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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Hermetically sealed and reveling in tumult, All Tense Now Lax is the most significant and developed work yet forged by Liberez. Based in main orchestrator John Hannon's remote studio No Recordings in Rayleigh, England, Liberez have expanded their palette from previous outings on Alter to produce a perfectly engineered machine that consumes the beholder.
A tense, gut-wrenching listen wrought with carefully considered space, the range of techniques and the depth of atmosphere is staggering. All Tense Now Lax never settles on a simple depiction of dread, foreboding or anxiety but layers textures upon rhythms to produce towering minarets of conflicting emotion. _Захвална породица (translated "Grateful Family") is a case in point: Hannon's wailing violin is torn across collaborator Nina Bosnic's lyric, while a loping beat is crushed with distortion. Indeed, a more pronounced focus on rhythm and movement on Liberez' 3rd album is perhaps what sets it apart from previous work. Centerpiece "Grease The Axles" showcases Hannon's technique of detourning from other cultures to dramatically altered effect. A lopsided rhythm and scraped violin are torn to breaking point: what starts off as a Moondog-esque tap at a train station ends with the train in flames. Liberez' brutality is not as literal as this all the time: on "How Much For Your Brother" an aggressively over-driven vocal loop is hammered into the stereo field by primitive percussion courtesy of drummer Pete Wilkins, but the overall effect is one of movement and hypnosis. A Rebetika melting into night- terror. The title track, meanwhile, presents a premature eulogy, coming halfway through what is an all-consuming album of frightening power.
John Hannon's breadth of technical mastery on All Tense Now Lax is never fully revealed in an ostentatious way. Instead the album is allowed to breathe and evolve, with field recordings, industrial patterns and alienated instrumentation woven together seamlessly. A tumultuous experience which transports rather than grounds the participant.
Out July 24 on LP and CD.
More information can be found here.
I hate to throw around the woefully overused phrase "great lost album," but Aguirre stumbled onto something quite amazing with this record.  I have no idea if Tim Robertson is still involved in music at all these days, but in his teens he was a church organist who traveled the world with his missionary parents.  After returning to Barcelona following a few years in Africa, he bought a four-track and spent two years obsessed with the idea of creating music "for future temples on Neptune and Saturn."  Eventually, that bizarre phase passed and Tim threw out all of his recordings except for two tapes, which he gave to his (presumably bewildered) parents as a gift.  Roughly 20 years later, those surreal experiments have now publicly surfaced thanks to a chance meeting in a thrift store.  This is "outsider" music for sure, but its guileless simplicity and elegiac beauty nevertheless place it very high in the pantheon of early New Age fringe-dwellers.
Admittedly, Robertson’s story sounds like it has all the makings of a hoax, but Aguirre seems like an extremely unlikely label to perpetuate such a thing.  Also, the provenance of Outer Planetary Church Music is not particularly important for its enjoyment, as it is a legitimately appealing and unusual album regardless of when it was recorded or by whom.  That said, it is noteworthy and amusing that Tim definitely did not allow his imagination to run too wild when he was dreaming these pieces up, as the future music of Neptune apparently shares a staggering amount of common ground with the church music of contemporary Earth.  For example, it looks like it will be primarily played on an organ in 4/4 time using common Western musical scales.  Nevertheless, Tim did make some significant innovations within those very earthbound constraints.  On the first untitled piece, for example, he slows down to an eerily shimmering reverie embellished with ghostly wordless vocals and floating harmonies, all of which are further enhanced by the murkiness and hiss of the recording.  The building blocks of conventional church music may be present, but they certainly do not sound like any religious music that I would expect to hear outside of an especially cool and psych-minded cult.
