December 1st has been designated as World AIDS Day since 1988.
This episode features music by Dinosaur (Arthur Russell), Karen Dalton, Minty (Leigh Bowery), Ofra Haza, John Grant, Dumb Type (Teiji Furuhashi & Toru Yamanaka), Kozmonaut, Gil Scott-Heron, John Sex, and Roy Garrett & Man Parrish.
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This Chicago-based singer-songwriter is a bit of an enigma to me, as details about his discography are quite slim. As far as I can tell, however, 3am is his second solo album, which is noteworthy given that it has been 8 long years since Swan’s similarly excellent debut (I'll Be Around) surfaced. What he was up to during that hiatus is mostly unknown to me (aside from "drawing the night in around his private, unnerving vigil," of course), but one thing I do know is that he formed a duo with James Schimpl called Dead Bandit that released their debut on Quindi last year (the same label behind this album). In any case, 3am is one hell of an aptly titled album, as it very much has the feel of a hushed, late-night confessional via four-track. The overall aesthetic calls to mind the "desolate outsider folk" blurring of an insomniac Elliott Smith or Zelienople with the homespun intimacy of early Iron and Wine, yet the pervasive mood of late night sadness is beautifully balanced with cool production tricks and shades of more lively and eclectic influences like Suicide and Charlie Megira.
The album’s description insightfully notes that Swan’s aesthetic plays “on the natural distortion and delirium which occurs at the farthest end of the night,” which is an excellent way to explain how this album differs dramatically from ostensibly similar artists exploring the “after late night television pain” vein such as Russian Tsarlag or Matt Christensen. Swan has some darkness to exorcise, to be sure (check out “Hospice”), but 3am feels more like a batch of poignant and hook-filled gems that were handed off to the night itself for a “late night delirium” production overhaul. Obviously, that is not what actually happened, which makes Swan a bit of a visionary production-wise: he uses the same roughly instrumentation as everyone else, but those instruments are inevitably veiled in hiss, buried deep in the mix, or distorted by their lo-fi recording process (Swan apparently “drags the music through layer upon layer of tape fuzz” as part of his process). Significantly, he goes the opposite route with his vocals, as they sound close mic’d in a way where it feels like Swan is whispering directly into my ear. Rather than hiding himself in a fog of reverb and hiss, he expertly wields murk to weave a haunted and hallucinatory backdrop for his stark, emotionally direct songs. The album’s lead single “Puppeteers Tears” is an especially fine illustration of Swan’s inspired strain of ghostly Americana, as it feels like something from The Creek Drank the Cradle eerily enhanced with a haunting whistle loop, a buried organ motif, and a primitive drum machine groove.
As far as singles go, “Puppeteers Tears” was a strong choice, but the same could have been said for at least half of the remaining songs as well. The bleak subject matter of “Hospice” presumably excluded it from contention for the honor, but it is a similarly stellar piece, as Swan’s hushed and rhythmic half-sung/half-spoken vocals are backed by a smoldering groove featuring jangling jingle bells and a wobbly synth hook. Elsewhere, the darkly sensual “Swing” sounds like the best song Suicide never wrote, while the title piece sounds like a blearily hallucinatory minimal wave classic. “It Could Always Be Worse” is another skeletal would-be pop masterpiece, as it feels like an early synth pop hit that has been completely drained of blood. The remainder of the album is quite strong as well, if a little less substantial (there are several instrumentals and brief interludes). There is also an unexpectedly tender surprise in the form of “She’s My Sweet Summer Storm,” which somehow manages to feel like a sincere love song without dispelling the uneasy “fever dream” spell of the album. In fact, just about everything Swan attempted turns out wonderfully on 3am, as he manages to effortlessly evoke the ghosts of roughly five different artists I love without ever creeping into derivative “pastiche” territory. Hopefully it will not take another eight years for Swan’s next solo album, but quietly releasing an album or two like 3am would be enough to make him a cult hero in a sane and just world. If this album had been released in 1983 (or even 1993), I suspect collectors would be happily dropping hundreds of dollars for an original copy. Sadly, Swan probably missed his window for achieving indie immortality, but 3am is a hell of a lot better than many highly sought-after bedroom masterpieces that came before it.
Keeping up with Andrew Chalk’s discography has always been an amusingly challenging endeavor, but the challenge has shifted from pouncing on limited edition physical releases to vigilantly ensuring that he does not quietly surface with a substantial new opus of some kind without my notice. The most recent substantial new opus is this one on Colin Potter’s ICR label, which is billed as Chalk’s “first new solo album in five years.” It certainly feels like a major statement to me, though the meaning of terms like “new” and “album” can be quite blurry and elusive given Chalk’s singularly minimalist approach to providing album details. In any case, The End Times was (perhaps prophetically) recorded earlier this year and marks a rare CD release after Chalk’s recent run of cassettes. Beyond that, further details are quite slim. That is just fine by me, as the only thing that actually matters is that Andrew Chalk is still making incredibly beautiful and distinctive music, as The End Times is a characteristically sublime and immersive dreamscape of tender melodies, elegantly shifting moods, and vividly detailed textures.
