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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Back before the days of MP3s and file sharing, it was not uncommon for me to slowly lose my goddamn mind because there was some album that I desperately wanted to hear, yet could not find anywhere.  Naturally Coil, Current 93, and Nurse With Wound were all regular members of that exclusive club, but the reigning king of maddening elusiveness was always La Monte Young–more specifically, The Well-Tuned Piano, though Dream House (now finally reissued) would have been a lovely consolation prize (both albums have regularly turned up on Discogs' "most expensive items sold" list).  The reason for my obsession is quite simple: Young was the ur-visionary at the root of many of the more compelling strains of underground culture that have blossomed over the last 18 years, heavily and directly influencing the aesthetics of Brian Eno, Andy Warhol, The Velvet Underground, and Terry Riley (in fact, John Cale, Angus MacLise, and Riley were all members of Young's Theatre of Eternal Music ensemble).
Originally released in 1973, Dream House is one of the inaugural releases in Aguirre’s series of reissues from the amazing and forward-thinking French label Shandar.  Before its basement office was largely destroyed by a flood in 1979, the label run by Daniel Caux and Chantal Darcy released an unprecedented string of crucial avant-garde albums featuring everyone from Charlemagne Palestine to Sun Ra to Pandit Pran Nath.  Even among that milieu of iconoclasts, however, Dream House stands out as exceptionally outré.  Comprised of two side-long pieces, Dream House explores Young’s obsession with idea of eternal music without beginning or end.  Few (if any) Western musicians were as invested in the idea of hypnotic, trance-like repetition as La Monte Young was in the 1970s.  Significantly, it was not so much a musical choice so much as it was a lifelong obsession, as the idea of a "dream house" was later expanded into a series of installations (of varying degrees of permanence) built around Young’s sine waves and Zazeela’s accompanying light sculptures.
The first and far more distinctive piece, "13 I 73 5:35-6:14:03 PM NYC," features a stripped-down version of the Theatre of Eternal Music ensemble, in this case just future avant-garde luminaries Jon Hassell and Garrett List.  The general idea is quite simple, as it is basically just a drone piece built from Young’s sine waves, Zazeela’s voice, and the ensemble’s sustained brass tones.  Over that, however, are Young’s otherworldly, nasal, ritualistic, and chant-like vocals.  On one level, Pandit Pran Nath’s influence is abundantly clear, but there is a buzzing, quasi-insectoid quality to Young's voice as well.  As such, the piece still sounds quite alien today, so I cannot begin to imagine what unsuspecting American listeners in the early ‘70s made of such a bizarre, time-stretched blending of Indian classical music and the hum of high voltage power lines.  Nor can I imagine what listeners would have made of the hyper-minimal second piece, "Drift Study 14 VII 73 9:27:27-10:06:41 PM NYC," a gently oscillating 39-minute sine-wave solo.  Neither piece offers anything in the way of conspicuous evolution or strong melody, as the emphasis is quite squarely on the hypnotic properties of endless repetition and on small-scale shifts in harmony and oscillation.  Dream House was far more than an unusual synthesis of Eastern music, minimalism, and the more experimental strains of jazz and classical music–it was a radical experiment in transforming how we hear and experience music.
There is no question at all that Dream House is a radical and significant work by a woefully underdocumented and hugely influential figure.  However, the inevitable downside to being a groundbreaking visionary is that when one of your seminal masterpieces is finally reissued 40 years after it was recorded, the rest of the experimental music world has already long caught and surpassed it.  Granted, the first half of the album still sounds quite unusual by 2016 standards, but its capacity to blow anyone's mind has long expired.  In the case of most composers, there would be some sadness to that, but La Monte Young’s career almost seemed completely independent of his albums.  Dream House is merely a snapshot of an ephemeral instant in an endless evolution, as any clips that I have heard from Dream House installations are considerably more immersive and harmonically complex than what is documented here.  Also, "13 I 73 5:35-6:14:03 PM NYC" is allegedly just a mere section of a larger piece called "Map Of 49's Dream The Two Systems Of Eleven Sets Of Galactic Intervals Ornamental Lightyears Tracery."  And, of course, that piece is itself allegedly just a section of Young’s even larger and never-ending opus "The Tortoise, His Dreams And Journeys."  Odds are quite high that most of Young’s greatest work probably existed only live or in concept alone, so we are probably lucky to get to hear any of it at all.  There is not much available, so every single bit is cause for excitement.  I am absolutely thrilled that this has finally been reissued.
