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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Yally is a new project from Raime, designed to "explore Bass Futures indiscriminately.” The release inaugurates 12 x 12, a new series of one-sided releases from Boomkat Editions which will run over the next few months. We’ve asked twelve of our favourite artists (old and new) to contribute a release each to the series, the first installment featuring two scudding, killer steppers productions from Raime’s expert bladesmen, Joe Andrews and Tom Halstead, moonlighting here for the first time under a new alias on a rare away-day from Blackest Ever Black.
With a deep blue, skunked-out appeal right on the lip of late ’90s garage and early ’00s grime, London’s dankest duo compound, reflect and relieve the choking intensity of their recent 2nd album Tooth on the paranoid bruiser "Burnt" and its dread inversion "Sudo," making up their most ‘floor-dedicated session in more than five years of operations.
Toeing a line in the shadows between nervy but enervated, crushed and high, both cuts transpose the indelible impression of raving in a very different London landscape - pre-smoking ban and extreme financial bifurcation - with a patently shocking sense of economy and pressure that feels as vitally subversive as ever in the face of current capitalist realism.
Drawn from muscle memory of 2-step’s transition from champagne-soaked knees-up into paradoxically dense but spacious, stoned and impending sound designs, they form a sort of coming-to-terms with that epoch’s innovations in much the same way that their Moin releases firmly grappled with inextinguishable influence from the studio genius of Steve Albini and This Heat.
"Burnt" pins us by the windpipe with Stanley shanked hi-hats and ratty claps whilst cavernous, amorphous subs bruise flesh and dislocated yelps of pleasure/pain break thru rictus jaws. Think El-B or Hatcha echoing out of a graveyard slot on pirate radio circa ’03. With "Sudo" they pronate on the tightest, simmering halfstep; harnessing illicitly overloaded, vintage Air Max PSI allowance with shoulder rolling organ motif and nerve-tying ligature, perhaps imagining the pre-echoes of earliest Hyperdub or a Black Ops joint that even Jon E Cash was too shook to issue.
More information can be found here.
"Over the last 12 months Lee Bannon’s transition into Dedekind Cut has yielded some of the most curious, immersive electronic music from the USA. His transformation now appears to be complete with the strikingly spacious and absorbing ambient sound designs of $uccessor, the NYC-based artist’s debut album in this guise.
It feels as though Bannon's previous releases, American Zen for Hospital Productions, and the scything torque of R&D with Rabit, were cleverly planned stepping stones into this brave new world, where he establishes a dream-like topography of diaphanous ambient pads pitted with the shrapnel of grime and trap, ultimately revealing a simulated, otherworldly environment deeply personal to the artist.
His amalgamation of layered ambient dimensions with haunting harmonic figures nods to early ‘90s AI and electronica from FSOL to Coil via the antecedent spheres of modern sci-fi and computer game soundtracks, whilst also existing in a history of North American computer music and noise that connects to the spirits of Prurient and Carl Stone.
We’re parachuted in like an avatar in "No Mans Sky" to the lush levels of "Descend From Now," streaking across the iced out sino-eski zones of "Instinct" to the heart-rending eight minutes of "Conversations with Angels" and the perpetually elusive rhythms of "Fear In Reverse," before the hyaline harmonies of "☯" makes his most faithful, explicit nod to Coil, and "Integra" reaches to more optimistic New Age planes before culminating in the aching chamber figure, "46:18."
It's telling that the album is brought to you via two highly individual labels such as Non and Hospital Productions - this meeting of worlds provides a context for the music itself, making for an album that we'd recommend as much to those of you who have enjoyed recent outings by Chino Amobi, Rabit or Arca, as much as followers of Prurient or, indeed, Dominick Fernow's Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement project."
-via Boomkat
"Seventeen (count ‘em!) years since their split side with Techno Animal, Andy Mellwig and Thomas Köner’s legendary Porter Ricks shores up on Tresor with three cuts of brand new material as immersive as any of their '90s dub techno classics.
Since that last release in 1999, Mellwig has busied himself with Experimental Audio Research alongside Kevin Martin, Pete Kember and Kevin Shields, whilst Köner has continued to pursue a dark ambient zeitgeist deep below the surface, before the two remerged for a sublime remix of Ryo Murakami in 2014.