The opening “House of the Holy” provides an appropriately representative introduction to the album’s overall aesthetic, as a vaporous melody of blurred, lingering notes unfolds over a gently gurgling pulse. As the album unfolds, a few subtle new details emerge that set The End Times apart from some of Chalk’s other recent work, but the most prominent features throughout are the quivering, liquid-like character of the notes and the ephemeral brevity of the pieces. Rather than evolving and expanding, these 13 pieces instead feel like a series of enigmatic mirages that offer a fleeting and flickering glimpse of heaven before dissolving back into nothingness. Given all the gentle, blurred sounds and the tone of meditative reverie, it is deceptively easy to mistake The End Times for ambient music, yet it reveals itself to be considerably more than that for those willing to fully immerse themselves in Chalk’s slow-motion fantasia of beautiful details and small yet significant events. I view it as somewhat akin to looking through a rain-streaked window–it is easy to gaze through the glass and simply think “today is a wet and overcast day,” but it is also possible to appreciate how the individual droplets quiver and roll down the glass or how the streaks of water subtly bend and warp the appearance of the outside world. Albums like this are the reason why the genre term “lowercase” needed to exist, as Chalk’s compositions are incredibly rich, but the size of the reward is directly proportional to how closely one listens.
While Chalk’s vision admittedly tends to focus on the metaphorical trees, he does not entirely forget the metaphorical forest, so there are some more overt pleasures to be found as well. The most immediately gratifying is “Midsummar,” which feels like a bittersweetly melodic piano miniature transformed into quavering, viscous droplets of bliss, but it also features a bit of a gently hallucinatory Ghost Box/library music feel. Elsewhere, the shimmering, sad beauty of “The End Times” steals the show as the beating heart of the album, while “War Horns” uses a simple, ghostly melody as the canvas for a micro-scale fireworks display of Pole-esque hisses, clicks, and pops. “At Sunset” is yet another quiet stunner, as Chalk transforms a slow parade of frayed, swelling tones into something that feels like time lapse footage of the psychotropic bloom of an otherworldly flower. More than any other piece on the album, “At Sunset” illustrates the singular magic of a great Andrew Chalk piece, as he is without peer at sculpting compositions until nothing remains but a fleeting and fragile moment of simple poignant beauty.
Few artists have consistently fascinated and perplexed me quite like Oren Ambarchi, as I absolutely loved his early solo guitar albums like Grapes From the Estate, then witnessed him spend the next 15 or 20 years exploring improvisatory and rhythmic-driven detours to continually intensifying and breathless acclaim. I imagine it feels somewhat akin to being a Velvet Underground fan encountering unanimous rapturous praise for their post-Cale albums–I get the appeal, but that would not be my personal go-to era if I wanted to illustrate that band's greatness. Then again, maybe my perspective on Ambarchi's evolution would shift dramatically if I just liked jazz fusion more. In any case, I can certainly understand the unusual trajectory from Oren's viewpoint, as few would pass up a chance to form a trio with Jim O'Rourke and Keiji Haino and jamming with talented friends over mutant krautrock/fusion grooves seems like a hell of a lot more fun than making slow-motion guitar magic by yourself (can't fault a guy for loving spontaneity and challenging new collaborations). Both spontaneity and inspiring guest performances abound on Shebang, as Ambarchi enlisted quite a killer (virtual) ensemble, resulting in one of my favorite of his albums in recent memory (2016's Hubris being the other serious contender).
The album is essentially a single 35-minute piece, but there are four numbered sections that segue seamlessly into one another. The first begins with a quirkily rhythmic and twinkling electric guitar motif that is soon joined by additional layers that bring unpredictably interwoven melodies and a stilted, oddly timed funkiness. It does not take long before the sheer intricacy and rhythmic sophistication of its various moving parts starts to feel dazzling and virtuosic, but the piece soon gets even better as it becomes more bass-heavy while bleary shades of psychedelia begin to bleed in. The second section announces itself when Joe Talia's skittering, shuffling drums emerge from a haze of feedback and shimmer. Curiously, all of the prominent themes from the first section fall away for a very stripped down palette of drums, subtle piano, rhythmic palm-muted guitar, and an occasional bass clarinet skwonk, but that downshift into simmering spaciousness nicely set the stage for me to be completely wrong-footed by the inspired appearance of BJ Cole's Hawaiian-sounding pedal steel.
