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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Following a handful of elusive limited edition cassettes, Berlin-based composer Caterina Barbieri makes her formal debut in a big way with this massive and mesmerizing double LP epic.  On one level, Patterns of Consciousness is quite possibly the epitome of Important Records' long-standing obsession with pure synthesizer albums.  On deeper level, however, this album is a unique and ambitious experiment that also happens to be synth-based, as it is structurally inspired by Barbieri's interest in baroque lute music and conceptually inspired by a desire to trigger a fracture in consciousness through subtle shifts in hypnotically repeated patterns.  Either way, it is quite an achievement.
This is actually Barbieri's second full-length for Important (or for any label, for that matter), as she first surfaced in 2014 with Vertical on the label's Cassauna imprint.  Predictably, that album was similarly synth-centric (it was composed for a Buchla 200), but otherwise bears little resemblance to this latest salvo.  All of the vocals, techno touches, drone elements, and grinding textures from that release earlier are gone and forgotten, which makes sense, as it seems like Barbieri was still finding her direction at that point.  I think she has conclusively found it now, as Patterns seems much more like an inventive, coherent, and honest fusion of her far-reaching and esoteric aesthetic and conceptual interests.  In fact, it would be an understatement to say that Barbieri has an interesting background for a modern synth composer, as she has studied classical guitar in Italy, extensively researched the history of Hindustani music, and written a thesis on "3D spatialization and the perception of time, space and sound spectrum in vertical music."  In the wrong hands, such a resume would undoubtedly translate into something rather bloodless and over-cerebral, but Barbieri proves to be quite adept at using her deep knowledge to take relatively accessible and vaguely Kosmiche music into more transcendent and psychotropic realms than usual.  The closest stylistic antecedent for Patterns of Consciousness is prime/early Tangerine Dream, though Barbieri has clearly assimilated that influence in a rather curious and oblique way.
The area where Barbieri's unique sensibility manifests itself most conspicuously is that of structure and sequencing.  For example, each piece is composed of just a few simple intertwined patterns and nothing more, unrelentingly pulsing and burbling along from anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes with no significant new motifs or melodic shifts ever turning up to disrupt the entrancing spell.  Also, on a larger scale, the album itself is structured rather bizarrely: each piece that has an actual name, such as the opening "This Causes Consciousness to Fracture," is followed by a much slower piece with the same title presented as an acronym ("TCCTF," for example).  The two pieces seem paired in name only, unless any shared patterns are slowed to complete unrecognizability, yet they certainly seem designed to give the album a very unusual rhythm (the more complex and kinetic pieces are always followed by languorous and comparatively simple ones).  That disorienting dynamic push/pull pattern is not broken until the final piece, the slow-moving coda of "Gravity That Binds."  Despite their significant differences, however,these seven pieces are thematically held together by a thread of strong, uncluttered melodies and enormous attention to small-scale dynamics.  Given the understated nature of the album, Barbieri keeps the effects subtle, but her constant tweaks are more than enough to keep her themes sounding fresh: nothing is ever static and all of the various threads are constantly shifting in relation to one another and leaving a vapor trail of bleary after-images.
If Patterns of Consciousness has a fault, it is only that its mantric repetition, deceptive simplicity, and minimalist aesthetic do an unintentionally fine job of concealing Barbieri's more radical intentions.  Also, I am not sure that her foundational premise was actually successful in "unfolding new layers of perception" or unlocking unused psychic potential in me, though I doubt such changes would register all that dramatically in the conscious mind if they occur.  The subject certainly interests me, but I have historically had much more of a noticeable psychoactive response to experiments with inaudible frequencies than I did with these shifting patterns.  Still, it was a valiant effort that yielded an unusual album, so there is little to grumble about.  More importantly, no one at all would care about the conceptual ambitions of this album if the actual music was not good (which it is), so any triggered hallucinations, revelations, or breakthroughs into a higher mental plane are just icing on the cake.  In particular, I was most struck by some of the slower, later pieces on the album, such as "INTCAEB" and "SOTRS," which resemble a sort of narcotic, sensuous, and bittersweetly melancholy twist on an organ mass.  More significantly, Patterns of Consciousness as a whole feels like a major artistic statement through sheer obsessive repetition, slow-burning accumulation of power, and Barbieri's singularly lute-influenced and arpeggio-heavy approach to modern synth composition.  It is extremely damn hard to establish a distinctive voice wielding only a synthesizer, but Barbieri has succeeded admirably at it.  No one else sounds like this.