Shadow Boat dials in the duo’s first material since then, and they’ve patently not lost their lust for total dancefloor immersion. The title cut is a lushly visceral demonstration of techno at its most enigmatic, effective, diffracting beautifully elusive melodies and haunting harmonics thru silty black, subaquatic bass dynamics that leave us reeling, before the crushed, acidic chug of "Bay Rouge" stretches out on a more elastic sort of acidub grind punctuated with killer woodblock, and "Harbour Chart" comes up for air with a bad case of the bends emphasized by glitching rip-currents sure to mess with the dance."
-via Boomkat
Billy Gomberg is a Brooklyn-based multi-instrumentalist whose past work has been published on labels such as and/OAR, Digitalis and Sunshine Ltd. In addition to his solo output, he operates in a variety of collaborative settings (including Fraufraulein, a duo with fellow label alum Anne Guthrie) and, over the course of the last five years, has carved out a niche for himself at the crossroads of electro-acoustic improvisation, ambient, and minimalist music. Slight at that Contact is a beguiling album that brings to mind both the bucolic electronica of Microstoria and the expansive arrangements of Mirages-era Tim Hecker. "Medial" opens the record with a sea of vaporous, blooming tones set against an array of delicately percussive clicks and cuts. "Acute" further develops this motif, conjuring a cinematic atmosphere that recalls perhaps a train station in some ruined, futuristic metropolis. Over the course of eight understated but nuanced compositions, Gomberg cultivates an intoxicating aural topography, a deep, expressive collection that offers considerable rewards to the attentive listener.
More information can be found here.
This Dutch pianist first crossed my path as part of the murderers' row of unusual contributors to Current 93's I Am The Last of All The Field That Fell, an event that would easily be the high point of most musicians' careers.  In Van Houdt's case, however, it was merely the most recent of a long string of interesting and provocative ventures, as his prominent role in the avant-garde community has led to participation in all kinds of important premiers and work with titans such as Luc Ferrari and John Cage.  As such, it is a bit surprising that his first solo album would surface on the rather post-industrial-centric Hallow Ground imprint.  That was quite a bit less surprising when I actually heard it though, as Van Houdt largely casts aside his background as a classical pianist to explore the darker electronic fringes as well as tortured theatricality a la Scott Walker.  Naturally, some veins are more compelling than others, but Paths of the Errant Gaze is certainly a strange and fascinating journey.
One immediately striking aspect of Paths of the Errant Gaze is that Van Houdt seems to have quite a restless muse, as it is quite difficult to discern a consistent stylistic thread running through these seven pieces.  For example, the wonderful yet all-too-brief opener "Atopic Radio" is a densely sizzling and throbbing collage that sounds like a pile-up of distorted numbers station transmissions filtered through a nightmare. Had the album continued in that vein for longer than two-and-half minutes, I suspect I would play it to death.  Instead, however, the following "Fabric of Loss" is a blearily dissonant and distracted-sounding piano reverie embellished with some ominous subterranean throbs, resembling nothing less than a Lustmord remix of an imaginary Morton Feldman piece.  It gets quite a bit more interesting once it segues into "Orphic Asylum," however, as cellist Simon Lenski contributes some beautifully strangled string work and Van Houdt starts disrupting the proceedings with a host of wild and gnarled musique concrète flourishes.  Somehow, it all gradually coheres into a vaguely "industrial" drum machine groove beset by all kinds of electronic cacophony, before wrong-footing me yet again with another segue into an eerily subdued drone piece ("Vessel") of hazy, choral-sounding vocals and reverberant creaking strings.
