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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For Eric Hardiman’s Rambutan project, 2016 was an uncharacteristically quiet year. This new tape from the Upstate New York multi-instrumental experimentalist did not appear until November, and as best as I can tell it was the only release of the year. Perhaps that singular focus on this album was a good thing, because Universal Impulses is another fascinating release, up there with Remember Me Now and Inverted Summer as a complex, beautiful and mysterious work.
The instrumentation Hardiman utilizes throughout this tape are, as usual, rather ambiguous.The brief opening piece "Aside from What Matters" seems to be built from a slightly malignant sounding bit of scraped guitar playing.It stays as a repeating element to which more dissonant electronics are added, to the point that the piece eventually dissolves into a melodic mass of decay.Beyond that, however, the instrumentation is most definitely less apparent.
It is that juxtaposition between melody and noise that Hardiman does consistently through these seven compositions that gives Universal Impulses its greatest strengths.For "The Slow Pulse," he leads off with a bit of aggressive, dense noise that obscures a churning foundation that eventually takes the focus.With its subtle panning and processing and low, pulsing passage of what may be bass guitar, it overall feels reminiscent of Motion Pool era Main with its hint of traditional music scattered throughout the more fragmented moments.
A bit of crackling on "Backwards to Never" acts almost as a rhythmic backing track to which a subtle melody is added.The aforementioned melody eventually swells to a more distorted outburst and takes on a humming drone-like quality to shift things up very well before closing on a gentle, soothing fade out."Inside the Minute" has Hardiman pairing an almost marimba like base layer to which he adds scraping noises and bells, and enshrouds the entire thing in a wonderfully murky ambience that adds just the right amount of obtuseness.
The album culminates effectively in the nine and a half minute conclusion "Surface Elevation."At first a combination of filtered bell like tones and random noises, sputtering bits of radio static are slowly mixed in.He again keeps a repeating melodic layer the focus, suspended by a grimy accent of audio dirt.The pace is slow but piece opens and envelopes beautifully.The weird clipping effect that appears, sounding almost like a rat or insect, is a bit unsettling, but as a whole it is a wonderful, if occasionally bleak sounding piece to end an already powerful album on.
Besides this balance between melody and noise, Eric Hardiman's Rambutan also excels on this tape with the sheer dynamics of his sound.The pieces are never disjointed or inconsistent, but never overstay their welcome either.He keeps elements constant long enough to be appreciated, but not so much that they start to feel dull or repetitive.Because of that, repeated playing results in a work that unravels more and more of its secrets each time, but always seems to maintain a sense of being a mystery that is never entirely solved.
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Richard Skelton was atypically quiet in 2016, as he and Autumn Richardson seemed to be focusing primarily upon their publishing ventures, poetry, visual art, and Skelton's esoteric and multifarious research projects.  Fortunately, however, the duo managed to release this EP in December to accompany a series of collages they completed during a month-long residency in the Orkneys.  While it only clocks in at a lean 20 minutes, Earth by Means of the Currents is one of the more focused and powerful releases in the duo’s collaborative oeuvre, featuring both a solid foray into their warmly beautiful drone comfort zone and a buzzing, gnarled plunge into its negative image.
Corbel Stone Press/Aeolian Editions
In classic Skelton fashion, the residency where this album was birthed was both hyper-specific and geological in nature, as this work is part of a commission for ØY, a "festival of island magnetism."  Since this EP is not a radical divergence from typical *AR fare, it is unclear how much that commission directly shaped the couple's musical decisions, though there are apparently field recordings from Papa Westray used throughout the album.  I suspect most of them are well-concealed and subtle textural touches, however, as I could only pick out the sound of waves washing up on a shore in the opening "The Primary Menstruum or Mother-Liquid."  Much more evident is the commission's impact on the song titles, as "primary menstruum" was Evan Hopkins' description of the ocean in his 1844 book On the Connexion of Geology with Terrestrial Magnetism.  That book was the subject of Skelton and Richardson’s collage series.
