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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After a lengthy six-year hiatus, this long-running bi-coastal duo have unexpectedly resurfaced with a new LP of buzzing, bass-heavy drones.  I am not sure if Disorder necessarily counts as a radical departure given Growing's history of constant re-invention, but it is certainly a remarkably far cry from their last full-length (2010's dance-damaged and sampler-centric PUMPS!). It also bears little resemblance to the more shimmering and gently psychedelic fare for which Growing is best known.  Instead, the dominant aesthetic seems to be that of Kevin Doria’s recent pure drone work as Total Life, though that vision sounds artfully blurred together with Joe DeNardo's own (noisier) Ornament project, adding some welcome layers of depth and harmonic complexity.  While it does not necessarily recapture the magic of the duo's prime, it makes up for it by opening a promising and surprisingly visceral new chapter.
Growing has been compared to a lot of other artists over the years as they have evolved, but none of the familiar names are remotely relevant anymore.  With Disorder, Doria and DeNardo seem to be looking back into the past to the early days of electronic minimalism, albeit with some much rougher edges thrown into the mix.  The most apt summary that I can conjure is this: picture Eliane Radigue doing a solo improv show with a sine wave generator; some distortion pedals; a large, rusty fan; and an ancient and fitfully operational air conditioner.  That just about nails it, I think
The first half of Disorder commences with a slowly sweeping flange over a dense bed of humming and buzzing sustained tones of indeterminate source.  The flanging is subtly hallucinatory and creates a useful kind of structure and pulse, but the real activity is sneakily hiding in the deceptively static-sounding foundation.  At first, Doria and DeNardo just slip in subtle changes in harmonic coloration, but after about five minutes, some harsher feedback-like tones intrude and the piece makes an unexpected chord change.  No further chord changes immediately follow, but the tone of piece is transformed into something more throbbing and dynamically unusual as the flanging becomes more distant and spectral.  At that point, the piece begins to take shape in earnest, as a host of overtones and buzzing oscillations glacially ebb and flow over the gently undulating drones.  It is quite a quietly impressive trick, taking the distortion-heavy "amplifer worship" aesthetic of bands like Earth and Sunn O))) and using it as a backdrop for the small-scale pleasures of a well-crafted cloud of shifting overtones.  In classic "vinyl release" fashion, however, a grinding new "locked groove"-style motif emerges from the reverie to ride out of the final few minutes of the side.  Fortunately, I like that part too, but it does sound like a completely different piece.  On the bright side, drone music is especially conducive to making such moves seem relatively seamless.
The second side of the album begins with a steady bass throb, but the melodic foreground is comparatively kinetic, as some hollow-sounding guitar feedback slowly moans and pulses.  While the guitars initially sound like they are going to mass into a roiling maelstrom, they instead cohere into a restrained rhythm that is out of phase with the underlying bass hum, albeit not in a particularly rewarding way.  That basic  theme is somewhat enlivened by some harmonics and overtones, but the piece does not truly come alive until a squall of guitar noise blossoms into another obsessive locked-groove motif that sounds half like industrial machinery and half like a relentless robotic juggernaut slowly bulldozing a dystopian futuristic landscape.  As much as I enjoy that unexpected twist, Doria and DeNardo do not do all that much with their cool new theme for quite some time, opting to embellish it only with a quavering haze of distant and ghostly feedback moans.  Eventually, however, a similarly mechanical and shuddering counterpoint emerges and an erratic and mesmerizing polyrhythm takes shape.  The final few minutes are the payoff, as all the thickly buzzing instrumentation disappears, pulling back the curtain to reveal quite a fascinating and complex skeleton of moving parts.