While Ambarchi's primary influences for Shebang were ostensibly folks like Pat Metheny and Henry Kaiser, I would be hard pressed to think of any album at all that resembles the singular fusion/exotica/psych/broken funk stew conjured by his murderers' row of remote collaborators once the piece properly catches fire. Moreover, by the time the third section begins, I have absolutely no idea what Ambarchi himself is even playing, as it sounds like a live recording of a Keith Jarrett trio or something (albeit one with added spice from Jim O'Rourke's spacy synth intrusions). Shebang's final act then turns up the heat even more with Julia Reidy's viscerally jangling 12-string while Talia continues to unleash a quiet storm of absolutely killer drumming en route to a satisfyingly cathartic climax.
Notably, however, there is an unusual amount of restraint on display, which makes Shebang considerably more compelling and memorable than the standard "get some friends together for a wild improv session" trajectory–aside from its tight and exacting craftsmanship, the most striking feature of the album is how the piece seems to linger in a state of suspended animation even as it steadily intensifies. It reminds me of Terry Riley's In C, except instead of monomaniacally playing one note, Ambarchi's ensemble seems to endlessly riff around a single chord while stealthily ratcheting up the tension and complexity without ever granting the release of chord changes or a volcanic, howling crescendo. It is quite a tour de force, combining unique vision with absolutely brilliant execution.
A noisy wall of sound is combined perfectly with atmospheric hooky tunes on this wonderful latest release from National Screen Service. I came across the 2017 release Hotels of the New Wave on Bandcamp, which caught my ears initially (however it is sadly seems no longer seems available from there). The project appears to have started in 2014 (Sea Level Trials can still be obtained from Bandcamp), and apart from being from somewhere in England, that's the extent of all I know of them (him? her?). To me it feels as if that mystery can genuinely make the music more engaging, allowing it to speak for itself while as listeners, we are free to engage the imagination. Released oddly (or tactfully) on the first Friday of October, A New Kind of Summer is a perfect warm summery album adaptable to other seasons.
With all music crafted without words, I imagine this album title hinting at being created during the first active summer following the COVID-19 pandemic. Unlike the moodier Hotels of the New Wave, A New Kind of Summer positively exudes a warm ambiance from the start with "Safe Dunes," but soon enough, we are greeted with familiar and friendly guitar layers before the music cascades into elegant noise. The beats are motorik, hook upon laden hook from the first song, and well into the following.
The title track's refrain has me both wistful for summers gone by and exhilarated for summers to come, and it is not often a song that has stuck both chords in me at once. Consider it a testament to the power of this music. A measured dose of driving bass in a few of the tracks keeps the album in motion. On "Low Winter Somewhere," that momentum is accented with bits of ambient drone that send the song into the ether before retaking the reins, dragging my ears back downwards through the atmosphere.
There is no more apparent clue to the mood National Screen Service achieves than the track title "The Sound of Your Childhood." The music threads melodies of exuberance and simplicity, even when joining together a myriad of instruments for that "wall of sound" experience, keeping melodies bright, familiar, and engaging, sprinkled with the bright bells, synth, and guitar and supported by a foundation of deep bass. The album just feels personal, and I almost can understand the persons behind the songs "Claudia Forever," "Katy," and "Jay." A New Kind of Summer is richly rewarding with an engaging soundscape that allows a safe and joyous escape.
Samples available here.
I am a big fan of Adrian Sherwood's passion for luring the greatest luminaries in Jamaican music history into late-career collaborations, as it is hard to imagine a better deal than working with On-U Sound's murderers' row of killer musicians and having a contemporary dub visionary at the console. Midnight Rocker (released in April) was the first fruit of Sherwood's union with Horace Andy and (unsurprisingly) focuses primarily on Andy's legendary voice while putting a new spin on a few of the Jamaican tenor's signature jams (along with a nod to his more recent work with Massive Attack). Given the caliber of everyone involved, Rocker is a predictably likable album and an impressive return for Andy, but a big part of the fun with classic Jamaican music is the inevitable wave of dubs and variations that follow, so I connected much more deeply with the newly released companion album, Midnight Scorchers. Wisely, Andy's voice remains a central focus, so it is easy to recognize the hooks and melodies from the previous album in their new context, yet Sherwood allows himself to go a bit wild in the studio for a "sound system" take on the material. To my ears, the same songs are the strongest on both albums, but the weaker songs from Rocker benefit significantly from the more adventurous arrangements and production on Scorchers.
