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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When Gary Mundy's Ramleh reemerged in 2009 after over a decade of inactivity, both the recorded output and performances were mostly skewed towards the project’s noise and power electronics history. With long time member Anthony Di Franco, the duo released the excellent Valediction album and embarked on a series of performances, updating the harsh electronic sound Mundy began as a teenager in the 1980s. Circular Time, however, is a return to the idiosyncratic psychedelic rock sound Mundy and Di Franco (along with other collaborators) fully realized in the 1990s. I have enjoyed every variant of Ramleh that I have heard, but I always had a soft spot for this more musical era and, thankfully, Circular Time is a return to form in every possible way.
The 2000s incarnation of Ramleh did not totally abandon their more conventional moments, however.Also in 2009, the 10" of Switch Hitter/The Machines of Infinite Joy was released, to somewhat less acclaim."Switch Hitter" had most of the standard Ramleh sound, but with an almost too traditional sound structurally, with the sound teetering towards far less unique hard rock sounds.The instrumental b-side, however, was more faithful to the band's previous work.The line-up on this double album (just shy of two hours of material) is the same as that single:Mundy on guitar and vocals, Di Franco on bass, and Mundy’s Breathless bandmate Martyn Watts on drums.This time, however, the music contained within touches on all facets of the project’s guitar-centric incarnation.
The opening acoustic strums of "Re-Entry" are at first unexpected, but the humming feedback that punctuates the mix soon takes over, resulting in a fully blown-out bass lead and pummeling, insistent drums.It does not take too long before that aggressive, but loose and improvised sound from the Shooters Hill (half of Works III) album shines through.Mundy's pained, barely controlled guitar tone emanates from the mix as the juggernaut of a rhythm section decimates all around."Incubator" continues, but with the addition of almost 1970s hard rock guitar soloing deep in the mix: an oddly clean and delicate sound compared to the remainder of the mix, which sounds as if it is on the verge of collapse for the song’s six minute duration.
The vaguely blues influenced opening to "American Womanhood" is comparably much more spacious and less oppressive than the two preceding pieces.With Mundy's clean, improvised guitar and fuzz heavy bass from Di Franco, there is more than a passing resemblance to the prog rock influence that appeared throughout the Be Careful What You Wish For album."The Ascent" features the band syncing together in similar complexity, with Watt’s drumming taking on a more intricate, though no less heavy tact, as layered guitar, both dissonant and melodic, is weaved in and out of the song.
At other times, such as on "The Tower," the material stands as some of the most conventional music the project has ever done.With the spiky rhythm and stabbing guitar, shades of early Public Image Ltd. are hard to ignore, and it is one of the few vocal pieces on this set, though like most Ramleh, they are anything but emphasized.These less challenging moments are easily balanced by some of the record's more difficult ones, such as the expansive wall of guitar and pummeling, complex drum rolls of "Renaissance Warfare."With the multilayered guitar and a bass tone that verges on a dull roar of distortion not far removed from their noise work, the entirety piece lies somewhere between structured music and chaotic noise.Both "Entropy" and "Weird Tyranny" are drumless, atmospheric compositions of droning bass and feedback-laden guitar, never too harsh though, and call to mind similar pieces on Homeless.
The final song, "Never Returner," makes for the perfect conclusion for the album.Di Franco's fuzzed out bass, Watts pounding out a nuanced but slower rhythm, and Mundy's guitar generating both beautiful melodies and ugly squalls of noise captures everything that makes this album (and Ramleh) so exceptionally brilliant.If it were not for the comparably cleaner production (which is a characteristic of this entire record), I could easily have thought it a song that was left off of Works III, complete with the strained, depressive vocals.The bit of acoustic guitar that closes the song perfectly ties it back to the opening of disc one, as well.
Everything and anything I could have hoped for on a new release from Ramleh can be found on Circular Time.The perverse psychedelia, the motorik rhythms, and the oppressive, noise heavy ambience all appears here, and hangs strongly with the band’s previous records.I do wish there were a few more vocal tracks, as Mundy's vocals, as well as Consumer Electronics member Philip Best's (a staple of the band's 1990s output that is not on this record, but has performed with the band in recent years) were consistent on my favorite songs from the era.That makes for a minor gripe, however, because this album just perfectly encapsulates everything I have loved about the band, and with an unquestionable freshness and sense of invigoration.Without a doubt on my short list for best albums I have heard this year.