To their credit, Disorder is definitely not the album I would have expected Doria and DeNardo to make after being apart for so many years: Growing's erratic trajectory always at least seemed to be heading towards vaguely more and more accessible, melodic, and electronic-based territory.  Consequently, I expected them to either look backwards toward their own prime or instead pick up roughly where they left off and try to rekindle some of their upward momentum.  Instead, they completely mashed the "reset" button and made a deep plunge back into the subterranean.  The Growing of Disorder genuinely sounds like a band that might have beaten up the Growing that made PUMPS! (an observation that I mean in the best possible way).  Of course, on another level, this release makes perfect sense and is probably the most honest album that the duo could have possibly made: Disorder is an improbably natural-feeling culmination of the stripped-down and darker directions that both artists have been exploring lately in their own solo careers.  While this is not a perfect release (the second half feels a bit too meandering and unfocused for my liking), the flaws lie only in the execution and the pacing: I have absolutely no qualms at all regarding the vision.  At its best, Disorder strikes the perfect balance of power, nuance, simplicity, and machine-like repetition.
Like master painters exploring a subject over a lifetime’s work, Kevin Martin and Dylan Carlson – The Bug and Earth, respectively – have each been mining and defining their genres for more than 20 years. They’re united by an interest in – really an obsession with – heaviness. They search for, examine and break the boundaries between beautiful and ugly, minimal and maximal, light and dark – but The Bug and Earth always make music that is heavy in the most thrilling of ways.
These two uncompromising outsiders met via the visual artist Simon Fowler (Angels & Devils.) Simon arranged for Dylan to come to a King Midas Sound gig, but Martin’s trademark use of a powerful strobe light meant that the epileptic Carlson couldn’t enter the room. Undeterred, Carlson featured King Midas Sound’s music in a podcast, and the pair eventually decided to collaborate around Angels & Devils.
The anglophile Carlson had long admired Martin, and other British sonic experimenters like Spacemen 3 or Pentangle. In turn, Martin understood the genius in Carlson’s deconstruction of metal, and Earth's boiling down of the genre to its core, elemental riffs. Martin saw that he and Dylan were both "wanderers," and "misfits in the world we live in." They were both huge fans of dub and the Velvet Underground, and they discussed how those influences could provide a combined template for something entirely new.
When they finally began to record, it quickly became apparent that the music they made together needed room to stretch out and "drone," – to be its own thing. Two tracks eventually emerged, "Boa" & "Cold," and were released as a standalone EP, with Dylan's signature guitar sound weaving seamlessly around some of Kevin's most destructively heady bass explorations. Martin had decided to exclude those songs from Angels & Devils, as he felt "They had developed a singular life of their own, outside of the identity of that album."
Ninja Tune asked The Bug and Dylan Carlson to perform live in LA around the label’s 25th anniversary, and Martin and Carlson took the opportunity to further the recording project in person. So The Bug vs Earth project holed up in Daddy Kev’s legendary LA studio, with DJ Nobody engineering, for two very long days. Those recording sessions have resulted in the masterpiece that is Concrete Desert. Inspired by J.G. Ballard’s urban dystopias, and the Californian dream capital's sordid, fragmented underbelly, Martin says that the album is in some ways a Los Angeles-set companion piece to London Zoo.
The record's beautiful, chiming melodies are like shards of sonic light, glowing in currents of heavy bass darkness. There are pulsing soundscapes, ambient pinks and whites, and irresistible grooves. This is music that grips you entirely, and catches you in its lava-flow – an astonishing, primal album of vast depth.
One of the most exciting new movements in modern music involves electronic producers venturing into sonic realms of fear and uncertainty. Though these artists’ unforgiving style places plenty of demands on their listeners, it is devoid of cheap shock value and predictable moralizing, and is capable of finding and creating romance in a grayscale world of Brutalist architecture and all-pervasive automation.
While typically associated with the artist rosters of labels like Downwards, Blackest Ever Black and Modern Love, Stroboscopic Artefacts has played just as strong a role in shaping this aesthetic. So it's only fitting that the next Monad issue from Stroboscopic Artefacts would come from the German duo of Eric Goldstein and Konstanze Bathseba Zippora, - better known as OAKE - whose previous efforts on Regis' Downwards label have established them as one of the most unique products of their genre.