Unfortunately, Tim also occasionally delves into twinkling, major key vapidity at times, as he does with the mercifully brief second piece (which my imaginary "cool" cult would no doubt scoff at).  On balance, however, Robertson is inspired far more often than he is not.  He is at his best when he is at his bleariest and most bittersweet, as he is with the third piece.  Also, Tim makes a definite virtue of simplicity, allowing his strong and melodic motifs to unfold in an unbroken, hypnotic stream.  In lesser hands, the lack of transitions or multiple movements would be a distinct shortcoming, but Tim adeptly compensates with an intuitive knack for timing, flow, and texture.  Though none of these seven pieces ever quite blossoms into something noticeably different than their initial theme, all tend to build into something appealingly warm, layered, and subtly hallucinatory nonetheless.  Being a "one idea equals one song" artist is perfectly fine if the artist in question knows how to get the most out of a given motif, which Tim clearly does.
Other highlights include the final two pieces (both untitled, of course).  The first is kind of a sleepy, languorous reverie, but it is beautifully enhanced by a haze of oscillating harmonies and overtones, some of which are likely unintended gifts from Tim's lo-fi, analog home-recording set-up.  The similarly excellent closing piece, on the other hand, is built upon a couple of sonorous, melancholy chords that are gradually subsumed by layers of twinkling arpeggios and woozy swells.  Sadly, it fades out unexpectedly early, but it is certainly great while it lasts.  While it is admittedly perplexing that Robertson decided to truncate one of his strongest compositions, it feels a bit ridiculous to critique the decision-making process of a man who set out to create church music for Saturn.
As far as I am concerned, Outer Planetary Church Music’s greatest flaw is actually an asset: it definitely feels like a primitively recorded and sketch-like suite of songs, but that adds weight to both the sincerity of the enterprise and the feeling that I am hearing something secret and special that was never meant to escape into the world.  That said, there are a couple of weaker pieces that I could have done without, but they are mercifully short.  I was actually far more troubled by the great songs not being quite as long as I would have liked.  Such quibbles are somewhat immaterial, however, as they are easily eclipsed by the fact that an otherworldly, improbable album like this even exists (and that it is actually remarkably good).
 
This sort of dark, atmospheric work has always been a favorite of mine, but too often I find the records hard to discern from one another. Between the Horizon and the Abyss does not have this problem at all, because while there is a consistency from piece to piece, it is far from monochromatic. Each individual composition has a distinct sound and mood that makes for a dynamic, ever changing piece of music. That variation from piece to piece is where this album excels.
From the first moments of opener "The Awakening", Michael J. V. Hensley and Steven Hall set the mood for the remainder of the album.A sweeping bass abyss looms heavily, as a series of heavily processed and mangled sounds are shifted in and out.The components they use may be the standard for the "dark ambient" genre, but the duo keeps evolving and moving the composition rather than becoming overly stagnant."In Silent Fields" is from a similar mold, with low end rumble and noisy stabs being the primary focus, with bits of what sounds like human voice blended deep into the mix.
The instrumentation, while never clear, varies greatly throughout the album, which keeps it fresh and dynamic.For example, "White of the Eye" begins with what sounds like it could be a passage of distorted guitar, and later is mixed with the last transmissions of a dying orchestra."Tomorrow in Ruins" has the duo emphasizing synthesizers, with metallic and sharp waves of noise cutting through.As the piece goes on, there is a tangible sense of decay, both figurative and literal with the electronics crumbling away throughout its duration.
Rhythmic elements make an appearance on "Cold Summer Sun," largely in the form of what sounds like rattling spring reverb effects.Atop a low, undulating electronic drone, these hollow metallic echoes and other clattering noises make for a complicated, creepy piece of unidentifiable sounds."Ashen Shroud" has a bit of rhythm in what sounds like a cavernous, subterranean water drip, which gives the composition a slightly different sensibility to it.Comparatively there is a bit more light here than most of the album, like sunlight shining through the tiniest of cracks.
The concluding "The Procession" is also a bit lighter and less rumbly than most of the pieces here.However, as part of an overall bleak and dissonant piece, it feels less like sunlight and more like an all destroying nuclear blast.
