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 a follow-up to 2015's debut EP, the duo of multimedia artists Nicol Eltzroth Rosendorf and Jonathan Lukens expand on the ambiguity and sparseness on Two, while still showing marked development and innovation in their work. With their sonic palates expanded and a determined focus, the final product is an album that conveys a significant amount within its somewhat minimalistic framework.
With nine pieces spread over two sides of a cassette, there is a clear sense of two distinct suites of music, joined together but with each half developing and evolving on its own as a distinct organism.The slow, bleak opening of "Wolf Tone" sets the stage as sparse yet deliberate.Bleak melodies are perceptible, but low in the mix, to give a nicely haunting sense of space. This transitions into "Duet," which sees the duo adding an intentionally erratic kick drum into the already complex layered structure.The layers swell and retreat, providing a strong contrast to the more strident rhythms that stab through.
The overt beats retreat on "Circularity of Action," but the piece comes together as a science fiction tinged composition, with hollow machinery noises reverberating throughout a cold, clinically clean space.The piece does not move as much as drift on its own inertia, and although the piece is extremely rich and complex, there is an unabashed frigidity to the music.The closer of side one, "Null," is a brief respite that ends the first half very well.Instead of the icy space that preceded it, it is more of a warm, pleasant cloud of sounds that slowly fill the space and concludes the first half on a calm note.
On the other half, Rosendorf and Lukens start off big with "Tremendum."Multiple passages of dissonance and melody intersect, propelled by a rumbling low end and expansive mid range of sound.The sound is a bit of everything, but never discordant or chaotic in nature.Instead it is a strong balance of noise and tone, and covers the Scratched Glass school of sound perfectly.Comparatively, "Manifest" is a bit more understated, and has a pleasant murk to it, with the two weaving in a nice passage of feedback-like chaos to contrast the calmer moments.
"Perverse Instantiation" features a return to rhythm, though much less conventional than heard on "Duet."Instead the work is more an examination of textures, with a continual shift between the more musical facets of the band’s sound, and their occasionally abrasive approaches.This transitions into "Gold," although at this point there is a greater sense of space and expanse.The harsher elements build slowly simmering and eventually become the primary focus.The second half of Two is tied up nicely on "Normative", a slowly lurching piece that pulls the entire tape together handily.
Scratched Glass’ debut was a good bit of ambiguous sound and composition, but Two feels like a more fully realized work.The strongest elements of the first tape are still here: a blending of dichotomous sounds, but the whole is stronger this time around.While I would have enjoyed hearing Rosendorf and Lukens flirt with rhythms a bit more as they did on "Duet," the nuanced and constantly evolving sound on this tape is extremely effective in its own right.
This is kind of a companion piece to 2015's absolutely sublime A Light At The Edge of The World, embracing a similarly fragile and dreamy mood, but taking a very different structural approach:  while its processor took the shape of an extended and gorgeously floating stasis, Everyone Goes Home When The Sun Sets consists of nearly twenty discrete and ephemeral miniatures.  That is not entirely new territory for Chalk, as that approach previously reached its apotheosis with 2012’s fine Forty-Nine Views In Rhapsodies' Wave Serene, but it is still a curious step away from his strengths and his longform comfort zone.  As such, Everyone Goes Home is not quite as immersive and hypnotic as Edge Of The World, but it is still a fairly unique release within Chalk's canon, as its gently hallucinatory drift of glimmering vignettes offers its share of nuanced and distinctively Chalk-ian pleasures.
