Plenty of new music to be had this week from Laetitia Sadier and Storefront Church, Six Organs of Admittance, Able Noise, Yui Onodera, SML, Clinic Stars, Austyn Wohlers, Build Buildings, Zelienople, and Lea Thomas, plus some older tunes by Farah, Guy Blakeslee, Jessica Bailiff, and Richard H. Kirk.
Lake in Girdwood, Alaska by Johnny.
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Like her last record (2013's Character) and much of her solo material, Asperities is Kent, her cello, and a tasteful amount of processing and effects. While her list of collaborators are a veritable who’s-who of modern experimental music, her solo work is just as strong, but stripped down and intimate enough to place all the emphasis on her and her instrument. These restrained arrangements, however, serve to bring out the finest and most nuanced details in her playing and strong sense of composition.
Unsurprisingly, the deep, at times friction-laden sound of bowed cello strings feature heavily throughout the nine pieces that make up Asperities.Opener "Hellebore" exemplifies this, with its mostly untreated passages being slowly layered atop one another.The sound and dynamics are clearly that of a traditional cello, but eventually the swells become a massive, cavernous wall of tense music that fails to relent until its conclusion."Heavy Eyes" is another song in which the traditional sounds of Kent's instrument remain at he forefront, with the other elements making for subtle, but effective accents.
Compositions such as "Flag of No Country" and "Invitation to the Voyage" feature Kent opting for plucked, rather than bowed playing, and have a less tonal, more overall rhythmic feel.Both of these pieces, however, feature her blending in the more sustained tones (both via her playing style and through effects) as a backdrop to the mix, resulting in rich works that carry the same intensity as a much larger ensemble would struggle to meet.On a song like "Lac Des Arcs," both her playing and the arrangements take on a more somber, bleak sensibility, which contrasts the more boisterous, aggressive pieces on the album extremely well."Empty States" is similar, with an overall murky mix to the song, which starts from slow, heavy creaking noises and expands into a more intense, fleshed out piece with a tasteful amount of distortion at the end.
I found most memorable were the pieces where she expanded upon just focusing on the cello and into other instrumentation and heavier sonic treatments.The early moments of "Terrain" embody this perfectly, where a jerky synthetic rhythm underscores deep, churning layers of cello to create an amazing, tangible sense of tension that builds and grows even once the rhythms are removed.The concluding "Tramontana" also features a bit more in the way of processing and effects, with bits of delay and reversed playing fleshing the song out before concluding on an aggressively dissonant note, both in her playing and her processing of the sound.
Julia Kent's solo work has always emphasized the sound of her singular cello playing above most other instrumentation, and Asperities is no different.Because of that, anyone who is not a fan of the instrument (and it being the primary focus of an album) may not find this record as engaging.However, her sense of composition and virtuoso playing ability results in an always changing and evolving piece of music, and the record ends up being a much more diverse endeavor than it may seem.Kent captures a plethora of moods and emotions here, in a way that few artists who focus so heavily on a single instrument can.
The dynamics of this record sit somewhere between the harsh dissonance of the noise world and the more reserved, spacious setting of an ambient record.For example, the short "Homes in Paris" is an idiosyncratic collage of found, but unidentifiable noises and incidental sound effects.But even within these abrasive layers, processed electronics and droning moments bring an oddly comfortable set of music and placidity to the otherwise heavy chaos.
On other pieces, the noisier tendencies of the duo’s sound stays in the forefront."Black Box Recording" sounds as if much of the recording is culled from its title, based upon what sounds like bursts of static and radio communication noise, but never fully discernible dialog or human voices.Layers of low fidelity recordings, bursts of noise, and explosions results in the two artists’ conveying the harrowing nature of a flight recorder capturing the first few moments of a catastrophic disaster.
Other moments, however, make for more of a transition between the harsher and melodic moments."Tearing Up" is all dark and lurching loops, at first just uncomfortably dissonant but amped up with static and distortion go become even more chaotic.Interestingly, towards the conclusion some clean guitar playing from Bjella glides to the forefront with a somber, beautiful tone that gives the song’s title two distinctly different interpretations depending on its pronunciation."Yes the Enduring Classics" is built from cavernous, almost musical loops as layers of noise are piled atop.Both the melodic and chaotic moments are magnified by the inclusion of what sounds like cello and metallic percussion, and straddles that line perfectly.
The two choose to close the album on a dourer, disturbing note on the lengthy "The Brighter Side of Fucking History".Opening with massively reverberating water drips and rattling noises with bass-heavy, subterranean rumbles, it captures the ambience of an expansive, disused concrete basement.Some oddly treated synthesizer passages drift in and out, with strange metallic scrapes and mechanical clattering making for an unsettling piece of moody ambiguity that excels in both its composition and its insinuated creepiness.
