Plenty of new music to be had this week from Laetitia Sadier and Storefront Church, Six Organs of Admittance, Able Noise, Yui Onodera, SML, Clinic Stars, Austyn Wohlers, Build Buildings, Zelienople, and Lea Thomas, plus some older tunes by Farah, Guy Blakeslee, Jessica Bailiff, and Richard H. Kirk.
Lake in Girdwood, Alaska by Johnny.
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There is a station where the train never arrives, where the Waiting Room is always occupied, where the conversation is inevitably awkward and where you’re never quite alone, but perpetually ALMOST alone.
Ladies & Gentlemen, welcome to Station Yellow Moon, the final bastion of humanity, the last stuttering blip on the life support system, the domain where Access Is Denied perpetually – but who the Hell would want to go there anyhow? Well, some pay handsomely for the Great Escape, despite the risks….
High On Station Yellow Moon is a new solo album by Edward Ka-Spel of The Legendary Pink Dots, and marks the beginning of his collaboration with long-time friend and fellow traveler Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls.
Perc (London-based producer Ali Wells) returns with Bitter Music, his third album following Wicker & Steel (2011) and The Power And The Glory (2014). As before, the album is released via his own Perc Trax imprint, giving Perc the complete creative control needed to realize his vision of what should be a milestone release for both himself and Perc Trax.
Originally a very inward looking album when work started on it in March 2016, the extensive political change happening in both the UK and around the world forced the album to widen its perspective. By the time the album was finished in December, it was clear that the sentiment of tracks such as "Look What Your Love Has Done To Me" was as equally applicable to the micro politics of person relationships as it was to concerns for the future of a country in a state of flux.
Sonically, the album takes in everything from strung-out vocal treatments to the type of warehouse rabble-rousers Perc has made his own since his very first releases. More dancefloor-focused than his previous albums, yet pulling from a wider range of sounds, Bitter Music shows a development and maturing of Wells' music that could not have been foreseen just a few years ago.
Delicately balancing the personal and the political, Bitter Music stands apart from most recent techno albums as it continually pushes outwards rather than concerning itself with the microscopic refinement of already established sounds. It is an album unafraid to take chances from an artist continually looking for his next step forwards.
Arnold Dreyblatt has been called "the most rock 'n' roll of all the composers to emerge from New York's downtown scene in the 1970s." Dreyblatt founded the Orchestra Of Excited Strings in 1979, harnessing unusual tuning intervals to an exuberant performance style. Propellers In Love, the Orchestra's second album – originally released in 1986 on the Stasch imprint, in conjunction with the contemporary art space Künstlerhaus Bethanien – develops Dreyblatt's rhythmically exacting exploration of the glittering resonances and overtones generated by an ensemble of uniquely-altered stringed instruments and drums.
On Propellers In Love, simple song titles – "Odd & Even," "Harmonics," "Bowing" – belie intricate harmonic structures. Dreyblatt's modified instruments – a contrabass and miniature piano fitted with piano wire along with violin, all tuned in just intonation – undergo the Orchestra's rapid, staccato attacks. Sparkling timbres dance above interlocking rhythmic patterns moored by sparse yet propulsive percussion ("Pedal Tone Dance" and the title track). Throughout, the Orchestra's perpetual motion achieves a tremulous and exquisite density.
For his second album, Two Solo Pieces, Jon Gibson forgoes the dense, multi-layered timbres of Visitations in favor of simple textures and tone. While Two Solo Pieces serves up further evidence of Gibson's centrality to American minimalism – witness its inclusion in Alan Licht's famed Minimal Top Ten list – this profoundly intimate record also reveals the beauty of enclosed spaces and infinite harmonic vistas.
As its unadorned title suggests, Two Solo Pieces consists of a pair of side-long tracks featuring the composer alone. While "Cycles," an iridescent improvisation on organ, achieves a downright eerie sense of expansiveness, Gibson's captivating alto flute on "Untitled" draws the listener inside the instrument itself.