The overarching theme throughout Everyone Goes Home is one of elegant simplicity and fragility, as Chalk crafts most of these pieces from little more than rippling, reverb-soaked piano reveries or cascading and pointillist koto motifs.  With few exceptions, Chalk seems quite intent on evoking something quite vaporous and dream-like, eschewing strong melodies and distinct edges in favor of impressionist and slow-motion tumbles of arpeggios.  That is merely the foundation, however, as pieces like "Minsaori" seem far more like production experiments than fully formed compositions, as the delicately plinking lattice of notes takes on a subtly rich life of quietly squelching and whooshing textures.  Both of those sides of Chalk's artistry are clearly working towards a common cause, however, as his endgame seems to be the creation of a woozily pretty sort of soft-focus unreality, like the musical equivalent of a rippling sun-dappled pond or a snowfall experienced in extreme slow-motion with crystalline clarity.  Granted, Andrew Chalk has essentially made an entire career out of slowing down time and blurring reality, but this album takes that approach to a greater extreme than usual, offering up a gently flickering fantasia of glistening and self-contained microcosmic soundworlds.  There are certainly elements of Chalk's characteristic drone impulses to be found, but the far more prevalent theme is that of space between notes, inviting me to focus my attention upon the timbre and texture of each individual note that slowly rolls across Chalk’s miniature sound-portrait.
Naturally, such an aesthetic is not an attention-grabbing one, so Everyone Goes Home When The Sun Sets is predominantly for the already converted–a certain element of trust is required to give these shimmering compositional droplets the necessary attention to unlock their small but exquisite pleasures.  Occasionally, however, Chalk allows himself three or four minutes to stretch out into something a bit more substantial.  My favorite of the pieces in that vein is "Silk String Quintet," which beautifully combines a blurred and see-sawing sway with glittering, slow-motion washes of synthesizer chords.  Not many other pieces offer much in the way of an actual pulse though, as the album's other highlights rely upon alternate tactics to stand out.  The gorgeous and too-brief "San Baladino," for example, bolsters its shimmering and rippling backdrop with a lazily bittersweet synthesizer melody.  Synthesizers appear again in "Misty Island," serving as a lush and emotive backdrop of organ-like chords to Chalk's languorous trickle of bleary piano tones.  Yet another highlight is "Spiritual Lanterns," which weaves a fragile and gently tumbling koto melody that is shadowed and enhanced by a lovely nimbus of understated and watery harmonies.  The tenderly melancholy closer "Solstice" is yet another high point, as Chalk's unhurried and quietly moving koto meditation cuts through a hissing, quavering haze of wah-wah sizzle.  A similar tactic is employed with "Platform Under The Stars," albeit with glistening electric piano substituted for koto.  The subtle wah-wah use is a nice addition to Chalk's palette, as his combined arsenal of effects enables his tender snatches of melody to seemingly hang in the air as a living, breathing, and squelching haze.
That said, I was initially a bit underwhelmed by the album, partly because I had loved A Light At The Edge Of The World and was hoping for more of the same.  This is not an easy album to fall in love with even without the hurdle of unreasonable expectations though, as it kind of feels like a slightly warped Andrew Chalk record playing as I drift off to sleep and flicker in and out of consciousness.  That is not inherently a bad thing, but it does not offer any solid ground to grasp onto: motifs rarely stick around longer than a few minutes, there are fragmented suggestions of melodies rather than actual melodies, everything feels wobbly and out-of-focus, the pieces all feel like similar variations upon a very constrained theme, and there is not any readily apparent arc unfolding as the album progresses.  It ultimately grew on me quite a bit though, which I suppose makes this album the proverbial "slow-burner."  Granted, it will probably never be among my favorite Andrew Chalk albums, but it is a good one and I am glad that it exists: there are already plenty of excellent albums exploring other facets of Chalk's vision, so an experiment like this is a welcome departure from the expected.  There is a lot of fragmented and precariously quivering beauty to be found here–it just takes a bit more time and effort than usual to get acclimated to the unusual pacing and flow of these vignettes and sketches.  Actually, "fragments" might be a far better term, as this album does not sound like a collection of half-finished ideas so much as it resembles a complete and coherent composition that has been purposely shattered.  That may also be the perfect simile for Chalk's aesthetic here: if a great Andrew Chalk album is like a beautiful and mysterious photograph that I can get lost in, Everyone Goes Home is like smashing the frame and studying the subtle refractions of light as the shards rain down and time slows to a complete stop.