Midnight Rocker borrows its title from the opening line of Massive Attack's "Safe From Harm," which was the lead song on their 1991 debut Blue Lines. Notably, that album was the beginning of Andy's recurring involvement with that project, but "Safe From Harm" is a curious song to revisit, as Andy did not sing on the original and it has a darker, more dramatic tone than the rest of Midnight Rocker. Given how wildly successful that album was, I imagine its inclusion here was a savvy choice, but its killer bass and tambourine groove plays far more to Sherwood's strengths than the lyrics and tone do to Andy's. The album's other trips down memory lane are a handful of contemporized resurrections from Andy's own sprawling discography such as "This Must Be Hell, "Materialist," and "Mr. Bassie." Of that lot, "Mr. Bassie" fares the best, as it boasts a strong melodic hook and wades into increasingly dubby territory as it unfolds.
The strongest songs tend to be entirely new ones, however, and there is a great run in the middle of the album that elevates Rocker into something more satisfying than just a well-meaning nostalgia trip. That said, "Watch Over Them" still sounds like a breezy, newly unearthed classic from the early '80s due to its upbeat groove and prominent synth hook. My favorite pieces are "Today is Right Here" and "Try Love," as they strike the most perfect and organic blend of the two artists' formidable talents. In "Today is Right Here," a great vocal hook is matched with a stark bass-driven groove, smoky horns, and cool percussion flourishes executed with an admirable lightness of touch. Elsewhere, "Try Love" boasts one hell of a sinuous, disco-damaged groove that Sherwood manipulates brilliantly. I am tempted to say Midnight Rocker could have been a superior album if Sherwood had simply gone with a stripped-down palette of bass, drums, percussion, and Andy's voice, but I do dig some of the cello, brass, and guitar parts, so that would not be entirely fair (when they work, they work quite well). Fans more amenable to rampant harmonicas will probably enjoy Midnight Rocker more than I do, yet this uneven collection features enough flashes of greatness to be a worthy addition to the discography of everyone involved (including the late Style Scott, who somehow made it onto this album despite shedding his mortal coil in 2014).
By my count, Midnight Scorchers reprises eight songs from Rocker (with new and different titles), but also throws some welcome new elements into the mix along with a pair of new pieces and a completely different sequence. For me, the most crucial development is the involvement of cult dancehall hero Daddy Freddy on three songs, as his playful and chaotic presence almost always makes a song instantly feel like a killer party. On "Dirty Money Business," Sherwood keeps Andy's central vocal hook from "Easy Money," but devotes the verses to Freddy's fiery motor-mouthed toasting ("Mr. Andy buy a house with a satellite dish!") for a livelier and more entertaining twist. I also enjoyed the more prominent percussion and the unexpected splashes of spacy synth and Spanish guitar. It is a very "everything but the kitchen sink" piece, but the execution is absolutely stellar. Daddy Freddy's other big showcase lands on the new version of "Mr. Bassie," as "More Bassy" benefits greatly from having a feral-sounding man roaring about the urgent need to turn up the bass. Daddy Freddy also turns up on the new "Safe From Harm," but even he is not enough to save that song from its dour chorus, though I do prefer the new version due to its spacier tone and unexpectedly Egyptian-sounding harmonica hook.
Happily, Scorchers also features three more highlights despite Daddy Freddy being sidelined for the remainder. Unsurprisingly, two of those are new versions of highlights from Rocker. On the opening "Come After Midnight," Sherwood rekindles the smoldering groove of "Try Love," but does so with more aggressive dub interventions as well as some funkier wah-wah touches. Elsewhere, "Away With The Gun And Knife" is a version of "Watch Over Them" with enhanced dubbiness, some cool brass solos, and a more pleasantly laidback feel. Sadly, I don't believe "Today is Right Here" made the leap to Midnight Scorchers in any form (it must have been perfect already), but the consolation prize is that it was replaced by an absolutely smoking cover of "Ain't No Love in the Heart of the City" that is a strong candidate for the best goddamn song on the entire album. While Andy's presence is mostly reduced to the chorus hook, the rhythm section absolutely slays and cellist Ivan Hussey trades solos with the brass section while Sherwood's production ensures that everything is as sensuous and smoky as possible. I could take or leave the other new song ("Dub Guidance"), as it feels like a harmonica-crazy deep cut from a classic '70s dub album, but the new versions of other songs from Midnight Rocker tend to show some welcome innovations and improvements (such as the jabbering Mad Professor-style electronics and party horns on "Hell and Back"). Coupled with the more generous helping of highlights, that is enough to elevate Midnight Scorchers from "it is nice to see Horace Andy releasing new music" to "damn–this is a legitimately good and contemporarily relevant album."