Like OAKE's previous work, their new Monad EP immediately establishes a tight hold on the listener's consciousness with its rigorous balance of ethereal vocal seduction and concussive rhythm, making one feel thrust into a world where the forces of techno-science and magic are involved in a constant reciprocal conversation. The opening track "L'esclandre," while just a harbinger of things to come, is still as intense on its own as anything else in the electronic music realm, ritualistically laying a foundation of heavy kick drums and metallic lashes that seem aimed at key pressure points of the body.
The following track "Jardin d'évasion," bringing spoken vocals and haunted sung melodies into the caustic mix, allows the listener to soar over the aforementioned Brutalist landscape while still somehow feeling the full weight of it - a dark musical gem whose vocal repetition of “keeping...awake” elegantly completes a feeling of post-industrial yearning and restlessness.
"Hélicorde" returns OAKE to a more stripped-down, rhythmically dominant format; in the process offering a track that seems to have been by some kind of hybrid machine-wolves rather than by humans enhanced with studio technology. The feeling of being ‘on the hunt’ is captured here with great panache, but doesn’t leave the ears so exhausted that they won’t be able to enjoy the breathtaking finale "Paysage dépaysé." Initially powered along by hammering kicks and grinding ambience, a siren voice appears which leads the instrumentation through a number of increasingly intense permutations on the main theme. Immense, yawning dirge tones and dissonant strings combine with the already established presence of pneumatic drill percussion to make a timeless meditation on lost grandeur.
Editions Mego is pleased to welcome Danish Loke Rahbek (Damien Dubrovnik, Croatian Amor and Posh Isolation) to the fold. Known for countless creative and commercial endeavours, Loke presents his first solo full length under his own name. As with all of Loke’s output City of Woman harnesses the radical with the aesthetic in a manner of extreme pleasure for all who encounter. Harnessing his thorough knowledge and experience in extreme electronics, melodic encounters and sultry showmanship Loke ties together disparate threads of various underground movements to create a singular and deeply personal journey through industrial temptation, noise refraction and melodic seduction. This is 21st Century pop music. One which dismantles previous held borders of sound to present a wide palate of sound, song, abstraction and intense emotion.
In Silhouette is unmistakably the product of Brian Pyle, who once again returns as Ensemble Economique. Well over a decade ago, Pyle and his merry band of Starving Weirdos popped onto the scene from out of nowhere. Truth be told, that ‘nowhere’ is Humboldt County, California whose grand mythologies about its marijuana industry dwarfs all others. The Weirdos, not averse to method acting through Humboldt’s prized chemistry, stood an unusual chimera in the world of out-rock and avant-garde practitioners. Electronic-Improv, fuck-all auto-didacticism, and monotone psychedelia. Too feral to be AMM, too electronic to be NNCK, too discordant to be :zoviet*france:. As the Weirdos slowed to halt, Pyle’s restless energy insisted that he go on. Hence Ensemble Economique. Over an impressive catalogue of albums, he steadfastly continues down this rabbithole, polishing and refining his craft into a signature polyglot of expressionist collage.
Pyle’s latest opus dials up the cinematic flourishes that have graced many of his earlier recordings, through his sinewed synth-tone undulations, polyphonous ostinato, Wolfgang Voigt pulses, and fractalized cascades of generative serialism. All of this glides through the patterned electronic chiaroscuro atmospheres that are at once ethereal and haunted, dotted with male and female vocals whispering unknowable secrets. This tech-gnosticism flickers with light and shadow through Pyle’s rich production and beckons for the big screen, as Pyle’s work is grandiose in scale, psychologically nuanced, and deeply affecting. In Silhouette is the twelfth Ensemble Economique album.
All the Way is a collection of radical re-workings of traditional and jazz standards such as “All the Way,” “You Don't Know What Love Is,” and “The Thrill Is Gone” (made famous by Chet Baker). It also includes a solo piano interpretation of Thelonious Monk's “Round Midnight,” and live voice and piano interpretations of the American traditional “O Death” and the country song, “Pardon Me I've Got Someone to Kill.” The album includes both electric live performances (recorded in Paris, Copenhagen, and East Sussex) and studio recordings made in San Diego, CA.
