Brainwashed Radio: The Podcast Edition

West Philly Kitties by Gabriel

Spring has sprung and there's plenty of new sounds to be heard. 

New music from Einstürzende Neubauten, somesurprises, Joseph Allred, Pan•American & Kramer, Oren Ambarchi / Johan Berthling / Andreas Werliin, A Place To Bury Strangers, Blazing Worlds, seekersinternational & juwanstockton, Dip Friso, and Madeleine Cocolas, plus a classic from The Ex, and some music from the vault of Broadcast.

Thanks to Gabriel and this picture of "West Philly Kitties."

 

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Rrill Bell, "False Flag Rapture" & "Blade's Return"

cover image With two different releases in 2021, Jim Campbell (as Rrill Bell) follows up 2020's Ballad of the External Life going in two very different thematic directions. A cassette, False Flag Rapture, is a personal, intimate work based around a recording of his grandmother, while the digital (available with printed material as well) Blade’s Return is a narrative tale about a saw (I am not sure if it is truly meant to be anthropomorphic or not). Both feel rather different from each other, but both also feature the heavy tape manipulations of Campbell, reducing instrument recordings to raw material that he shapes into entirely different and unique forms.

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Robert Haigh,"Human Remains"

https://f4.bcbits.com/img/a2112077871_10.jpgWith apologies to Laurie Speigel after whose album the label takes its name (and Sylvia Tarozzi), it must be said that solo piano is at the core of Unseen Worlds. Their standards are high, as evidenced by recent releases such as James Rushford's Musicá Collada/See The Welter and "Blue" Gene Tyranny’s Detours. Human Remains is Robert Haigh’s third (and best) release for the label. His composition and playing superbly balance immediacy and detachment. This balance places a subtle disguise or mystery over these compositions. I detect a similarity with the approach of Werner Herzog in many of whose films the audience is allowed to feel and react without heavy-handed close ups.

Unseen Worlds

Robert Haigh is well known to brainwashed, of course, as a veteran of the UK underground since around 1980 via Nurse With Wound, Omni Trio, Silent Storm, Sema, and Truth Club. He is a natural fit for Unseen Worlds since, as he has said, piano is at the root of all his compositions. My view is that his solo piano works should have him up to his ears in film commissions, as they are jammed to the gills with poignant and unfussy (or anti-virtuosic pieces) and imbued with an essential immediacy and detachment. On earlier records, Haigh has borrowed titles from film, such as "Juliet of The Spirits” and “Ipcress Girl,” so I am guessing that he would take on the right project. An excellent longer piece on Human Remains titled “Signs of Life” got me thinking about Werner Herzog—since he made a film of that name. Herzog has argued, in one of his more believable utterances, that filmmaking is about creating immediate and profound connections with people. Robert Haigh certainly makes music according to that axiom and seems also to follow another choice of the master filmmaker. In the book A Guide For The Perplexed, Herzog mentions his decision to not move the camera in too closely to an actor’s face, since it will be “more fascinating to the audience if they see you as big as an ant in the landscape.” He adds “I have never wanted to see an actor weep. I want to make the audience cry instead.”

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Tasos Stamou, "Monoliths"

cover imageDiscovering this London-based composer's adventurously psychedelic collages of traditional Greek music was one of 2021's great musical pleasures for me, so I was very eager to hear this ambitious double album follow up to Antiqua Graecia. As expected, it is a characteristically wonderful and unusual release, but it is also marks a detour away from Stamou's impressive run of Greek-themed albums. The theme of the aptly titled Monoliths is instead Stamou's attempt to "collide" the two sides of his working methods: live performances and studio work. By my estimation, it was a very successful collision, but it was mostly a behind-the-scenes one, as I would be hard pressed to determine where one approach starts and another begins. As a result, the more immediate and striking theme of the album for me as a listener is that each piece feels like an extended experiment in crafting an immersive, complexly layered sound world from just a single recognizable instrument. At least, that is how Monoliths unfolds for its first half, as the bottom drops out of the album's hallucinatory feast of bells, organs, and steel drums to reveal a considerably more processed, abstract, and psychotropic second hour of drone-damaged mindfuckery. That approach admittedly makes Monoliths a bit less accessible than some of Stamou’s more conventionally melodic work, but serious heads looking for a deep and sustained dive into otherworldly psych meditations will likely love this immersive tour de force.