Samples:
 
Newly resurrected by Oren Ambarchi’s Black Truffle imprint, this would-be landmark 1987 recording was originally slated to be released on Glenn Branca’s short-lived Neutral Records.  After sadly sitting on the shelf for roughly a decade, it was finally issued by Dutch label Barooni in 1998 and thankfully reached enough people to warrant yet another resurfacing almost 20 years later.  It is hard to understand how this album wound up so cursed while the very similar Strumming Music became so revered, but the world is not a fair place, I guess.  In any case, Godbear is a suite of three solo piano pieces recorded in a church and it is wonderful.  While perhaps not quite as essential as Palestine's more ambitious and unusual recent work (2015’s Ssingggg arguably eclipsed absolutely everything that came before it), Godbear’s rumbling storms of overtones are quite visceral and inventive by solo piano performance standards.
In a curious bit of temporal coincidence, Godbear is being reissued at roughly the same time as La Monte Young’s Dream House, making 2016 a banner year for former Pandit Pran Nath students who released seminal albums on Shandar.  Unlike Dream House, however, Palestine’s 1974 Shandar release Strumming Music got a major reissue in the '90s and kickstarted a career resurgence.  Remarkably, given how prolific he is today, Palestine did not release a single album between 1974 and 1997–a hiatus that the doomed Godbear would have ended.  Aside from being 1.) cursed, and 2.) quite good, Godbear is also significant for essentially being a reprise and improvement upon the 13-year-old Strumming Music.  In fact, Godbear’s second piece is even called "Strumming Music," though it condenses the previous album's epic 52-minute duration into a mere 11.  The other two pieces have different names, but the simple, underlying idea is very much the same for all: rapidly hammered notes at neutral intervals (octaves and fifths) that gradually become much more complicated and much less neutral.
The first side of the album is filled completely by the 20-minute "The Lower Depths," which is arguably the album’s highlight (though competition is fierce).  The title likely has its root in the fact that the piece gradually descends into the more rumbling, lower reaches of the piano's range, but its infernal connotations are warranted as well.  It does not take long at all for the ringing and rolling harmonies to descend into a darker mood, but Palestine does an excellent job rationing out the tension and dissonance, always returning to calmer, more consonant harmonies…until he finally stops circling around and decides to get dark in earnest.  Taken on its face, "The Lower Depths" is a dynamic and compelling piece of music, but its real power is somewhat sneaky and not instantly apparent with casual listening: there are the notes that Palestine is actually playing and then there are the complex clouds of dissonance that start to cohere with increased regularity due to the use of the sustain pedal.  Once I became fully aware of the latter, the piece took on a whole new unpredictable life for me.  The combination of the clattering, rumbling lower keys and the oscillating, spreading black mass of overtones is quite spectacular when it comes together just right.  Also, it is kind of a neat magic trick, as the piece often feels improvisatory and roving, but it is all in service of creating eventual rich and unexpected blossoms of looming, dissonant harmonies.
"Strumming Music" is considerably more radiant and rippling in nature, using the same tools to evoke a very different mood.  It also seems considerably more structured and indebted to earlier minimalist composers than the rest of the album, as it feels like a single strong motif that recurs and evolves, whereas "The Lower Depths" is significantly more freewheeling and messy (albeit in a good way).  That said, "Strumming Music" is still absolutely lovely, cohering into a wonderfully shimmering and undulating haze of bliss.  That respite is brief, however, as things get heavy again for the closing "Timbral Assault," which immediately delivers exactly what it promises.  In fact, it sounds a lot like an impressively prescient precursor to Tim Hecker’s "Virginal."  Unlike "The Lower Depths," however, "Timbral Assault" is instantly dissonant and ominously minor key in mood.  Also, it is the most rhythmically unusual and unpredictable piece on the album, as its forward motion is constantly disrupted by stuttering flurries of notes.  Despite those strengths, or perhaps because of them, "Assault" is the weakest of the three pieces, as it lacks the slow-burning build-up to a pay-off that makes "Depths" and "Strumming" so satisfying.  "Timbral Assault" certainly starts off wonderfully, but it does not leave itself many places to go when it does and consequently starts to fade and meander a bit as it unfolds.
