Being thankful for an earful.
Brand new music by Marie Davidson, Niecy Blues (feat. Joy Guidry), CEL, Marisa Anderson and Luke Schneider, Stina Stjern, Carmen Villain, Murcof, A Lily, and Far Golden Pavilions, with music from the vaults by Tomaga, Ozzobia, Jan Jelinek.
Sushi photo by Lindsay.
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Locusts and Gegenschein follow up the highly acclaimed Music for Church Cleaners release from Irish artist Áine O’Dwyer. Whilst continuing to explore the church organ as the primary instrument, these two releases steer away from Church Cleaners in both sonic content and themes explored.
Recorded & performed in 2015 at St James’s Church, Barrow-in-Furness, England & The First Unitarian Congregational Society Church, Brooklyn Heights, New York, Locusts presents itself as a celebration of the pipe organ’s acoustical abilities of tapping into electronic pulses along with O’Dwyer’s liturgical memories which are at times, pushed into horrorthon states.
Gegenschein was recorded at the Franciscan Friary in Limerick city. Áine gained access to the Friary in 2012 and explored both pipe organ and space in it’s disused state. What becomes of a sacred space after the dispersion of the spirit, after the light has been switched off, after the deconsecration?
More information can be found here.
Future music duo Second Woman's sophomore full-length for Spectrum Spools further hones their distinctive fusion of shapeshifting software sculpture and tessellated footwork. Shivering digital textures oscillate with and against algorithmically mapped percussion samples; smeared synthetic chords levitate in the distance; stabs of digital noise punctuate the mix in twitchy, time-distorting patterns. Their anamorphosis verges on ascetic: stark, splintered waveforms rendered into unique fiber optic hieroglyphs.
Multi-instrumentalists Josh Eustis and Turk Dietrich share a deep history going back to their days in the New Orleans ambient electronic community, as part of Telefon Tel Aviv and Belong, respectively. Even so, S/W pushes beyond their combined discographies to date, flexing impossibilities, building rhythms from arrhythmia, teasing veiled emotion from bold iterations of cold code.
More information can be found here.
Editions Mego is proud to present the latest opus from legendary British composer, actor, sound designer and all round fine human Simon Fisher Turner. Giraffe is a new major work which blurs the lines between sound design and song, machine severity and narrative sentimentality. Subtitled "living in sounds and music" Giraffe take the listener through a vast journey where an abstract clacking of unknown origin rubs up against a melancholic electronic sequence. "Life sounds" were captured with a portable hard disc recorder and i-phone and appear alongside contemporar sound design. Emma Smith provides the narrative on "Slight Smile," whilst electronic machines grind amongst background industrial klang in "Mud Larks." "Save As" revolves around a beautiful simple piano motif which soon folds into an unnerving field recording and drone combination.
Giraffe is a document of interior and exterior duality. A living space where machines and the surrounding world collide, a sonic landscape where musical and nonmusical elements are placed on an level hierarchy. The alchemy of these constituent parts results in the magic of Giraffe, one where the symbiotic sequence of events highlights a unique approach to sound as rapturous matter in whatever form it takes.
More information can be found here.
Let us explore new modes of music making. Let us take the intensity of the studio session and drop it into the home. If the "avant-garde" is thought to be un-domestic then what impact does this domestic situation have on the shape and sound of our project? Can the radical even exist inside the domestic? It's so private in the home. How vulnerable are we? Are the shades down and the curtains drawn? Can we become out of order? A rug turned at a slight angle, resisting not to straighten it as you pass by. The merger of soft and dark sides, melodic voices and angular jabs, organic and pre-programmed, dinner parties and carry out. A dislocated and disjointed dance. "Deviation of the logical function from it's usual pattern" - André Breton The "Detroit House Guests" project concept was conceived in the early 2000s and became a reality in 2014 after receiving a John S. and James L. Knight Foundation grant. The project was based on the "visual" artist residency model but for musicians. Each musician would come for up to a 3 week period with the parameter that we live, work, and collaborate together. The results - a total anthropological sound experiment and a full length album. ADULT. is the Detroit duo Nicola Kuperus and Adam Lee Miller. They played their first live show together in Germany in 1997 under the name Artificial Material. In early '98 they released their first 12" under the moniker Plasma Co. Later that year, they released their first 12" under the name ADULT. Currently, they have released six albums and 19 EPs or singles on Ghostly International, Thrill Jockey, Clone Records as well as on their own label Ersatz Audio, (which currently has over 40 releases since it was founded in '95) They have remixed over 20 acts as well, including Tuxedomoon, John Foxx, Death in Vegas and Pet Shop Boys (for Moog Music). Kuperus and Miller also make sculpture, paintings, films, photographs, performances, videos and installations. They strive to intersect the lines between art and audio. They have exhibited their work at institutions such as the Austrian Cultural Forum (NY), Mattress Factory (Pittsburgh), Detroit Institute of Arts (Detroit), MOMAS (Saitama, Japan), and Centre d'art contemporain de Meymac (FR). They have shown their film The Three Grace(s) triptych at places such as Anthology Film Archives (NY), Distrital Film Festival (Mexico City), and Grey Area for Art and Technology (SF).