Strut present the first official reissue of a landmark album in the field of African music, Mulatu Astatke's Mulatu Of Ethiopia from 1972. Recorded in New York, the album arrived at a time when Astatke had begun to master the delicate fusion of styles needed to create Ethio jazz. "I left the UK for America and studied at Berklee College in Boston. I learnt the technical aspects of jazz and gained a beautiful understanding of many different types of music. That's where I got my tools. Berklee really shook me up."
Journeying regularly to the Big Apple to play and watch live shows at the Cheetah, the Palladium and the Village Gate, Astatke met producer Gil Snapper on the circuit. "Gil was a nice and very interesting guy. He produced music and worked with all kinds of musicians." The meeting would lead to a series of albums on Snapper's Worthy label. The first, Afro Latin Soul, documented Astatke's new-found directions. "Mulatu has created a new sound," enthused Snapper on the album jacket. "He has taken the ancient five-tone scales of Asia and Africa and woven them into something unique and exciting; a mixture of three cultures, Ethiopian, Puerto Rican and American."
A second volume of Afro Latin Soul followed before Astatke began to hone his sound further, infusing funk and Azmari "chik-chikka" rhythms into the mix. Returning to a downtown Manhattan studio with Snapper and working with some of the city’s top young jazz and latin session players, Mulatu Of Ethiopia began to take shape. "We rehearsed for 3-4 weeks," remembers Astatke. "It took them a while to get the right feeling in the music."
The resultant album represented the first fully formed document of Astatke's trademark Ethio-jazz sound. It features "Kulunmanqueleshi," "Dewel," and "Kasalefku-Hulu," tracks that Mulatu would return to regularly on singles and in live shows, the Ethio-Latin workout "Chifara," and the self-titled groover "Mulatu" ("I wanted to make a track for…. myself!").
This definitive reissue of the album comes in a limited edition 3LP 6-panel gatefold set featuring the stereo album master, a pre-mix mono master and a selection of out-takes from the sessions, giving the listener rare access to the DNA of the studio process. Also available are standard 1CD and 1LP formats. All formats feature a new interview with Mulatu Astatke and rare photos.
IN THE SUMMER OF 2016 BEN FROST LANDED IN CHICAGO TO WORK WITH STEVE ALBINI. OVER TWO WEEKS - VAST SYSTEMS; UNSTABLE, OVERLOADED, AND ON THE VERGE OF COLLAPSE - WERE FED INTO AN ARRAY OF AMPLIFIERS INSIDE A CAVERNOUS STUDIO. SHAPES WERE FORMED, SPEAKERS WERE TORN. BEHIND THE GLASS ALBINI COMMITTED LIVE PERFORMANCES TO TAPE; SLASHING AT THEM INTERMITTENTLY WITH A RAZORBLADE. MORE THAN 2 HOURS OF MUSIC WAS RECORDED.
THE THRESHOLD OF FAITH EP IS THE FIRST RELEASE OF MUSIC FROM THOSE SESSIONS.
"Ian shared this live performance with me in January of 2017, while I was living in London for work. I fell asleep countless times whilst listening to this, day and night. After some arm twisting Ian agreed to let me publish it. He had not planned on releasing it officially.
Durbē embodies the most elegant and meditative aspects of Ian's music. Live, Ian's music is able to stretch and fold and soak. These long-form takes show how purely structure and melody rotate within him. In the fall of 2016, Ian performed these recordings in a 14th-century Latvian church. This environment kissed Ian's cheek that evening, and he sang in top form, ascending into the rafters."
Floating on a plume of pure shoegaze, Lignin Poise conjures nature, specifically the waters and forests of the Cascadia bioregion, as ecstatic reverie. It is a work of deliberate renewal in a time of global tumult. A golden oasis of deep memory open to all seekers; hallucinogenic, like stumbling into one of the verdant, highly-oxygenated upper canyons of the Columbia River Gorge on a late spring morning, soaking in the warm humidity and cool mist.