Back in 2009, Important Records released a landmark compilation entitled The Harmonic Series (A Compilation Of Musical Works In Just Intonation). Significantly, that album featured a Greg Davis piece entitled "Star Primes (For James Tenney)," which was Davis's earliest foray into composing using just intonation. Nearly a decade later, greyfade founder Joseph Branciforte found himself mesmerized by that piece on a long drive back home from Vermont and was inspired to contact Davis to discuss the unusual process behind the piece. As it turns out, Davis's interest in mathematical just intonation experiments ran quite deeply, as it formed the entire basis for his 2009 album Primes. Naturally, the enthusiastic Branciforte encouraged Davis to revisit his work in that vein, which led to an 8-channel performance at NYC's Fridman Gallery in 2019. The aptly titled New Primes is a reworking of that new material repurposed for a stereo home-listening experience. Needless to say, math-driven sine wave drones are not for everyone, but the cold and futuristic alien beauty of these pieces will likely resonate deeply with fans of otherworldly "ghost in the machine" opuses like Nurse With Wound's Soliloquy For Lilith.
My interest in "generative and process-based music" is considerably more casual than Davis's or Branciforte's, but it is not hard to understand the allure, as I imagine every serious musician on earth endlessly struggles to escape familiar patterns and an excellent way to do that is to create some kind of system that either opens new pathways or makes repeating those patterns impossible. Obviously, John Cage's I Ching-driven work is an especially noteworthy touchstone, while Ben Chasny's Hexadic compositions are a more recent prominent example, but there are presumably limitless ways to elude predictable compositional paths (albeit with wildly varying results in listenability). Davis's own system is a bit more complex than my feeble mind can handle, but it can be roughly summarized as "using prime number sets as a way to develop just intonation tuning relationships and intervals" which he realizes through a "custom software system in the Max/MSP environment, using a network of pure sine tones."
According to Davis, the prime number set used determines the overtones and the "panning, fades, metronome speed and other variables of each overtone are related to its frequency." In less abstract and cerebral terms, that basically means that New Primes feels like an album made by sentient feedback, as sine waves endlessly ebb and flow to create shifting patterns of oscillations. Given the hyperminimal nature and purposely characterless sine wave source material of these six drone pieces, they all unavoidably sound quite similar to one another, but they amount to an immersive and eerily lovely whole that is especially rewarding on headphones. To my ears, "Irregular" and "Pierpont" feel like the most compelling variations on the theme, but the entire album is fascinating in a cosmic/"post-human" sense, as it feels like the sort of album the hallucination-spewing ocean in Solaris might've made. This is music distilled to its barest essence of hums and oscillations, calling to mind mysterious deep space transmissions, time-lapsed blooms of otherworldly flora, or the amplified vibrational frequencies of the universe itself.
I doubt anyone can truly say that they know what to expect from a new Hausu Mountain release, but I still felt a bit gobsmacked by the latest from this ambitiously unhinged Ohio duo. While it may read like hyperbole to the uninitiated, the label's claim that Whipped Stream is a "durational smorgasbord of new music capable of knocking even the most seasoned zoner onto their ass" feels like an apt description of this triple cassette behemoth of fried and kaleidoscopic derangement (it clock in at roughly 3½ hours, after all). As I have not yet been lucky enough to experience Moth Cock's cacophonous sensory onslaught live, I was also a bit stunned to learn that most or all these pieces were culled from real-time performances. I honestly do not comprehend how two guys armed with a sax, loop pedals, and a "decades-old Electribe sampler / drum machine" can whip up such a vividly textured and wildly imaginative hurricane of sound so quickly and organically, as there seems to be some real hive mind shit afoot with these dudes. Unsurprisingly, I am at a loss to find a succinct description to explain what transpires over the course of this singular opus, but most of Whipped Stream can be reasonably described as a gnarled psychedelic freakout mashed together with Borbetomagus-style free jazz, the '80s noise tape underground, and jabbering sound collage lunacy. In the wrong hands, such an outré stew coupled with such an indulgent duration would be an effective recipe for total unlistenability, but I'll be damned if Moth Cock have not emerged from this quixotic endeavor looking like fitfully brilliant visionaries. I should add the caveat that Moth Cock also seem willfully annoying at times, but it is rare that such bumps in the road are not ultimately transformed into a near-perfect mindfuck or something unexpectedly sublime.
It did not take long at all for me to fall in love with this album, as the opening "Castles Off Jersey" is an absolute tour de force that starts off as a layered and trippy homage to Terry Riley-esque sax-driven drone and only gets deeper and weirder from there. Along the way, it makes stops at gnarled, howling noise and burbling kosmische synth en route to an impressively apocalyptic and layered crescendo of swirling orchestral samples and electronic chaos. The following "Threefer Thursday" is still more bananas, calling to mind the viscous, squirming synths of Rashad Becker's Traditional Music Of Notional Species series before throwing sleepy Hawaiian slide guitar into the mix for an exotica nightmare. It's an audaciously sanity-dissolving collision, but that is merely the jumping off point into an unexpectedly gorgeous stretch of warm, woozy chords…and then the bottom drops out again for a finale of cold, churning industrial-damaged psychedelia that feels like it could have been plucked from a live Throbbing Gristle performance.