Moving Furniture

The opening "Bells Drone" sounds deceptively like it could be layered field recordings of wind chimes at first, as bells of different sizes amiably jangle and clang for couple minutes before any real evidence of Stamou's hand starts to emerge. Soon, however, some tones start to linger supernaturally and the mood darkens into uneasy shadows of dissonance. It is quite a wonderfully hallucinatory and entrancing piece, evoking an ancient ritual in a cavernous subterranean temple revealed behind a dissolving reality. While it is the shortest piece on the album at a mere 13 minutes, it is nevertheless a solid representation of the album’s first half: a simple and minimal theme gradually transforms into a vividly multi-dimensional dream world. On "Chord Organ #2," for example, an organ drone slowly evolves into a Catherine Christer Hennix-esque nightmare of dark harmonies before unexpectedly resolving on a note of sundappled transcendence. "Steel Drum Drone," on the other hand, steadily becomes something akin to a lovesick tropical Steve Reich. That one is another favorite, as I am quite impressed with how Tasos weaves together patterns of plinking and bleary steel drum melodies into a thing of woozy multi-layered beauty.  In fact, I love every single one of the opening three pieces, but they turn out to be a mere prelude to two pieces in which Tamou goes totally bananas. In the first, "Supernormal," Stamou mingles a chirping electronic drone with squealing and sliding strings en route to an harrowing mindfuck that calls to mind a goddamn demon summoning (the final stretch of oscillating synth thrum is especially choice). The closing "Synapse" improbably features some even more gnarly sounds, passing though such colorful stages like "menacingly gelatinous bass throb," "an undead gamelan ensemble wanders the deserted streets in search of their next victim," and "a simmering and intense prepared piano performance over quasi-industrial rhythmic loops." This is an absolute feast of an album: five great longform pieces in a row spanning nearly two hours. Most days, I admittedly prefer the more meditative/ritualistic first half to the more nightmarish second half, but Stamou was swinging for the fences with every single piece on this album and the result is a monolithically stellar release.

Samples can be found here.

Oval, "Ovidono"

cover imageAt this point, I consider myself quite well accustomed to Markus Popp's penchant for bold stylistic reinventions, yet this latest album managed to completely blindside me nevertheless. To be fair, however, Ovidono is not quite a pure Oval album, as Popp is joined by return collaborator Eriko Toyoda and artist/actress Vlatka Alec. The latter, in fact, is responsible for the album's concept: transforming the poetry of Ovid and Ono No Komachi into sound art that evokes "the tactile, immersive quality and intimacy of ASMR." The trio definitely succeeded in that regard, as Ovidono is probably the finest ASMR-inspired album that I have yet heard, but it is also a bit more ambitious than just a hallucinatory swirl of hushed and sibilant voices. Obviously, that would have been just fine by me too, as Popp is an absolute wizard at chopping and reassembling sounds. However, Ovidono is also quite compelling compositionally, as Alec and Toyoda's voices are backed by music that lies somewhere between noirish torch song, deconstructed piano jazz, and the uneasy dissonances of Morton Feldman.