The album's second half commences with an unexpectedly haunted and moaning dirge ("Gaussian Veils") that showcases guest vocalist Paul Amlehn. I am rather perplexed by its inclusion, as it absolutely screams "Scott Walker" (or at least Black to Comm's Earth) and bears little resemblance to the rest of the album.  Objectively, the simmering underlying music is fairly inspired, as Van Houdt's dissonant, impressionist piano ripples are nicely enhanced with some menacing throbs and a disquieting harmonic haze, but Amlehn’s "opera of the damned" vocals understandably steal all the attention.  Sadly, the appeal is hopelessly lost on me.  Admittedly, I am not a huge Scott Walker fan either, but there is a substantial difference between feeling like I am eavesdropping on a demonic possession and feeling like some kind of undead creature clawed its way out of the grave to share its poetry with me.  "Gaussian Veils" errs on the side of the latter.  Thankfully, the piece catches fire a bit near the end, as it unexpectedly erupts into buzzing, sizzling, and hissing snarls of electronic noise. Curiously, the spectre of Amlehn disappears completely as the piece morphs into "Transfinite Spectre," a lengthy eruption of cut-up harsh noise that sounds like someone dropping the needle on a different spot of a Merzbow album every five seconds or so.  To his credit, Van Houdt does harsh noise quite well–I just do not understand why he felt the need to, as a classically trained musician of his caliber has a limitless number of less oversaturated creative avenues open to explore.  Perhaps the appeal is just that it is so violently different from the modern classical fare that he plays in his daily life as part of the MAZE ensemble.  In any case, once the cacophony eventually dies down, Van Houdt closes the album with a very brief yet beautiful coda of eerily oscillating drones, tape hiss, and tinkling piano ("Vapours").  Much like the other bookend, it is both wonderful and maddeningly ephemeral.
I suspect that some of my frustration with this album is probably due to the very high expectations that I had from the samples that preceded its release, but there are also a handful of moments such as "Atopic Radio" that easily exceed those hopes.  My real issue is simply that Paths of the Errant Gaze has a puzzling lack of focus, as if Van Houdt is trying on one guise after another hoping to find one that completely fits and feels natural.  I have no idea if he ever found it.  Also, the amount of time spent on each theme is weirdly self-sabotaging and seemingly arbitrary, making me wonder if this is more of a collection of experiments and odds n' ends that Reinier had lying around than a deliberately composed and sequenced whole.  The counterargument to that theory is that nothing here feels even remotely half-baked: Van Houdt's commitment, exactitude, and instincts are beyond reproach.  However, the counter-counterargument is that I do not understand why so many of the most inspired ideas end so quickly while the foray into howling white noise extends for almost half of a side.  Grumbling aside, however, this is still a very enjoyable album, as Van Houdt unquestionably has both excellent taste and the necessary talent to channel his disparate influences into visceral and evocative new forms.  For now, this is merely promising and enjoyable, but Van Houdt has the potential to be quite a formidable voice if the distinctiveness of his vision someday catches up with his abilities as a composer and musician.
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It has taken me an embarrassingly long time to finally acknowledge the sublime brilliance of Vancouver-based polymath Ian William Craig, but he certainly has not made it easy, as every album that I have heard from him seems to showcase a new facet of his elusive aesthetic (classical pianist, distressed tape experimenter, instrument builder, the next Tim Hecker, hallucinatory hymnal composer, etc.).  Also, much of his best work was quietly released in limited vinyl editions on Sean McCann’s Recital Program imprint (and the stellar Heretic Surface does not even appear in Discogs), so it was easy to miss.  With his latest release, however, Craig seems poised to breakthrough to a larger audience.  At the very least, Centres is certainly a creative breakthrough, expertly weaving together several different experimental and esoteric threads into an excellent batch of actual songs with hooks.  If it is possible to make a largely guitar-free classic shoegaze album, Craig has done it with Centres.
FatCat/130701
The opening "Contain (Astoria Version)" is surprisingly radical statement of intent, as it not only places Craig's strong, classically trained vocals front and center, but it goes one step further and runs them through Autotune.  It is quite an unusual effect, as it sounds like a very sincere and melodic half-sung poem or a post-modern opera refrain filtered through contemporary pop music.  Or maybe like David Sylvian teamed up with Rihanna’s producers to try to break through to the teen market, but then ran out of money before anyone got around to adding beats.  That is only half the story though, as the surrounding music is a fuzzed-out ocean of hissing bliss, lush grandeur, and loops of angelic female vocals.  Somehow it manages to be simultaneously razor-focused and unrepentantly indulgent at the same time, as Craig never loses sight of the strong melodic hooks, yet perversely allows his perfectly sculpted avant-pop gem to dissolve, smear, and stretch into a ten-minute epic.  It is an audacious monster of a piece that sounds like nothing else that anyone else is doing.  It is also a fully formed synthesis of several stylistic strains that have run throughout Craig's career, somehow blending his quasi-operatic talents with blown-out Hecker-esque drone and wobbly, hissing tape manipulations without pushing any of them into the background.