The photo on the album's back cover – a seated Gibson surrounded by cascading rows of organ pipes and the vaulted ceiling in Manhattan's Peace Church – offers a striking visual complement to these gorgeous recordings.
Since releasing two stellar albums in 2012, Aaron Dilloway has been comparatively quiet, contenting himself with a steady stream of cassettes, collaborations, and reissues.  Apparently, he also spent a bit of that time slowly assembling The Gag File, the long-awaited follow-up opus to Modern Jester.  Given that Dilloway has long been one of the most influential figures in the American noise scene, it is no surprise that The Gag File is a bizarre, aberrant, and fine album.  That said, some aspects were still deliciously wrong-headed enough to catch me off-guard (though the cover art should have been a fair warning).  At its best, The Gag File transcends mere noise entirely and ventures into realms that feel like a vivid kitschy nightmare or the infernal horror of an endless bad party.
The opening "Ghost" presents a somewhat muted introduction to Dilloway's haunted funhouse, as it is initially little more than a soundscape built from industrial-sounding drones and flanging washes of synthesizer.  There is certainly some low-level dissonance and menace right from the jump, but the bottom does not drop out until its drugged and lurching groove blossoms into a brief interlude of garbled and distorted vocals, like someone struggling (and failing) to be heard from the spirit world.  The following piece, "Karaoke With Cal," is where the album first catches fire.  Again, Dilloway returns to voices, this time using a pitch-shifted tape that sounds like an incoherent and upset elderly man delivering a halting monologue over a broken, locked-groove waltz (of sorts).  There is also a whistling interlude (also of sorts) that sometimes sounds more like a space-y Theremin solo.  All of the individual components are certainly great, but the genius of the piece lies in what Dilloway does with his warped palette, weaving a thoroughly disorienting spell with layering, obsessive repetition, shifts in tape speed, and a distorting patina of hiss and crackle.
In a blackly funny bit of sequencing magic, "Cal" segues into the sounds of sirens and a screaming, fleeing crowd in "Inhuman Form Reflected."  After the initial hysteria, "Inhuman Form" settles into a rhythm that sounds like a room full of wheezing, buzzing antique machines…before unexpectedly erupting into an amusing final act of gibbering monster howls…followed by yet another final act that sounds like a man having a complete psychotic breakdown in an empty room.  Dilloway is quite a wizard at riding the line between black humor and catharsis, seeming to delight in freezing the smile on listeners' faces, a trait I find very endearing.  The album's first side then winds to a close with a simmering and rumbling loop pile-up ("Born in a Maze") that resembles an earthquake that gradually transforms into a distorted locked-groove snippet of a prog rock song.
The album's second half begins in sublimely creepy fashion with "It’s Not Alright," an obsessive and hallucinatory loop of soulful overlapping voices repeating the mantra of "It's Alright" over a simmering bed of hiss and a slowly swelling pulse that sounds like a macabre parade.  In yet another feat of sequencing brilliance, that piece seamlessly blurs into "No Eye Sockets (For Otto and Cindy)," which sounds like a gently tweaked field recording of a bunch of laughing office workers chatting inanely and enjoying happy hour as funky blues rock plays in the background. Near the end, the music seems to start again from the beginning and the laughter becomes a bit more sinister and echoing.  I definitely expected the existentialist hell to pointedly and mischievously continue for much longer, but Dilloway abruptly bulldozes the whole scene with the manic, blown-out Latin-dance-party-meets-industrial-machinery-and-an-erratic-tape-player confusion of "Switch."  Eventually that nerve-jangling cacophony grinds to a halt, but Dilloway replaces it with the similarly discordant "Shot Nerves," which drags the momentum down to a sickly crawl.  Initially, it is one of the weaker pieces on the album, as it just sounds like someone playing a meandering one-finger non-melody on a sizzling and overdriven synth in hopes of making the ugliest possible harmonies.  Heroically, however, Dilloway rouses himself for one final (if brief) fanfare of chopped, jabbering voices and annoying buzzes and the album ends on a solid note.