After the sold-out cassette release of Stanza / Stanza II on Beacon Sound/Baro in 2015, and last year's The Benoit Pioulard Listening Matter on Kranky, Seattle's Thomas Meluch returns with a brand new Benoit Pioulard album of ambient bliss.
If “mission creep” refers to a long-haul fatigue cited with increasingly regularity in the present political moment, David Grubbs imagines “creep mission” to be a talismanic utterance in the effort to turn this ship around.
Creep Mission is an album of instrumental compositions with Grubbs’s effortlessly recombinant electric guitar at its core, and its m.o. is to go both deep and wide. The album goes deep in the sense that the guitar becomes the relentless, meditative focus of these songs without words, and it goes wide in that these pieces utilize a discontinuous set of arrangements that make the most out of an extraordinary group of musicians convened for the mission at hand.
Drummer and most simpatico sparring partner Eli Keszler picks up where his brilliant contributions to Grubbs’s 2016 Prismrose left off; trumpeter Nate Wooley defies you to identify his range of sounds as coming from a single player; and Jan St. Werner (Mouse on Mars, Lithops) can hardly contain his joy in transforming the proceedings into electro-prismatic splinters. For his part, Grubbs’s guitar playing has never before so confidently mangled commonsensical distinctions between composed and improvised music.
The album’s opener, “Slylight,” wends its way through a sequence of instrumental combinations in a manner redolent of Gastr del Sol’s Camoufleur. Before the album has concluded with the melancholy country raga of “The C in Certain,” waystations between have assumed the character of sludge-rock power trio (“Creep Mission,” “Return of the Creep”), pointillistic electroacoustic improv (“Jeremiadaic”), and bejeweled nylon-string guitar miniatures (“The Bonapartes of Baltimore,” “Jack Dracula in a Bar”).
David Grubbs’s solo albums often have a “the band has left the building” quality of dramatic left turns in the final act; on Creep Mission, peripatetic playing is basic strategy.
Related Blue Chopsticks titles:
BC2 David Grubbs & Mats Gustafsson, Apertura
BC5 David Grubbs, The Coxcomb / Avocado Orange
BC9 David Grubbs, Act Five, Scene One
BC11 David Grubbs & Mats Gustafsson, Off-Road
BC17 David Grubbs & Susan Howe, Souls of the Labadie Tract
BC20 David Grubbs, Hybrid Songbox.4
BC21 Belfi / Grubbs / Pilia, Onrushing Cloud
BC22 Susan Howe & David Grubbs, Frolic Architecture
BC23 Wingdale Community Singers, Night, Sleep, Death
BC24 David Grubbs, Borough of Broken Umbrellas
BC25 Belfi / Grubbs / Pilia, Dust & Mirrors
BC27 Susan Howe & David Grubbs, WOODSLIPPERCOUNTERCLATTER
I have always viewed Psychic TV with a mixture of fascination and annoyance, as the project managed to assemble some of the most talented and idiosyncratic artists in underground music, but were far too erratic, scattershot, and over-prolific to ever turn their genuine flashes of brilliance into a great career.  That said, the founding duo of Genesis P-Orridge and Alternative TV's Alex Fergusson definitely started off strong and these two reissues roughly bookend that golden age.  Pagan Day, which first surfaced as an extremely limited release in 1984 (it was released December 24 and deleted on Christmas), is a collection of early 4-track sketches, several of which were later released in different form. The strange and uneven Allegory and Self from 1998, on the other hand, was perversely the band's pop breakthrough, featuring the half-annoying/half-subversive underground hit "Godstar" and whole lot that could never be chart-worthy.  Admittedly, there are a few moments of magic amidst that stylistic jumble, but the more polished ensemble work unexpectedly feels a bit less substantial than Pagan Day's rough-hewn creative outpouring (for good reason).