I am more familiar with Michael Bjella's work as GOG, and while a different beast, Black Box Recordings still bears his mark in the same way his primary project does.With less of the heavy metal elements and increased noise contributions from Skrzyński, it is an album of blackened industrial noise and experimentation that may have a familiar mood, but an entirely fresh and innovative sound in its execution.
"Zinging, absolutely deadly 7-track EP from Micachu on her return to DDS, featuring three tracks with Tirzah (including the much sought-after Go), plus a Demdike Stare Edit.
DDS render a precious haul of new Micachu zingers on her return to the label, ramped up by Demdike Stare's dextrous edit of "I Dare You" to chase up 2014’s acclaimed Feeling Romantic Feeling Tropical Feeling Ill LP for mutant dancefloors and sun-kissed headphone journeys.
Smitten by the hugely addictive, brilliantly slippery 2-step twister on Go, Demdike suggested the cut for release on DDS, and were subsequently privileged to peruse the unique space-time folds and dance/pop sampledelia of Mica’s archive.
As they also found out whilst compiling her last solo LP; it is a deeply rewarding experience to explore the Mica’s output: immersing themselves in her peerless world of refractive colours, sawn-off textures and teasing arrangements.
They’ve emerged with a joyously unhinged party-ready EP, traversing the mercurial 2-step viscosity of Mica & Tirzah’s "Go," to their addictively sticky ohrwurm, "Dare You," and the free cosmic pop whorl of "Trip6love," before taking in the clanking ragga jag of "More Red" with Brother May, a.k.a. the London-based MC who voiced Mica’s Fact Mix 444 in 2014.
The cherry on top is a crucial Demdike edit of "I Dare You," featuring Miles and Sean extending and swerving the original just like they would with two copies of the 12"."
"Blues Alif Lam Mim in the Mode of Rag Infinity/Rag Cosmosis" is a new composition from Catherine Christer Hennix's expanded just-intonation ensemble, the Chora(s)san Time-Court Mirage. This expanded ensemble includes vocalists Imam Ahmet Muhsin Tüzer, Amir Elsaffan and Amirtha Kidambi, an expanded brass section with the addition of Paul Schwingesnschlögl and Elena Kakaliagou as well as the additon of Marcus Pal and Stefan Tiedje on electronics.
Out March 18th, 2016. More information will soon be found here.
Central Palace Music, performed by Catherine Christer Hennix's just-intonation ensemble The Deontic Miracle, is the first in a series of archival Hennix releases to be issued via IMPREC. This previously unheard piece was taken from an eight day festival organized in the Spring of 1976 at the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm. The group features Catherine Christer Hennix on Renaissance oboe and custom sinewave generators, Peter Hennix on Renaissance oboe and Hans Isgren on sheng.
Central Palace Music is packaged in a deluxe letterpressed package and is being released at the same time as a recent recording of Hennix's new ensemble live at Issue Project Room.
"...Hennix has created a sound that reliably taps into our subconscious and frees us from linear time..." The Quietus
Out March 18th, 2016. More information will soon be found here.
The way I see it, there are only three possible reactions to the statement "Matmos just made an entire album from recordings of their washing machine."  The first, which was my reaction, is "Yes!"  The other two, of course,  are "Ugh-of course they did." and "Who?"  What I am getting at here is that Ultimate Care II sounds exactly like everyone will expect it to sound, which is (naturally) exactly like a Matmos album: part conceptual art, part bizarro dance party, part abstract experimentation, and part willfully ridiculous (they let the actual rinse cycle play out unmolested for several minutes at one point).  The only real surprise for me was that Ultimate Care II is just a single extended piece that loosely mirrors the stages of a single wash cycle.  That one piece covers a lot of strange and varied stylistic ground, however, veering wildly from pummeling junkyard percussion to Looney Tunes to musique concrète to Love's Secret Domain-era Coil within a single 38-minute span.  Predictably, it is a wild ride indeed and precisely the type of album that no one but Matmos could (or would) ever make.