Modestly billed as a counterpart to last year’s At The Dam album, the prosaically titled Collected Pieces is quite a big and very pleasant surprise, as my expectation was that it would just be some outtakes and orphaned pieces of interest to serious fans only (an expectation that was only reinforced by the limited edition cassette format).  I suppose these six pieces are technically orphans of a sort, as they never made it onto any of Lattimore's formal albums, but it certainly was not because they were not good enough.  Rather, they all just surfaced as an erratic trickle of one-off self-released pieces on Bandcamp and Soundcloud.  That method of working definitely seems to suit Lattimore, as this "box of memories"/impressionist travelogue is at least as good as any of her actual albums and the gorgeous "Wawa By The Ocean" and "The Warm Shoulder" easily rank among her finest moments to date.
There are lot of preconceptions that I have about what a harp album is likely to contain, but one thing that I never expected to encounter was a rippling, lushly beautiful tribute to the beloved hoagie-purveying convenience store Wawa.  Technically, I still have not encountered that, as the opening "Wawa By The Ocean" is more directly inspired by Mary's memories of trips to the beach town of Ship Bottom, NJ, but Wawa still amusingly sent her a prize pack when they found out about the song.  Being a harpist seems very lucrative sometimes.  As for the song itself, "Wawa" is quite a slow-burning and quiet stunner, unfolding a lovely bittersweet melody over a beautiful descending progression of arpeggios.  While the composition itself is quite wonderful, Lattimore's subtly escalating use of effects gradually transforms the piece into an exquisitely layered dreamscape of shimmering afterimages, undulating hazes of overlapping notes, and gently hallucinatory delay.  It is quite an impressive achievement indeed, as the piece does not evolve so much as seamlessly dissolve into heavenly soft-focus unreality.  Naturally, that makes "Wawa" an impossible act to follow, but Mary doubles down with the even longer "Bold Rides."  Initially, that elegiac piece sounds like fairly standard Lattimore fare (which is just fine), but eventually a new vibrato-heavy and zither-like motif blossoms in the upper registers that makes me feel like I just time-traveled back to an imperial Chinese court.  Though it is somewhat less successful than its predecessor due to its lack of a central heart-grabbing melody, "Bold Rides" follows a very similar trajectory, as the various layers gradually start to deliriously bleed together and tumble all over one another.  In fact, "Bold Rides" ultimately takes that processing even further, eventually reversing and transforming one layer into chirping abstraction.
The next piece takes a languorous trip to Twin Peaks, as the brief and hazily rippling "We Just Found Out She Died" pays tribute to The Log Lady (Margaret Lanterman passed away soon after Lattimore saw her speak).  The evocatively titled "It Was Late And We Watched The Hotel Burn" is yet another major piece, eschewing conventional structure for bleary, hallucinatory ambiance, weaving a distorted tapestry of backwards melodies, plinking and overlapping cascades of arpeggios, and an undercurrent of blown-speaker rumble and snarl.  The following "The Warm Shoulder" (inspired by a cannibalism-themed joke, naturally) unexpectedly distills the best aspects of "Wawa" and "Bold Rides" into one concise and perfectly chiseled piece, lazily unfolding a beautiful melody over a delicate tapestry of arpeggios, then gradually embellishing it with more exotic zitherisms and subtly psychotropic layers of haze and delay.  The album then winds to a close with soft-focus reverie "Your Glossy Camry," which initially seems like a pleasant and lazily undulating soundscape of pointillist arpeggios before unexpectedly blossoming into a lovely and tender solo.  While it is not the strongest piece on the album, it makes an absolutely perfect coda as it gradually pares down to an unexpected level of quiet intimacy (it feels like every little pick and scrape is amplified and nakedly audible by the end).