Detroit House Guests features collaborations from Douglas J McCarthy, founding member of Nitzer Ebb, solo artist and one half of Fixmer/McCarthy; Michael Gira from Swans / Angels of Light, Shannon Funchess from US duo Light Asylum; Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe aka Lichens, Austrian thereminist Dorit Chrysler and multidisciplinary artist Lun*na Menoh.
Alan Courtis (aka Anla Courtis) is one of those composers that at times is occasionally too prolific, spreading himself thin over numerous collaborations and solo works each year. Because of that, his work is sometimes less focused than it could be, simply due to the extreme breadth of what he puts out. However, when one of his releases is obviously a fully realized concept, his work is usually exceptionally compelling.  Los Galpones (The Sheds) is one of his more targeted works, by that standard. A record built upon mostly just guitar and metallic objects, it is a wonderfully unified suite of four distinct pieces that work together perfectly and creates a nuanced sense of post-industrial decay.
Each side of Los Galpones consists of two pieces, one shorter and one longer.In these, Courtis coaxes pained sounds from his guitar, with rhythmic elements from springs and other found objects, into a bleak din of industrial (in the physical sense) dissonance."Hombrear" is all deep and bassy hollow expanses, with electronic sounds slowly bubbling up from the tarpit like foundation below.Heavy echoes mix with the electronics, building slowly and becoming more and more imposing.By the end, there is a strong rhythmic structure to it, nicely composed, with abrasive, violent bowed violin strings cutting through like a rusty blade.The shorter companion "Aparcero" is comparably sparser, with what sounds like scraped guitar strings and other less identifiable processed outbursts.By the end of its relatively short duration, it is a disorienting mess of whipping panned noises that are anything but monotonous.
On the other side, "Estiba" begins as a heavy bass murk, with a far off guitar clang slowly introduced into the mix.For the whole performance Courtis works on top of an insistent rhythmic throb, with the entirety being noisy yet structured.Some whistle blowing like noises pop up here and there to keep everything abrasive, but the guitar nicely contrasts by becoming more and more musical.Even with the violently grinding harsh bits that appear towards the end, the overall feel is more depressive rather than aggressive, and the song concludes in a great, erratic disintegration of noise and melody.
The shorter accompaniment "Corralon" is largely pleasantly strummed guitar compared to the dissonance before.Rather than the heavy processing and effects before, it is essentially just echoed and delayed, creating a more expansive sound from a rather simple source.Courtis layers these sounds expertly, mixing in percussion and subtle treatments to create a thick, rich expanse of drones that is far more than the sum of its parts.Compared to what preceded it the feel is more sad and mournful than overly depressive, ending the album on an especially beautiful note.
Los Galpones is a high point in Alan Courtis' expansive, ever-growing catalog.There is a bleak darkness, like a sense of urban decay to be heard throughout the album that he captures through the instrumentation and his guitar playing.It never comes across as forced or overly on the nose, though.Instead the performance and production captures this sensibility in a solely audio form.Make no mistake:Los Galpones is bleak and anything but uplifting in sound, but it is a bleakness achieved so adeptly that it takes on a distinct beauty all its own.
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For his two most recent (near simultaneous) releases, Jim Haynes has scaled back his audial representation of decay to something a bit colder and more intentionally off-putting. Both albums are largely based on field recordings taken from a residency in Estonia, and capturing the detritus of Soviet era electronics (and some still active) via shortwave and then processing the results. The final products may be somewhat sparser than his other works, but no less fascinating, and with an additional menacing edge.