Psychic TV is a band that embodies quite an impressive array of curious paradoxes and surprises, but one of the more amusing ones is how much this incarnation seemed to be united by a genuine love of '60s pop.  Nowhere is this more apparent than on Pagan Day's surprise highlight, a gorgeous and sincere cover of The Rolling Stones' "As Tears Go By" with a very strange history.  For one, it is deceptively entitled "Farewell" and was first listed as a bonus track on the 1986 reissue, but...it was not actually on that album.  Instead, it turned up roughly a decade later on the Cleopatra reissue.  Also, it clearly features a number of people other than Fergusson and P-Orridge, but none are credited.  In any case, it is a perfect mix of lovely vocal harmonies, lush organ melodies, and an endearingly kitschy and ramshackle-sounding drum machine groove.  The less commercial side of the '60s also appears in the form of a credited and straightforward acoustic cover of Pearls Before Swine's "Translucent Carriages."  Later, "Baby’s Gone Away" sounds like a demo that could have been left on the cutting room floor from The Velvet Underground and Nico.  Yet another endearing and unexpected quirk of this era is how some of the best pieces are so simple and conventionally beautiful (a far cry from Throbbing Gristle).  My favorite song in that vein is "The Orchids" from Dreams Less Sweet, a song that appears here in embryonic form as "Cold Steel."  Sadly, "Cold Steel" is a bit too hurried and distracted-sounding to quite capture the beauty of its later incarnation (which was confusingly recorded later but released earlier).
That wide-eyed sincerity also arguably surfaces in the melancholy organ ballad "We Kiss," but the best songs that are not Rolling Stones covers tend to be the stranger and more experimental moments.  The lo-fi and exotic-sounding opener "Cadaques" is an appealing mix of propulsive disco grooves, Spanish-sounding surf guitar, and eerie minor key synths.  Later, the duo attempt similar fare with the dreamier "Alice," embellishing a pleasant and sunny synth melody with an insistent snare rhythm and amusingly intrusive "funky" bass playing.  It is quite a wonderfully charming and faintly absurd piece.  I like it.  The same is true of the ridiculous and driving "L.A.," which sounds like someone trying to clumsily compose a swaggering disco anthem on a cheap Farfisa in their bedroom.  Again: fine by me.  More legitimately great, however, is the stellar closer "New Sexuality," which sounds like a lost late-period Gristle classic, blending a hooky disco/synth pop groove with languorous deadpan vocals that do not quite conceal a hint of menace.  Unlike "Cold Steel," "New Sexuality" does not seem to have been reincarnated elsewhere, which is strange given that it was apparently a live staple.  I guess it did not need to be revisited, as the unpolished version here would be quite hard to top.  Characteristically, the rest of Pagan Day is consumed by jams, filler, and baffling missteps ("Opium" is a meandering and wrong-headed stab at the blues), but the messy charm, charisma, fun, and enthusiasm here handily outweigh the weaker moments (and a pair of legitimately great songs certainly does not hurt either).
As is amusingly apparent from the cover art of Allegory, Psychic TV's other big fascination from this period (besides the '60s) is the occult–the cover stars are Brian Jones and Austin Osmond Spare.  Those two fascinations make for strange bedfellows, especially when combined with the band's naked embrace of pop music here.  Notably, this was to be the last album involving Alex Fergusson, as P-Orridge became increasingly drawn towards electronic dance music and these sessions were plagued with larger, unrelated problems that fractured their union.  As such, Allegory and Self represents the swansong of an era, albeit quite an uneven one that seems to indicate that the group was already broken and lean on solid new material.  For one, two of Pagan Day's songs (not the best ones) are reprised in more polished and fleshed-out form ("We Kiss" and "Baby’s Gone Away") and one song is largely included for comic purposes (a piece sung by Genesis's daughter Caresse).  That said, "Caresse Song" does have kind of an outsider carnival-esque brilliance to it, marrying a stumbling one-finger calliope-esque organ to amusingly tuneless ramblings like "don't do what you want, do what I want cuz it’s not your house–it's my house."  The band seems to have a lot of trouble sticking to a direction even when they are not handing over the controls to a child though, as Allegory's remaining eight songs erratically veer from straightforward disco to '60s pop to polished electronic pop to snarling and noisy jams.  Some of those songs are quite good, but just as many feel very much half-baked.  It is fascinating that a band that set out to release 23 live albums in two years could have such a difficult time assembling a solid batch of songs for a third studio album: Allegory sounds like the work of three or four different bands, only one of which seems particularly focused on songwriting.