While Ultimate Care II is unquestionably a quintessential "Matmos" album, Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt did not make it alone, enlisting the aid of several guests from around the Baltimore area including Dan Deacon and members of Horse Lords, Needle Gun, and Half Japanese.  To their credit, some of the guests even earned some serious washing machine cred beforehand by periodically doing their laundry at the Matmos house.  Aside from generally being a fun project, the involvement of so many people in this quixotic endeavor served a practical purpose as well: every sound on Ultimate Care comes from the washing machine itself, so recruiting talented collaborators was a useful way of coming up with enough interesting ideas to fill an album.  Unsurprisingly, quite a few of the sounds on Ultimate Care sound recognizably like a washing machine, while many others exploit the machine’s rich percussive potential.  Then, of course, there are many others that veer so far off the tracks that it is hard to believe their origin.
The magic, of course, lies in how those myriad sounds are combined and how all the various motifs evolve into one another.  Many of the best parts sound positively raucous, as the duo prove particularly adept at combining stomping and plinking rhythms into a fun quasi-industrial dance party.  Also, the crazier and wonkier the grooves get, the better.  Most of Ultimate Care’s best moments occur when Schmidt and Daniel settle into a weirdly funky and stumbling groove filled with kooky bleeps and buzzes.  Infectious rhythms aside, the other highlights tend to be the gutsier and/or more surprising moments.  For example, there is an admittedly non-gutsy, yet completely unexpected interlude where the piece coheres into an absolutely beautiful passage that resembles a haunting glass harmonica performance.  More frequently, however, Ultimate Care reaches its greatest heights when it just gets go-for-broke bonkers.  Like, for example, when it sounds like jungle-themed exotica made by a mental patient.  That thankfully happens more than once and it is absolutely glorious every time.
Of course, not every idea that found its way onto Ultimate Care was entirely brilliant.  Some of the more straightforwardly pummeling percussion passages definitely left me a bit cold, as they are a bit too bombastic for such a fundamentally absurd venture.  Admittedly, they can be quite visceral, but I do not like Matmos because they can sound like Test Dept. if they want to–I like them because they are imaginative and unique.  I was also not wild about a blurting passage that sounded like a computer throwing up, as it was only interesting because it was made from a washing machine.  Conversely, however, I actually did enjoying the few sections that basically sounded like untreated washing machine recordings.  In my defense, if washing machines did not sound cool, Matmos probably would not have made this album.  I am not ruling out the possibility that I am becoming an easily amused simpleton, however.  In any case, the good parts far outweigh the bad and none of the weaker moments stick around for long.  Also, I would be crazy to expect a flawless, seamless longform composition made from a goddamn washing machine: Daniel and Schmidt are primarily experimenters and Ultimate Care is essentially a series of wild set pieces that flow together surprisingly well.  I am sure there will be plenty of better compositions this year than Ultimate Care, but I doubt many of them will rack up quite as many memorable highlights along the way.
Blackest Ever Black presents a new vinyl edition of Af Ursin’s 2005 masterpiece Aura Legato, and its first outings on CD and digital formats.
Af Ursin is the alter ego of Finnish autodidact composer/improviser Timo van Luijk. He began his musical activities in the mid-1980s, co-founding the Noise-Maker’s Fifes collective with Geert Feytons in ’89. During the ’90s he developed his solo work under the name Af Ursin, before establishing his private press, La Scie Dorée, in 2001. It continues to act as the main platform for his own music, including regular collaborations with Christoph Heeman (as In Camera) and Andrew Chalk (as Elodie), while his other label, Metaphon (run with Marc Wroblewski and Greg Jacobs), is focused on archival presentations from the likes of Michael Ranta, Joris de Laet, and IPEM.
Van Luijk’s work is rooted in the use of acoustic instruments (wind, percussion, strings), but his special sensitivity to the timbral qualities of each instrument, and his deft blurring of them, results in a sound-world that is mysterious, amorphous and hallucinatory, full of suggestive shadows, creaks and whispers. Informed by years of intensive listening to various types of free music, exploratory drug use and especially the “irregular organic forms” of the Belgian countryside where he resides, van Luijk’s process begins always with pure improvisation: music played in an intuitive, sensual way, without the employment of conscious technique. He performs and overdubs each instrumental component himself, and out of this process micro-structures and loose arrangements emerge: the piece becomes an improvised composition. Over time he has evolved his own richly poetic musical language, full of allusions to drone, acid folk, classical, Musique concrète and jazz, but beholden to none.
Originally released on La Scie Dorée in 2005, in an edition of 350 copies, Aura Legato is one of van Luijk’s darker and more acutely psychedelic offerings. It’s a work of profound interiority, but one that also conjures images of old Europe and fin-de-siècle decadence – dabblings in Thelema, the fog of the opium-den – and has earned telling, if inadequate, comparisons to Third Ear Band, Nurse With Wound, Mirror and HNAS. Fully remastered by Noel Summerville, the album has never sounded better, and our vinyl edition replicates the original’s ornate presentation: sleeve die-cut in the style of a 78rpm record, with gold detailing and individually hand-glued labels. Due to be released in May 2016, we urge you to acquaint yourself with what is, unmistakably, a modern classic.