On the first side of the Flammable Materials record, Haynes presents three pieces that are perhaps the most inline with his previous works.Treated static and radio interference is unsurprisingly a recurring theme of the record, but are especially prevalent on the opening piece "Of Blast and Bleach".Here Haynes mixes it with some sort of idling motor sound that is fittingly inconsistent.Elements of the static and noise are shaped into some sort of rhythmic structure that contrasts the abstract remainder of the composition very effectively.
Haynes takes on a more noise-centric approach on "Nyet".First a lava-like wall of harshness with the occasional tone slipping through, it is quickly broken back down and built back up, with an emphasis on shifting filters obscuring the low register part of the spectrum.For "E. Kohver" he takes on the opposite approach to the structure and arrangement.This piece is mostly a heavy, imposing drone with metallic tinged machinery noises that never goes full on dissonant, but stays sinister.At times the shortwave static is molded into that crackling texture-like sound that Haynes does so well, but the whole piece is very menacing and dynamic.
The other side of the album is dedicated to a single piece, "Electric Speech:Nadiya".A bit over 20 minutes, the composition is based solely on the radio broadcast of a woman speaking.Of course Haynes also makes use of the static and noise inherent to this type of recording, but in general he embraces minimalism more.The source material voice appears frequently, cut into fragments and phonemes that are anything but identifiable words, regardless of the language being spoken.As a whole it is a different style he is working in, with that singular focus and an impressive use of silence to contrast the more commanding moments.
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Throttle and Calibration is from the same residency, and makes use of the Active Crossover series of audio archives by Simon Whetham in addition to Haynes’ own field recordings.Beyond just the sound from shortwave radios, these six pieces also utilize environments captured from shipping containers, decaying water towers, frigid winds, and other remnants of Cold War era decay.Since its conceptual focus is a bit broader, it is not surprising then that the sound is more reminiscent of his other recent releases."With Lead" is at first all dramatic crashes and weirdly wet sounding organic noises that are disturbing in their ambiguity before transitioning to a more understated rumble.
"Radiesthesia" is at first a foghorn like tone and abrasive mid-range distortion, but collapses again, interrupted with louder moments and backward voices to create a ominous ambience that is simultaneously disturbing and haunting, but is in league with what I have expected from his work.Haynes' standard practice of creating rot and decay is also on full display for "It Burns", which is a mass of abrupt noise blasts and violent crashes that becomes thinner and more brittle with time.
"Kirikulau" is a bit of a departure for him, however.The sound is more focused on lighter, ringing sounds and surging, unpleasant noises.It is not as dynamic as usual, but his balance of sustained tone and noisy outbursts is structurally reminiscent of Hermann Nitsch's compositions, with a more pronounced sense of rust and decay."What Do You Mean By That?" also stands out as more haunting and feedback-centric, with an overall seasick wobble to it, even though there is an unsettling sense of calm.Haynes adds layers and layers of distortion and noise throughout, pulling back to leave some open space and occasionally punctuating things with a metallic clang or thunderous rumble.
Both of Jim Haynes' newest works are exceptional additions to his already impressive body of work.The Throttle and Calibration tape is probably the less adventurous of the two, but is still a work deeply embedded in his style without being any sort of retread or replication of material he has already done.Flammable Materials from Foreign Lands benefits from its unique conceptual direction and focus, but really neither one is better than the other, and both are just excellent works from someone who has done an admirable job developing a career of sound art that always stands strong as utterly unique and fascinating.
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Christian Savill and Sean Hewson have been in bands together since the late '80s. In 1989, one of these bands, Eternal, released a single on Sarah Records called Breathe that featured the dreamy, fuzzed out guitars soaring over pop melodies that Christian brings to any project he is a part of. Sean was missing for that but returned for a shambolic gig supporting Slowdive and Chapterhouse in Reading. Shortly afterwards, and with some justification, Christian left to join Slowdive.
Ten years later, Christian and Sean formed Monster Movie in a failed attempt to go Krautrock. In 2001, they released their first EP on Clairecords which contained a few seconds of Krautrock but was mainly dreamy, fuzzed out guitars soaring over pop melodies. In the years spanning 2002-2010 Monster Movie put out four full length albums, a mini album, and a few EPs, the majority of which were released on Graveface Records.