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City of Brides is the third full-length album by En, the Bay Area-based duo of multi-instrumentalists Maxwell August Croy and James Devane. It was recorded over the last few years in a variety of contexts and follows upon 2012’s well-received Already Gone, further developing the diverse sonic palette of that record. Across four sides, the pair present exotic, transportive, and richly detailed pieces that toe the line between ecstatic longform ambience and elegant, structured electronic composition. As always with En’s output, the koto is a focal point, its distinctive tone ringing out amidst the hazy guitar, vocal, and synthesis environments that surround it. The material on the record ranges from moody to celestial, from cool to white hot. Pieces such as "Blonde is Back" and "Mendocino Nature Rave" merge sizzling modular synth lacework with plaintive, familiar drone clouds to rapturous ends, while the two-part "Songs For Diminished Lovemaking" sequence charts a more minimal and nostalgic course. With City of Brides, we’re pleased to present En’s most realized and defining statement to date, a welcome addition to the ever-expanding and fertile topography of American West Coast drone music. Artwork by Justin Almquist.
More information can be found here.
Most people got to know Apparat through his albums Walls and The Devil´s Walk and don't know much about his electronic music dating back to just after the turn of the millennium. In his early twenties at the time, Apparat created an autonomous, radical sound universe on those albums that even today has just as fascinating an effect on its listeners as it did back then. Shitkatapult is now bringing the three albums together in a beautifully rendered special edition. Produced between 2001 and 2003, the music has been painstakingly remastered by Mike Grinser.
More information can be found here.
Hugely sought-after techno classic - the precedent to Butterfly Effect, originally released on Berlin’s legendary Chain Reaction and out-of-print for 15 years, now newly remastered from vinyl by Matt Colton at Alchemy. A massive personal favourite of Demdike Stare's, Shinichi Atobe's Ship-Scope was Chain Reaction's penultimate release in 2001 and, with the benefit of hindsight, also one of the legendary label's most sublime offerings.
Phase fwd to 2015 and DDS rightly put it back into circulation with this necessary reissue arriving in the wake of Atobe's much loved archival salvage, Butterfly Effect, which caused quite a ripple in late 2014.
Notable not only for its unusually sweeter, dreamier ambient tone - especially when compared with the rest of the CR#'s - but also for its happily lost-at-sea feel, connoting a deeply romantic and almost shoegazy late '90s / into-the-'00s deep techno aesthetic that would essentially become washed away with the advent and normalisation of mnml techno's pristine production values.
-via Boomkat
James Saunders spent close to a decade working on his #[unassigned] series. Comprising 175 variations of modular compositions for solo instruments, the project was designed to emphasize unique instrumentation, techniques, and spaces. Repetition was anathema and multiplicity prized—once performed, each arrangement would then be set aside in favor of the next configuration, never to be played again. The UK-based multinational ensemble Apartment House were the first to try an #[unassigned] composition in 2000 and they executed several different versions afterward, until the project was concluded in 2009. With assigned #15, they return to Saunders’s work, now presented as re-performable composition scored for seven musicians who play, among other things, viola, chamber organ, dictaphone, and shortwave radio.
There’s a trace of contradiction in the idea of a once-performed composition. Composing usually entails repetition, regardless of whether variables are introduced to the score. It’s an activity that, either accidentally or purposefully, preserves a number of materials and actions for future use. Even something like John Cage’s Variations II, which requires its interpreter to arrange and measure a series of 11 transparent sheets in almost any way at all, can be repeated, in the sense that different configurations can be saved and attempted again after the first go.
Saunders went a step further with his #[unassigned] works and filed each one away after just a single rendition. What survived between the reshufflings were the constituent parts, the instructions that guided the flute player to sustain a series of long low tones in succession, or that asked the cellist to rub his or her strings without producing a pitch. The series both privileged and minimized the roles of time and structure in music. In one way, #[unassigned] persisted as an asterism of instructions, in another it survived because those instructions were intermittently organized so that a group could recognize and perform them in relationship to one another.
With assigned #15, Saunders exhumed an old #[unassigned] variant and recorded it with Apartment House at St. Paul’s Hall in the West Yorkshire town of Huddersfield. In an interview on the Another Timbre website, James says that he returned to this material because he wanted "explore the beauty of sound again," versus focusing on the processes that produce such sound. assigned #15, then, is music frozen into a particular shape.