A new long-form offering of poignant, isolationist machine music from Secret Boyfriend. Eschewing the cryptic and compact song-sketches that characterised his 2013 Blackest Ever Black LP, This Is Always Where You’ve Lived, Ryan Martin instead guides us through vast interior topographies and nerve-damaged ambiences that comfort and deceive like memory itself.
Beginning with "The Singing Bile" – minimal synth submerged and subjected to an almost oceanic pressure – the tracks are mostly crude, extended live improvisations, recorded straight to tape. Martin’s loose intention was to subtract himself from proceedings and “let the music play itself”, but the erasure is not quite complete: on the contrary, each piece feels distinctly authored, and charged with personal significance. The atrophying loops of "Memorize Them Well"broach the elegiac grandeur of Gas and William Basinski, while "Paean Delle Palme" summons E.A.R., Af Ursin, and the clammy, opioid exoticism of :zoviet*france:*’s Just An Illusion. The album is largely instrumental, but there are two weighty exceptions: the sprawling, drumbox-driven space blues of "Little Jammy Centre" and the guileless yearning of "Stripping At The Nail." This is electronic pop undressed, unravelled and mapped onto the infinite wave.
Expansive and enveloping, Memory Care Unit's offer of comfort and refuge is difficult to resist. But this amniotic idyll is frayed and haunted at its edges, and ultimately treacherous. The return to innocence it promises may be possible, but the price is separation, alienation and loss.
Saturday Night Fever takes the concept of the movie of the same name and stretches the night a bit later, the fever a bit higher to the point where the party ends up blending into something much more sinister and wild. What starts out as a disco drumbeat with funky guitar swagger and melodic horns, may slowly deteriorate into some sort of corroded ambient loop that eventually morphs into melodic horn samples.. Basically every track is subverting it's own gestures, carving out a narrative of interruption and stretching the disco template in directions simultaneously embracing and mocking the form.. In a way, this album is a sequel to "A Republic of Sadness", embracing the criticisms people had of that album and expanding on those flaws. The resulting album sounds like Morley's pulling out some heaping doses of the hermit boogie and Otago funk and stretching it into some sort of Basinskian disintegration loop gone Bernard Bonnier zonked mutant scene.. There are so many moves within each of the four extended tracks, that it feels like that illuminated dance floor is always slipping beneath your feet. I promise it'll be worth the effort, twinkletoes...
This trio featuring ubiquitous pianist Nils Frahm is one of the more pleasant surprises that have come across my path in recent memory, as I expected some sort of bloodless avant-jazz/post-rock hybrid, but was instead treated to quite an innovative and unique album (albeit quite an understated one as well).  I suspect a lot of that success is due to the band's exceedingly unconventional recording process, as they spent 8 years recording, re-recording, editing, recombining, and endlessly tweaking these pieces before finally concluding that The Gamble was finished.  Consequently, whatever these songs sounded like when they were originally played is probably a hell of a lot different from what ultimately wound up here.  To my credit, I was right about this album being a sort of avant-jazz/post-rock hybrid, but all of the instrumentation is so blurred together that The Gamble transcends either genre entirely and instead sounds like a strain of dub techno that is just as influenced by Latin percussion as it is by Jamaican dub. Except when it sounds like the greatest album that Tortoise never recorded.  Or when it sounds like something else entirely.
If their colorful biography (featuring a major fairground ride tragedy) is to be believed, this trio of Nils Frahm, bassist Sepp Singwald, and drummer Frederic Gmeiner have been playing together since childhood.  Even more suspicious than the carousel tragedy, however, is the fact that their biography makes absolutely no mention of Übertonmensch, a previous band featuring the exact same line-up.  Instead, Nonkeen is framed as the culmination of a lifelong journey.  I suppose it probably is in some ways, but these guys are still quite an inscrutable bunch.  Their backstory and previous output go a long way towards explaining their current sound though, as the trio have flirted with both jazz and electronic music, but were originally brought together by their shared love of tape machines and their possibilities.  Consequently, it makes perfect sense that they would eventually shake free from more straightforward genre fare and embrace the studio as their true muse.