Willfully annoying bits aside, The Gag File is quite a wonderfully disorienting, bleakly amusing, and ambitiously experimental album.  In fact, it feels a lot like I am experiencing the final flickering impressions in the mind of a dying vaudeville comedian or birthday party magician in the thrall of acid psychosis.  Admittedly, not every song achieves such a transcendent illusion (in fact, only a handful do), but it is remarkable that any do at all.  Granted, Dilloway's former bandmates in Wolf Eyes share a similar passion for celebrating the sickly and the broken, but Dilloway is on much darker, stranger trip all his own.  In fact, I never get the feeling that Dilloway shares the same concerns as other noise/experimental musicians at all, nor that he is particularly interested in making cool sounds (though they sometimes happen anyway).  Rather, Dilloway seems like an artist that has ingeniously found a way to use ravaged tapes and cultural detritus as a means of burrowing deep into his subconconscious to exhume a rotting mound of buried dread and anxiety.  Certainly other artists have had similar ambitions over the years, but rarely are the fruits this undiluted by artifice.  More significantly, it is even rarer still for that horror to be transformed into the darkest and most perverse of comedies.
Brainwashed is proud to premiere "See Your Door", the first song from the new Circa Tapes album Love and Venom, due July 21st on Medical Records. Hear the song here, or in the most recent Brainwashed Podcast (Episode 351).
This is the third album by Adam Killing (the solo artist behind Circa Tapes), with previous releases on Ghostly International and DKA. "See Your Door" is the first song to be released from the album: a pensive, gloomy song of midtempo drum machine and analog synth pulse. The cold, robotic backing tracks contrast beautifully with haunting vocals and dour keyboard leads. It is the perfect teaser for the upcoming album, full of dark moods. The song is propelled by vintage synths and drum machines that nod toward a dance-tinged industrial past, but looks forward towards a distinctly modern and distinct future. Look for the full record, Love and Venom, coming July 21st, 2017 on Medical Records.
Brainwashed is proud to premiere "See Your Door", the first song from the new Circa Tapes album Love and Venom, due July 21st on Medical Records. Hear the song here, or in the most recent Brainwashed Podcast (Episode 351).
This is the third album by Adam Killing (the solo artist behind Circa Tapes), with previous releases on Ghostly International and DKA. "See Your Door" is the first song to be released from the album: a pensive, gloomy song of midtempo drum machine and analog synth pulse. The cold, robotic backing tracks contrast beautifully with haunting vocals and dour keyboard leads. It is the perfect teaser for the upcoming album, full of dark moods. The song is propelled by vintage synths and drum machines that nod toward a dance-tinged industrial past, but looks forward towards a distinctly modern and distinct future. Look for the full record, Love and Venom, coming July 21st, 2017 on Medical Records.
Ten Years Alive On The Infinite Plain is the quintessential work of artist/filmmaker/composer Tony Conrad. Comprised of both film installation and minimalist score for amplified strings, Ten Years leaps across genre and medium to connect his revolutionary structural filmmaking with the experiments in long-duration sound that Conrad had begun in the 1960s as part of the Theatre of Eternal Music.
"Ten Years began with image before sound," writes Andrew Lampert, "a row of quadruple projections arranged side-by-side, all the shuffling stripes cascading into each other. Over the next two hours the music throbbed and the projectors incrementally shifted inwards, their beams gradually uniting to form one pulsating, overlapping picture."
For its 1972 premiere at New York's The Kitchen, "Ten Years" included Conrad on violin as well as Rhys Chatham and Laurie Spiegel performing on instruments of the composer's own making. Chatham played the Long String Drone – a 6-foot long strip of wood with bass strings, electric pickup, tuning keys, tape, rubber band and metal hardware – while Spiegel carried out an arrhythmic bass pulse throughout.
Superior Viaduct is honored to present this previously unreleased recording of the project's breathtaking premier performance. As Chatham recounts in the liner notes, "When I first listened to this recording after not hearing it for over 40 years, it transported me back to the early Kitchen and the heyday of early minimalism, played outside the Dream Syndicate."