Since 2014 Christian has also been involved with Slowdive's reunion and subsequent touring. The band have just released "Star Roving," their first single in 22 years. Slowdive's reappearance has also had a positive effect on Monster Movie with Sean and Christian realising that they needed to move away from being a studio project and become a proper band. For their latest and strongest album, Keep The Voices Distant, they were joined by James Harrison from Air Formation on drums and Nick Chaplin (Slowdive) on bass with Christian and Sean contributing guitar, bass, keyboards and vocals. Since September 2015 Monster Movie have been Kev Wells (guitar/vocals/everything), Sean Hewson (bass/vocals/everything), Christian Savill (guitar/vocals/everything) and James Harrison (drums/vocals/everything).
Keep The Voices Distant is Monster Movie's fifth album and their first record since 2010's Everyone Is a Ghost. It was recorded with Martin Nichols at White House Recording Studios in Weston-super-Mare and produced by Ryan Graveface. As with all Monster Movie releases it is a combination of Christian and Sean's song-writing, playing, arrangements, general grumpiness and chaotic, personal lives. This time, however, with James, Nick and Ryan in the studio with them, the songs have really been allowed to really take off.
More information can be found here.
Xiu Xiu’s Jamie Stewart and Lawrence English are not two artists that I would have ever thought to pair together, but a shared appreciation for David Lynch is probably as solid a foundation for a collaboration as any.  Also, HEXA makes perfect sense given the circumstances:  Xiu Xiu recorded an incredible Twin Peaks homage,  Brisbane's Gallery of Modern Art assembled a major retrospective of Lynch’s work, and Lawrence English is one of Australia’s most prominent and distinctive sound artists.  Notably, however, this commissioned accompaniment to Lynch's photographs of abandoned factories sounds almost nothing like either English or Xiu Xiu.  Instead, it sounds a hell of a lot like an artfully restrained and simmering noise album.  More specifically, Factory Photographs is industrial music in the most literal sense of the word, resembling nothing less than the troubled dreams of a ruined and long-deserted factory.
The most immediately striking aspect of Factory Photographs is how completely Jamie Stewart's aesthetic is subsumed by this commission.  There is absolutely no distinctive aspect of Xiu Xiu’s sound that survives at all, aside from the vaguest elements imaginable, such as "a tendency towards darkness" and "a fondness for harsh textures." Of course, English’s vision does not assert itself all that much either, though Photographs does bear some textural resemblance to his upcoming Cruel Optimism album, albeit with absolutely all of the musical elements excised.  English has worked extensively with field recordings in the past though and that is what Factory Photographs most closely resembles: field recordings of crunching and clanging machines collaged, embellished, and enhanced.  The opening "Sledge" effectively presents the template for the entire project:  echoing clashes of metal, deep crunches and rumbles, subdued and pulsing machine rhythms, menacing feedback, and unexpected transformations of mood. Admittedly, the mood palette here is quite limited, probably only covering "tense," "brooding," and "haunted," but those are all moods that I am quite fond of.
Yet another immediately noticeable feature of this album is that feels like part of an installation (which I suppose it is) rather than a series of stand-alone compositions.  It often feels like quite a harrowing installation though, so if English and Stewart were aiming for mere industrial ambiance, they chose a particularly visceral and menacingly intrusive strain of it.  This album definitely has some teeth.  That said, the overall feel throughout Factory Photographs is that of rusted, churning machinery violently rattling and spraying sparks alone in a cavernous empty space.  With that as the baseline, however, Stewart and English periodically erupt into a handful of striking set pieces.  The gnarled feedback of the opening "Sledge" is one such moment, but it was not until the one-two punch of "Lumber" and "Ring Bark" that Factory Photographs truly grabbed and held my attention.  In "Lumber," a clipped, locked groove-style rhythm relentlessly carries along a howling and crunching cacophony that sounds like a giant machine has gone mad and started tearing apart its surroundings.  "Ring Bark" is a bit more subtle, but no less mesmerizing, as its initial ghostly hum of feedback unexpectedly explodes into a stuttering rhythm of static that sounds like the end of a record being playing at a disconcerting speed.  I suspect Lynch himself would appreciate that small nightmarishly surreal touch.