To his credit, Craig does not attempt to replicate any similar feats elsewhere on the album, instead seeming restlessly hellbent on moving constantly forward into new vistas.  For example, the following "A Single Hope" is a left-field shoegaze masterpiece, as Craig's elegantly melodic vocals drift over a glacially slow bed of distorted chord swells to basically produce high-grade heroin for the ears.  "Drifting to Void on All Sides" follows in a similarly gorgeous and narcotic vein, unfolding as a wobbly chorus of angelic voices floating from a battery of malfunctioning tape machines.  The comparatively clean and accordion-based "The Nearness," on the other hand, sounds like fairly straightforward "pop classical," which makes sense given that Centres is a rare dispatch from FatCat’s classically bent 130701 imprint.  Despite its initial form, however, "The Nearness" still ultimately dissolves into crackling and hissing tape-ravaged heaven.  The recurring theme throughout the album time and time again is that of strikingly beautiful and serene melodies blearily drifting through a roiling maelstrom of hissing, stuttering, crackling, and quivering distortion and decay.  On the most immediately gratifying and memorable pieces, the structured melodies manage to heroically assert their dominance, but the pieces (such as "Set to Lapse") that just wallow in this bliss-storm are quite pleasurable in their own right.  In fact, an album of murkily hallucinatory and masterfully textured drone in the vein of "A Circle Without Having To Curve" would probably still be a lock for one of my favorite records of the year.
I suspect that Centres probably could have been condensed from a double-album to just a single LP if the more incidental/interlude-type pieces had been scrapped, but their presence feels crucial in maintaining the sustained and soft-focus altered reality of Centre's spell.  Also, the recurrent sea of artfully blurred abstraction seems necessary to ensure that each island of fully formed song makes a maximum impact.  Seven or eight great songs in a row would be wonderful, but probably also a little numbing: I definitely appreciate the surprise of a simple and pure masterwork like the quasi-hymnal "Purpose (Is No Country)" blossoming forth from the static quite deep into the album.  
Appropriately, Craig saves one last treat for the final piece, reprising the oceanic and fuzzy heaven of the opening "Contain" with just his voice and an acoustic guitar.  Naturally, it is wonderfully tender and beautiful, which illustrates exactly why this album is such an absolute goddamn masterpiece: most of these songs were already quite good before Craig unleashed his distressed-tape  sorcery and arrangement skills upon them.  And as far as texturally and harmonically rich sound art goes, it is amply clear that Craig can hang with just about anyone else around.  As far as I am concerned, Ian William Craig is creative supernova at this point in his career.  Centres is easily one of the few albums of 2016 that I can safely declare to be an instant classic without feeling dangerously close to hyperbole.
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Sarah Davachi’s impressively prolific 2016 finally winds to a close with this release, which is arguably the finest of her three albums this year.  Following the uncharacteristically acoustic/organic All My Circles Run, Vergers again returns to the synthesizer (in this case, a rare, vintage, and analog EMS Synthi 100), but the two albums are actually not all that different: a completed Sarah Davachi album always sounds languorous, gently hallucinatory, and elegantly minimal regardless of how it originally started.  In any case, the big draw here is the opening 20-minute epic "Gentle So Gentle," as it is easily one of Davachi's strongest and most beautifully sustained compositions to date.
As it is currently only being released on LP, Vergers is an album that is very much shaped by its intended medium: the entire first side is devoted to the aforementioned longform opus "Gentle So Gentle," while the second side is composed of two comparatively minor pieces in a roughly similar vein.  Initially, "Gentle" feels like just another warm, hazy, and lazily undulating drone piece, albeit quite a good one.  Gradually, however, more and more details and layers begin to blossom forth from Davachi's droning bliss-cloud and the piece slowly coheres into a hypnotic pulse and starts to reveal hidden depths of emotion.  The overall feel is like a dense, rolling fog filled with mysterious, flickering lights or, more prosaically, like an especially beautiful bit of classical music that has been blurred and time-stretched into unrecognizability.  As a composition, it is sublimely gorgeous, simple, and pure, but there are a lot of less obvious details that I found beguiling as well.  The most significant is Davachi's talent for artfully keeping her various motifs mysterious and half-hidden, allowing just enough melody into the light to make an impression without ever being fully explicit.  Also, there is a wonderful precariousness and fragility to the piece, as a number of textures feel wispy or frayed and piece gradually dissolves into a heavenly coda rather than escalating in density.  In short, it is an absolutely perfect piece of music.