Self-released

The opening "Dormant" does a fine job of setting a suitably bleary, haunted, and hallucinatory mood, as tumbling minor key piano melodies cast a spell of unease beneath a flickering swirl of ghostly whispers. The music reminds me a bit of some of the prepared piano pieces from Aphex Twin's Drukqs, but a more fluid and melodically sophisticated version. If Ovidono was simply nine subtly nightmarish piano miniatures in the same vein, it would probably be a legitimately excellent album, but "Dormant" feels like a goddamn masterpiece with the added layers of Alec and Toyoda's seductively hissing, popping, and clicking voices panning around my head. Wisely, Popp does not make any drastic changes to that winning formula for the other pieces, but he does vary the tone enough to give each piece its own distinct character. For example, the second piece ("Lost in Thought") features ghostly flutes and vocals of a more stammering and fluttering nature that seem to dissolve into a rain of clicks and pops. "As I Do" is a bit more of a departure, however, as it initially feels like I am trapped inside a haunted music box with a conspiratorial Japanese ghostess. As it progresses, however, it becomes increasingly spacy and blossoms into an immersively chiming and quivering fantasia of harp-like sweeps and Gilli Smyth-style space whispers. Yet another highlight is "Feeling," which evokes a melancholy pianist sadly twinkling his way across the keys in a nearly empty, neon-lit bar (a scene nicely enhanced by the hushed and flickering voices burrowing psychotropically into my subconscious). The closing "Over" is another personal favorite, as Popp's piano takes a brighter tone that is further warmed by shimmering and droning strings. It has a simple straightforward beauty that I do not normally associate with Popp's work, but I quite like it and the sibilant swirl of sensuous voices around it makes for good company. The remaining pieces are all similarly strong and offer their own twists, so I expect some of them will someday become favorites as well. Then again, I cannot foresee myself ever having much urge to single out an individual piece, as this entire goddamn album is brilliant.

Samples can be found here.

Mary Lattimore/Growing, "Gainer"

cover imageThis lovely and unexpected collaboration was quietly released digitally in November with no background information provided at all, but it is probably safe to say that it was recorded quite recently, as it shares a lot of common ground with the radiant drones of Growing's Diptych (2021). That, of course, also means that Gainer can sometimes feel like a welcome throwback to "classic Kranky" era drone artists like Stars of the Lid, though each piece ultimately blossoms into something more ambitious and distinctive by the end. That drone-heavy aesthetic sometimes makes figuring out where Lattimore fits in quite a challenge, as recognizable harp sounds are a bit of a rarity amidst the smoldering bass thrum and ambient shimmer. Then again, recognizable guitar and bass sounds are not exactly rampant either, so maybe all three artists opted for elegantly blurred impressionist abstraction. In any case, whatever they did worked quite well, as Lattimore and Growing's two aesthetics bleed together quite nicely and often feel like something greater than the mere sum of their parts (or at least like a very good Growing album beautifully enhanced with subtle acoustic shadings and flickers of melody).

Self-released

The album is divided into two longform pieces that each clock in around 16 or 17 minutes. The opening "Flowers in the Center Lane Sway" fades quietly into being with a slow melody of harmonic-like swells. Around the 2-minute mark, however, the piece unexpectedly blossoms into a far more harmonically and texturally rich chord progression. Given that this partially a Growing album, there is a healthy amount of amplifier hum and buzzing drone waves as well, which provides a pleasantly bleary and immersive backdrop for a simple, seesawing melody that evokes the faint streaks of light from the final moments of a vivid sunset. Occasionally, there is a hint of audible harp or the sensation of something harp-like moving amidst the hum, but Lattimore finally appears in earnest for the piece's final third to add rippling and ephemeral arpeggios that feel like glimpses of twinkling stars in the gaps between passing clouds. As all that happens, the piece sneakily accumulates a pleasantly heaving and hypnotic pulse as well, which is a damn neat trick. It is solid piece, but the following "Tagada, Night Rises" is both stronger and more distinctive. Lattimore initially seems to be steering the ship for the piece, as quivering webs of arpeggios streak lazy trails across a smoldering backdrop of bass drone. Rather than feeling like it is evolving toward something larger, however, the piece lingers in a warm and glimmering dreamscape akin to a state of suspended animation (though the bass drone does seem to be stealthily building in intensity throughout the piece). "Tagada" takes a surprise detour around the halfway point though, as it feels like a menacing vibrato has curdled the bass drone and cast a shadow of uneasy dissonance across everything. That darkening paves the way for yet another composition trick, however, as the piece slowly brightens for a warmly lovely crescendo of woozy and quavering guitar and harp motifs before ending with unexpectedly gorgeous outro that feels like dark birds silhouetted by a deep red sunset. While I suspect both pieces will resonate more with fans of Growing's dronier side than with Lattimore's own fanbase, Gainer is both an impressively organic/seamless convergence of visions and a sustained, quietly beautiful reverie.