Anticlimactic final act aside, Godbear boasts a solid half-hour of near-perfect music that is both distinctive and powerful, so it definitely deserves a place in the upper echelon of Palestine's oeuvre.  It makes complete sense that the later phase of his career spread out in such varied, experimental, and eccentric directions, as Godbear and Strumming Music both took Palestine’s solo piano vision as far as it could reasonably go.  Until they build a Bösendorfer Imperial Grand Piano with even more keys in the lower octaves or make some radical breakthroughs in sustain pedal technology, there is no need to ever return to this well again.  The definitive statements have been made–they are just waiting around to be heard.
 
Traditional Synthesizer Music is a collection of songs created and performed live exclusively on the modular synthesizer by Aaron Funk. Each sound contained within was created purely with the modular synthesizer. No overdubbing or editing techniques were utilized in the recordings on Traditional Synthesizer Music. Each song was approached from the ground up and dismantled upon the completion of it's recording. The goal was to develop songs with interchangeable structures and sub structures, yet musically pleasing motifs. Many techniques were incorporated to "humanize" or vary the rhythmic results within these sub structures. An exercise in constructing surprises, patches interrupting each other to create unforeseen progressions. Multiple takes were recorded for each song resulting in vastly different versions of each piece.
More information can be found here.
Few years ago, an idea germinated while reading The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. An idea not driven by the narrativity of the book, but by the traces and the aura invoked in it. That was it: an audible auratic journey trough the memories of a place lost in the heights of the Swiss mountains.
A century after the events depicted in the book, we went where the story took place, trying to capture the remaining sounds that could have been heard at the time, and the ghosts who might have still wandered around.
Zauberberg is based on these captures, on recordings of the music played by Hans Castorp (the novel’s main character), on acoustic/electronic instrumentation and digital processing. The result is an evocation of time and duration, an exploration of what remains and what is lost, a meditation of the dissolution and persistence of the aura surrounding everything.
— Kassel Jaeger, Nov. 19, 2015
More information can be found here.
Ethics and passion in their purest form. Welcome to the world of Sarah Records, active between 1987-1995, and possibly the most indie of all indie labels. This is a documentary where principles prevail and attitude and actions are just as important as the music. Heroics and belligerence, ephemeral-eternal-pop, fanzines and the incorruptible founders Clare Wadd and Matt Haynes. Their inspirations, the records, the bands, the letters, the long list of journalists that detested Sarah, the fans that love Sarah...The defiance and determination of our founding duo and and their final declaration. Their focus on something that was non-commercial and exciting, as if music could change lives and mean SOMETHING. My Secret World is a resounding reminder that music doesn’t need to be about posturing, production or money to be an outright success.
My Secret World. The Story Of Sarah Records is the first feature length documentary to explore this influential and often misunderstood label. Now the label founders, former Sarah band members, music critics and those that have been inspired by the label tell their story.
The production of this documentary has been made possible by the generosity of everyone involved; the artists who've permitted their music to feature in the soundtrack, the interviewees for their time and help, the film makers who helped film the interviews and the Sarah fans who donated archive footage and photographs.
Directed and funded by Lucy Dawkins, My Secret World has been 4 years in the making. More information can be found here.
"Intimate portrait of a quietly radical indie outfit" -Uncut
Front 242, Tuxedomoon, Eric Random and more not-disco classics for the dancefloor.
JD Twitch has done more than most to improve our record collections this year, introducing us to some incredible post-punk rarities on his Optimo Music compilation [Cease & Desist] and releasing an inspired intercontinental collaboration featuring young musicians from Glasgow, Ghana and Belize on his Autonomous Africa imprint.
For his next trick, Keith McIvor is going back to his roots with a compilation of club favourites from his earliest days behind the mixer. "So Low is an occasional night at The Poetry Club in Glasgow where I play some of the music I played when I first started DJing back in 1987," McIvor explains.
"At that time the audience I played to mostly loathed what I was playing and rarely danced, but then shortly after, when house music arrived, I found a different audience who actually liked to dance."