Yen Pox manages to supersede the tendency to simply emphasize bass frequencies and bury everything in reverb to attempt sounding creepy.Instead, this album is a high water mark, with Between the Horizon and the Abyss being eight distinct pieces that all work brilliantly as their own individual cinematic psychodramas.Cinematic may be a term that is often overused, but it is befitting an album of this depth and complexity.
 
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Mentiras may be BOAN's first release, but the duo of vocalist Mariana Saldaña and José Cota (who also record as SSLEEPERHOLD) previously made up two thirds of Medio Mutante, who also mined similar classic synth-centric sounds. Working exclusively with classic equipment and embracing the limitations of such, the result is a wonderfully vintage feeling album of five songs that capture an era while having their own unique identity at the same time.
It has become rather trendy for bands to be heavily invested in using classic analog synth and drum machine technology, but BOAN take this pseudo-Luddite approach even further.Besides ensuring the full production suite is appropriately vintage, they also allow the flaws of this early electronic technology to show through.For example:the slightly out of tune keyboards that open "Babylon" and a few moments of partially off-time sequences that pop up throughout show a true dedication to the flaws of technology like control voltage sequencing rather than driving vintage gear with the inhuman precision of MIDI.
The duo's sound then is unsurprisingly rooted in the early 1980s, as synth technology was moving out of prog rock bloat and academic experiments and into the world of pop music.The aforementioned "Babylon" is heavily rooted in this, with a strongly echoed vocal from Saldaña, a memorable melody and extremely effective rhythms that perfectly capture that transition from disco to synth pop, akin to New Order circa 1982.
The same atmosphere runs through "Secretos" as well.The duo utilize a complex synth sequence to drive the piece, while the vocals alternate between intimate whisper and disconnected flat affect capture a similar feeling.The perky arpeggiated bassline and glassy leads of "Mentiras" keep the tempo up, but there is still a sadness throughout, which cannot be uprooted by the bombastic gated reverb drum programming.
BOAN step out of this framework on a few songs, however."Freak Snake" might feature the fat, thudding drums and percolating synth accents of other songs on this record, but the emphasis is placed on rhythm and a more raw, distorted keyboard lead.It still fits into the record as a whole, but stands out as a unique song.The nearly 11 minute "BOAN Acid" is clearly aimed at the dance floor, with the repetition of the title and a beat heavy sound.The first half may be purely dance floor oriented, but the second deconstructs the piece into less repetitive, more abstract shards of keyboard and rhythm.
Saldaña and Cota's minimalist approach to songwriting on Mentiras, as well as their staunch devotion to vintage technology, is what gives this album its unique character.The simplicity of stripping the music back to the bare essentials of rhythm, bass, lead, and vocals makes way for memorable melodies and gripping drums.This, along with Saldaña's vocals being mostly in Spanish throughout, result in a record that has tinges of familiarity, but also a distinct sound and identity.At its core, however, it is a strong set of catchy, memorable pieces of electronic music, and that is all it needs to be.
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During their prime, Zoviet France pioneered a strain of music variously known as either ethno-ambient or sci-fi tribal, but they quickly moved on and nobody since has quite been able to quite fill the resultant void for me.  Others have certainly tried, but they usually have an "overwrought" or "overproduced" feel that dispels whatever illusion they are trying to evoke.  Consequently, I was absolutely delighted to find out about Phil Maggi and his eerie, mesmerizing, and loop-based sound collages.  Maggi's aesthetic is exactly what I was looking for, particularly on 2011's Ghost Love.  His similarly fine (if not even better) new album is a travelogue of sorts, culled from field recordings and snatches of traditional music accumulated during a 2011 trip through Umbria, Italy.