They also embraced current Miasmah artist Andrea Belfi, who contributes guest drums and percussion on five songs.  That certainly adds further to The Gamble's blurring effect, as it is impossible to say where Belfi's contributions end and where Gmeiner's begin, especially since no instrument credits are provided except for Belfi.  In fact, it is entirely possible that Belfi steals the show, as two of his five songs are among the best on the album ("Animal Farm" and "Chasing God Through Palmyra").  Naturally, everyone's contributions swirl together at all times, but Nonkeen are at their absolute best when their hazy almost-jazz is driven by a strong pulse.  "Animal Farm," for example, boasts a very cool organ-like chord progression and a nice slowed-down tape loop of a male voice, but it is the sexy Latin groove that makes it seem like a bombshell compared to the earlier songs on the album (especially when the beat takes on an ominous, industrial texture).  The album's lead single, "Chasing God Through Palmyra," is equally Latin-tinged, tape loop-enhanced, and quasi-industrial, but even more propulsive.  In fact, I believe both pieces were culled from many of the same parts, but "God" is a bit more sped up and consequently feels quite different.  Elsewhere, the tensely clattering and improvisatory-sounding "Ceramic People" is another high point, benefiting from some fairly wild live drumming.  The Belfi-less closer ("Re: Turn!") might actually be my favorite piece of all though, sounding like a dreamy treatment of a simple, repeating piano motif that calls to mind a hallucinatory reimagining of Steve Reich’s "Music for 18 Musicians."
My sole grievance with The Gamble is just that it has much more filler than I would expect on a 9-song album that took 8 years to make: not much happens at all in either "Capstan" (sounds like someone noodling on a vibraphone while someone else practices drum rolls) or "Pink Flirt" (a few melancholy chords, some tape hiss, and a prematurely aborted good idea).  Otherwise, however, Nonkeen seem to have had plenty of fine ideas in a number of different directions, yet made them seamlessly fit together with an unwavering commitment to space, mood, and understatement.  I was especially struck by how ego-less this album is, as few things are rarer than getting three musicians with reasonably solid jazz chops together in a room and having them all try to smear together unrecognizably in service of a smoky, dub-wise aesthetic.  Even when Nonkeen sound like an actual jazz trio, as they do on the excellent "Beautiful Mess" and "The Saddest Continent on Earth," it sounds like a noir-ish afterhours jam designed not to wake any neighbors.  Equally significant is the fact that I never would have ever guessed on my own that The Gamble featured a pianist of Frahm's caliber: not because the playing is unexceptional, but because Nonkeen somehow manage to make everything feel so seemingly effortless, simple, and natural.
Like her debut release, Valence (2012), Montreal's France Jobin’s work is from the traditional school of electronic minimalism, in which the sparsest of sounds and instrumentation are utilized to create complex, nuanced sculptures of tone and texture.  Inspired by quantum physics and actualized by a variety of processing and modular synthesis, this album is yet another strong entry in her growing discography.
One aspect that sets Jobin's work apart in this often-crowded field is her judicious use of dissonance.Rather than relying on distorted processing effects or abrasive synthetic tones, her work is instead more restrained and nuanced.Gliding, almost bowed-string like tones cut through dramatically on "l," as she builds upon simple loops into a richer, almost conventionally melodic sound.The lengthy opening piece "n" features a swirling, almost organ like tone that fights with pure silence during the opening.The piece transitions to a shimmering, sharper quality not unlike Robert Hampson’s work as Main in its most stripped-down capacity before blending extreme, yet low volume frequencies in its conclusion.
That is not to say that France's work is all pure sounds and open spaces, however.Sustained low-end vibrations stretch throughout "m," which results in a piece with just the right amount of grit, but one that complements the rest of the piece well.Even with these darker rumbles and the occasional bit of what most closely resembles digital interference, her use of quiet, almost melodic passages contrast extremely well and give the piece a distinct feeling of beauty.
The 13 and a half minute concluding composition, "s," makes for the perfect culmination of Singulum and encapsulates her style as a whole.The opening passages are bleaker and less inviting, exemplified by icy sounds and a slowly pulsing, slightly menacing layer of noises.It never becomes overly powerful or commanding, but the sound has a distinctly sinister characteristic to it.However, she uses the piece's duration to evolve and develop the sound, rearranging the various layers to alleviate the tension she created beforehand.By the conclusion of the composition, the layers have been shifted to a more open, spacious arrangement that lets light shine through what previously was kept in the dark.
Singulum is one of those albums that requires focused and dedicated attention, as any sort of distraction significantly hinders the impact of the work.But through these hushed volumes and carefully treated electronic passages, France Jobin has constructed an album of quiet, yet lush arrangements.While it is difficult to exactly imagine how quantum physics can translate to sound, Singulum is undoubtedly a pretty close approximation.