To my ears, those are probably the strongest pieces on the album, but there are number of other wonderfully haunting motifs strewn through Photographs, like the slowly quavering and uncomfortably harmonizing moans of "There Never Was," the dissolving eruptions of flutters in "Over Horizontal Plains," and the slow-motion volcano of shuddering static that is "The Body."  Given that two of the album’s ten pieces are mere snippets that last less than a minute, English and Stewart rack up quite a strong hit-to-miss ratio, even if it all tends to rapidly flow by in an all-too-brief blur. Weirdly, I am not quite sure if that is a triumph of sequencing or a flaw, as it is hard to tell if Factory Photographs was intended a series of incidental pieces seamlessly stitched together into a coherent whole or an attempt at a fully formed album that needed a little padding to reach an acceptable length.  More likely, it is the former, but it still feels more like a (delicious) snack than a meal.  Of course, that also means that no pieces ever overstay their welcome, which I greatly appreciate.  More importantly, I was quite impressed at how completely Factory Photographs succeeds in other regards.  For one, it feels like a true collaboration with a strong and distinctive vision: if it sounds a bit like a Lawrence English album, it at least sounds like a sinister negative image of one.  Also, HEXA unquestionably nails the grainy, desolate, and unreal mood of Lynch's photographs, which was the whole point of this collaboration.  While it probably is not an essential release within either artist’s canon, it feels like much more than just a soundtrack and is a fine way to imbue my home with an appropriate atmosphere of Lynchian dread.
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This winter marks the 20th anniversary of Maurizio and Roberto Opalio’s singular My Cat is an Alien project, a milestone that they are celebrating with a pair of fascinating and divergent releases.  Originally recorded back in 2015, Eternal Beyond is the fruit of an explosive and wildly experimental 4-day session with French black metal vocalist Joëlle Vinciarelli that does not sound at all like black metal.  RE-SI-STEN-ZA!, on the other hand, is billed as a sort of culmination of My Cat is an Alien’s entire career.  As I have not yet heard much of the Opalio’s earlier work, I cannot vouch for the truth of that, but I was pleasantly surprised by the title piece, which sounds like the work of a radical art commune a la Amon Düül embellished and collaged by a talented noise/musique concrète artist.
Up Against the Wall, Motherfuckers!
I am always especially eager to hear the Opalio brothers' collaborative endeavors, as My Cat is an Alien is such a singular and hermetic entity.  As such, it presents quite a unique challenge for any artist attempting to merge with their aesthetic, which generally leads to some intriguingly bizarre results.  Also, I am often unfamiliar with the other artists who enter the Alien orbit, so it can be a potential opportunity for me to discover some similarly outré minds.  In this case, I was vaguely aware of Joëlle Vinciarelli’s La Morte Young side project, but completely unfamiliar with her status as the howling frontwoman of French black metal band Talweg.  Black metal and MCIAA seem like unlikely bedfellows, but it is immediately apparent from the harrowing shrieks in brief opener "Preludio" that Joëlle’s feral edge is probably the perfect foil for the Opalios' burbling psychotropic miasma.  The first fully formed piece of the album, "Eternal Marriage of Heaven and Hell," only deepened that belief.  The core of "Eternal Marriage" is very much in line with MCIAA's recent aesthetic of plinking and disjointed strings, churning electronic drones, and a quavering and wordless vocal haze, but it is viscerally enhanced by crunching and scraping metal textures and a host of guttural screams and jungle sounds.  It sounds like a wonderfully cacophonous and unearthly collision of lysergic reverie, space battle, metal recycling plant, and monkey orgy.  That is certainly not a niche that I knew needed filling beforehand, but it works brilliantly.
The other two major pieces on the album are similarly compelling, particularly "Eternal Albert Ayler," which enhances Maurizio Opalio's harp-like backdrop and the buzzing electronic periphery with a wonderfully strangled and primal trumpet solo from Vinciarelli.  The 22-minute "Eternal Eclipse du Soleil" is the album’s massive centerpiece though, unleashing a buzzing and sizzling bed of electronic textures, wordless ritualistic chants and moans, and plenty of crunching and scraping metal textures.  As it progresses, some of the components grow increasingly unreal in texture.  Also, it often sounds like there is a hapless noise-guitar band a la The Dead C trying to be heard above the din.  The overall effect is quite a difficult one to convey, but the closest description I can muster is "it sounds like approaching a remote monastery through a jungle while the earth shakes and fire rains from the sky."  As with many great MCIAA works, it could arguably benefit from more aggressive editing, but the length feels fundamentally crucial for pulling me completely out of my reality in time for the heavy and beautifully crafted final crescendo.