Naturally, the second half of the album has a tough time measuring up to such a quietly stunning opening salvo.  One fundamental hurdle is that shorter compositions do not get to fully benefit from Davachi's greatest gifts as a composer: her near-supernatural patience and her lightness of touch.  Davachi is definitely at her best when she has a chance to stretch out and unhurriedly weave her slow-burning magic.  If a piece is only a mere eight minutes, like "Ghosts and All," it needs to make an impression a bit faster.  Much like "Gentle So Gentle," "Ghosts" initially takes root as a deceptively simple drone piece, albeit one with a considerably murkier and more ominous tone. Soon, however, a mournful violin theme appears over the dark throb and the song takes its form.  After the album's beautifully understated first half, however, the violin theme feels a bit too blunt and dirge-like for my taste.  Also, it does not so much evolve as just appear and gradually fade away.  The closing "In Staying" fares a bit better, as its more harsh, metallic-sounding texture is balanced out by the subtlety of its shifting pulse of throbs and slow phase shifts.  Again, it never gets around to blossoming into something more, but its ten minutes of small-scale shifting dynamics and textures is enjoyably hypnotic nonetheless.  While it is not a threat at all to unseat "Gentle So Gentle" as the album’s centerpiece, "In Staying" is exactly the kind of piece that I could casually have playing in the background for hours without ever getting bored of it.
I suppose this review makes it sound like Vergers is only half-great, which I suppose is technically true, but I feel like the album's entire raison d'être is "Gentle So Gentle," which is a masterpiece.  As such, I see the second side primarily as just a couple of bonus tracks appended to an absolutely stellar EP (though I admittedly do like "In Staying" quite a bit). The vinyl format is especially useful here, as Vergers is practically engineered to facilitate playing the A side to death, which is exactly what I expect to do.
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It has been seven years since these Viennese avant-rock deconstructionists last surfaced with a proper full-length release, so I was not quite sure what to expect with this album, particularly since my interest in the "post-rock" milieu has since dwindled to almost zero.  Also, aside from a one-off collaboration with Giant Sand's Howe Gelb, On Dark Silent Off is the band's first album without founding member Stefan Németh.  As it turns out, any misgivings that I may have had about Radian's place in the current musical landscape were instantly erased, as the trio is every bit as unconventional, imaginative, quietly heavy, relevant, and singular as ever.
The unusual and enigmatic title of this album is a homage to painter/theoretician Ad Reinhardt, who seems like quite an appropriate inspiration for a cerebral and boundary-pushing ensemble such as Radian.  For instance, Reinhardt is best known for his "black paintings," which initially give the impression of total negation, but reveal themselves to actually be nuanced works of various black and near-black shades upon closer inspection.  In their own way, Radian do the same thing, eschewing most of the expected and more immediately gratifying aspects of rock music to dwell instead on "microscopic" details and finding ways to make music from seemingly non-musical base materials.  In essence, their foundational philosophy seems to be to start off with the intention of doing everything "wrong," then finding a way to make it work anyway.  The most extreme examples of that aesthetic on On Dark Silent Off are probably "Blue Noise, Black Lake" (built from a recording of the pads on Mats Gustafsson's sax) and "Codes and Sounds" (rooted in a marble rattling on a snare drum), but the whole album is basically a tour de force of amplifier hum, creaking strings, feedback, and unidentifiable noises shaped into satisfying form.
Such an aesthetic could easily result in a bloodless and joyless intellectual exercise in the wrong hands, but Radian's more experimental impulses are viscerally backed up by an absolutely stellar rhythm section.  In fact, it is inconceivable that Radian could exist without drummer Martin Brandlmayr, as his muscular and freewheeling half-jazz/half-rock drumming is the root of all the album’s power, flow, and dynamically compelling shifts in emphasis.  Bassist John Norman is certainly quite prominent as well, but his task is far more blunt: providing a distorted, seismic rumble.  Relatively new member Martin Siewart may have toughest role of all, as it falls upon him and his guitar to give these pieces a semblance of structure and melody while eluding conventionality (though he does unexpectedly open up on "Blue Noise, Black Lake" with a relatively straightforward solo).  For the most part, however, these seven pieces bear only the most precarious relation to rock music.  The closing "Rusty Machines, Dusty Carpets" comes closest, as it gradually coheres into a heavy groove that features a rare multiple-note bass line and some explosive crescendos of power chords and crash cymbals.  Despite that, the central motif is still largely just a rhythmic blurt of feedback and the whole thing stretches out for a distinctly non-radio-friendly thirteen minutes.  "Scary Objects" also falls within spitting distance of resembling a single, but On Dark Silent Off is mostly just a wonderful freeform celebration of simmering, unresolved tension.