In the wake of that wonderful opening salvo of hits, "Invisible Pranks" makes the album's first deep plunge into willfully obnoxious territory, as it feels like a manically jabbering locked groove for its first few minutes, but the second half blossoms into ghostly and lysergic drone magic. That piece also illustrates one of the album's defining traits: the end of these songs is often unrecognizably different from the beginning, yet Moth Cock somehow make such dramatic and maniacal transformations feel organic and seamless. Moreover, all of their genre-splicing madness is almost invariably distinctive and dazzlingly inventive–rather than feeling like a gleeful parade of crazed pastiches, Whipped Stream feels like five different impossibly cool bands all out to blow my goddamn mind. In fact, my notes for even the lesser songs are an amusing cavalcade of colorful phrases like "alien tuba nightmare," "Beefheart-inspired talent show at a mental hospital," "laser-strafed marching band on a tropical vacation," "children's song divebombed by psychotropic ghosts as an arcade throws up," and "an acoustic guitarist jamming with some elephants and an absolutely deranged doorbell buzzer." Also: "new age album invaded by a gibbering herd of malfunctioning toy dogs." Needless to say, such terrain is very much not for everybody, but it sure feels like nirvana to me, as I never have any idea what the hell is going to happen next and nearly all of it ends up being totally unlike anything I have heard before (and much of it rules). In general, the longer pieces tend to be the most inventive and rewarding, but this whole album is a god-tier rabbit hole of playfully broken-brained mindfuckery built upon a partially concealed scaffolding of killer musicianship, sophisticated avant garde sensibilities, and flashes of otherworldly beauty.
This is apparently B. Fleischmann's eleventh solo album, which surprised me a bit, as I generally enjoy his work yet have only heard a small fraction of it. That said, the eclectic and shapeshifting Austrian composer's release schedule has slowed considerably since the heyday of IDM/indietronica/glitch pop in the late '90s/early 2000s that put him on the map. In fact, it has been four years since Fleischmann last surfaced with the amusingly titled but hopefully not prophetic Stop Making Fans and Music for Shared Rooms is actually more of a retrospective than a formal new statement. That said, most fans (myself included) are unlikely to have previously encountered any of the sixteen pieces collected here, as the album is a look back at some highlights from Fleischmann's extensive archive of pieces composed for film and theater. That archive apparently includes roughly 600 pieces composed over a stretch of twelve years, so Fleischmann presumably did not have much trouble coming up with a double LP worth of delights. To his credit, however, he decided to rework and recontextualize the selected pieces into a satisfying and thoughtfully constructed whole (and one that also doubles as a "kaleidoscopic glimpse of a forward-thinking musician at home in many different musical worlds"). Admittedly, some of those musical worlds appeal more to me than others, but Fleischmann almost always brings a strong pop sensibility and bittersweet warmth to the table, so the results are invariably wonderful when he hits the mark (which he does with impressive frequency here).
The title Music for Shared Rooms alludes to Fleischmann's vision for this album, as he views his recontextualized scores as something akin to "a photo album" in which each "page" conjures a "different scene in which you can immerse yourself." To his credit, the fundamentally "B. Fleischmann" feel of the pieces remains surprisingly constant despite their myriad moods and disparate original contexts, but nailing down the character of that aesthetic is an elusive task. In a rough sense, however, it is fair to say that Fleischmann achieves a unique blend of "seemingly naive" pop simplicity with exacting production and complex arrangements. Sometimes he admittedly leans a bit too much to the "willfully naive" side for my liking, but his instincts generally tend to be quite solid (if sometimes perplexing). Case in point: "Taxi Driver" opens as some kind of Mission Impossible/Peter Gunn theme hybrid, but unexpectedly transforms into a killer dubby groove that calls to mind prime Tortoise.
Elsewhere, Fleischmann sneakily transforms a tender piano reverie into a bittersweet trip-hop groove and a psychotropic squall of shortwave radio-style electronic cacophony in "Entwurf einer Ballade", while "Flüchtlingswalzer" turns a wonky carnivalesque waltz into a dramatic and dizzying crescendo of driving drums and swirling orchestral loops. To my ears, his neatest trick of all is probably "Der Lärmkrieg," which borrows a page from Beethoven's "Für Elise" and turns it into something that sounds like a sentient and lovesick old-timey player piano with some deep regrets. I am also quite fond of the spacey synth melancholy of "Im Atelier" and the stomping, "air raid" psychedelia of "Red Pill," but just about everything on the album boasts enough twists and hooks to hold my attention. Those endless twists and turns are also the album's biggest caveat, as not many pieces stick to a single theme for their duration, which can be a bit exasperating if I love a certain passage. Of course, the flipside is that the passages I am less enthusiastic about almost invariably transform into something cool if I stick around long enough and all of those eclectic and surprising detours add up to an endearingly charming, playful, and imaginative hall of mirrors.
