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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It is rare for me to get very enthusiastic about tour-only releases, as I feel that artists generally want their best material to be heard by as many people as possible rather than just a handful of collectors.  This compilation of The Legendary Pink Dots’ ephemeral holiday EPs was an exception though, as it has always driven me slightly crazy that I had missed the boat on so many special one-off releases.  Also, Edward Ka-Spel always seemed like the rare artist who might be unpredictable and prolific enough to cheerfully release his best material in an incredibly limited edition.  Upon hearing the sprawling Festive, I can safely say that that was not the case, as a lot of LPD's holiday epics tend to be drifting, understated soundscapes or amusing experiments in twisting and tweaking samples, but a few pieces are legitimately striking and the cumulative effect of all this material at once is pleasantly overwhelming.  As such, this prolonged plunge into the benignly deranged holiday rabbit hole is strictly for fans of the Dots' more abstract and unrepentantly indulgent side.
Festive is wisely and deceptively frontloaded with 2015's "Hypothetical Angel," the closest thing to a single on the entire collection.  Even so, its tender and lilting balladry only lasts about three minutes before dissolving into eerie synth drift and something that sounds like a children's choir that has been digitized, stretched, and pixelated into a chorus of lethargic, drugged robots.  Then, of course, comes a delightful parade of chopped and collaged snatches of Christmas movies that is just the right balance of whimsy, darkness, and hallucination.  It may very well be the definitive phantasmagoric Christmas-themed mindfuck of all-time (I especially enjoyed the looping and cartoonish outro of "Christmas?  Bleh!").  Yet another highlight of the first disc comes from The Legendary Pink Dots Hallowe’en Special 2015 (I love how each release sounds like a variety show): "The Wall Street Spectre."  Opening with an appealingly sing-song vocal melody over a wobbly and heavily chorused arpeggio pattern, "Spectre" takes a page from "Angel" and dissolves into something far stranger and more abstract after just a few short minutes.  The crux of it all is a wry amusing and occult-tinged Ka-Spel monologue about "market forces" in the guise of a fellow named Hollow Ian.  Midway through that interlude, Ka-Spel's voice takes a turn for the demonic and the music becomes increasingly distorted and wrong-sounding.  Unfortunately, it does not quite hold together as well as "Angel," quickly degenerating into a disjointed and seemingly arbitrary flow of odd found-sound vignettes and snatches of music.
The rest of Festive is even less song-based, alternating between lengthy plunges into brooding ambiance and droning psychedelia and brief interludes of surreality.  For the most part, the interludes are interesting, but too short to make a strong impression.  "Pink," for example, is just a loop of Bing Crosby’s "White Christmas" that gradually morphs into "I'm dreaming of a pink solstice" as it becomes more distorted, echo-heavy, and obsessive.  Elsewhere, "I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Decade" is a haunted bit of minor key chamber music that sometimes sounds like it being dragged into the pit of hell.  
Obviously, the longer pieces are considerably more substantial, but their flashes of inspiration are a bit more stretched and diluted.  "Pagan Place" is the most immediately gratifying of the lot, as its initial collage of woozy music box melodies and children singing is an unusual balance of warm and creepy.  Gradually, however, it gets more discordant and impressionistic and the children all disappear to be replaced by a groove that sounds somewhere between Eastern European folk music and prog rock being played backwards.  "The Witching Hour," on the other hand, dispatches with any attempt at a hook at all and plunges wholeheartedly in nearly 25 minutes of fragmented nightmare.  It feels like a mash-up of horror movie ambiance and cheap Halloween tapes heard through a heavy fog of drugs.  The remaining longform pieces are considerably less fractured though, opting instead to quietly sustain a dark mood.  In that regard, the quietly simmering and blearily hallucinatory "Seasonal Chill" is a dark horse contender for the real centerpiece of this collection, as it just eerily stretches out for nine minutes of focused and languorous disquiet.  The inscrutable closer "Purple" seems to attempt a similar feat, but is just too drifting and understated for its own good: it feels like being trapped instead a festive snow globe where everyone else is dead–initially disorienting and sinister, then increasingly dull and devoid of surprise.