To the duo’s credit, "Primary Menstruum" certainly sounds appropriately oceanic, albeit far more like a calm and sun-dappled bay than a raging sea.  It is quite a simple and organically flowing piece structurally, built from warm and slow moving swells of strings embellished with a Siren-esque nimbus of Autumn’s hazy, wordless, and cooing vocals.  While it is a strong motif on its own, a lot of secondary appeal lies in the piece's nuances (such as sneakily massing harmonic overtones) and subtle dynamic shifts (the gently churning and throbbing undercurrent).  The undulating harmonic cloud that it leaves in its wake as it fades away is especially beautiful.  Beauty was presumably not the intention for the following "The Winding of a Galvanic Wire" though, which seems to be inspired by Hopkins' theories about the world being turned by a powerful current.  Naturally, the piece feels suitably like a deep and terrestrial electrical hum, as its core motif is a densely buzzing and oscillating bed of shifting drones from a tone generator.  There are a few ominous and cavernous sounds in the periphery and some twinkling, buried, and fried-sounding strings to give the piece a bit of an epic and massive feel, but the meat is primarily just the mass of thick, buzzing drones.  It is an enjoyable and effective piece as a counterbalance to "Primary Menstruum," but it would not stand with the pair's finest work on its own, as Skelton has previously channeled crushing elemental force far more viscerally on The Inward Circles' Nimrod is Lost in Orion and Osyris in the Doggestarre album.
Given that Earth by Means of the Currents was created to coincide with a series of visual works, it is probably not entirely fair to judge it as a stand-alone work.  However, that is presumably how most people are going to experience it, aside from those who snapped up the limited edition booklet. Happily, it holds up quite well to that unintended scrutiny: it is certainly a rather modest release, but quite a strong one too.  Both pieces flow nicely and feel like they have been painstakingly chiseled down to their clutter-free essence.  While "Galvanic Wire" is a bit of a departure, the stronger and more characteristic "Primary Menstruum" is the EP's true centerpiece.  As such, Earth by Means of the Currents unavoidably feels a bit like *AR treading water creatively and perfecting familiar themes between more substantial endeavors, but they certainly manage to do that beautifully: Skelton and Richardson's instincts, craftsmanship, and attention to detail remain in peak form.
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Available for the first time since being issued privately as extremely limited vinyl, Dirter are pleased to announce the CD issue of the ultra rare 2014 two-track LP The Great Ecstasy of the Basic Corrupt. The additional track "Circles of Confusion" comes from the equally rare Silver Bromide LP.
Indulge yourself in these three immersive, ocean deep and intensely powerful tracks of sinister whimsy for the wretched. Yet another classic from the timeless and ever evolving Nurse With Wound.
More information can be found here.
World-renowned as one of experimental music's most vital and impressionistic composers of the past few decades, William Basinski’s tape loop works have been especially influential, particularly on the historic series, The Disintegration Loops, where distorted, orchestral tape samples burrow deep into the listener's psyche through meditative repetition. On his new album, A Shadow In Time, Basinski plunges deeper than ever for the plaintive, solitary eulogy to David Bowie, aptly titled "For David Robert Jones." Conversely, the title track, "A Shadow In Time," is a subtle, celestial escalation of melody and drone. The result is one of the most truly transcendent pieces of music he has ever committed to – or wrung from – tape.
More information can be found here.
Thanks again to everyone who participated in the Annual Brainwashed Readers Poll.