Live at St. Thomas the Apostle documents Galás’ volcanic May 2016 performance at St. Thomas the Apostle church in Harlem NY, described by the New York Times as "guttural and operatic, baleful and inconsolable, spiritual and earthy, polyglot and wordless, nuanced and unhinged." The concert, produced by Intravenal Sound Operations and Red Bull Music Academy, was composed exclusively of what Galás calls “death songs.”
NYC-based artist Evan Caminiti breathes life into the Dust Editions imprint with the release of Toxic City Music. Caminiti has explored electro-acoustic music since the mid 2000's, the latest transmission being 2015's Meridian. While that album was Caminiti’s first to omit electric guitar, he has now returned to the instrument. Here it is buried it in an electronic mist and melted down, its sonic fabric reshaped.
Toxic City Music was inspired by the psychic and physical toxicity of life in late capitalism. Conceived throughout 2015 and 2016, Caminiti captured the sounds of NYC’s machinery and voices before weaving them into his studio experiments. This collection of song mutations unravels in hazy plumes and serrated edges; concrète sounds mesh with disembodied strings and corrosive electronics on "Joaquin", drones ripple under stuttering rhythms and crude synth detritus throughout "NYC Ego." On "Toxic Tape (Love Canal)," layers of digital degradation smear guitar clusters, dissolving into a dubby devotional-ambient space.
This classic minimal music album is now available again on vinyl for the first time since the '70s.
Primed with a glass of cognac, Charlemagne Palestine sits at the keyboard of a Bösendorfer Imperial grand piano. One foot firmly holds down the sustain pedal while both hands perform an insistent strum-like alternation on the keys. Soon Palestine and his Bösendorfer are enveloped in sound and bathed in a shimmering haze of multi-coloured overtones. For 45 minutes, this rich pulsating music swells and intensifies, filling the air.
When Strumming Music first appeared on the adventurous French label Shandar during the mid-1970s, it seemed a straightforward matter to place Charlemagne Palestine in the so-called Minimalist company of La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass, whose work also featured in the Shandar catalogue. Palestine too used a deliberately restricted range of materials and a repetitive technique, but as he has often pointed out in more recent times the opulent fullness of his music would more accurately be described as Maximalist.
Strumming Music, recorded in Palestine’s own loft in Manhattan, has no written score. In an age of recorded sound he still feels no need for traditional notation. The surging energy of this particular recording stands comparison with the improvising of jazz visionaries who impressed and inspired him while living in New York, as a young man. But, as Palestine himself has made clear, primarily he brings to music-making the sensibility of an artist rather than a musician.
Although the technique of the piece has roots in Palestine’s daily practice, when a teenager, of playing the carillon at a church, hammering sonorous chimes from a rack of tuned bells, it also draws on his later work as a body artist, staging vigorously muscular, physically demanding and often reckless performances. In addition, Strumming Music can be heard as a sculptural tour de force, while its textures connect with the colour moods, plastic rhythms and tactile space of Mark Rothko’s Abstract Expressionist canvases.
At the time when Philip Glass, Steve Reich and Terry Riley were becoming well-respected and widely heard composers, welcomed in concert halls and opera houses around the world, Charlemagne Palestine actually stopped making music altogether. He relocated to Europe and devoted his creative energies to the making of stuffed animal sculptures including the mighty God Bear, three-headed and six metres high. His involvement with music was revived and renewed during the 1990s, when younger generations of musicians and listeners, attuned to immersive noise and sensual sounds, were rediscovering Strumming Music and recognising that Palestine had blazed an idiosyncratic trail into their emerging world.
Since then he has returned enthusiastically to musical performance and his formerly meager discography has steadily grown. Still Strumming Music remains the essential index of Palestine’s singular creative vision. Fundamentally this fascinating piece is a collaboration between an artist and an instrument. Palestine had first encountered the Bösendorfer Imperial back in 1969. He had already been playing church organs for several years, relishing their power and presence. Now he had found a piano that satisfied his need for sonic depth and weight. "The Bösendorfer at its best is a very noisy, thick molasses piano," he has remarked. Charlemagne Palestine embraced its clinging sonorousness, its clangorous resonance and out of that embrace came the voluptuous sonic fabric of Strumming Music.