To my ears, Eternal Beyond was an ideal collaboration for the Opalios at this stage in their career, as they have plunged as deeply and completely into a hallucinatory rabbit hole of otherworldliness as anyone. While I am sure Maurizio and Roberto will no doubt go even deeper into that singular headspace with future albums, this release is an unexpectedly explosive lateral move away from that expected trajectory.  Most MCIAA albums evoke and explore an increasingly vibrant and fully realized alien soundworld totally unlike anything else I have heard–on Eternal Beyond, the Opalio’s vision instead feels like it is ripping through a dimensional barrier to bleed into our own.  That is a welcome twist: as much as I love being totally unmoored in unfettered imagination run wild, some earthbound context and contrast adds some very effective sharp edges to MCIAA's strange dreams.
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The atypically earthbound and representational cover art provides an immediate clue that RE-SI-STEN-ZA! might not be a typical My Cat is an Alien album and that is indeed a safe assessment. For one, it is the most personal of the Opalio brothers' releases, standing as a tribute to their family, their region, and the culture of resistance, all of which come together in the cover photograph of the duo's maternal grandparents.  I never expected overt political statements from MCIAA, but it is understandably hard to be a bystander in such an increasingly frightened and xenophobic era.  That said, the theme of resistance is one that has arguably shaped MCIAA's entire career, as there are few other artists who have been so unwaveringly challenging and iconoclastic for as long as the Opalios.  The average My Cat is an Alien album has absolute zero common ground with anything happening in the mundane world of the masses, as Maurizio and Roberto seem to exclusively look to the stars or search inwardly for their inspirations instead.
The opening title piece is a surprise exception to that trend, as it instead looks backward to the music of revolution-minded rock and communal free-improv.  At least, it does initially, as Roberto declaims his titular poem over a lurching and oddly timed quasi-tribal rhythm of deep toms and ringing ride cymbal.  That nod to the radical past is both precarious and fleeting though, as the groove is soon beset by a haze of oscillating and chirping space toys.  As long as Roberto is speaking, the piece remains somewhat subdued, though there is clearly the feel of a gathering storm beneath him. Eventually, however, it finally erupts into wildly bubbling and churning stew of electronic chaos and it is glorious.  Unexpectedly, however, it quickly settles back down into a woozily plinking and ringing simmer…before absolutely exploding into a roiling crescendo of howling noise and swirling alientronics.  The remaining and similarly lengthy piece, "Let Their Voices Speak Through The Wind," is a bit more in the vein of recent MCIAA albums such as Psycho-System and The Dance of Oneirism: heavy psychotropic drone built from chirping electronic pulses and Roberto’s wordless layered cooing. Nevertheless , it marks an intriguing (if subtle) evolution, as Roberto and Maurizio occasionally cohere into a bit of a more structured composition than usual with a simple and languorous one-finger keyboard melody and some ghosts of a chord progression.  Of course, the primary appeal is still the sheer otherness and enveloping haze of pulse and oscillations, but the spectral hints of poignant melody and unexpected harmonies add a welcome extra shade of depth and beauty.
It is hard to say if RE-SI-STEN-ZA! is better than any other recent My Cat is an Alien albums, as their last few opuses have all been absolutely absorbing masterpieces of outsider psychedelia.  This album does stand apart as distinctive for a couple of reasons though.  The most obvious one is that it delves deeply into an uncategorizable sort of spaced-out, noise-damaged psych rock quite different from their recent abstract drone-fests.  Also, Maurizio unexpectedly unleashes quite a gorgeous and rippling guitar coda at the end of "Let Their Voices Speak," which is rare treat from a duo so devoted to unconventional instrumentation (and with such a liberated approach to scales and chords).  The less immediately apparent innovation is that these "spontaneous compositions" seem to have more of a premeditated dynamic and compositional arc than usual.  That is a welcome innovation; particularly since the sneaky intrusion of structure does nothing dispel to the mind-warping transcendence of the Opalios' alien vision–it merely makes it a bit more accessible.  Most likely, everyone already indoctrinated into My Cat is an Alien’s singular vision already knows that this is an essential release, but it may very well be the perfect entry point for the curious as well.