Obviously, the big selling point for this collection is that it makes available five rarely heard and rather anomalous LPD releases.  In that regard, it serves its purpose beautifully, even if not all of those EPs quite captured the Dots at the peak of their game.  In fact, Festive would be a far better album if it had been aggressively condensed rather than comprehensive and complete.  As such, Festive is probably only for completists and fans in love with the band's more subdued, ambient side.  I personally like it, but it is definitely the sort of album that I would be rather hesitant to recommend to anyone: it is quite a diffuse and exhausting listening experience, as there are plenty of long and meandering lulls between the various flurries of activity.  Also, no one piece manages to stand out as particularly essential within the LPD canon, though there are plenty of cool ideas and flashes of humor strewn about in wait for patient listeners to happen upon them.  The emphasis was definitely on spontaneity, fun, and naked experimentation here rather than songcraft or editing.  As such, Festive is a perversely non-traditional album that celebrates holiday traditions, as it eschews hooks and cohesiveness and does not hold up well to attentive listening or scrutiny, but does a perfectly fine job of blurring and softening the edges of harsh reality for a couple of hours.
Many influential characters graced the stage of Max's Kansas City within the creative zeitgeist of New York City during the late 1970s, but one local native named Annie Bandez thrust herself into the downtown scene with her punk ensemble Annie and the Asexuals, establishing her nom de plume Annie Anxiety (later known as “Little Annie”) and colliding head-on with the social norms of contemporary punk culture entangling the city at that time.
After a couple years of disintegrated pursuits in New York, Annie relocated to England, finding herself at the doorstep of the famed anarchro-commune Dial House headed by activist Penny Rimbaud. It was here that Annie Anxiety established herself as a singular artist and voice with her debut 1981 single “Barbed Wire Halo” on seminal Crass Records and forging a creative alliance with Crass members Penny Rimbaud and Eve Libertine. As the landscape of punk in the United Kingdom was shifting towards a more diverse, multicultural focal point, artists such as Annie Anxiety found themselves exploring musical signatures in styles such as dub reggae and rocksteady.
In the summer of 1983, Annie began work at Southern Studios on what would be her first full length endeavor which encompassed all of her creative assets at that time. Employing the expertise of legendary dub producer Adrian Sherwood to realize this vision, Annie pulled together members of Crass, Flux of Pink Indians, Family Fodder, African Head Charge, London Underground and Art Interface to record her groundbreaking dub industrial masterpiece. Upon its initial release by the unofficial Crass off-shoot label Corpus Christi in 1984, Soul Possession started the avalanche of activity that would include dozens of releases and collaborations with Nurse With Wound, Coil, Current 93, Swans and Marc Almond.
Dais Records proudly reissues Soul Possession on vinyl for the first time in over 30 years in a limited edition pressing featuring the original artwork by Eve Libertine on January 6, 2017. Limited to 500 copies (400 black vinyl / 100 brown vinyl).
A Winged Victory For The Sullen, the otherworldly collaboration between Adam Bryanbaum Wiltzie and Dustin O’Halloran, commence the New Year with their third full-length titled Iris – available worldwide via Erased Tapes on January 13th 2017.
Adam Bryanbaum Wiltzie and Dustin O'Halloran first met the director Jalil Lespert after he had discovered A Winged Victory For The Sullen on a music search online. After listening to their music, he immediately knew: "it was the sound of my new film." With an excellent cast of France’s finest actors Romain Duris, Charlotte Le Bon, and the director himself, plus a script filled with tension, sexuality and darkness, they knew there was a lot of musical territory to mine. It was agreed that they wanted to explore more analogue electronique experiments as well as working with a large string ensemble, to create something that felt very modern and still cinematic.