Samples can be found here.

Tanz Mein Herz, "Quattro"

cover imageI began 2021 not knowing a single goddamn thing about Jeremie Sauvage, the Standard In-Fi label, or France's fascinating Auvergnat/avant-folk milieu, but I am certainly ending the year as a somewhat obsessed fan. Weirdly, this year was not an especially prolific year for the milieu, though Yann Gourdon and Sourdure had fresh releases, yet this album, the Sourdure album, and a pair of France reissues seemed to reach a lot more ears than usual and two of those ears were mine. The linguistically astute may successfully deduce that Quattro is Tanz Mein Herz's fourth album, but details beyond that are minimal and the recordings actually date from a two-day "public recording session" back in 2016 (the band's entire discography seems to have been recorded between 2014 and 2016, in fact). There is also some poetic information provided in French that makes repeated references to drones, vibrations, resonance, infinity, suspension, immensity, and a "pendulum of dreams," which I found both apt and predictably alluring. Admittedly, many of those descriptors could also apply to a host of disappointing drone albums, but I suspect the "pendulum of dreams" bit is probably the secret ingredient that makes this particular album so transcendent. That said, Quattro can also be quite challenging at times, but it unquestionably captures a very unusual acoustic drone ensemble at the very height of their eclectic and hypnotic powers, so it invariably winds up somewhere compelling no matter how prickly the voyage may become along the way.

Standard In-Fi

I am not sure how constant Tanz Mein Herz's line-up is (or was), but at the time of the Quattro sessions they were a seven-piece ensemble and damn near everyone involved has ties to some other notable project (France, Toad, Sourdure, La Baracande, Faune, Omertà, etc.). I suppose that makes this project some kind of fitfully convening all-star team that brings together all the best threads of a flourishing scene, which seems to unexpectedly be a winning formula these days if one also considers Enhet För Fri Musik. In any case, Quattro consists of six pieces that stretch across four sides of vinyl and most of them are quite long (even the shortest piece ("Outro") clocks in at over seven minutes). In a surprise twist, my favorite piece is among the album's shorter ones, as "Tales From the Middle of the Night" crams a hell of a lot of brilliance into just over ten minutes. The piece is built upon a repeating marimba-like melody and heavy buzzing drones, but it does not take long before it blossoms into a mind-bending phantasia of sliding, smeared, and howling strings that calls to mind La Monte Young’s Theatre of Eternal Music trying their hand at exotica (yet another winning formula, for those keeping score). As it unfolds, however, it only gets improbably better and better and burrows deeper into my mind, which is exactly what I want from psychotropic drone (and I would be hard pressed to think of anyone else who does it quite this well).