This first solo album from queer, androgynous soul singer Kyle Kidd is an incredibly strong contender for best debut of the year, but he/she/they (Kidd embraces all pronounds) has been been steadily releasing great music for a while as part of Cleveland's Mourning [A] BLKstar ensemble. Notably, however, Kidd's past also includes a background in church choirs as well as a stint as an American Idol competitor. Normally learning about the latter would send me running in the opposite direction, but Kidd joins the exclusive pantheon of vocal virtuosos like Ian William Craig and Zola Jesus lured away from a conventional trajectory by a healthy passion for more underground sounds. That said, a decent amount of Soothsayer legitimately feels like it could have burned up the Soul/R&B charts if it had been released in the late '70s and had a major label production team at the console. As time travel was not a viable option, Soothsayer instead found a home on the oft-stellar Chicago indie American Dreams and Kidd's sensuous, hook-filled songs eschew the polished sheen of pop production for a hypnagogic veil of tape hiss and reverb (much to my delight, predictably).
The gospel-inspired opener "Salvation (Ode for Eunice)" is bit of a stylistic anomaly for the album, but the understated, minimal piano chords and subtle flourishes of jazz guitar beneath Kidd's soulful, wailing vocals illustrate one of the more notable and consistent themes on Soothsayer: backing music that sounds like crackling rare grooves unearthed by a moodier, more libidinal Madlib. Consequently, I was quite surprised when I glanced at the album notes and saw the large cast of guest musicians involved, as it genuinely feels I am hearing appropriated unheard grooves from Larry Levan, Arthur Russell, or Ann Peebles' backing band transformed into smoky, subtly psych-damaged Sade territory by a producer with a vision. The result does not exactly feel loop-based, but Kidd's songs tend to be built from single-theme vamps, which is exactly the right move: just lay down a hot groove and give Kidd plenty of room to belt her heart out and a killer song is almost certain to result.
In general, the strongest songs on the album tend to be the more smoldering, sexy ones like "Glass Dance" (or smoldering, brooding ones like "Temple"). However, the album ends with a sublime left-field highlight in the form of "Dreama," which hazily drifts along as a fantasia of rippling harp and a Satie-inspired flute hook. It almost calls to mind Nina Simone after a steady diet of Grouper and Benoit Pioulard albums, which is an unexpectedly wonderful niche that I had not previously encountered. Aside from perhaps the Sade-esque heartache of "Scars Alight" or the languorous sensuality of "Inside My Love," the remaining songs do not match the heights of that trio of near-perfect delights, but that is only because they are a bit more improvisatory and insubstantial in a "lost Arthur Russell jam session" kind of way. Unsurprisingly, that has its own appeal and Kidd wisely avoids letting such pieces overstay their welcome.
In fact, the whole album is over in roughly half an hour, which is exactly the right "leave 'em wanting more" length necessary to induce me to immediately start it all over again as soon as it ends.
Over the last few years, it has become quite clear to me that any major new solo guitar album from Bill Orcutt is destined to be an inventive, visceral, and damn near essential release. Unsurprisingly, Music for Four Guitars does absolutely nothing to disrupt that impressive run, yet I sometimes forget that Orcutt has a restless creative streak that endlessly propels him both outward and forward like some kind of avant garde shark. As a result, his discography is full of wild surprises, unexpected detours, and challenging experiments such as last year's wonderfully obsessive and completely bananas A Mechanical Joey, so anyone who thinks they know exactly what to expect from a new Bill Orcutt album is either delusional or not paying close enough attention. Case in point: Music for Four Guitars feels like an evolution upon Orcutt's Made Out of Sound approach of using a second track to improvise against himself, but he now expands it to four tracks and shifts to a more composed, focused, and melodic approach very different from his volcanic duo with Chris Corsano. Notably, this project was originally intended for a Rhys Chatham-esque quartet of guitarists and has been gestating since at least 2015, but COVID-era circumstances ultimately led Orcutt to simply do everything himself. As Tom Carter insightfully observes in the album notes, this album is a fascinating hybrid of the feral spontaneity of Orcutt's guitar albums and the "relentless, gridlike composition" of his electronic music that often calls to mind an imaginary Steve Reich-inspired post-punk/post-hardcore project from Touch and Go or Amphetamine Reptile's heyday.