“Despite A Winged Victory For The Sullen being associated with film score type music, trying to survive the process of creating the modern film score is not for people with fragile egos. It requires those who are the most responsive to change. The director and the film presented a new set of challenges, so we decided to stop thinking about cinema as an object, and moved closer to using the film’s images as triggers for experiences. The more we were able to let go, and see the music as something that happens, like a process – not a quality, the more we were able to reach a place that sounded like us. It was as if we were making our first record all over again, except being filtered through another language littered with dead metaphors," the duo elaborate.
The recording sessions began with their long time sound collaborator Francesco Donadello in the form of some modular synth sessions in Berlin. Dustin and Adam began working from the script in their own studios, and after filming commenced they continued to create music that could be used for first edits of the film – each day getting new scenes that triggered ideas that would become the base of the film score. Over the course of the next few months the two slowly crafted the music with weekly discussion from their studio to the editing room. The final sessions to what is now the score of Iris was recorded with a 40-piece string orchestra at Magyar Radio in Budapest.
Upon label founder Robert Raths' request the over sixty minutes of material were then edited down to a concise album listen at forty-one minutes. The digital bonus track edition includes two solo pieces by Adam Bryanbaum Wiltzie entitled "The Endless Battle Of The Maudlin Ballade Part 2" and "The Endless Battle Of The Maudlin Ballade Part 3," as well as tracks by Petite Noir, dOP, DJ Pone and The Shoes which feature in the film. The artwork was created by Berlin-based illustrator Stephanie F. Scholz who also created the iconic cover for Nils Frahm's Music for The Motion Picture Victoria.
The late 1990s was a fertile time in the American electronic underground. A growing body of artists, spread around the nation, were engaging in the latest round of a decades-long transatlantic musical conversation. At the convergence of hip-hop, electronic, and soul music, these artists sought to carve out their own lane. In September 2001, New Orleans’ Telefon Tel Aviv, high school friends Joshua Eustis and the late Charles Cooper, joined the conversation with their debut album, Fahrenheit Fair Enough, released by Hefty Records. A labour of love, Fahrenheit was an attempt by the pair "to contribute something meaningful" Eustis says today, "something definitely American, and kinda southern too." On the fifteenth anniversary of its release, Ghostly International is reissuing Fahrenheit Fair Enough with a vinyl edition and bonus digital material.
Living in New Orleans in the late 1990s, Eustis and Cooper were in the thrall of two musical orbits: black America——New Orleans' bounce, Detroit's techno, Chicago's house——and British electronica——Autechre, Aphex Twin, Jega. Recorded over the course of a year in Eustis' childhood bedroom in the Riverbend neighborhood of New Orleans, Fahrenheit mapped out a potential for American electronic music in a time of hope. The music features delicate Rhodes and guitar instrumentation wrapped in a southern bounce shell, smothered in r&b, and cut up by digital rhythm programming. The tracks were meant to be "constantly, evolving sculptures." Fascinated by IDM, the pair sought to inject "some swagger into it, loosen it up a little but also make it hyper romantic."
Eustis and Cooper had imagined making a "hard club record," but instead Fahrenheit came to be seen as a delicate slice of electronica by fans and critics who misconstrued its stylistics roots. This was, perhaps, hardly surprising. Telefon Tel Aviv arrived at a time when there was no roadmap for an American electronic music scene comparable to what the UK had produced in the 1990s. They were the latest artists to find themselves in a strange middle ground between hip-hop and electronic music that had yet to be understood.
“We just wanted to see if we could make it work,” recalls Eustis. “We didn’t know. Our aim was to make something we could be proud of.”
We are kicking off 2017 with the 1st of several planned releases for the new year. This (Blue Flea 022) is a limited edition cassette tape featuring 2 long songs of music perfectly suited for the cold & snowy winter months.
"GODZILLA OF SNOW" is a previously unreleased, unedited full length mix (an edited version was released in January 2014 by Life Like Tapes in an edition of 30 copies). "WITCH & A CAULDRON" is also a previously unreleased, unedited full length mix (an edited version was released in October 2016 for the GEOGRAPHIC NORTH Cassette Death on the Hour: Aural Apparitions from the Geographic North which was limited to 100 copies)
Tapes will be 60 minutes long, with full program running on each side.