and now, the results:
Fovea Hex, "The Salt Garden 1" (Headphone Dust/Die Stadt)
Coil, "The Ape Of Naples" (Important)
"Music Of Morocco, From The Library Of Congress" (Dust-to-digital)
Autechre, "Elseq 1-5" (Warp)
Carla dal Forno
"This category is almost always an interesting curveball and Carla dal Forno is a fine addition to that tradition: an Australian dream-pop chanteuse on a label best known for the bleak, heavy, and misanthropic sounds of Raime and Cut Hands. With Tarcar and F Ingers, Carla has certainly dipped her toes into such fare herself, but her solo career is refreshingly different, hooky, and darkly sensuous, albeit in a rather stark and willfully bloodless way. While her understated aesthetic makes some of her songs blur together a bit for me, an awful lot of people played the hell out of "What You Gonna Do Now?" this year (and for good reason)." - Anthony D'Amico
Pauline Oliveros
"Through her music, Pauline Oliveros not only challenged her audience with new sounds to listen to but also with new approaches to listening. Her music veered between the intense, visceral immersion of her early tape works, stark and complex scores for ensembles of various sizes and her truly transformative solo and group performances on accordion. Through her Deep Listening philosophy, she took the seeds sown by John Cage with 4'33" and let them bloom into fantastic, previously unknown blossoms. Through the Deep Listening Band, she took these concepts on the road and created some of the most beautiful music committed to the air. Her music was a deep intertwining of meditation and performance; where most artists use climax and crescendo as a mode of catharsis, Oliveros instead used a gentle and disarming wave of love. Deep Listening by implication lends itself to a more empathetic approach to sound and to interactions with others, it is sad to know she is gone but her legacy is a powerful one. Teach yourself to fly." - John Kealy
"One of the few few truly wonderful things about living in upstate NY was being around for EMPAC's prime and getting to have a beloved,accordion-wielding, and legitimately iconoclastic octogenarian as a hometown hero. In fact, Oliveros's 80th birthday concert stands as one of the single most impressive events that I have attended (I believe there were like 20 drummers and the venue recreated the acoustics of the cistern where her 1989 masterpiece Deep Listening was recorded). Significantly, that event highlighted something rather bizarre about Oliveros's career: everyone can agree that she is hugely influential, but I don't think most people are fully aware of the true depth and breadth of her vision, as no one has yet distilled her scattered recordings into anything resembling a comprehensive retrospective. As much as I enjoyed Important's 12-CD Reverberations box, it stopped at 1970 and Oliveros was just getting started at that point, as far as I am concerned: much of her finest, most listenable, and most distinctive work was recorded decades later with the Deep Listening Band. That period remains far too underheard for my liking.
While her passing leaves a large hole in the international experimental music community, her legacy is a hugely inspirational one. Plenty of artists record one or two great albums, but very few manage to remain constantly evolving and relevant for their entire lives. Also, by all accounts, she was quite a wonderful person. I did not know her personally, but I did get a chance to see her attempt to save a Laurie Anderson concert that was plagued with technical difficulties and I know that she played at least one DIY show at Albany's small artspace with a handful of her students. I bet Luc Ferrari was not doing stuff like that in his 70s." - Anthony D'Amico
"On top of her lasting legacy as an electronic pioneer, she was an amazing person. I only met her a few times but she always came off as a friend. You could always feel like you belonged in her presence. So many losses in the music world of 2016 and Oliveros was another one who was still active until the moment her heart stopped beating, which is far more sad, to me, than an artist who hasn't created in years. She left behind a wealth of material to explore and I remain hopeful we will still be able to hear plenty of music yet to emerge." - Jon Whitney
As a complement to 2014's Francisco Lopez curated audio-MAD, this is another work, compiling artists from his current home in the Netherlands (both permanent residents and those who were just spending time in the city) with the intent of giving lesser-known electronic artists a wider amount of exposure. However, for such a minimalist composer, Lopez has had a maximalist streak as far as presenting material as of late. The aforementioned audio-MAD (which compiled material from artists residing in Madrid) was a two data DVD compilation of 100 artists, and 12 hours of uncompressed audio. audio-DH (for Den Haag/The Hague) goes even further: issued on a custom USB card and is compilation of 190 artists and over 16 hours of audio. So a quick listen it is not, but it is a rich and unique compilation of many artists I had not been familiar with in the past, but now am most definitely interested in examining more closely.
Audio-DH (digital)/iii Editions (physical)
The largest proportion of these compositions (largely around five minutes in duration) is unsurprisingly focused on abstract and experimental electronic sounds.Something like Nicky Assmann and Joris Strijbos' "Echo's Under Sunset" is a clear example of this sort of thing.A pastiche of subtle electronics, the two composers emphasize the lower end frequencies of the spectrum to generate a sinister sounding piece of dungeon ambience.Ana Morán’s "One" comes from a similar sonic place:a combination of shimmering tones and rumbling electronics that is forceful, but not overbearing, and while a sparse mix overall, the work evolves and varies greatly.
Other artists focus on using electronics to create more organic sounding compositions.Ezequiel Menalled's unfortunately titled "Sonic Contribution Audio DH" does an excellent job of crafting natural sounding crunches and creaking textures that, while not groundbreaking, are an exceptional example of the style.Sara Pinheiro's "Elephant Whispers" has some similar sensibilities, giving a great bit of crackling space enshrouded in a nice fuzzy distortion.There is also a unique depth to the crispy, open spaces of Tom Tlalim's "Curtain Master" that results in a specifically outstanding work.