At the request of his wife, and some friends who were too young to hear these songs in the club at the time, he now runs the So Low night as an excuse to give records by the likes of Front 242 and Chris & Cosey another airing. "It has an extremely enthusiastic audience, a joyous atmosphere and is the antithesis of what a club in Scotland playing this music nearly 30 years ago would have been like," he explains.
The So Low compilation focuses on some lesser known stars of cold wave, from UK and European minimalists like P1/E, Colin Potter and Gerry & The Holograms, to US industrial band Hunting Lodge and avant-garde San Francisco collective Tuxedomoon, as well as a number of French and Belgian acts such as Siglo XX, Front 242, Marc Verhaeghen’s The Klinik and Clair Obscur.
Teaming up with The Vinyl Factory for the releases, McIvor has also enlisted contemporary cold-wave fans Powell and Helena Hauff to provide remixes for their favourite tracks on the compilation, which seems like a very good idea to us.
Check out the tracklist below, and look out for the compilation on February 19 on 2xLP, CD and digital, with the remixes following soon after.
More information can be found here.
Tracklist:
Front 242, Tuxedomoon, Eric Random and more not-disco classics for the dancefloor.
JD Twitch has done more than most to improve our record collections this year, introducing us to some incredible post-punk rarities on his Optimo Music compilation [Cease & Desist] and releasing an inspired intercontinental collaboration featuring young musicians from Glasgow, Ghana and Belize on his Autonomous Africa imprint.
For his next trick, Keith McIvor is going back to his roots with a compilation of club favourites from his earliest days behind the mixer. "So Low is an occasional night at The Poetry Club in Glasgow where I play some of the music I played when I first started DJing back in 1987," McIvor explains.
"At that time the audience I played to mostly loathed what I was playing and rarely danced, but then shortly after, when house music arrived, I found a different audience who actually liked to dance."
At the request of his wife, and some friends who were too young to hear these songs in the club at the time, he now runs the So Low night as an excuse to give records by the likes of Front 242 and Chris & Cosey another airing. "It has an extremely enthusiastic audience, a joyous atmosphere and is the antithesis of what a club in Scotland playing this music nearly 30 years ago would have been like," he explains.
The So Low compilation focuses on some lesser known stars of cold wave, from UK and European minimalists like P1/E, Colin Potter and Gerry & The Holograms, to US industrial band Hunting Lodge and avant-garde San Francisco collective Tuxedomoon, as well as a number of French and Belgian acts such as Siglo XX, Front 242, Marc Verhaeghen’s The Klinik and Clair Obscur.
Teaming up with The Vinyl Factory for the releases, McIvor has also enlisted contemporary cold-wave fans Powell and Helena Hauff to provide remixes for their favourite tracks on the compilation, which seems like a very good idea to us.
Check out the tracklist below, and look out for the compilation on February 19 on 2xLP, CD and digital, with the remixes following soon after.
More information can be found here.
Tracklist:
Ecstatic offer a fascinating, often dizzying insight to the primitive industrial minimalism of Italian siblings, Giancarlo and Roberto Drago, a.k.a. The Tapes, via Selected Works 1982 - 1992 sourced from original tapes and pressed to vinyl for the first time ever.
Following on from Ecstatic’s issue of "mail artist" Danielle Ciullini’s Domestic Exile Collected Works 82-86, this set surveys a blind-spot in most people’s knowledge of early '80s Italian underground music, framed against a backdrop of the Anni di Piombo, or Years of Lead - a period of domestic political turmoil between the late '60s and early '80s - and the mushroom shadow of nuclear war.
These 21 tracks, drawn from 10 different, limited tape releases, perfectly distill a wandering, weirdo spirit, ranging from the funereal swagger of Tanz Fabrik and the darkwave hip-thrust of The Day of Silence to freeform, motorik trajectories such as Time Out of Joint and singular enigmas like the Actress-esque bobble of The Wait and Falso Movimento B2’s weightless, hyaline spindles.
Collected and compiled by Alessio Natalizia (aka Not Waving) and remastered by Matt Colton, Selected Works 1982 - 1992 represents a decade of modest but searching and instinctively grooving experimentation of the rarest, precious and compelling kind.
As Giancarlo Drago explains:
“The Tapes was an unplanned experience, an unplanned need to express myself. Looking back on this music I wonder sometimes how I did it - the whole process from the concept to the completion. Everything I do now seems trivial and obvious and I just end up aborting the idea. And exactly for this reason I think that everything has its time, with a beginning and an end...”