 
Eli Keszler's Cold Pin was easily one of most remarkable and inventive albums of 2011, but he has largely been working under my radar ever since, steadily releasing a flow of live recordings and small-edition vinyl-only collaborations.  Consequently, I was delighted to discover that he was finally ready to unleash another solo opus.  Last Signs of Speed, the inaugural release from Berlin's Empty Editions, is inherently a bit less radical than Cold Pin, as it is sadly not built from a motorized string installation.  It may as well have been built from a motorized percussion installation though, as Keszler's hyper-kinetic free-jazz-inspired drumming is compellingly inhuman and unpredictable.  There is also some music: the album description intriguingly references both Scientist and Iannis Xenakis as key influences, but that dub influence is a damn subtle one.  Instead, Last Signs generally sounds more like Xenakis mixed with a truckload of drumsticks being fitfully poured down a long and winding flight of stairs (in the best way possible).
I tend to think of Eli Keszler primarily as an incredibly talented percussionist with a lot of bold and interesting ideas, so I sometimes forget that he is a formidable composer and multi-instrumentalist as well.  In fact, most of these twelve pieces were performed entirely by Keszler himself, which goes a long way towards explaining why it was recorded in three different cities over two years.  Sometimes Keszler had some talented help though, as he is occasionally joined by cellist Leila Bordreuil, percussionist Geoff Mullen, and the String Orchestra of Brooklyn.  Unsurprisingly, the pieces featuring the string orchestra tend to be the most Xenakis-like and often the most vibrant, rich, and fully formed.  That is not always the case though, as Keszler goes it alone in the wonderfully deranged opener "Sudden Laughter, Laughter Without Reason," which sounds like a handful of sickly, out-of-phase sonar pings uncomfortably harmonizing with one another as Keszler unleashes a wildly skittering drum solo.  It is a quite an opening salvo.  As for the orchestra, they make their strongest showing on "Is Stage Director," as they work up quite a churning and cacophonous din of ugly drones as Keszler goes absolutely bananas on his kit.  It is probably the strongest piece on the album just on sheer intensity alone, as Keszler is an unpredictable blur of oddly timed and insanely intricate fills.  Curiously, that unhinged flurry is immediately followed by my other favorite piece ("Holes, Parts Missing"), which eschews percussive pyrotechnics altogether in favor of a quietly lurching and see-sawing rhythm of deep bowed strings.
The rest of the album is a bit more one-dimensionally percussion-focused, but there is indeed a bizarrely manifested and deeply abstract dub influence that arguably surfaces again and again in the form of woozily throbbing bass pulses. "No Iodine, No Breeze" is an especially representative example of that strain, resembling a crawling reggae groove that has been deconstructed into ghostly starkness with some eerily tinkling piano accompaniment.  It is the sort of thing that would definitely drag in the wrong hands, but the wildly plinking and ricocheting percussion handily erases any danger of a lull.  Also, aside from his "conventional" drumming, Keszler additionally creates a lot of unusual textural and rhythmic effects using rocks and gravel on his kit.  It is quite a distinctive sound.  
Most of Last Signs of Speed is devoted to interesting variations upon similarly minimal melodic themes, such as "Breaches Breaches," which sounds like someone tirelessly pumping away at a dying accordion.  The more dramatic departures tend to occur only when other musicians are involved, such as Leila Bordreuil’s nuanced miasma of nightmarish cello drones in "The Next Day, In the Afternoon." Not to be upstaged on his own album, Keszler's percussion for that piece resembles nothing less than several overlapping and fast-paced ping-pong matches.  Later, Keszler teams up with Geoff Mullen for an apparent reprise of "No Iodine, No Breeze" entitled "Willing to be Open," which takes the album’s percussion to strange and frenzied new heights.  Wielding an array of glass, metal, and wood fragments, it sounds like either the work of an insanely busy Rube Goldberg contraption or an amplified and bizarrely rhythmic hail storm.
Naturally, the problem with making an album as brilliant and inventive as Cold Pin is that there will inevitably have to be a follow-up and that it will be nearly impossible to make the same impact a second time, though Keszler did revisit Cold Pin's mechanized installation once more with 2012's Catching Net.  Last Signs of Speed is a different beast altogether though, veering away from installations and sound art into a kinetic tour de force performance behind the drum kit.  As such, it is considerably more technique-driven than conceptually visionary, but Keszler's technique is quite staggering on its own, as he is a skittering, clattering whirlwind.  His talents as a composer are not quite on the same level though, so Speed probably would have been stronger as just a single LP rather than a double.  The pieces are all generally quite good, but a few feel interchangeable with one another and a broodingly monochromatic mood has a tendency to make an album feel longer than it actually is.  Minor grumbling aside, however, Last Signs of Speed is still quite a singular and inspired album.  My opinion may be somewhat suspect though, as I love listening to great drummers flexing their improv skills and could probably happily listen to Keszler play for hours with no music at all.  While I am sure that such a predisposition towards free-jazz drumming helps make Speed a bit more mesmerizing, it is probably not essential, as this is exactly the sort of album that could make someone excited about virtuosic percussionists.