Remarkably, the only real difference between that highlight and the rest of the album is merely that the other pieces simply take a bit longer to truly catch fire. For example, the 20-minute "Magical Stones and Shiny Mud" starts off on a somewhat unpromising cacophony of bagpipe-y drones and flutes, then detours into a radiant and languorous drone-rock groove. I initially suspected I would not be able to connect with it at all, but then the final five minutes darken into a killer drone rock finale that seamlessly incorporates space rock, dub, and Eastern-tinged melodies. In a perfect world, it would admittedly not have taken fifteen minutes to get to that payoff, but the important thing is that they eventually got there and that it is quite wonderful once it happens. And there is certainly not anyone else who is doing the same thing in more impressive fashion, so I am happy to experience Tanz Mein Herz's singular vision in whatever goddamn shape they feel like presenting it in. Elsewhere, "Spiegel Haus” has a more promising and exotic-sounding central theme, but otherwise follows a similar trajectory, as the band pleasantly treads water in an Amon Düül II-style communal jam vein before eventually erupting in roiling cacophony of bubbling, spacey electronics and howling guitars. The following "96" is a bit more focused, as a looping bass hook steadily builds into a jangling and howling nightmare of sharp drones and ugly harmonies, while the minimal "Alor" sounds like drones from an ancient war horn or something that Yoshi Wada might have built. Given that, it is safe to say that Quattro is a seriously ambitious and oft-"difficult" album, which may throw some listeners who are less forgiving of extended durations and long, slow build ups or those less attuned to Wada-esque dissonance. For those who are unfazed by such rough edges, however, Quattro will likely feel like an absolute godsend, as it beautifully channels the late ‘60s glory days when Eastern drones, freeform improvisation, and heavy psychedelia converged in spectacular fashion (and it throws in some welcome new twists as well).

Samples can be found here.

Klara Lewis, "Live in Montreal 2018"

cover imageKlara Lewis has been a unique and consistently interesting artist ever since she first surfaced, but 2020's Ingrid felt like a massive breakthrough and just about everything that she has released since has been stellar (live albums included). Unsurprisingly, Live in Montreal 2018 does nothing to derail that streak, but there are a couple of somewhat big surprises with it too. The first one is the date of the performance, as I had no idea that Lewis was on this plane two years before Ingrid came along. That is not to say that Live in Montreal would have necessarily eclipsed 2016's excellent Too had it been the follow up, but the Lewis of 2016 was an artist who seemed categorically disinterested in doing anything the conventional/expected way. And the comparative melodicism of 2018's fitfully great collaboration with Simon Fisher Turner (Care) felt like a one-off experiment in applying her non-musical found sounds to a more traditionally musical vision rather than a change in direction. As it turns out, however, Care was merely a tease of greater things to come and the lucky attendees of this performance got a sneak preview of those greater things long before the rest of us. The second big surprise is that this album is composed of seemingly all new material rather than variations on Lewis's existing work—it feels aesthetically akin to a proto-Ingrid, but a stage before that piece was distilled to just a single perfect motif. Obviously, that narrowing of focus yielded great results, but this more varied and shapeshifting approach yielded some legitimately great results too, elegantly blurring the lines between drone, noise, spacy synth explorations, and pop plunderphonics.

Editions Mego

As with a lot of live albums these days, the only significant difference in sound quality between Live in Montreal and one of Lewis's more formal recordings is that it feels like there is a thin veil between me and the full harmonic richness, clarity, and crunching physicality of the music. Obviously, that is less than ideal, but that loss is presumably offset by a more significant gain like "it was not possible to reproduce the magic and spontaneity of this performance in a studio." In any case, this album consists of a single 47-minute piece "with three distinct discernible sections" and an overarching theme of "permanent collapse" in which "strange sonic elements introduce themselves, rise to the fore, threaten the fundamental discourse only to recede on the brink of destroying the work itself." While I sometimes have a hard time determining which elements constitute "the work" and which ones are the threatening interlopers as the piece unfolds, the trajectory of the opening section is quite easy to grasp: an intense choral sample plays over a subdued, gurgling, and crackling industrial rhythm, becomes erratic, then settles into a looping and haunted-sounding melody just as a visceral assault of white noise erupts. In a rough sense, it resembles a killer noise set tenaciously trying to tear its way through a classical requiem with only moderate success, which is a very appealing aesthetic given the fine balance of beauty and violence that Lewis achieves.