More information can be found here.
This is a well-deserved and expanded vinyl reissue of the absolutely stellar My Body is A Dying Machine EP, which Justin Broadrick quietly released in digital-only format back in 2010. So quietly, in fact, that I completely missed it the first time around.  As with most expanded releases, the added material in this case is not exactly crucial, as most of the best songs were already on the original EP.  It is quite good though and the appeal of Black Dollars does not lie so much in its enhancements as it does in the fact that Downwards have resurrected some prime Broadrick material that snuck by most casual fans.  Stylistically, Black Dollars is very much in the "instrumental version of Jesu" vein, capturing Broadrick at his shoegaze-mode zenith.
Downwards
Black Dollars opens in fine fashion with its previous namesake, "My Body is a Dying Machine."  Built upon an insistent, overdriven bass throb, "Body" unfolds as a languorously swaying and sizzling haze of slow-moving guitar and synth tones.  The bass foundation is an essential part of the piece's success, as the deep undercurrent of dense, distorted rumble prevents the dreamy foreground from ever seeming too weightless.  Also, Broadrick makes some inspired textural choices, as the bass has a nice stuttering sizzle that sounds like a hapless amplifier being pushed to its limits.  Also, one of the many half-buried layers in the piece sounds like a vocal track that has been time-stretched and reversed.  That creates an extremely cool effect in which it seems like words are trying to fight their way through all the guitar shimmer, but never quite making it far enough to be intelligible.  It is an absolutely sublime and perfectly realized piece of music.
Happily, "Body" is not the only piece of that caliber birthed during that fertile creative period, as both "Gravity" and "Black Dollars" scale similar heights.  In fact, "Gravity" both reprises and improves upon the same formula of driving, distorted bass; drifting guitar shimmer; and buried vocals by ratcheting up the sizzle, hiss, and snarl.  "Black Dollars," however, goes in a bit of a different direction, pushing the bass deep into the background to make room for warmly hissing ambiance and a beautifully slow-moving, twinkling, and reverberant guitar melody.  The remainder of the original EP was rounded out by a live version of "My Body is a Dying Machine" (straight-up filler) and a likable bit of lazily glimmering treated-guitar drift ("A Slight Return").  Naturally, both appear on Black Dollars as well (albeit in different sequence).
Unexpectedly, one of the bonus tracks added for this reissue manages to be something of a highlight itself, as "Flow River Flow" reprises the territory of "A Slight Return" in considerably more gnarled, textured, and vibrant fashion.  In fact, it sounds a lot like a cool outro guitar solo on a classic shoegaze song being played over warped and pitch-shifted field recordings of church bells and a bubbling cauldron.  I sincerely hope that it births a hot new sub-genre.  "The World is Not Waiting for You" is yet another pleasantly surprising addition, returning to the more "rock" structure of Black Dollars' best songs, but doing it in a more soft-focus, burbling, melodic, and feminized way (the vocals are softened and pitch-shifted to the point of at least androgyny).  The remaining dreamy ambient-meets-feedback squall of "The Eternal Daydreamer" is also quite likable, if a bit less memorable than Black Dollars' more propulsive and structured pieces.
If Black Dollars can be said to have any flaws, they are not particularly significant ones.  For example, I do not see any need for the live version of "My Body is a Dying Machine" to be included, as it is not radically different from the studio version in any way.  However, the decision to bookend the album with two versions of one of its best songs is admittedly a nice sequencing move.  Also, the more "ambient" pieces are generally not on the same level as the rest of the album, but that is because the rest of the album is so great, not because the album is padded with substandard material.  I suppose I should not be surprised that Black Dollars boasts at least three instant classics, given Justin Broadrick's long history of excellent and innovative music, but…damn, I am.  Quite pleasantly so.  At its best, Black Dollars hits the absolute perfect balance between heaviness, hooks, and experimentation.  And at its worst, it is merely another very good release by a musical titan.  This is a hugely welcome reissue.