Motherland begins in a very perverse and deceptive way, as someone (Maggi?) happily strums away at a ukulele while nearby birds chirp and burble, painting quite a bucolic picture indeed.  Very quickly, however, that ukulele disappears to make way for slowly massing, densely buzzing, and quite menacing synth drones.  That does not seem to faze the birds much, but it certainly changed the tone of the album in a big way for me.  While that brief synth piece ("Epona Ballade") is not representative of the entire album in any specific sense, it is a fine example of what Maggi excels at: taking rather innocent field recordings and transforming them into something much darker and stranger with a few simple tweaks.  There is a definite naturalness and ego-less-ness to this deeply unnatural music, as Phil does not use the field recordings as building blocks for his compositions; rather, he uses his compositional talents to bring out the most hallucinatory and nightmarish aspects of the recordings themselves.  Admittedly, these brief pieces never quite evolve into anything larger before they end, but they always dissolve into something new and similarly bizarre long before they begin to seem tiresome or one-note.
Throughout Motherland, Maggi casts quite a wide net for his raw material and finds some very effective and ingenious ways to juxtapose disparate recordings.  The best moments tend to be the most hellish ones, however, which seems to be a talent that Phil truly relishes.  I have no idea if he uses actual tape, but most pieces have a very "tape loop" aesthetic of obsessive, relentless repetition and snowballing lunacy.  One such highlight in that vein is "Shine/Pyre," which marries a diseased-sounding horn snippet with a chorus of gibbering, chattering voices to evoke a cacophonous march of the damned.  The following "Congratulator" also has a curiously "medieval parade"-like feel, albeit a far more majestic one than its predecessor.  It is still far beyond the pale, however, as it sounds like the cavalcade in question is entirely subterranean and experienced only as a distant echo.  Most of the other pieces are considerably less triumphal though, like the jabbering and queasy reverie of "Golden Age" or the clattering, buzzing, and stuttering cacophony of "Roma."  Though there are a few appealing divergences mood-wise, Phil's default setting generally seems to be "simmering horror" when he is not in "sinister parade" mode.  I am a fan of both.
If Motherland has a downside, it is only that Maggi does not develop his best ideas further than he does.  For example, the lushly gorgeous "Riots For The Sun" is basically an entire William Basinski album condensed into under three minutes, while the album's rare forays into less inspired ambient gloom are given equal time.  As an entire album, however, it works beautifully–not every song is a masterpiece, but the pieces are all short enough to maintain brisk momentum that draws me deeper and deeper into Maggi’s deeply warped and kaleidoscopic world.  This is an album of constant transition, motion, and cumulative power.  As far as I am concerned, Motherland is a huge success on at least two levels.  As sound art, it is a vibrant, evocative, distinctive, and masterfully constructed whole.  More impressive still, however, is Maggi's power as an illusionist: much like Natural Snow Buildings at their best, Phil is able to erase any sense of either the present or the artist's presence to yield something that feels like a recording from a completely different time and place.  I love this album.
 
I have been a fan of Piotrowicz’s electronic, usually modular synthesizer-centric work for a number of years now, and I have quite enjoyed following his evolution and development as an artist. With Samoobrona, however, I went in with some trepidation. Not because of my lack of faith in his work, but more the nature of the recording: a radio play exclusively in Polish. I was happy to find, however, that his electronics are still the primary element throughout the two side-long compositions and even without following the narrative, the result was enthralling.
The play, originally written by Helmut Kajzar between 1974 and 1975, was recorded three times previously, once for the radio and the two remaining times in the authors home.Piotrowicz and director Lukás Jiricka chose to strip the dialog down and include stage directions in the narrative, transforming the author’s work while remaining faithful to his original intent, especially on the themes of physicality and death.This performance features acting by Klara Mielawka, Joanna Drozda, and Milogost Reczek.To be fair, the included insert features an English translation of a selection of dialog presented in the performance, so not being able to understand Polish does not mean narrative part of the work could not be understood.I did, however, intentionally listen to it first solely as a piece of music to form my early opinions and impressions.