It’s a decent image for what the album sounds like: a dense, opaque block of ice shaking under internal pressures. A constant machine-like drone rumbles throughout the piece, its source not easy to determine. It could come from the chamber organ, but it might be the product of the dictaphones and shortwave radio too. Similarly, some of the tapping, rhythmic sounds could be traced back to string instruments or they could as easily belong to the percussion section.
Bowed metal, quickly struck piano keys, scratch tones, rattling chains, and piercing train-whistle whines also find a place in the music. They move in and around each other with such ease that it’s hard to find where one section ends and the next begins, and that contributes to the performance’s heaviness. All of the softer sounds, like the fragile string and flute interaction in the album’s second half, congeal with the rougher-edged, glass-on-sandpaper textures, forming a tight grid of noise that never loosens, even as the work winds down and the chamber organ hums in relative isolation. The piece changes over time, but it never seems to move forward. Instead, it spins in place, or spins and simultaneously revolves. Different facets reflect off its surface as it moves through different positions, but its insides are always hidden. The music may be frozen in its course now, but the sound travels forward anyway, with or without the composer’s dispensation.
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Matmos announces new album Ultimate Care II, sound-sourced entirely from a washing machine
Harvesting the machine’s chugs, drones, splashes, and clanks, Matmos has crafted a work of sly humor and dazzling artistry
Since their formation 20 years ago, driven by their abiding belief in the musical potential of sound, the duo Matmos (Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt) have created a wide range of imaginative recordings and live performances. In addition to releasing a string of acclaimed electronic music albums, they have played the uterus and reproductive tract of a cow at the San Francisco Art Institute, canisters of helium at Radio City Music Hall while opening for Bjork, and John Cage’s personal collection of conch shells at Carnegie Hall. Their forthcoming album Ultimate Care II perfectly reveals their artistry; they made it entirely out of the sounds generated by a Whirlpool Ultimate Care II model washing machine in the basement of their home in Baltimore, Maryland.
Harvesting the machine’s rich vocabulary of rhythmic chugs, spin cycle drones, rinse cycle splashes, metallic clanks and electronic beeps, Matmos have crafted a work of sly humor in which one of the quintessential sounds of everyday life is transformed into an unlikely source for a surprisingly listenable suite of music. Dan Deacon, Max Eilbacher and Sam Haberman of Horse Lords, Jason Willett (Half Japanese), and Duncan Moore (Needle Gun) all took part, either playing the machine like a drum, processing its audio, or sending MIDI data to the duo’s samplers. The result is a suite of rhythmic, melodic and drone-based compositions that morph dramatically, but remain fanatically centered upon their single, original sound source. Ultimate Care II swirls with perverse paradox: it is at once funny and sad, bouncy and creepy, liquid and mechanical.
Ultimate Care II will be released on February 19, 2016.
More information will eventually be found here.
I’m going to do something I never do – I’m going to write this press release in the first person.
This is a very special release and it’s been a long time coming. I met Arash Moori when we both attended the same Art School in Birmingham in 2000. We quickly realized that we both liked music – I think it was a shared love of To Rococo Rot or Metamatics that sparked the first conversation – and within weeks of meeting each other we were DJing fairly regularly. We kicked off a number of nights in the city, some successful (Default, which birthed the Type label), some not (Left Handers Disco, which confounded punters who didn’t understand how well Kelis mixed with snd). Arash was also kind enough to teach me some production tricks as I was putting together my first album.
Over the years, Arash pieced together a deeply personal palette of electrical sounds from strobe lights, fluorescent lights, radios, plasma balls and electronic devices. He exploited the peculiarities of these devices to create harsher and more aggressive sounds. This gave way to a series of live performances using minimal hardware and self-built devices to structure, shape and trigger sounds rather than resorting to samples. The computer was an editing device, not a compositional one.
Heterodyne is the culmination of these experiments. The resulting tracks are far more than academic exercises: Arash has taken years of theory and woven together a spiky collection of coarse techno and disorienting drone. The raw electrical textures and rhythms he spent years collecting are framed by analogue synth pads and oscillators which add contrast and levity. It’s a demanding listen, certainly, but a rewarding one.
This is an album I’ve seen develop for longer than any other and it’s a pleasure to unleash it on the world. Our own collaboration LP (touted for release on City Centre Offices in the early 00s) will never see the light of day, but Heterodyne may be one of the most personal records I’ve released on Type to date. Enjoy.