The most withering critique that I can muster of Collected Works is merely that "We Just Found Out She Died" is a bit underwhelming and that a few of the longer pieces could have benefited from more aggressive editing.  Of course, the counterargument for the latter is that the longer pieces all tend to undergo a striking transformation at some point, which is a compositional tactic that often benefits from the length of the journey.  Bringing up perceived flaws is kind of beside the point here anyway, as it is hard to be disappointed that a compilation of unreleased material falls just shy of perfection.  For the most part, Collected Pieces is a genuine revelation.  I admittedly have a tendency towards hyperbole sometimes, but a piece like "Wawa By The Ocean" manages to elicit an almost childlike level of joy and wonder in me, as Lattimore is able to craft something of guileless, simple, and heartfelt beauty, yet still manages to imbue it with enough depth, experimentation, and subtly unreality to overcome my jaded aversion to prettiness.  I could probably also go on all day about Lattimore's knack for affecting melodies and genius for transcending the constraints of the harp's limited palette, but the real magic of her best work lies in the refreshing, clear-eyed purity of her vision: while Lattimore admittedly employs a healthy arsenal of studio effects, that artifice generally tends to be in service of a strong, focused melodic hook presented with elegantly uncluttered accompaniment and she hits the mark with uncanny regularity here.  I think this might actually be my favorite Mary Lattimore album.
Mike Cooper's output of the past half century has been described as "post-everything." It's a fitting phrase really when you consider he has been at the beating heart of so many critical musical moments. From the development of the blues touring circuit in the UK, through the growth of the folk scene and into the explosion of free improvisation that came to define a generation of UK musicians. Amidst it all, working at stitching these disparate forms into some kind of deterritorialised zone, was Mike Cooper.
It’s fitting then, that he explores the notion of journey on his latest full length edition. Even more fitting that he examines the vessels that carry us on journeys. With Raft, Cooper charts his interests in ambient exotica and collides it with his research into various South Pacific musical traditions. The record extends his palette considerably, stretching away from the hypnogogic flows of his master piece Rayon Hula, into a more oceanic setting. "Raft 21 Guayaquil To Tully," for example, sets out a lilting rise and fall of harmony which erupts with spluttering electronics.
Specifically inspired by Vital Alsar and William Wills, sailors who undertook some of the 20th centuries most impressive solo voyages, Raft reflects upon the determination of the solo traveller. In a musical sense, Mike Cooper's work of recent years has very much reflected a determined solo traveller work ethic. In his commitment to travel alone, he has developed a range of strategies that he works against as a means of surprising himself and uncovering unfamiliar sonic relations.
This approach has proved an incredibly fertile pursuit for Cooper, arguably producing some of his most affecting and engaging works, his Room40 albums Fratello Mare and White Shadows Of The South Seas amongst them. Raft is a vital record that sets its sights beyond the horizons of convention and in doing so reveals a perspective that is only available to lifelong voyagers such as Mike Cooper.
After a three year silence, mysterious Chicago duo Acteurs return with not only new music, but the debut of new label MILD VILNC. Their signature bleak - downtown punk sound remains intact, welded together by stark noise and a tense momentum. It's minimal all around but not lacking for substance, each track pushing the boundary between simplicity and unknown force.
The 5 tracks collected on the Corridor EP show Acteurs turning their already strong aesthetic on its head, opening it up from the other side. Mini mantras butt up against scrapes and drones, tied together with rhythms built and taken apart again. It's the sound of a future you may not want to be a part of, but we don't really have a say in that do we?
In late 2014, Planning For Burial's Thom Wasluck left the red house in New Jersey he’d called home for the last decade to return to his childhood bedroom in the mountains of Pennsylvania. Back in the house where he grew up, Wasluck found himself cut off from the familiarities of the previous decade as he put himself to work in the family trade. The monotony of routine quickly set in; work, home, and alcohol day after day became the norm. The childhood room that had given birth to his primordial four-track recordings was now a place of emptiness. These conditions set the stage for Planning For Burial’s third full-length, Below the House.
In terms of genre, Planning For Burial is often simply characterized as "gloom," which can be seen as a blend of slowcore, shoegaze, doom, 90s alt rock and drone, and this album offers nine sullen and frequently heavy songs that brim with nostalgia and suburban ennui. It is a return to form of sorts to his beloved first album, 2010’s Leaving — an introverted work characterized by its heavy dynamics and personal obsessions.