For the most part, anyone familiar with Piotrowicz's previous works are going to feel comfortable here, since his use of synthesizers and electronics are in full effect.The piece opens with backwards and forwards electronic sounds and noises, with spoken word appearing early on, but never being overly dominant in the mix.It is a chaotic piece, with some passages sounding more in the spirit of free improvisation, but constructed entirely via electronic instrumentation.
Surges of sound are introduced as the mix becomes denser, with abrupt changes adding to an ever-growing sense of tension.The dialog part of the performance is more heavily mixed and collaged, treated at times almost like another instrument rather than the centerpiece (an intentional decision by Piotrowicz and Jiricka).Eventually he works in an almost rhythmic electronic thud that is rhythmic in the most liberal application of the word, as noises shift and change chaotically.The piece concludes with clanking machinery noise, voice loops and swirling synths.
The second half of the performance continues the same themes and concepts sonically.Hints of rhythm appear, simplistic but effective in their application.Following wobbling pitched electronics, voices are cut up, delayed, and paired with more aggressive almost pseudo-rhythms that do an excellent job at conveying aggression without being too blunt.Amongst this disorienting collage of noises, Piotrowicz works in synthesizer passages that brilliantly approximate the dissonance of an electronic power drill.
Even though this is technically an audio play, Robert Piotrowicz and Lukás Jiricka do not follow convention and treats the actor’s work as any other instrument in a composition.With their subtle treatment of the dialog and Piotrowicz's consistently exceptional ability at creating bizarre electronic sounds, Samoobrona works as a narrative of anger and madness without even a single word being understood.
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An artist working primarily with guitar used in abstract compositions, Jeff Barsky, also known as Insect Factory, does an exceptional job of carefully using effects and processing to create complex compositions, rather than chaotic walls of sound. On this solo cassette and older split LP, he avoids the temptation to simply run his instrument through a battery of guitar pedals on every song and instead uses that technique sparingly, along with less obscured, more conventional playing. It is his careful balance of texture and mood with conventional melodic playing that makes his work fascinating.
Barsky's work on these releases also differs from piece to piece as well.In general, the limited handmade tape of Mind has him working with a more loop-centric approach, building from repeating, simple motifs into richer, more expansive passages of sound.The first of two pieces on the first side of the tape (I assume, there is no documentation at all on the cassette) begins from a simple repeating swell of guitar noise.From this most basic passage effects are placed, with the sound becoming more and more cacophonous and metallic, with scraped strings and distorted outbursts all mixed together into a wall of dissonant, but still beautiful noise.
What I assume is a second piece on the side (or an abrupt change) does initially see Barsky using the "pile of pedals" method I alluded to before, but generating a beautiful ringing cloud of sound rather than a dull roar.Bright, colorful passages explode as tiny fragments of string scrape noises sneak out before the piece is pulled apart and also reorganized into a more rhythmic loop-heavy framework.The second side of the tape again works with looped guitar tones and weirdly clipped noises.The loops are expanded upon again, but here it less of a metallic harshness and more of a soft, textural sound in nature.As the piece progresses, more conventional melodies and guitar playing shows up, ending the side on an especially beautiful passage of heavy sustained guitar notes.
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The Insect Factory half of the split LP with Earthen Sea is more expansive and far less loop-heavy than what was on Mind.What resembles a shrill bowed guitar opens the piece, mixed with a jerky passage of oddly clipped, processed guitar notes.Blended with a beautiful passage of drone, the mix of erratic guitar noise and massive walls of melody is a brilliant one.Eventually the piece becomes a pile of layered guitar noises, with each layer seemingly vying to be the dominant sound but instead becoming entwined like string.