In any compilation of these sorts of artists, there is always some more aggressive, abrasive works to be found, and this is no exception."Cables from Hell", courtesy of Lucho Pelucho, is a mass of harsh, aggressive loops and crashing, banging chaos that could potentially be a lost Merzbow work from the mid 1990s.The brief contribution from Sohrab Motabar, "A Miniature for The Hague" is an erratic outburst of ugly electronics that stands out as appropriately uncomfortable.Francisco Lopez contributes a piece himself, "Untitled #340" that, while not overtly noisy, is a mass of uncomfortably low frequencies, resulting in more of a physical experience of sound pressure pressure than a listening experience.
A few contributions skirt the line between noise and music quite effectively as well.Center no Distractor (Stephanie Pan and Stelios Manousakis)'s piece for taiko drum and electronics, "That Which Melts is Exaggerating" is a dense, pummeling pastiche of rhythm that is reminiscent of late 1970s/early 1980s industrial projects.Cocopino's "Niks Te Zeggen" is all echoing synth pulses and a cheap drum machine that, with the addition of spoken word vocals, has a unique lounge/electro sound to it."DDR", courtesy of Grand Mal has a vaguely melodic and rhythmic sensibility to it, even though on the surface it is abstract sounding.Jeff Carey's "20160411.1101_16bit" drifts more into chaos, but in the form of an erratic, deconstructed form of electronic music.
Much like the audio-MAD compilation, this set also features additional "recombinant" performances courtesy of the HARING (Humanless Audio Recombinator for Infinite Novelty Generation) software, which is an additional suite of three works just short of an hour each.Not just a bionic DJ mix of the material, the software instead analyzes, compiles, and rebuilds a composition based upon the initial building blocks.While I feel the original compositions feel more conceptually strong and focused comparison, it still is a nice and unique edition to an already expansive compilation.
Given the length and depth of this project, it is not something that is easily taken in all at once.I personally chose to dive in and out of the material over a period of time, picking random songs each time and listening to them individually.With that approach, audio-DH is not nearly imposing and is instead a wonderfully deep well of music that I was able to come back to multiple times and find new and captivating works to enjoy at each and every visit.
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For the second part of the quadrilogy, the cage that composer David First decided to lock himself into is perhaps the most sonically diverse and flexible of the chosen cages: the venerable Korg MS-20 synthesizer. Compared to the previous work using an acoustic guitar, and the future two involving blues harp and sitar, the massive array of knobs and options almost seem not limiting enough, conceptually speaking. As a whole, First adheres to his staunchly ascetic approach to composition and delivers an appropriately focused meditation on the instrument.
The MS-20 is an excellent choice from both a conceptual and sonic standpoint:it has more flexibility and depth than the earlier analog units, but its semi-modular construction means it cannot go too crazy compared to true modular synthesizers.It also makes for an instrument that is well suited for hands-on improvisation, perhaps even more so than for conventional playing.There is a reason that everyone from indie hipsters to politically questionable European power electronic bands has favored this thing for a number years, and extra kudos to First for using the more recent mini reissue.
Even with the added flexibility of the instrument, First keeps things such as post-production and effects to a minimum, with most of the pieces being recorded simply in mono, and a few having only subtle accents added in the form of post production.The first side opens up with the sputtering electronics of "Dronemod2/ESP," locking into a rigid structure of repetition.First keeps the variations to a minimum to focus on the core sound, with only subtle changes being noticeable that may be either subtle tweaking of LFO effects on the filter or the generally unstable nature of analog electronics.
"S&H" is more commanding, patched into a 1980s video game like loop.The insistent pulse never changes for the piece's lengthy 12 minute duration, but his tweaking of the pitch knobs and filter effects makes it an overall diverse and dynamic experience.For the opener of the second side, "Bassdronemod", First eschews a more rhythmic approach to instead stay as a brittle, sustained bit of electronic noise.The composition ends up becoming crunchier and crunchier, and as a result it is one of the harshest and most intentionally abrasive pieces here.
For "Dronemod2," First goes back to a raygun like traditional synth pulse that never ceases, but for what seems so initially basic ends up being far more nuanced and expansive.By the end, the sound locks into an engine like chug that sounds more like a lawnmower than most synthesizers are able to.Comparably, "Pulse Filtering" is overall looser and more erratic, with a tremolo like dynamic that helps propel the weird shifting pitches.The final piece, "S&H-Switch-MW" is First opting for the most overly harsh noise sounding work here.With wet, sweeping noises scattering atop an unrelenting rhythmic throb, it could almost be a lost work from an Astro or CCCC album.The sci-fi tinged spacey depth, strong variation and diversity in sound comes together as a hyperactive, strongly varied recording that stands out as a high point on a very strong record overall.