I am not sure if the noise element necessarily wins in the end, but the original choral theme is eventually reduced to a bleary drone augmented by woodland sounds like chattering birds while the noise/industrial elements rhythmically continue onward to steer the piece into a fresh passage of flanging drones over a heaving, crunching sea of roiling white noise. Gradually, however, it starts to feel like me and my chirping avian buddies are now at the seaside (along with some quivering feedback ghosts) as large waves relentlessly crash upon the shore, yet that too proves to be an ephemeral interlude, as Lewis soon starts to segue into her next dazzling set piece. While the next section could reasonably be described as "warm ambient drones," they are vividly enhanced by a shapeshifting host of dissolving and hallucinatory new elements (hiss, submerged backwards melodies, glimpses of Spanish guitar, Whitney Houston belting out (nearly) unrecognizable fragments of "I Will Always Love You," etc.). All of those other elements gradually vanish, however, leaving a gorgeously psychotropic and crystalline drone palace in their wake. For her final trick, Lewis ends the pieces with frayed, shivering synth swells that spectrally wobble over a stark backdrop of crackling textures. It is an appropriately beautiful conclusion to the set, but Lewis's more impressive achievement is how organically fluid and compelling the journey to get there was: this album flows along wonderfully and the bridges between its major events never lull, nor does it ever feel like Lewis artfully stitched together a trio of different pieces into one. There is a definite arc to this album and it is a thoughtful and satisfying one with no missteps or unnecessary detours to be found. While live albums outside the improv/jazz milieu are historically not my favorite thing, this one is a rare and notable exception, easily ranking among the finest releases in Lewis's already impressive discography.

Samples can be found here.

Robert Takahashi Crouch, "Jubilee"

I don’t know exactly what synth-like equipment Robert Takahashi Crouch uses to generate these sounds and maneuver them into place, but these three pieces are very impressive. This is an album of abstract music and it is useful for reference to have detailed context of Crouch's personal challenges and struggle as outsider, victim, self-destructor, or whatever. I read those between my first and second listens to Jubilee and it definitely helped.

Room40

The opening track "Ritual" has a tense vibe and a sense of emotional heavy lifting is achieved by huge slabs of grinding, vibrating, texture, which emerge and then blend or get overlaid like shifting tectonic plates of sound. There is a weird feeling of aggression, but this feels turned inward rather than aimed at the listener. I felt involved with the music but it also came over as both detached and claustrophobic. An odd pair of descriptors, perhaps, but I hear Jubilee not unlike how I see the doomed grey void of the Rothko Chapel: it drew me in but kept me at arms length). According to Crouch's contextual notes, the next track “I have been part of evil doing” is an acknowledgement that even the abused may do "bad" things to others which they come to regret. This shorter work, which takes it’s title from “People Like Us” a 2007 record by The Dears, has a calmer, gentler, softer, air - an excellent variation against the weightier “Ritual.” This quite lighter mood leads perfectly into “Reconciliation” which is just as beautiful. This final track begins with the recounting of a survived bridge suicide attempt in a sample from a poem by Ted Berrigan from the 1975 record The Dial-a-Poem Poets: Biting Off The Tongue of a Corpse. The placement of a human voice here is another fine contrast, and the somber tone and graceful pace of "Reconciliation" succeeds in uniting the whole album with a powerful renewal of hope and forgiveness (especially the latter). The three sections together make Jubilee a really coherent and satisfying recording, located betwixt sound installation art and electronic expressionism, with an emotional edge that gives it a tangible feeling of integrity and maybe even hope for personal growth.

This is a fine album which I would prefer to listen to again than revisit the Rothko chapel (though I love Rothko's other works). In fact I have already heard Jubilee six or seven times, despite the title being a reference to a work by the so-called anarchist poet (with a trust fund) Hakim Bey to whose writing I have a strong aversion. To call him a juvenile imitation of William Burroughs would be flattery. It is certainly possible to view him as an incoherent creep, spinning deceitful tips for weekend rebels or oozing his pitiful justifications for pedophilia like puss from an open wound. It is debatable whether his blather is worse than the illogical, pseudo-freedom loving gasbag rambles of Ron and Rand Paul when they butter-up their constituents with easily-decoded defenses of racism. I personally can't stomach a message of forgiveness from any of them and the fact that Andrei Codrescu got suckered into feting Bey also does nothing for my digestion. Thankfully all this is merely a matter of opinion, perhaps worthless, certainly available free on the internet as is the entirety of Bey's writing. Crouch's record is worth more.