-John Twells, October 2015.
More information can be found here.
Italian artist Andrea Taeggi’s latest full-length is a rich exploration of tense, rhythmic minimalism. Unlike his work with Koenraad Ecker as Lumisokea and his material under the Gondwana moniker, Mama Matrix Most Mysterious showcases Taeggi’s interest in finding strength in simplicity. Taeggi was able to limit himself by working on old modular synthesizer systems – the Buchla and the Serge to be exact. “I needed to adapt to them,” he admits. “I don’t actually master them, which isn’t necessarily a disadvantage.”
This playfulness buoys Mama Matrix Most Mysterious throughout, distancing it from the litany of self-involved modular synth LPs filling the shelves right now. Rather, the Serge and Buchla systems allowed the Italian producer to realize his rhythmic and timbric visions. Taeggi filters decades of beat-driven electronic music through these machines to come up with a record of chattering bass-heavy experiments that sound like little else. You’d struggle to dance to it, but Taeggi’s sound is so physical that you can almost feel the electricity running through the circuits. And isn’t that exactly what electronic music should be about?
More information can be found here.
Christopher Bissonnette:
"This new series of works reflects an evolution of my adeptness with modular synthesis. As with my previous release Essays in Idleness, Pitch, Paper & Foil was constructed from a range of synthesis and compositional techniques. The goal with this album was to form a collection that exhibits more restraint than previous works. Modular synthesis can be an unruly medium and taming it in order to produce delicate or subtle tones can be challenging. As with Essays, I have allowed the artifacts of the process to find their way into the finished product. Tape noise, distortion and by-products of the random sequencing method all contribute to the character of the final recordings."
Kranky:
Continuing the explorations of the analog synthesizer first revealed on his last album, Bissonnette's deft touch in recording and mixing is a joy to experience. While most contemporary analog synth slingers find themselves unable to not overload the sound-field with the endless array of possibilities the instrument provides, Bissonnette provides a master class in economy and control.
More information can be found here.
Since his self-titled LP debuted on Peak Oil in 2012, M. Geddes Gengras has amassed a following for his distinctive take on synthesis, with releases on Umor Rex, Leaving, and Opal Tapes. New Lines is his anticipated homecoming to Peak Oil.
“New Lines” sees Gengras delve deeper into the copper plated, arpeggio spewing nooks and crannies of his prodigious modular synthesizers, dragging them across vast expanses of infinity oscillations via stops in Detroit techno’s neo-romantic strings (“Bushi”) and Manchester’s early 90s grime-soaked IDM clatter (“Cris Rose”).
When absorbed in its entirety, New Lines is an expansive step forward for Gengras’ futurist sonic explorations.
More information can be found here.
In 2015, Room40 is proud to announce the release of a series of works from American guitarist and composer Norman Westberg.
Best known for his work with the seminal outfit SWANS, Westberg’s output beyond that group is sprawling and restless. His name recurs and ripples through many interconnected micro-histories surrounding New York City’s music and art scenes. From appearances in film works associated with the Cinema Of Transgression, through to his participation in bands such as The Heroine Sheiks and Five Dollar Priest, Westberg’s name is woven deeply into the fabric of New York over the past three decades.
His debut release with Room40 is 13. Originally recorded in 2013, Thirteen has previously only been available in an ultra-limited hand made edition of just 75 copies.
The Room40 edition of 13 has been completely re-mastered and edited and is available for the first time digitally, as well as in an elegant physical edition.
A note from Lawrence English:
“Norman Westberg’s guitar playing with SWANS has influenced a generation of musicians across genres. I can personally attest to how his particular approaches to that instrument, in creating both harmony and brute force, have challenged and ultimately influenced my own sonic preoccupations.
What Norman has created with his solo works is an echoing universe of deep texture and harmonic intensity. His solo compositions generate an affecting quality that drives the listener towards reductive transcendence.
His guitar, as singular source, becomes transformed through a web of outboard processes. He transforms vibrating strings completely, taking singular gesture and reshapes it through webs of delay, reverb and other treatments. To me, these works echo many of the concerns of American minimalism and sprawl towards the work of bands such as Stars Of The Lid. Norman has created a very dense and powerful statement of intent with these recordings and I couldn’t be more pleased to have some small part in helping to share them.”
More information can be found here.