Even with the diverse array of noises and sound that the MS-20 is capable of, David First keeps himself in check with these performances, which ensures that Solomonos for Analog Synthesizer stays within his self-imposed performance and compositional guidelines.I am personally expecting that this will end up being my favorite in the series, given my own affinity for the model of synthesizer, but I imagine that it will be an important piece of the overall series, even if it stands so distinctly on its own.
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Both Kinit Her and Wreathes are projects of the Wisconsin duo of Nathanial Ritter and Troy Schafer, and while there is clearly overlap in the two, there are also some distinctly different elements. The former is more deeply rooted in folk traditions, which an emphasis on medieval moods and esoteric concepts (but none of questionable politics), while the latter is almost a post-punk, electronic take on those stylistic flourishes. Both of these new releases are excellent, and present the duo taking both projects in increasingly varied and complex directions.
Kinit Her (Digital)/Wreathes (Digital)/Pesanta Urfolk
For The Blooming World, what stands out the most is the complexity and richness of the instrumental arrangements, especially for a form of music that is so often focused on simply acoustic guitar and vocals.This added depth is immediately apparent on the opening "Open Shadow" (which also features additional vocals from Worm Ouroborous/Barren Harvest's Jessica Way and Dani Schafer).Instrumentally, the duo work with layered strings and percussive elements primarily, but as a whole the piece is very dynamic with the subtle touches of electronics here and there.
This is also especially evident on the lengthy album closer "Key Granting Key," which includes contributions from Burial Hex's Clay Ruby.Multi-tracked vocals and cyclic guitar make for a loop-centric repetitive foundation, but Ritter, Schafer, and Ruby slowly add more things to the mix, like piano, bells, and some noisy electronics to come together in an intensely complex, diverse array of instrumentation that can be most easily appreciated in the instrumental closing minutes."The Blooming World" is another example of rich, dramatic arrangements with the blend of male and female voices, the former at times guttural, and impressive variation.
Both "Learning Conveyed in Daylight" and "Oppositions" stay more stripped down and focused on the acoustic guitar and vocal elements of the duo’s sound, but the former’s shifting tempos and the latter’s big, booming percussion keep either from stagnating or becoming too cliché. On most of these songs, both Schafer and Ritter deliver the vocals as a duet, and their exaggerated, dramatic delivery may be a bit of an acquired taste.For much of the album, the two use this to conjure an appropriately formal medieval-esque mood, but at times it does seem to become almost a bit too po-faced and melodramatic.
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As Wreathes on the EP The Gold Array, the two use a similar vocal style throughout the three songs, which is perhaps where the closest similarities to their work as Kinit Her lie.As a whole, however, there is more of a contemporary edge to instrumentation and performance.At first, "The Gold Array" chimes, piano and vocals sound very similar to the folky tendencies Kinit Her, but the overall mix and prominent drumming add an effective pseudo-death rock tinged sheen to the otherwise ancient sound.
On "It's Only Air," a strong bass guitar driven melody and an extremely well captured drum sound powerfully the piece, while on "We Defy," the rapid acoustic guitar is modernized via the electronic passages and big, booming drums. Once again this retains the traditionalist folk elements to the duo’s sound but with a modernized edge.
Both Troy Schafer and Nathaniel Ritter work separately in a multitude of other projects (and sometimes together as well), but I have always seen Kinit Her as their core project.I think it is this prolific nature that has been a great influence on these two bands, as it has continued to diversify the overall sound and mood without losing the original identity.Wreathes then stands apart as a true side project, but one that recontextualizes their staple sound into a more modernized element, resulting in a project that is an exceptional compliant to the duo’s primary outlet.