Given how much time I have spent enjoying a handful of Bill Orcutt's recent masterpieces, I occasionally forget that he has been releasing albums for roughly three decades and his scrabbling, explosive improv eruptions are just one stylistic choice in an endlessly evolving body of work. I bring that up because Music For Four Guitars makes it clear that Orcutt could probably churn out killer riffs, intricate countermelodies, and inventive harmonies in his sleep and would seemingly be perfectly at home channeling his inner Glenn Branca, Built to Spill ("In The Rain"), Gang of Four ("From Below"), or art-damaged '90s emo band like Departures and Landfalls-era Boys Life if he felt like it. All of those stylistic threads appear in varying forms here and the determining factors tend to be whether Orcutt is inclined to craft a tense, jerkily staccato rhythm ("A Different View"), sharpen a melody with a spiky counter motif ("Two Things Close Together"), or do both at once ("In Profile").
At other times, Orcutt seems intent on channeling a locked groove escaping its confines or some kind of spasmodic mutant blues, but the results are invariably singular, melodic, and sharp-edged. If I had to glibly describe the album with one concise phrase, I would probably go with "sounds like a No Wave Steve Reich," but I would also have to add the caveat that Music For Four Guitars feels quite different from other artists in that vein (such as Chatham and Branca).
The difference is subtle yet important, as Orcutt seems to be arriving at a similar place from the opposite direction: this is not post-punk stretching into the realm of high art–it is high art sharpened into slashing, snarling, and convulsive two-minute sketches of noise-damaged post-punk urgency (most of the time, at least). As a result, this is yet another stellar album from Orcutt and also a very different animal from his other recent classics.
While I probably still prefer the more fiery and spontaneous-sounding side of Orcutt's formidable oeuvre overall, a strong case could be made that a piece like "Two Things Close Together" condenses virtually everything that I love about his work into a single near-perfect diamond.
I had successfully deluded myself into thinking that I had spent my pandemic downtime wisely and constructively for the most part, but learning that Drew Daniel spent that same period assembling an all-star disco ensemble is now making me lament the sad limitations of my imagination and ambition. The resultant album—Is It Going to Get Any Deeper Than This?—is slated for release this October, but this teaser mini-album (part of Thrill Jockey's 30th anniversary campaign of limited/special releases) is one hell of a release in its own right and a true jewel in Daniel's discography. Naturally, the big immediate draws are the killer single "Is It Gonna to Get Any Deeper Than This (Dark Room Mix)" and a disco/deep house reimagining of Coil's classic "The Anal Staircase," but the other two songs are every bit as good (if not better) than that pair, so no self-respecting fan of Daniel's oeuvre will want to sleep on this ostensibly minor release (very few artists choose to release their best work on cassingle in 2022). Naturally, there is plenty of psychotropic weirdness mingled with all the great grooves, but I was still legitimately taken aback by how beautifully Daniels and his collaborators shot past kitsch/homage/pastiche and landed at completely functional, fun, and legit dance music. No one would raise a quizzical eyebrow if someone secretly slipped this album into the playlist at a party (not until "Anal Staircase" dropped, at least).
Some years back, one of Drew Daniel's friends was fatefully asked "is it going to get any deeper than this?" while DJing at a club. That question became a "kind of mantra" for Daniel, as he was fascinated by the elusive meaning of that question. I am somewhat fascinated now myself, as it inspired me to think about which elements can imbue a piece with "depth" and whether or not the opening "Is It Gonna to Get Any Deeper Than This (Dark Room Mix)" could be said to meet that enigmatic criteria. My official verdict is "absolutely," as Daniel's bevy of outsider disco brethren inventively ride an absolutely perfect, sensuous, and thumping dub techno-style groove for 8 glorious minutes without ever dispelling the magic with a single misstep. It almost feels like Coil and Rhythm & Sound teamed up to record a libidinal, floor-packing party anthem (it's a damn shame that never actually happened, but it seems like Daniel is perfectly happy and willing to fill that stylistic void himself).
Elsewhere, the following "You Don't Know (The Full Rose of Dawn)" feels like a sexed-up channeling of "Loose Joints"-era Arthur Russell, while "The Anal Staircase" gamely attempts to translate the stomping and dissonant menace of the original into a catchy house anthem. It doesn't quite work as well as the other three pieces for various reasons, but the biggest one is probably that guest vocalist Daniel Clarke sits that piece out (he is my pick for this release's MVP, as his soulful freestyling is a reliable and recurring highlight). On the bright side, it is impressive that a cool Coil cover is handily eclipsed by all three of the original pieces. In particular, the closing title piece makes for one hell of a surprising finale, as Daniel and some talented friends from Acetone, Horse Lords, and elsewhere unleash something that sounds like an improbably wonderful collision of a groovy harpsichord-centric giallo soundtrack with a never-heard-before sexy and spaced-out lounge music experiment by Carlos Santana.