Since the beginning, Planning For Burial has been a solo endeavor. Wasluck has been recording music himself and touring extensively as a one-man band, playing hundreds of shows in DIY spaces and nightclubs, where he has shared the stage with acts like Deafheaven, King Woman and Chelsea Wolfe. Both incredibly loud and intimate, Planning For Burial plays with an unrivaled passion and funereal grace that is equally at home in basements and large venues.
The union of two creative forces with notable experience in the esoteric, Teleplamiste have emerged with a debut album of magical intensity and ecstatic fortitude. Frequency is the New Ecstasy conjures an audial liminal zone in which ancient methods and futuristic visions collide and collude.
This duo is formed by Mark O. Pilkington, whose work has extended from publishing countercultural and arcane literature with Strange Attractor Press to summoning rural drone reveries with Urthona, and Michael J. York, who brought his wide knowledge of traditional wind instruments to bear in bands that include Coil, Cyclobe, Guapo and The Stargazer's Assistant. The duo blur 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.
These six long, meditative pieces map out and extend into the infinite a pathway from the eerie realm of mid-twentieth century radiophonics, and the work of minimal iconoclasts like Daphne Oram and Else Marie Pade, through the kosmische music of the '70s such as Cluster and Tangerine Dream to contemporary modular synthesists such as Keith Fullerton Whitman and Lichens, following a vision imbued with power and singularity. Heavy ambience and otherworldly atmospherics marry here amidst an aura of epiphanic radiance.
Rich, transporting and thoroughly immersive, Frequency is the New Ecstasy is a thing of trance states both euphoric and unheimlich.
A distillation of cultural memory through electronic process, James Place —the creative guise of New York native Phil Tortoroli, returns with his third release for Umor Rex. The sonic realization of love and loss, re-sculpted for the Post-Modern age, pursuing his glacial take on techno into newly intimate depths.
Departing from a line in TS Elliot’s Four Quartets "the moment in and out of time," its works take form through the haze of a dream. Over the course of several months Tortoroli tracked heaps of live stereo jams at home, jamming on his drum machine, sampler, polysynth, and effects setup. Poring over these hours of hazy jams, Tortoroli heard himself straining for an additional voice to further emote. Rifling through a vast library of old bounces and experiments, Tortoroli rediscovered the music of Sam Sally to complete Voices Bloom, resampled live and again "subdued into explorations of an old practice."
Voices Bloom is the musicality of cultural collage, immensely personal and intimate, arms stretched out, gathering diverse sonic worlds. The artist and his craft as a self-reflexive lens for an electronic age —a sonic patchwork heard from afar— impressions of memory, drawn close to the heart. Within the album’s cool displaced tones, rise nostalgic romances, drifting rhythmic works which defy the beat. A world where time enters multiple frames, those possible, literal, implied, forgotten, and remembered anew. The final results on Voices Bloom are the most reflective yet from James Place. The hopeful kosmische beats and hauntological synth music on previous albums, and more delicate melodies, riding crisp minimal rhythms that flow elegantly from vignette to vignette. Rhythms of abstract techno with glistening melodic lights.
Virtuoso guitarist Glenn Jones' second LP Against Which the Sea Continually Beats issued on vinyl for the first time on June 16th
Fully re-mastered with full artwork, detailed notes, & bonus download
"The songs on Against Which the Sea Continually Beats are successful as well-crafted vignettes, drawing listeners into a pleasant, powerful world where the strongest bonds and emotions cannot fully be captured by mere words." - PopMatters
“Glenn Jones has no fear. He embraces the unknown to the point of jumping into creative abysses that require fortitude to claw back from.” - Guitar Player
“A brilliant scholar whose technical virtuosity is, fortunately, matched by an emotional intelligence that shines through” - Mojo
"Glenn Jones' music is remarkably intimate: It feels so close, you'd swear you could reach out and touch the airwaves vibrating between strings.” - NPR
Virtuoso guitarist Glenn Jones will be releasing his second LP Against Which the Sea Continually Breaks on vinyl for the first time ever on June 16th, 2017. The album was originally released by Strange Attractors Audio House in 2007 on CD only. This release follows the first ever vinyl release of his debut album This Is The Wind That Blows It Out earlier this year, as well as a special live album release Waterworks, out Saturday, April 22nd.