“My rhythms are sexual, not machine-like.” Charlemagne Palestine, in 2013.
As we embark on a new year more characterized by fear and uncertainty than hope and optimism, a chronic shortage of dissent can be detected in the artistic community amidst a harrowing socio-political climate. Yet the Salford-based collective Gnod have wasted little time in kicking against the doom and disquiet with everything at their disposal.
"It seems like we are heading towards even more unsettling times in the near future than we are in at present." reckons Chris Haslam of Gnod. "2016 is just the beginning of what I see as the establishment’s systematic destruction of liberalism and equality as a reaction to the general public’s loss of faith in their system."
Charged by this outlook, Gnod's new album, Just Say No To The Psycho Right-Wing Capitalist Fascist Industrial Death Machine represents a hitherto uncharted level of antagonism and adversarial force for the band - an artistic statement as righteous, fervent and direct as its title. which far from being an echo of an anarcho spirit of yore, denotes a record firmly entrenched in the psychic terrain of 2017.
"On the surface it could almost seem like there's no political art movement out there to oppose what's happening, but there is - we know there is”'adds the band's Paddy Shine. "Maybe that movement is struggling to find its voice as a cohesive whole right now but that will change. It has to change."
Fueled by their militant drive and unyielding ardour, Just Say No… refracts Gnod's harsh and repetitive riff-driven rancour through a psychotropic haze of dubbed-out abstraction, with Paddy’s incendiary vocal delivery to the fore.
Just Say No…sounds like a record only Gnod could make - a band fiercely independent, never comfortable in one place artistically for any duration of time, always with their co-ordinates set on uncharted territory and the next challenge ahead, and delivering a monument of ire and iconoclasm.
Ecstatic's stunning split release between Maurizio Bianchi, godfather of the Italian industrial noise scene, and Abul Mogard, the much loved and hyperstitious synthesist, conjures a spellbinding testament to the transcendent and transportive energies of electronic music.
Although appearing to starkly contrast on the surface, both artists' work patently shares a lust for the suggestive abstraction of raw current and its pareidolia-like capacity to generate rich and uncanny emotional responses from the end user.
On the a-side, Maurizio Bianchi serves the obfuscated, coruscating atmosphere of "Nervous Hydra," a 17-minute piece of sunken, desiccated harmonic structures and warped greyscale tones rinsed with ET radio signals and distant percussion that recall the sound of embers landing on tinfoil or snow. It evokes the experience of being caught in a quietly raging whiteout with only a dying fire for company, or equally a sense of subaquatic, amniotic serenity prior to being evacuated into a much colder world.
In that piece’s tempestuous wake, Abul Mogard brings a sense of soothing, glacial calm with "All This Has Passed Forever" on the b-side. For 16 blissed minutes, Mogard spells out a nostalgic fantasy in creamy strokes of Farfisa organ and Serge modular recorded at EMS studios, Stockholm, and later combined with field recordings to elicit a wistfully widescreen paean to his days on the workshop floor accompanied by the harmonious drones and cacophony of heavy machinery.
Folk unit originated in the Swedish underground Enhet för Fri Musik -- featuring members of Sewer Election, Ättestupa, Neutral, Makthaverskan, and Blod - continually re-inventing what music is about through free improvisation and lengthy folk meanderings.
Embedded in the ever exciting Swedish underground scene Enhet För Fri Musik continues the quest for innovation numerous legendary Swedish bands started during the '70s, Pärson Sound, Trad Gras Och Stenar, Arbete Och Fritid. Taking the ideas of communal music craft and experimentation, on this album the group comes to a unique combination of Jandek-like atonal guitar, organ, tape effects, field recordings, saxophone and Sofie Herner's amazing loner voice running over it. Adding another inspiring document to the world of open-minded music.