The planned release date for this of January 14th 2017 may be bumped up depending on how quickly we receive these from manufacturing.
THIS CASSETTE RELEASE IS A LIMITED EDITION OF 150 COPIES (HAND NUMBERED & INDIVIDUALLY HAND PAINTED ARTWORK BY WINDY)
Cruel Optimism is a record that considers power (present and absent). It meditates on how power consumes, augments and ultimately shapes two subsequent human conditions: obsession and fragility. This pyramid is an affective ecology of the (ever)present moment.
When I made Wilderness Of Mirrors, clouds of unease were overhead. As I have worked through Cruel Optimism, what seemed an unimaginable future just a few years prior, began to present as actual. Over the course of creating the record, we collectively bore witness to a new wave of humanitarian and refugee crisis (captured so succinctly in the photograph of Alan Kurdi’s tiny body motionless on the shore), the black lives matter movement, the widespread use of sonic weapons on civilians, increased drone strikes in Waziristan, Syria and elsewhere, and record low numbers of voting around Brexit and the US election cycle, suggesting a wider sense of disillusionment and powerlessness. Acutely for me and other Australians, we've faced dire intolerance concerning race and continued inequalities related to gender and sexuality. The storm has broken and feels utterly visceral.
Cruel Optimism is a meditation on these challenges and an encouragement to press forward towards more profound futures.
Beyond the motivations forging the record, the process by which this edition was created was unlike many of my other records. Having worked largely alone in recent years, I wanted to shift away from that approach. I wanted the opportunity for exchange, to trial new ideas in various spaces and to find myself surprised by the perspectives of others. It was this desire that led me to reach out to friends, old and new, and invite them to contribute to Cruel Optimism. It also led to me using a range of studio spaces to explore new techniques, informed by what I had learned taking Wilderness Of Mirrors on the road for the better part of two years.
I leave it to you then, to listen as you can. This record is one of protest against the immediate threat of abhorrent possible futures. It’s an object of projection, from me to you and onward from there. I couldn’t be more pleased to share Cruel Optimism with you.
Originally issued as the fourth LP in the limited edition box set Tandoori Dog, Jerusalaam follows Jaagheed Zarb, the title disc, and Libya Tour Guide with a CD reissue; finally, the long out-of-print box has been completely reissued. Again the increased space of its new medium has allowed unreleased material from the original tape to be included. This time, however, the extra material is neither alternate versions of Tandoori Dog material nor new songs intended for those releases; the two extra tracks here, clocking in at near 15 minutes and just under 8, make up unused material from the Return of Black September sessions.
The contrast, even for someone with as wide a range as Muslimgauze had, is stunning. The original Jerusalaam fits in with much of Bryn Jones' classic work, with a heavy emphasis on hand percussion, bass-heavy distortion, sharply clipped loops, and the seething his of static. The two otherwise unnamed Return of Black September tracks, however, follow that album in taking a much more cleanly digital feel, with many of the elements Jones usually uses present but in more stripped down or even mechanized forms. The relatively clean pulse of these two longer compositions serve as a refreshing contrast next to the hand- and tape-made feel of tracks like "All the Stolen Land of Palestine" and "Hessian Bag of Camel Parts," an invigorating reminder of the breadth and vitality of Jones’ work even now.
Unsurprisingly for an artist as prolific and strident as Bryn Jones was, the flood of material he sent to labels and compatriots was not always carefully categorized. Also, sometimes he would be so eager to release material that if things didn’t happen fast enough he’d just send in another tape. And that circumstance is how you wind up with a fascinating oddity like Mohammad Ali Jinnah.