 
In a lot of ways, this latest Roly Porter release sounds like a sister album to Paul Jebanasam’s Continuum, which is not all that surprising given that Jebanasam and Porter co-run Subtext Recordings (along with Emptyset’s James Ginsburg).  Like Continuum, Third Law is an ambitious, forward-thinking, and viscerally produced monster of an album.  Unlike Jebanasam, however, Porter completely leaves both Earth and conventional composition far behind in favor of complex, futuristic abstraction.  It is a unique aesthetic to say the least, veering unpredictably from warmly stuttering electronics to rib-cage rattling percussion flourishes to sci-fi choral music to absolute planet-smashing intensity with the all the restraint that one normally associates with mad geniuses.  While Porter's bold, speaker-shredding, and universe-spanning vision could be said to lack a healthy amount of restraint, no one will ever say that he lacks an incredibly rigorous attention to detail.  That combination yields quite an unusual result, as Third Law sounds like what I imagine you would get if you typed "create epoch-defining masterwork" into a supercomputer.
I have spent a large portion of my life chasing, hearing, and obsessing over unusual music, but Third Law is unexpectedly one of the most confounding albums that I have ever tried to wrap my head around.  That situation is doubly weird because this is not even the first Roly Porter album that I have heard, though I probably just did not pay close enough attention to the other ones.  The issue is this: Third Law sounds like an album that was literally made in the future.  Or in a future, as in "possibly not ours."  Porter is working at a level of complexity and immensity so far beyond that of everyone else that it just seems futile and wrong-headed to try judge his work by current standards.  For example, while other musicians were spending 2015 sitting around trying to think of cool melodies or beats, Porter was busy dreaming up something that sounds like all the damned souls in hell raising their voices in chorus as the world is ripped apart by a black hole (the opening "4101").  If he was not making music, it is easy to imagine Porter filling his time with something akin to designing and building the Death Star in his garage.
The question that I am wrestling with is whether or not that makes Third Law a great album.  The best analogy that I can come up with is that hearing Third Law in 2016 would probably be a lot like seeing a Pink Floyd laser light tribute show in the late 1950s: regardless of its merits (or lack thereof), most people would definitely walk away from that gig thinking that Think Pink or Shine On was a hell of a lot better than an old-timey snooze like John Coltrane.  That said, of course, Porter has a considerably more vision and originality than any mere time-traveling Pink Floyd tribute band.  Conversely, however, Third Law lacks a lot of the characteristics that music normally needs to be loved and/or memorable, such as strong recurring motifs or expected song structures.  My guess is that Porter cast such concerns aside as regressive, but this album occupies a weird grey area between structure and abstraction that makes their absence noticable.  To compensate, Porter instead offers up something more like a series of dazzling set pieces, such as the "bouncing ball" bass hits in "Mass;" the alternating beautiful, skipping synth loops and crushing industrial rhythms of "In Flight;" and the lushly gorgeous melodies he unleashes during the crescendo of "Departure Stage."  Actually, now that I have tossed out the phrase "set pieces," it occurs to me that Third Law is probably best judged entirely by film standards, despite having absolutely no visual component.
Viewed in that light, Third Law can best be described as a wildly audacious sci-fi epic that unrelentingly blasted me out of my seat for 90 minutes, after which I stumbled out of the theater feeling like I lived an entire second lifetime.  And if anyone asked me what I thought of the film, I would only be able to describe it as "intense."  Several days later, however, after my over-excited synapses had a chance to calm back down and process things, I would start to think about the film more critically and realize that I completely did not remember entire sections of it and that it did not elicit any real emotions deeper than just pure awe.  And that maybe the whole thing a bit too conspicuously overwrought for my taste.  Of course, "pure awe" is still quite wonderful.  Also, my analogy is a slight oversimplification: Third Law is much more than just mere spectacle, as there are plenty of great moments strewn all over the place and they follow a very coherent and dynamically satisfying arc.  And, of course, this album is an absolute tour de force of sound design.  What I will remember is mostly just the spectacle though, as most of Third Law’s other traits are hopelessly eclipsed by its sheer immensity and power.