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Emptyset has always been a project that I felt weirdly guilty about not appreciating more, as they seemed like a more cerebral and mercilessly deconstructed twist on the UK's industrial-damaged post-dance milieu of Raime, Haxan Cloak, and Demdike Stare.  Also, I love James Ginzburg's Subtext label.  Unfortunately, all their songs sounded vaguely the same to me and I found all the praise for their architectural inspirations a bit mystifying.  Yet still I kept optimistically buying each new album hoping for a masterpiece that never arrived.  Thankfully, this debut release for Thrill Jockey finally makes everything click for me.  The same general template as always is still in place (improbably dense, ribcage-rattling bass and a slow-motion kick drum pulse), but Ginzburg and Paul Purgas have now distilled it into a thing of truly bludgeoning elemental force: Borders absolutely explodes from my speakers.  Also, the duo now wield a bass-heavy homemade "zither" to wonderfully visceral and snarling effect, which I did not see coming at all.  I am officially now a convert.
I freely admit to being very late to the party in embracing Emptyset, but there have always been some rather significant and mitigating "the emperor has no clothes" aspects to the duo that were somewhat difficult to get past While I have not heard all of their releases, I have heard several of the major ones and Ginzburg and Purgas have a long history of avoiding anything resembling hooks, chord changes, melodies, propulsive rhythms, or songcraft. In fact, a remarkable number of Emptyset pieces (particularly the ones on this album) are built upon the obsessive repetition of just one note.  There is also an unwavering fixation on deep, slow-motion thuds for the rhythmic component.  Occasionally, on pieces like "Descent," Emptyset open up with something resembling a relentlessly pummeling groove with multiple notes and rare ping-ponging snare-like drums.  Even then, however, the duo lock into that groove to a mechanically rigid and relentless degree. In general, however, Borders is a feast of extreme bass worship, heavy industrial textures, and cutting edge sound design.  To some degree, many these eleven songs are almost interchangeable, but not in a "this band has absolutely no ideas" way.  Rather, each new piece sounds like yet another monomaniacal attempt to bulldoze me into dust.  I am totally fine with endless variations upon that theme.
On paper, that might not sound especially compelling, but the sheer single-mindedness and absolutely crushing execution of Borders can be legitimately awe-inspiring, particularly when played at an appropriately high volume.  In fact, I suspect the monolithic immensity of Emptyset can probably only be fully captured live, though Borders seems to come as close as a mere recording can possibly come to replicating such viscerally seismic and all-consuming force.  Also, the self-built zither was exactly the missing tool that Emptyset needed for their mission, as its buzzing metallic snarl gives these pieces a real sense of violence that far transcends conceptual sound art.  The zither is especially effective when it is strummed with punky urgency, as in "Speak" and "Dissolve."  Any attempt at maintaining forward momentum at all adds another yet layer of gratification.  It is certainly not something that Emptyset has explored much in the past.
I am most fascinated by Emptyset's core aesthetic though, as it dawned on me as I revisited some of their other albums that Ginzburg and Purgas were essentially applying a high-powered microscope to underground dance: they would essentially focus on small snippet of a groove, excise it, blow it up to rumbling and monstrous size, and then loop it.  In that light, I now appreciate the "architecture" component of Emptyset's art a bit better, as their real magic is their ability to take a simple idea and absolutely overwhelm a space with their highly localized earthquake of oversaturated frequencies, rich overtones, and subterranean rumble. That, of course, makes perfect sense, as anyone who heard last year's Paul Jebanasam and Roly Porter albums can attest that the Subtext milieu have a genius for explosive production values.  They also have a tendency towards crystalline clarity, but Emptyset bucks the trend, as Borders is quite an appealingly gritty and distorted affair.  There truly is not anything else out there quite like this, as Borders feels half like old Raime and Haxan Cloak snippets that have been chiseled and jacked-up to brutal effect and half like a boozed-up Ellen Fullman album spoiling for a street fight.  Borders is admittedly all force and density, but it is nearly impossible to imagine anyone else pulling off that feat any better than Ginzburg and Purgas do here.
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