Staalplaat has previously released, in 2002, the Muslimgauze album Sarin Israel Nes Ziona. While continuing to sort through and release the material Jones left behind with his death in 1999, the Mohammad Ali Jinnah tape was found to have significant overlap with that now out-of-print album, but only to a certain extent. 6 of the 15 tracks on Mohammad Ali Jinnah match up with material from the earlier tape (which included 20 tracks), but when Jones resubmitted this tape he also included extended mixes of 4 of the tracks from the original album ("Imam Fainted," "Yousif Water Pipe Habit," "Opulent Maghrebi Meze," and "Indo Muslem Atlas") as well as five entirely new compositions. The result is a fascinating re-setting of some of the music from that underheard release.
Whether Jones preferred one arrangement to the other is sadly lost to us, but listeners now can appreciate a wholly new experience with the material herein, even if some of the material itself is previously released. And the new tracks are fascinating, even by Jones' usual standards, whether they’re the grinding, obsessively focused percussion workouts "For Larger Iran" and "Burnt Pages of Ali Jinnah Koran" or the cryptically distant likes of "Cold Turkey." Paired with classic tracks like the bass-distorted, Middle Eastern boom bap of "Kurds Eye View" and the furtively head-nodding "Zahir Din, Cabdriver of Zind" the result is a release unlike anything else in Jones' discography.
Last Signs is Eli's first solo release since 2012's Catching Net (PAN Records) and explores a very different side of his unique acoustic universe. One in which the macrocosmic percussive collisions of his earlier work give way to a gradual unfolding of dub-influenced rhythmic constellations. Eli has described Last Signs as his response to playing in club environments over the last few years; an attempt to negotiate a delicate balance between the materiality of his acoustic instrument and the hyper-mediated sonic ecosystem of the club sound system. Coming off like an inspired synthesis between Scientist and Xenakis, Last Signs of Speedis a truly unique work by an artist at the height of his powers.
Ideologic Organ is proud to present the brand-new recordings from The Necks, the legendary Australian trio who excel in bypassing musical cliche whilst exploring and extending the practices embedded within improvisation, jazz, post rock, ambient, minimal, and textural, ‘sound based’ music.
The latest document from this long-running ensemble, Unfold, presents itself as a double LP, with four side-length tracks. A deliberate absence of numbered sides hands a substantial swatch of participation over to the listener, allowing her to navigate his own path through the soundscape at hand. The shorter length of the vinyl format, far from being a constraint upon the members of the ensemble, instead offers them a more compact horizon to contemplate, wherein the distance travelled is recalibrated to more immediate and dynamic textural concerns. The immediacy of "Rise" confirms this new path, as the mournful tones of Lloyd Swanton's bass swirl around Chris Abrahams' crystalline piano motif, with Tony Buck's percussion steering proceedings into enlightening free-jazz territories. "Blue Mountain" cuts a swathe through the sonic undergrowth, with soul organ, rattling percussion, whistles, and loping sound-waves all vying for the foreground. "Overheard" retains a sublime melancholic aura as the percussion and keyboards simultaneously embrace and fall apart, whilst "Timepiece" skips along as a gentle gesture of further possibilities. Exactly how The Necks conjure their particular magic - as deceptively simple as it seems - whilst always moving forward, is anyone’s guess, but Unfold proves yet again that rules and schools are to be broken and re-formed into patterns and frameworks unlike those we know.
Editions Mego is proud to publish the third release by Sendai. Comprised of Peter Van Hoesen and Yves De Mey, Ground and Figure presents the duo reside in a more economic framework which allows the sound and rhythm they produce more room to shift, swirl and swim the circumference of the audio spectrum. Moving away from the twitchiness and anxiety of the earlier output Ground and Figure is a vast spacious journey from a duo in full control of their chosen path.
Throughout Ground and Figure abstraction and rhythm weave amongst each other in such a sly manner that the resulting tension in the conflicting elements presents the listener with a hypothetical high-tech elastic percussive grid. A thudding, pulsating, shapeshifting ambient beast is summoned by these two creators working as one.
This is machine music. This is hypnotic disorientation. This is an immense ambitious and refined world of sound and rhythm. This is the work of two producers who continuously try to top up their skills.