From Strange Attractors Audio House: "The 2nd solo album for Glenn Jones (Cul de Sac), Against Which the Sea Continually Beats was recorded over four days during late September 2006 in beautiful West Tinsbury, Martha's Vineyard, MA. The peaceful, seafaring setting of the island community inspired the recording sessions, lending an air of tranquility that served to coax from Glenn Jones impeccable performances, most of which were captured in just one take."
Recently, Glenn Jones released his most ambitious work to date, Fleeting, which was named one of NPR's best solo guitar albums of 2016 and received praise from,Pitchfork, Premier Guitar, Guitar Player, and more. Jones plans to tour throughout the U.S. this summer.
Kate Carr melds the exquisite details of her field recordings with an ephemeral approach to the song. This Australian has relocated herself to London after many trips around the globe. With each orbiting journey, she has collected innumerable sounds from the urbane to the aqueous and from the frenetic to the sublime, contextualizing all of these into compositions rippling with primordial melodies through guitar, piano, voice, and electronics. The Story Surrounds Us follows her highly acclaimed albums I Had Myself A Nuclear Spring (first released on her own Flaming Pines imprint in 2015) and Carr's debut for Helen Scarsdale in 2016, It Was A Time Of Laboured Metaphors. Emblematic of her work is a gentle dislocation between the environmental sounds and her drone-dub ellipses of somnambulant melody. The clatter of a frozen dock or a vibrational shimmer from rustled objects or the unintelligible whispers displaces the sense of self amidst a sea of disparate symbols and coded thought. More a travelogue in and out of one's own body than to any particular place. Carr suggests "In a way, it is about restlessness, an uncomfortable tossing and turning in all these many different places, a struggle somehow to forge a connection between my own internal world and all these places and persons I have encountered. I think this holds a sense of unease and strain, with both beautiful and failed moments of intimacy and connection which are made either possible or impossible in the difficult and distorted context of being away. It is quite sad, really." Look to Carla dal Forno, Alan Lamb and those moments of clarity in the shapeshifting ethos from Jewelled Antler for neighboring sounds to Kate Carr's chimerical compositions.
Tara Jane O'Neil describes her latest album Self Titled as a "singer songwriter" endeavor.
At the invitation and by the design of Mark Greenberg (The Coctails), half of this record was recorded mostly live at Wilco’s Loft Studio in Chicago with a band that included James Elkington, Gerald Dowd, Nick Macri, and Greenberg himself. Another half was made in TJO’s home studio in California with Devin Hoff, Wilder Zoby, Walt McClements and string supervisor Jim James. This album also features the voices of Chris Cohen, Carolyn Pennypacker-Riggs and Joan Shelley. Tara Jane ONeil plays guitar, bass, keyboards and percussion.
As a solo artist she has released eight full-length albums internationally. O’Neil was a founding member of Rodan, the Sonora Pine , amongst other ensembles. She has collaborated on recordings and stages with Papa M, Michael Hurley, Little Wings, Marisa Anderson, Catherine Irwin, Mirah, Mount Eerie, and many many others. She has also performed at clubs, galleries, and DIY spaces around the world and venues such as the Centre de Pompdou, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and All Tomorrow’s Parties. She starred in the cult classic film Half-Cocked. Her visual art work has been shown in cities including London, Tokyo and Portland and has been published in three monographs.
A few years ago we received an anonymous email with a link to three tracks and a simple message: "Hi, maybe you would be interested in this music." It’s easy to be skeptical of yet another link from yet another artist in a world overcrowded with them, but listening is our job and so we do it. The songs were instantly striking: extraordinarily slow, somber, and spacious, each vaulted cathedral chord reverberating poetically into the distance, the melodies rolling out like fog across a cemetery. Captivated, we requested more, receiving a single word in response: "Yes." Then, nothing. Eventually, three months later, we received another email with slightly more information: a name (Irma Orm), a location (Stockholm), and a bit of context (she worked alone, and progress on music was slow but steady).
Fast-forward to mid-2016: we're informed the album is complete, and it is breathtaking. Hermetic gothic swan songs conjured from funereal piano, twilit ambience, minimalist percussion, and spellbinding vocals. The mood is lulling and lush but lost in sorrow, stark grey structures looming in the night. Majestic open spaces between notes heighten the melancholic grandeur of Orm's arrangements, blurring the line between lament and lullaby. The songs less end than ebb away, succumbing to their own downcast beauty.