If this album has any significant flaws, they are most likely by design.  Some of the songs admittedly blur together, but that is probably unavoidable when the band is trying so hard to avoid melody or conventional structure.  It would probably be more accurate to say that this is very abstract and challenging material that miraculously comes close to songhood.  A more significant critique is that the band sometimes errs a bit too on the side of over-conceptual and over-obtuse, as the marble motif in "Codes and Sounds" feels like more of a quixotic gimmick than a genuinely inspiring jumping-off point.  That said, Radian amply compensate for their occasional indulgences and overly arty moments with their sheer tightness and effortlessly organic interplay.  In that sense, the long delay between albums probably served the band quite well, as several of these pieces have been being chiseled to perfection on the road for years (or in the case of the title piece, performed at a film festival to accompany Peter Tscherkassky’s brief found-footage masterpiece, Outer Space).  More significantly, any minor shortcomings are largely immaterial, as I genuinely love Radian's vision and there is no one else around doing anything similar in any kind of satisfying way: On Dark Silent Off sounds like prime Pole and Tortoise mated, but had unexpectedly violent and intense offspring.
 
This cryptically titled release is a new side project from Black to Comm’s Marc Richter, inaugurating his equally new Cellule 75 imprint.  In some ways, Jemh Circs is quite a radical departure for Richter, following the zeitgeist-grabbing footsteps of The Range by diving into the limitless pleasure garden of chopped-up and recontextualized YouTube samples.  Vintage Oval is yet another clear touchstone, as Richter aggressive obliterates his raw material into an obsessively skipping and looping fantasia.  Happily, however, the specter of Richter's own Black to Comm aesthetic drifts throughout all of these disorientingly kaleidoscopic experiments as well, intermittently resulting in passages of lush beauty and eerie disquietude.
The opening 'Comp" sets the album off on deliciously squirming and jumbled course, as Richter conjures up an impressive pile-up of stuttering, pointillist, and pitch-shifted snatches of voices and exhalations.  Instead of building something from his gibbering entropy, however, he abruptly shifts gears into a slower, druggier variation upon the original theme that quickly reaches a crescendo of cacophony, then disappears.  The following "Ordre" continues that quixotic trend of endlessly wrong-footing me by disrupting its gorgeous motif of warmly droning loops with unexpected key changes and interludes of blurting randomness. It is quite a unique aesthetic and it goes far beyond the "a more digital and artificial sounding affair' promised by the album's description.  Also, it unsurprisingly bears little resemblance at all to the "modern day Pop Music" it cannibalizes.  Instead, the first few songs mostly sound like an over-caffeinated bad acid trip in a candy store where time keeps arbitrarily stretching and violently condensing.  That is not necessarily a bad thing, but Richter definitely prioritizes gleefully perverse experimentation over listenability.  Once it clear that the gauntlet has been thrown down and that the squeamish have left, however, the album gets increasing more compelling and conventionally beautiful as Marc starts to sustain his ideas long enough to leave an impression.
For example, the third song ("Va") is quite a bit more coherent and grounded than its predecessors, locking into lovely, dream-like pulse that gradually blossoms into additional harmonies.  "Est" then slows the pace way down, sounding like a disembodied, gauzy, and slowed-down dance music chord progression while making room for some intriguing textural touches in the periphery (like copious tape hiss and a distractedly singing German woman).  It is probably single most ambitious piece on the album, as Marc does some unusual things with both dynamics and tempo as it gradually snowballs in density and power.  My favorite pieces tend to be a bit more simple though, albeit no less bizarre.  One clear stand-out is "Iant," which sounds like the missing link between drone music and a woodpecker.  Lamentably, it is over far too soon, but several of the following pieces are of a similar caliber (such as the lush and gently quivering "Ondre").  Of course, there are also some thoroughly jarring moments thrown in as well, like the plinking and mercifully brief "Arbre."  For the most part, however, Richter does not let his "Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde" tone shifts derail the second half of the album much at all.  In fact, the album ends on an extremely strong note, as the closing "Fait" is an absolutely gorgeous excursion into woozily hallucinatory drone bliss that can easily stand with Black to Comm's finer moments.