The transcontinental collaboration of Arcata shoegaze abstractionist Brian Pyle and spectral Russian songstress Galya Chikiss began in Berlin (where the former was on tour and crashing with the latter) then finished in Northern California. Despite such distance, the duo's debut feels symbiotic and seductive, shimmering nocturnal mirages of devotional drone and processional dub. Named after the site of certain of Chikiss’ formative teenage experiences ("trashy rooms with old anonymous TV sets and video recorders, a zone of freedom and new information"), Video Salon conjure a ghostly, glassy-eyed mood, low-lidded metronomes layered in haze, whispers, and dazed fluorescent static. Sung in Russian, the lyrics cast an ominous spell: "I turn around and see the door / the lock moves in my hand like a cold grey snake / your sharp talons tear apart my shadow." An eerie and entrancing suite of electronic incantations by a complementary pair of exploratory expressionists.
I was initially planning to write something like "somehow this wonderfully sublime 2015 release managed to slip by me completely unnoticed," but immediately realized that there was no mystery at all: the only effective way to keep abreast of Andrew Chalk's quietly expanding oeuvre is to actively keep an eye on the Faraway Press website and hope that anything I gamble on is up to Chalk's usual high standards.  While a few of his recent releases have admittedly been a bit too pastoral to fully connect with me, the glistening and gently hallucinatory reverie of this single extended piece for electric piano completely hits the mark.  In some ways it reminds me of William Basinski's eroding tape loops or Steve Roach's classic Structures From Silence album, but not in any sort of direct way.  Rather, A Light At The End of The World just feels like a mesmerizing soundscape of almost liquid textures that I could happily listen to an infinite loop for hours.
At its surface, this album is essentially a single very simple and meditative motif extended for album-length duration.  There is no clear beginning or clear end, as "A Light at the Edge of the World" essentially just begins happening and then eventually stops happening with no overtly significant evolution in-between.  Rather, Chalk is content to just quietly, tenderly, and languorously improvise around a few arpeggios.  The magic, of course, lies in the details, as Chalk has made his career as a master of nuance and understatement and this album perversely takes those (non-extreme) tendencies to their hypnotically beautiful extreme.  The single most striking aspect here is the glistening tone that Chalk conjures from his piano, as each individual note seems like a sun-dappled droplet of water slowly rolling down a windowpane.  That curiously radiant, fluid, and organic texture, coupled with the flowing, arrhythmic pace of the notes combines to evoke a slow-motion cascade of shimmering globes leaving a blearily spectral and hallucinatory after-image in their wake.  Chalk truly weaves a near-perfect illusion here, masterfully erasing himself from the picture to leave just a lazily undulating mist of warm and elegantly blurred heaven that seems to extend forever.  In short, this album is basically a lysergic summer rain experienced in extreme slow-motion (not a particularly common aesthetic).
Naturally, creating a texturally rich and dreamily shifting soundscape that feels like a living organic entity is considerably more complex than it may seem from the apparent simplicity of the central theme.  While I have admittedly encountered a few loops that were perfect enough to warrant infinite repetition, the idea of an endless loop or floating stasis tends to be a hell of a lot more compelling than the reality.  Consequently, maintaining such an illusion requires a masterful sleight of hand to inconspicuously sneak in some much needed unpredictability and dynamic variability.  Chalk achieves that objective by quietly ensuring that his rippling tumble of individual notes unfolds over a constantly shifting haze of sustained lower tones.  Also, while he is not overt about it, the arpeggios in the foreground lazily follow the drift of the underlying chords rather than lingering around the same small cluster of notes.  Consequently, what feels like a warm, amorphous drift is actually a glacially unfolding flux of constantly evolving new harmonies (and one that is beautifully deepened by the lingering, quavering cloud of overtones to boot).