sounds available here

 

Fluxion, "Parallel Moves"

cover imageAs far as I am concerned, Konstantinos Soublis earned a lifetime pass as dub techno royalty with his early Chain Reaction work (the likes of which enjoyed a well-deserved renaissance when Type reissued Vibrant Forms in 2013). Much like fellow visionary Moritz von Oswald, however, Soublis has a creatively restless spirit that has led him in a number of different directions since that scene's late '90s/early '00s golden age came to an end. While I cannot say that I have been a fan of all of Fluxion's various detours over the years, Soublis's unpredictably hit-or-miss discography has continued to surprise me with a legitimate hit every few years. In fact, Fluxion has been in unusually fine form recently and that upswing seems to have culminated in this album, which is unexpectedly one of the most uniformly strong and inspired releases in the project's entire oeuvre. Part of that success is likely due to Soublis's decision to take his vision in a more intimate and inwardly inspired direction (the album was inspired by "real life moments, people, expectations, joy, dreams and disappointments"), but the primary appeal of Parallel Moves is that his new inspirations manifested themselves in quite a killer batch of unusually sensual, soulful, and melodic songs. To my ears, this is a very strong contender for the best Fluxion album ever released.

Vibrant Music

At its core, Parallel Moves still very much feels like a Fluxion album, as the usual dub techno elements are all in place (propulsive grooves, dub-wise production shadings, a fondness for minimalism, and a warm, repeating pulse), but it also feels elevated in a way that is difficult to pin down. I have seen it described as jazz-tinged and "almost balearic," however, and that seems reasonably accurate: it certainly feels breezy and tropical at times, yet is also feels like a lot of other things as well. The deeper transformation seems to lie in the execution rather than the style, as the best songs feel organic, nuanced, and casually effortless in the best way possible. For example, the album’s zenith is "Orange Sky," which is essentially just a stomping, off-kilter beat, a simple two-chord pulse, and some warm, bleary drones, yet the magic lies in the details and the dynamics (finger snaps, flickers of spectral guitar, etc.). Moreover, Soublis somehow makes it all feel effortless. It feels a bit like the heavily reggae-influenced dub techno of Rhythm & Sound, yet this is one of the rare instances where someone can match that celebrated project in quality, as Soublis steers that aesthetic into more sun-dappled territory with impressive lightness of touch and no loss of depth.

The title piece is even closer to the classic R&S sound at first, but the austere reggae groove proves to be merely the foundation for a smokily beautiful and soulful electric piano melody. And it only gets better from there, as an echoey dub breakdown steadily builds into a thumping and vaguely noirish finale. Elsewhere, "Correlation" beautifully transforms a warmly bittersweet synth reverie into a surprisingly sensual and thumping house banger, while "In Limbo" takes that four-on-the-floor kick drum into neon-lit noir-jazz territory (if Nicolas Winding Refn made a hyper-stylized Raymond Chandler adaptation with lots of slow-motion night driving scenes, this would absolutely be the appropriate soundtrack). "Blue and Yellow" is another highlight, as what feels like an improvised vamp steadily evolves into a nuanced, shapeshifting juggernaut that seems like it would have only continued to get better and better if it had been allowed to extend for the entire album. Naturally, there are plenty of other excellent grooves and delightful stylistic twists among the remaining pieces, as Soublis rarely (if ever) misses the mark here. More than that, however, he regularly blows up the goddamn mark with a seemingly supernatural gift for subtly incorporating new elements at precisely the right time to make a song catch fire. I have had this album in heavy rotation for months and I have yet to start growing tired of it, as there is a seemingly endless host of details and shadings to newly appreciate with each listen. Parallel Moves is instantly canonical dub techno.