While I like quite a few songs on this album, it is very easy to see why Richter decided to invent a new guise for this project, as Jemh Circs very much feels like a cheerfully maniacal cross between laboratory and playground.  There are plenty of moments of very real inspiration, but a number of pieces feel quite sketchlike and it is clear that Richter was not shy about indulging his more listener-unfriendly impulses.  In fact, "indulgent" is probably the single best word to summarize this album, though "playful" and "mercurial" are certainly also strong candidates.  As such, Jemh Circs is primarily for Black to Comm fans (like me) who are patiently awaiting Richter's next fully formed opus.  As a one-off aberration, however, Jemh Circs is quite likable, as its unapologetic mix of "anything goes" experimentation and ephemeral beauty is never boring or predictable.
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Piano Magic's final album, Closure, will be formally released by Second Language Music on January 20th 2017 worldwide on CD, 180gm vinyl and digital download formats.
Recorded in London between April and August of this year, Closure, features guest appearances from Peter Milton Walsh of The Apartments, Audrey Riley (go-to cellist for The Go-Betweens, Nick Cave, Virginia Astley and many more), Josh Hight (Irons) and Oliver Cherer (Dollboy). For this final album, the nucleus of Piano Magic was Glen Johnson, Jerome Tcherneyan, Franck Alba, Alasdair Steer and Paul Tornbohm.
More information can be found here.
Emptyset is the innovative electronic duo of James Ginzburg and Paul Purgas. The pair shares a history in Bristol’s underground music scene as well as an impressive list of production credits. Ginzburg, now Berlin-based, runs a network of record labels including electronic music label Subtext and Arc Light Editions, whose reissues include a work by Arthur Russell. He's a prolific producer and remixer for both independent and major labels, with diverse projects such as Faint Wild Light, Ginz and more recently Bleed Turquoise. Purgas, now based in London, founded the We Elude Control label in 2009, a curated collection of rare experimental music. Purgas is an artist, writer and curator who has presented projects with Tate, Whitechapel and Serpentine Galleries, and he is also an active promoter of electronic music in eclectic spaces from a carpark to a Modernist pavilion.
The duo composes within a complex set of self-imposed parameters or rule sets and the results of their expeditions on Borders are at once minimal and visceral. Focusing on shifting timbral changes over melody, Emptyset's work is an exploration of the relationship between rhythm, texture and space.
Each project's framework and parameters dictate how the sound or performance evolves. In the past, Emptyset have explored the ways in which the sonic and spatial interact within different architectural contexts: often site-specific locations such as the decommissioned Trawsfynydd nuclear power station in North Wales, or the neo-gothic Woodchester Mansion. Borders takes a different approach, centering around the performative and the performer. Having each created their own tactile instruments, a six-stringed zither-like instrument and a drum, Emptyset focuses on how organic sounds interact with the analogue processes that have defined their work to date.
Contrasting typical approaches to making electronic music, Emptyset set out to emphasize live performance rather than creating sequences within devices. While Purgas and Ginzburg utilize vintage analogue electronics, compressing and distorting the signals, the album itself is performed entirely live, where subtle movements make for substantial changes in sound.
From the very first track, "Body," one can hear how the physicality of the instruments have imbued the sound’s texture. The physical characteristics of the metal strings create a layer of dynamic juxtaposition to the grinding timbres emerging around them. The broody "Ascent," features the album’s clearest call-and-response between the stringed instrument and the drum, barking and thudding back and forth at one another. Evident in tracks such as "Border" and "Speak," Emptyset uses basic rhythmic structures drawn from an array of broad cultural practices, expressed neutrally and without overemphasis on the source. Taken as a whole, Borders distills the duo's inspirations to their essence and the resulting music is as raw as it is captivating.
Out in January 2017. More information can be found here.