Obviously, no discussion of this album is complete without bringing up the Brian Jones-worship of "Godstar," but I am not overly fond of it myself.  It is certainly an interesting piece of music though, positing Jones as a brilliant martyr ("a lamb going to the slaughter") who was betrayed by his friends.  I like that it brazenly appropriates a Stones riff and hides an acidic commentary in very innocuous-sounding pop, but it still sounds like innocuous pop.  Much more compelling is the following "Just Like Arcadia," which is similarly upbeat and catchy, but features a bittersweetly beautiful chorus and some great vocal harmonies.  That penchant for strong vocal harmonies reappears in one of the other highlights, "Being Lost," which essentially sounds like a darkly beautiful Beach Boys cover (if they had organs, banjos, and a fascination with tarot cards). Elsewhere, both "She Was Surprised" and "Ballet Disco" sound like fairly straightforward stabs at instrumental disco, though the latter makes playfully exuberant use of stuttering samples, unusual percussion, and slap-and-pop bass riffage (presumably from Sharon "Mouse" Beaumont).  The rest of the album is considerably darker, messier, and quite spontaneous-sounding.  For example, "Thee Dweller" just sounds like a murky jam with jabbering vocals and werewolf howls and goes a long way towards explaining the many guests involved in this album (it would be very easy to hand a dozen people instruments and ask them to play (or howl) along).  Wolves and snarling, jabbering vocals are also a prominent component of the more formless "Southern Comfort," a piece that is not a far cry from a Halloween sound effects CD.  Much better (and less feral) is the howling and clattering "Starlit Mire," which feels like a darkly simmering slab of early post-punk (it borrows its name from a book illustrated by Spare, incidentally, ensuring maximum occultist cred).  Bizarrely, both "Starlit Mire" and "Thee Dweller" feel (and sound) live, which is a curious choice given the incredibly polished production of some other songs.
While it is far from the album’s best song, "Starlit Mire" goes a long way towards explaining Psychic TV's (anti-) cult following in the form of Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, as Genesis sounds like a wild-eyed shaman imparting dark wisdom over a rapturously free-sounding cacophony.  I can certainly see the appeal of that, but I am much more a fan of good songs than I am of new messiahs, which means that Allegory's appeal for me lies primarily in the classic "Just Like Arcadia."  The liner notes for the Cleopatra reissue are quite helpful in elucidating exactly what went right and what went very wrong with this album: it was planned to be Psychic TV's masterpiece, as Genesis had a strong concept, a sympathetic producer (Ken Thomas), a vocal harmony wizard (Mickey Groome), and a #1 hit single on the UK indie charts all in place…until some drama with their manager left the band in financial ruin and unable to finish the album.  There are a handful of songs here that seem like they were meant for that magnum opus and completed during that initial surge of optimism, but the band's ill-timed flurry of hardships led to the departure of both Thomas and Fergusson, with the resultant and hobbled final product padded with demo tapes that Genesis was eventually able to locate in some boxes somewhere.  Consequently, this album represents the death rattle of Psychic TV’s first phase rather than its triumphant culmination, but it is not without a smattering of exquisite pleasures.