Less significantly, Chalk peppers the piece with a host of small-scale dynamic touches, such as understated space-y whooshes and washes of hiss.  His greatest small-scale dynamic feats occur with the central arpeggio motif though, as he sensitively varies his attack to give his notes a wonderfully physical and multi-dimensional feel.  It seems as though they are billowing through the mist at varying levels with varying degrees of force: some seem like they barely break the surface, while others feel like a small-scale eruption.  In Chalk's hands, the cumulative effect of all these small acts and behind-the-scenes plate-spinning is quite a wonderfully absorbing spell that feels like a natural event.  I am always in awe of composers who manage to completely dissolve into their work (there are not many around).  Naturally, I feel a bit silly hailing an Andrew Chalk album for all of the same slow-burning, nuanced, and thoughtful virtues that essentially define the bulk of his oft-wonderful oeuvre, but this album definitely feels like one of the more immersive and perfectly executed jewels in his sprawling and under-heard discography.
Given the current social climate across the world, it is not surprising at all that Paul Thomsen Kirk, the Scottish artist (by way of Hiroshima, Japan) has not lightened the mood on his latest work as Akatombo. Short Fuse is a direct follow-up to the 2015 release Sometime, Never, and continues his penchant for memorable rhythms paired with often abrasive electronics and obscure samples, coming together familiar and timeless at the same time his first vinyl release.
Kirk has always been a stickler for presentation, and this one is no different.Short Fuse is his first vinyl release as Akatombo, and still includes his normal handmade personal accents to the packaging, as well as a CD with the entire album plus three additional pieces that would not fit on the record.Like his previous work, the music contained recklessly plows through various subgenres of electronic while never settling into one:it is too loud to be downtempo, but the production is too nuanced to be made for crashing the dance floor, and so on.The beats are always strong, however, and the complex production is not easily dissected.
On some parts of the album, the touchstones are a bit more overt.With the pulsating synthesizer loops and processed drums, there is a distinctly 1980s industrial feel throughout "Project FEAR," exacerbated by his liberal (but appropriate) use of reverb.For "Tensile Strength," he throws in some excellently distorted, grinding bass synth layers and a multitude of voice samples, resulting in what could be a lost Wax Trax release circa 1989.Things are a bit different on "Haarp! The Herald," where a somewhat relaxed Middle Eastern ambience permeates into what could be a more chilled out version of Muslimgauze, without losing the unique Akatombo sound.
Many of the songs that are not as easily categorized feature the same level of dissonance and an overall bleak mood."The Incarceration of Habit," for example, is all a mass of dense, serrated metallic layers and grinding rhythms.Kirk piles on the instrumentation and effects, but it is exactly due to that heavy dissonance and multitracked beats that the piece stands out strongly.For "Tilt, Turn, Defenestrate," which is the CD-only closer to the album, he piles the layers on even more, for a mass of sound peppered with vocal samples that nudges into more traditionally noise territories.
Much of Short Fuse is aggressive and beat heavy, but Kirk knows how to keep things varied and dynamic."George Kaplan" is fragmented and deconstructed in its construction, putting more of the focus on the grimy textures and the intentionally overcast, foggy sounding production."Solitude in Numbers" is also a somewhat ambient work, with much of the thick mixing spread out to create an excellent sense of space and depth.Never dull, but Kirk’s choice to slowly drift passages in and out, rather than throw them all together, gives it a unique edge on an otherwise oppressive sounding record.
Previous Akatombo work has been exclusively in the digital format, but the analog sound benefits Short Fuse quite well, helping to bring out the subtleties to the production.The textures seem to have a greater depth, and the beats hit even harder.The album sounds fine on CD as well, and the extra bonus songs are appreciated, although I think Paul Thomsen Kirk made the right decision as far as what to include on the record and what would be considered ancillary material.Format philosophizing aside, however, what it really boils down to is that the new Akatombo record continues Kirk’s streak in the realm of dissonant, at times ugly, but always memorable rhythm heavy electronic music.It is a marvelous sounding and compelling form of oppression though, and quite possibly the best record he has made to date.