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s elusive, haunting, and uncategorizable 2021 film of the same name, yet Villain was also greatly inspired by Pauline Oliveros’s writings on “internally recalled sounds inaudible to others.” As befits an album inspired by said iconic deep listening visionary, Memoria is a deeply immersive and mesmerizing bombshell that absolutely requires headphones (or at least a building-shaking soundsystem) to reveal the full scope of its beautifully nuanced, vividly realized, spatially rich, and legitimately otherworldly vision. It is also fitting that Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s “sound as memory” rumination features a bit of a science fiction twist, as pieces like “Entre Nosotros” may very well be the most boldly futuristic iteration of dub that anyone will release this year.
After a brief yet gorgeous intro (“Labour of Imagination”) of deep exhalation-like chords and sensuous flutes that feel like a descent into a hallucinatory Peruvian rainforest, Villain gets right to the serious business of blowing minds with the aforementioned “Entre Nosotros.” While it is ostensibly just slow-motion dub techno with a bit of industrial hum, the magic lies in the sound design, as the groove feels unsettlingly viscous and a bit like the churning and throbbing of a vast subterranean machine. More glibly put, I would describe it as the seismic and gelatinous cosmic horror dance party of the year, but a ghostly, murky, and overlapping piano concerto gradually drifts into the piece as well and floats throughout space like Keith Jarrett transmitting phantom improvisations from the afterlife (which would be quite a neat trick, given that he is still alive). The following title piece is something of a sound design gem as well, as a faint sheen of ambient music drifts over a churning and shapeshifting landscape of industrial throbs, buzzes, and hums. Hell, I think there might also be the ghost of a buried rave anthem in there as well.
This latest full-length from Alex Cobb (the man behind the Students of Decay and Soda Gong labels) is a fascinating departure from his usual fare, as it was inspired by a recent stay at a Zen Buddhist meditation retreat. The unusual title alludes to a short poem that Cobb wrote as “an attempt to transcribe the experience of intensive zazen through a simple image of a chair tied to a faucet by a length of rope.” In musical terms, the experience led him to work exclusively with a Serge Modular synth and “an almost entirely dry signal path, interrupted only by small, intentionally deployed instances of reverb.” In essence, the Serge “invites direct engagement with the slippery materiality of electricity itself,” which seems to have been an ideal match for Cobb’s newly heightened powers of patience, restraint, and control. To my ears, this is quite possibly his finest album to date, as its two longform pieces are gently psychotropic deep drone nirvana.
The album is divided into two sidelong pieces that are each composed of two parts. In the brief opener “The Chair I,” a harmonium-like drone languorously oscillates and subtly expands beneath subtly spacey streaks of slow-motion melody. While it is the most conventionally “ambient” piece on the album, it does feature a few more nuanced elements that foreshadow the pleasures to come, as oscillations quietly speed up and slow down and a bleary cloud of quivering overtones gradually forms and hovers above everything. In the lengthier “The Chair II,” a deeper, hollower drone conjures both a similarly bleary oscillating haze and a gently pulsing and subtly shifting rhythm.
This sixth album from English slow-motion guitar magician Dean McPhee is something of a major creative leap forward, as he has newly expanded his arsenal of gear to now include a “powerful 18-inch subwoofer” and a wooden snare percussion pedal. While such a modest expansion would likely be a complete non-event for most artists, it is a massive development for McPhee, as his overdub-free real-time minimalism is now enhanced with an impressively solid approximation of a Jamaican dub-style rhythm section. In short, Dean McPhee is now a proper one-man band. Unsurprisingly, that enhanced palette unlocks a whole new world of rhythmic and dynamic possibilities that McPhee puts to especially inspired use in the titular side-long closing epic yet this whole release is remarkably strong, as it feels like a great single backed with a fine pair of languorously psychedelic zone-outs.