French artist Colleen is fearless in her willingness to explore new sounds and new ways of creating music as a solo performer. On her new album A Flame My Love, A Frequency she introduces the most drastic change to her music since she began singing on her fourth album. A chance encounter with a Critter and Guitari synthesizer at King Britt’s Philadelphia studio on the Captain Of None album tour cracked the compositional model wide open. Colleen bought a Critter and Guitari Pocket Piano with the aim to use it through a newly-acquired Moog filter pedal to create new and interesting rhythms to accompany her voice and viola da gamba. But it turned out the sounds of this viola and rhythm combination was not what she was looking for, so in typical Colleen fashion, she set the viola da gamba aside altogether and picked up an additional Critter and Guitari synth, the Septavox, dug out her her trusted Moog delay and dove right in.
Words used to describe her muse Arthur Russell are equally applicable to Colleen (multi-instrumentalist Cécile Schott). Schott's compositions can be in turn pop or experimental, vocal or instrumental, and acoustic or electronic. She has drawn on baroque sounds of a classical instrument using the most modern pedals and looping techniques. Shape shifting as she does, the pieces are always distinctly her strong and utterly unique musical voice. A constant across Colleen's albums are delicate extended melodies, minutely detailed soundscapes, and explorative unbounded compositions. Colleen's work is a direct result of her core belief that in order to keep growing as an artist, you need to continue to be willing to experiment and to embrace drastic changes.
The music of A Flame… is the closest Colleen has come to a concept album, a reflection upon one year in her life that began in the Autumn of 2015. The album‘s central theme is the inescapable fact that life and death always walk hand in hand. Schott is an avid bird watcher and her home and studio on the coast of Spain allow for frequent trips out into the wilds. As any naturalist knows, extreme beauty and vitality go hand in hand with brutality. This symbiosis was made more personal when, on the way back from visiting a very ill relative in France, she decided to spend the night in her former home of Paris in order to take her viola bow for repair at a luthier in the Republique area. It was late afternoon and she remembers the beauty of Paris and people sitting and enjoying the cafés. That was November 13th and a mere 4 hours later these very same cafés were the scene of utter terror and death.
A few weeks after the events, Colleen started composing the songs that make up the album. She recorded each song live with minimal edits and vocals were recorded without overdubs, creating a symbiosis between the machine and the performer that mirrors the album’s core concept. The personal narrative of the year in question yields a more vulnerable sound than any previous recordings by Colleen. "Separating" is an emotional response to being overwhelmed by the inevitability of death. Feelings of fear are never far from feelings of joy as they are in "Winter Dawn" with its propulsive thump and ominous lyrics "I came home with a fistful of fear," that manage to shift towards hope with "Love alone is your home." Joy and hope are strongly present throughout the album, the catalyst that lifts us out of the darkness as inevitably as night to day. We are shown the wonderment of "Another World," and through the metaphors of light, shown joy as in the title track. A flame my love, a frequency is an album that finds optimism in the face of tribulation, a meditation on humanity’s ability to prevail. It is a beautiful, complex album by a singular and remarkable musician.
UUUU are Edvard Graham Lewis, Valentina Magaletti, Matthew Simms & Thighpaulsandra
Recorded and Mixed at Aeriel Studios, Brechfa by Thighpaulsandra Mastered by Sarah Register
Photography by Antonio Curcetti
UUUU is a new outfit featuring Edvard Graham Lewis, Thighpaulsandra, Matthew Simms and Valentina Magaletti.
Individually these humans have implanted feathers in caps such as Coil, Dome, Wire, Tomaga, etc. Collectively they form UUUU, a powerhouse construction of fierce and free sonic exploration, as liberating as it is frightening, resulting in, the richly rewarding. The artists united present a project of exquisite curiosity and confident chaos where the individual thumbprints mesh into a gloriously muscular frenetic free sonic soup. It's Going All Over The Floor presents itself as a terse meeting between dance, ambient, abstraction and improvisation. The Latent Black Path Of Summons Served proceeds in a tense energy field where random elements bounce around until locking into a fourth world pattern designed to fall into a dense mass of ecstatic noise. Boots with Wings is classic Lewis - a pop tune from the other side of the mind.
UUUU is a schizophrenic seething/soothing masterpiece of a past/present hybrid equally at home in the club, the home and the mind.