 
 
On one hand, it is kind of astonishing that Andreas Brandal has not been covered on this site before, as the shape-shifting/multi-guised Norwegian experimentalist has been on the scene for more than two decades and has made plenty of excellent music covering an impressive amount of stylistic territory.  On the other hand, it makes absolutely perfect sense, as Brandal’s career is not unlike that of Machinefabriek: a seemingly constant and unrelenting stream of new projects, limited editions, and collaborations that no hapless fan (much less a casual listener) could possibly hope to keep up with.  I believe I personally have at least 8 Andreas Brandal albums at this point and I am certain that I do not have even the most tentatively grasp of the depth and scope of his discography: I have not just missed key album–I have missed entire genres.  I do know that I like him though and his newest release is an absolutely stellar one, occupying the unique nexus where heavy drone, languorous strings, and oversaturated Tim Hecker-esque textures wonderfully collide.
As much as I enjoy Brandal’s work (what little I have heard, anyway), I have to admit that I was instantly predisposed towards loving this tape because the opening "From the Bed to the Fire" awakened memories of a long-forgotten Fetisch Park album (Trost) that I played to death in the mid-‘90s.  The two albums have almost nothing in common aside from a talent for deep, warmly crackling, and seismic-sounding subterranean swells, but it was enough to get my "fond nostalgia" synapses happily firing.  Unintended memory-triggers aside, however, "From the Bed" is an absolutely gorgeous piece of music, especially coming from someone with such a long history of blackened and malevolent noise.  Brandal is the rare artist who excels both as a composer and as a sound designer, though he is probably most accomplished at the latter, as nearly everything he does winds up sounding richly textured, vibrant, and immediate.  While a somewhat minimal piece musically, Brandal makes "Bed" sound massive, haunting, and eerily distant, shrouding his lushly shimmering and bell-like chords and spectral melodies with plenty of hiss and grit to wonderfully otherworldly effect.  It feels a lot like hearing a distant and beautiful classical music performance during a minor earthquake on an impenetrably foggy day.
The following "A Moment Passed and All was Changed" takes quite a different path, as its buzzing synthesizer drone erupts out of the speakers and quickly blossoms into something akin to blurting, panning, and snarling electrical storm. The lengthier "A Murmured Name" returns to the beauty of the opener, augmenting a gently undulating thrum with a beautifully melancholy and reverb-swathed violin or cello theme before unexpected being consumed by a host of wonderfully crisp field recordings of grinding and scraping metal.  Curiously, the longest piece on the album (and title piece) is not nearly as distinctive as the rest of the album, as it is basically just ten minutes of deep, quavering synth drones.  It still has some character though, albeit much more subtly presented than elsewhere.  In fact, it is kind of a tour de force of understated nuance, as Brandal spends the entire duration unleashing an arsenal of throbs, shudders, rumbles, flutters, and quivering feedback swells that alternately hang in the air or bubble through the dense bed of drone.  The similarly lengthy "No Symbols Where None Intended" closes the album as a far more clear-cut highlight, as a muted, elegiac organ progression is slowly consumed by deep bell tones, throbbing synthesizer, and mysterious field recordings (owls?).  Ultimately, the entire piece is consumed by a densely throbbing electronic buzz, which nicely illustrates my high opinion of Brandal as a sound designer: musically, there is very little happening, but what little is happening is so frequency-saturated and psychoactive that it is just as compelling as Brandal more eventful side.
Curiously, it is the weakest piece ("The Thursday Curses") that best illustrates the high level of Brandal’s artistry: there is very little that excites me less than ten minutes of straight-forward minimal synth drone, but "Curses" easily held my attention due its many buried layers and vibrant microcosmic dynamic variations.  Conversely, it is very easy to imagine a great piece like "A Murmured Name" completely falling flat in the hands of a different artist, as the central theme is wonderful and elegant, yet very simple.  So much of Brandal's spell is rooted in intuitive and intangible things that go much deeper than mere melody or harmony.  If he did not have such a seemingly effortless knack for space, texture, frequency manipulation, and contrast, these pieces would not have nearly the beguiling and forceful presence that they currently possess.  The details are everything.  Consequently, The Thursday Curses at its worst still sounds like a much better than average drone album.  At its best, however, it sounds like a heavenly organ mass heard through a heavy fog of hallucinogens or a goddamn dimensional rift.  Or both.  Which is, of course, great.  I am totally the target demographic for that sort of thing.  Lamentably, I have absolutely no idea if The Thursday Curses is one of Brandal’s best albums or not, but I do know that it is definitely the best one that I have heard. Anyone curious about Brandal's work would be well-served by starting here.
 