Samples can be found here.

't Geruis, "Various Thoughts and Places"

cover image

Released back in the spring, this debut full-length from cryptically named Belgian composer 't Geruis has gradually blossomed into my favorite Lost Tribe Sound release not made by William Ryan Fritch or Andy Cartwright. According to the composer, Various Thoughts and Places is "an exercise in finding the balance between beauty and what is broken," which is a concise and poetic way of saying that this album shares a healthy amount of common ground with the more sublime side of tape loop artists such as Craig Tattersall and Andrew Hargreaves. Admittedly, few stylistic niches scream "Anthony D'Amico will like this” more than that one, but this album is also unexpectedly psychotropic and otherworldly in a way that is quite unique to 't Geruis. My best stab at describing that vision is that Various Thoughts and Places sounds like it was crafted from a handful of fragments of gorgeous and impressionistic-leaning classical albums and enhanced with strangled animal-like howls (I think there may also be a cannibalized pop song that I cannot place lurking in there too). Moreover, the execution is absolutely transcendent. Anyone looking for a slow-burning and immersive phantasmagoria of hissing loops and tenderly bittersweet melodies can basically begin and end their search here, as it is damn near impossible to imagine anyone surpassing this modest masterpiece once it hits its stride.

Lost Tribe Sound

The opening "Tree Weeping (Lacrima)" nicely sets the gently hallucinatory mood with a one-finger piano melody wandering through a landscape of subtle string drones, crackle, and hiss before blossoming into a lovely and bittersweet violin melody. In a rough sense, both the opener and the album as a whole could be described as "classical-adjacent," as the primary building blocks are simple piano and string melodies, but the album starts to feel considerably more unique and inspired with the third piece ("Een Deur Ergens In De Vallei"), as the full depth of 't Geruis's vision starts to quietly reveal itself. It evokes a flickering, slow motion silent film accompanied by a crackling supernatural Victrola that imbues every sound with a dreamlike melancholia that feels gnawed, vulnerable, and lovesick. From that point onward, the album settles into a sustained run of absolutely beautiful pieces that makes it clear that 't Geruis is probably some kind of textural genius/master loop architect. On "Where Birds Resonate," for example, a simple plinking melody gradually starts tumbling into itself while a cricket-like textural backdrop hypnotically pulses and pans in see-sawing fashion, while "Le Cadeau d'Alice" calls to mind the gossamer folktronica of early Colleen enhanced with a corroded-sounding bass loop that feels half "industrial" and half "slowly heaving cosmic exhalation."

Elsewhere, "Rendit l'Âme" uses a simple, pretty piano loop as the backdrop from a gnarled, warbling melody that sounds like it is struggling to emerge from the spirit realm. There is a definite "séance" vibe to the piece, but it also feels more visceral than that, as if 't Geruis built a homemade microphone that could pick up the sadness of eternity and that it manifested itself as a loop of tape-ravaged, heartbroken moans. Despite that, the piece and the album are not particularly dark one on their surface, as the central focus is almost always on light, lovely melodies rather than brooding atmospheres—the melodies just happen to be corroded, crackling, and hiss-chewed to such a degree that they always feel haunted and otherworldly. I suppose I would be remiss if I did not also mention that "Wanneer Alles Even Stil Staat" and "De Waarnemer" are highlights as well, but the album feels like a series of elegant variations on the same themes and its true magic lies in the sustained and beautiful spell that it casts as a whole. At its best, Various Thoughts and Places scratches roughly the same itch as some other contemporary tape music melancholia luminaries (always welcome territory), yet it also feels like it is being somehow channeled from an earlier century, which is quite a neat trick (and a tough illusion to sustain). While it admittedly took me a few listens before the full beauty of 't Geruis's vision began to fully bleed into my consciousness, I certainly got there eventually and this has since become one of my favorite releases of the year.

Samples can be found here.