The opening “Indica Fields” captures McPhee at his most lean and focused, as he manages to condense all of his usual epic tropes into a mere 5 minutes of simmering slow-motion folk/desert blues. Aside from the winding and circular melodic hook at its heart, “Indica Fields” is most notable for the echoing decay of the wooden snare and its looping bass line, which is the first of the album’s many nods to McPhee’s dub inspirations. For me, however, the crucial difference between a great Dean McPhee piece and a merely good Dean McPhee piece is whether or not I am blindsided by some kind of showstopping transition or dazzling effects pedal showcase. As it turns out, “Indica Fields” boasts two such passages, as one solo feels like a skyful of streaking comets, while another beautifully segues from backwards melodies to shimmering washes of rippling arpeggios.
This collaboration between four Michigan-based underground music lifers is something of a dream supergroup for me, as it brings together my favorite ambient/space rock duo with one of my favorite songwriters (Fred Thomas of Saturday Looks Good To Me). Sadly, Fred is off the clock as a songwriter for this one, but the consolation prize is that this is my first exposure to his Optigan Conservatory bandmate Frank Rotondo, who is the leader of the long-running Detroit-area free music ensemble Laughing Gas. The result of this long-gestating union of old friends is a series of drone-based improvisations that were later fleshed out and enhanced with overdubs and edits. Stylistically, it lands quite close to the twinkling and shimmering guitar bliss of classic Windy & Carl (which is perfectly fine by me), but there are also some fresh and compelling innovations that leave me hoping that this album is the beginning of something more rather than just a mere one-off.
The opening “Conductor” makes for a representative if teasingly brief introduction to the pleasures that follow, as a slowly flanging synth drone is gradually fleshed out with sustained harmonium tones and a pleasantly disjointed and disorienting calliope-like motif. That last bit is the part that most sets this quartet apart from most other purveyors of spacy psychedelic drones, but there are also some cool tingling frequencies that are more felt than heard.
This latest full-length from the Stockholm-based Lewis is billed as a “a deceptive recording with veiled melodies and clandestine bangers,” which feels more or less apt to me. Stylistically, Opening feels more like an eclectic grab bag of commissions, sketches, and cool ideas than it does a focused and fully formed statement like Ingrid or Thankful, but her collaborative albums are frequently collections of similarly short, spontaneous-sounding pieces and those tend to be every bit as rewarding as her more composed longform work and that remains true here as well. Aside from its comparative brevity and eclecticism, Opening’s other defining trait seems to be a fondness from playfully manipulating and looping orchestral samples, which makes it one of her more nakedly melodic and less noise-gnawed releases (though there are still plenty of beautifully frayed and blown-out textures to be found among these brief and sublime vignettes).
The opening “Ta Min Hand” is the first and the best of the album’s many clandestine bangers, as it quickly evolves from the sounds of hissing rain and dripping subterranean ambiance into a downright rapturous ascending melody of sensuously smeared and swooping sax with fitfully sharp and distorted edges. Eventually, instability triumphs and the melody breaks free of its obsessively looping structure to leave behind a jazzy sax solo in a blown-out and echoing miasma of noise.
Billed as this Los Angeles-based composer’s “most ambitious work to date,” this overwhelming triple LP collection brings together five solo pipe organ compositions, a choral suite, a collection of “interludes” for microtonal ensembles, and a new longform chamber piece. Notably, Davachi recently completed a doctoral study in timbre, phenomenology, and critical organology and The Will of Tongues very clearly feels like the fruit of all those years of research, which is another way of saying “this is extremely challenging music.” The emphasis is primarily upon “compositional concepts and methods that have preoccupied Davachi over the past decade” and that list covers “iteration, tuning theory, textural and timbral variation, extended duration, vertical harmony, intervallic affect, and canonic structure.” In short, this is one for the deepest of deep listeners, as Davachi brought in a sprawling and eclectic cast of guests ranging from avant-garde luminaries like Eyvind Kang to a microtonal brass ensemble to a Renaissance flute consort for a durational yet time-dissolving deep dive into the minutiae of timbre and harmony.
In one of my favorite sketches from Tom Scharpling’s The Best Show (“The Music Scholar”), the endlessly hilarious Jon Wurster calls in pretending to be a jaded and relentlessly namedropping record store owner who proceeds to dismiss absolutely every good band ever. After casually trashing everyone from The Beatles to Big Star, he gradually reveals that his taste has become so sophisticated that he can now only listen to field recordings of complete silence recorded by one specific artist.