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It has been an interesting couple of years for the former holy trinity of the UK’s blackened and gloom-shrouded post-industrial dance deconstructionists: Raime picked up guitars and turned into a post-hardcore band, Haxan Cloak started collaborating with Björk and composing film scores with NIN's Atticus Ross, and Demdike Stare doubled-down hard on their techno roots with a series of extremely beat-oriented 12" singles.  Sean Canty and Miles Whittaker’s latest full-length roughly picks up right where the extremely varied Testpressing series left off, leaving behind most of the duo's more indulgently bleak and bombastic tendencies for something considerably more visceral, pared-down, and propulsive.  While I almost always favor the more abstract/drone side of the spectrum to the dancefloor, Demdike Stare prove to be the rare exception to that rule, as they are a hell of lot more listenable when their darkness is more understated and spectral.  Some more melody admittedly would be nice, but Wonderland is quite a strong, striking, and beautifully focused work.
I have long had a complex and shifting relationship with Demdike Stare, as they can be quite bombastic and ponderous at times and their more club-themed material is very much a snapshot of this moment in dance music's evolution, presumably dooming it all to obsolescence within a few years.  Also, there is not any one Demdike Stare song or album that I can point to and say "this is brilliant."  Nevertheless, Canty and Whittaker seem to have unerring great taste and intuition.  Most obviously, that taste manifests itself in their excellent DDS imprint, but Demdike Stare's music (particularly recently) manages to seamlessly draw in inspiration from many disparate and cool sub-genres and spit it out into perfectly chiseled and visceral percussion work-outs that sound distinctly and recognizably their own. That is no simple feat with starkly beat-based music.  Though the most memorable part of the opening "Curzon" is the brooding synth crescendo, the real magic lies in the complexity and dynamic vibrancy of the groove.  There is nothing consciously ostentatious or virtuosic happening, but the beat makes many wonderfully shuffling and percolating transitions and they all feel beautifully organic and necessary.  The following "Animal Style" is even more rhythmically inspired, gradually transforming a fun and stuttering loop into something sounds like an off-kilter and wonderful skittering Muslimgauze at his most aggressively polyrhythmic.
Aside from being so single-mindedly propulsive and beat-based, the other real surprise with Wonderland is just how incredibly varied those beats can be.  For example, "Sourcer" sounds like clattering, off-kilter, and out-of-control drum n' bass mashed together with stuttering pitch-shifted snatches of reggae toasting.  Elsewhere, "FullEdge" feels like a maniacal futurist polka.  In general, however, Canty and Whittaker's primary aesthetic is still quite industrial-damaged, as the duo are clearly very fond of harsh metallic textures.  My favorite piece in that vein is "Airborne Latency," which sounds simultaneously blown-out, grinding, relentless, and weirdly Latin.  Also: quite precarious, as the beat has a wonderful tendency to seamlessly shift gears between simmering, explosive, and buried, as well as a penchant for fills and textural flourishes wild enough to threaten to derail the groove entirely.  Aside from that, the pieces that stand out the most are the ones where the duo take a break from their relentless momentum.  "Hardnoise," for example, unexpectedly dissolves into a cheerfully burbling and woozy synth coda.  The most significant and intriguing curveballs come at the end of the album though, as the brief "Fridge Challenge" eschews beats entirely for a densely squirming and warped synth motif and some amusing and disorienting field recordings of airport flight announcements. The closing "Overstaying" is yet another gem, as it unexpectedly kicks off with a strong and sexy hook, then perversely truncates and deconstructs it into a hissing, pulsing, and stumbling "locked groove" beat.
If Wonderland has a fault, it is only that Canty and Whittaker are master craftsmen and resourceful sonic magpies working within the somewhat rigid and ephemeral realm of contemporary dance music rather than legitimate visionaries.  Given the dearth of true visionaries around, it is hard to complain much about that.  Anyone well-versed in the UK dance underground can probably spot Demdike’s influences quite easily on this particular album, but that does not make these pieces any less visceral or sharply presented: Canty and Whittaker have a singular knack for vibrant, crisp, and inventively multilayered rhythms as well as a newfound talent for aggressively trimming away unnecessary clutter and fat.  While I suspect that Wonderland is too single-mindedly contemporary and beat-focused to have much longevity, it certainly sounds great for now.  Perhaps the next album will offer a bit more in the way of hooks, depth, and soul, but the duo's recent departure from brooding gloom is a very big step in the right direction: this feels like the work of a beautifully engineered and perfectly calibrated machine, which is fine by me.  While I have yet to fully process the Testpressing series, Wonderland sure as hell seems like a focused and concise distillation of those explorations, resulting in the most listenable and immediately gratifying album of Demdike Stare's career.
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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.
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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).