The other side of the record is very different comparably.Earthen Sea's Jacob Young keeps his piece more subtle and restrained compared to Barsky's half.Immediately it is a passage of expansive ambient electronics, generating a light atmosphere while soon blended with deep bass rumblings, almost resembling a drummer far in the horizon.The piece keeps this sparse feel throughout, with the expansion of the mix staying subtle, and having an overall haunting sound.The changes are small and understated, but extremely effective, especially Long's delicate concluding passage.
These may be two recent entries in Jeff Barsky’s discography as Insect Factory, but the very different sounds here show just how diverse of an artist he is.With the cassette focusing on slowly building loops, and his half of the split LP emphasizing layered passages of guitar, he covers a wide variety of sound with his guitar, never losing his identity or style to a pile of effects.I am less familiar with Long's work as Earthen Sea, but within the confines of that split record, his gentle and vast electronics sound provides an excellent counterpart to Barsky's gorgeous chaotic mass of guitar experimentation.
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Given how much I loved Cascade, my curiosity about this more ambitious companion album made for quite an impatient month of anticipation.  Unfortunately, now that The Deluge has finally arrived, I do not know quite what to make of it.  My initial gut feeling was that Basinski's added intervention diluted a piece that was already perfect and complete, but it has since grown on me quite a bit with repeated listens.  While I still feel that Cascade is the superior album, The Deluge mostly balances out its flaws with some higher highpoints than its predecessor.  Also, it will likely hold a lot of appeal for anyone who has always wanted to love William Basinski, but wished he were more dynamic (though I personally prefer him as just an invisible guiding presence).
Unsurprisingly, The Deluge sounds almost exactly like Cascade when it begins, as it is constructed from the same brief, bittersweet, and endlessly looping piano motif.  The only noticeable difference is that it feels a bit like it is being played on a somewhat wobbly and erratic tape player this time around.  Gradually, however, Basinski's numerous, varying-length feedback loops begin to make their impact more and more prominent and the piece begins to take on a bleary, smeared, and after-image-heavy identity of its own.  That said, it still takes some time before it becomes fully evident why Basinski and Temporary Residence thought The Deluge warranted its own album.  For me, that point comes around the 8:40 mark, when ghost-like shuddering swells start to surface from the melancholy haze of fragile piano.  While that particular feat of illusion does not stick around for very long, it is more than enough to justify this album's existence, as it is completely unexpected, weirdly natural-seeming, and eerily beautiful, as if the tape loop finally became worn down enough to set free the dark, buried secret fluttering beneath the notes.
About ten minutes later, The Deluge offers up yet another surprise, as the delicate piano theme slowly fades away to be replaced by a stuttering and overlapping new piano motif.  Again, however, that transformation is short-lived, as The Deluge then surges into an obsessively repeating orchestral crescendo before fading into a single undulating drone.  That might seem like a logical ending point, but the piece resurfaces yet again…sort of, anyways: the last ten minutes are an unadultered reprise of the Cascade album (part of it, at least).
There is definitely a lot to like about The Deluge, as Basinski’s transformative use of feedback loops managed to extract an added layer of mysterious beauty from a piece that was already one of my favorites.  Also, the orchestral passages are a bit of an unexpectedly playful, yet darkly evocative new facet to Basinski's aesthetic.  If it had been perfectly executed, I would place The Deluge near the top of Basinski’s discography, but it regrettably has some quirks that take it down a few pegs.
The first is a huge peeve of mine:  releasing pieces on vinyl that are too long to fit on one side of an album.  To his credit, William at least found a logical stopping point, as the first side feels like its own complete piece (the opening piano loop fades out 20 minutes after it started).  The problem is that that is not the end of the piece, as the remaining movement kicks off the second side and feels like something new altogether.  Also, there are some odd transitions and a feeling of being condensed as well- I did not like Basinski's tendency to always fade into silence between motifs, nor was I thrilled about how the appended version of Cascade lasted only ten minutes, as duration was an extremely important part of the original Cascade’s power.  Ultimately, I still think The Deluge is a great album, but I cannot escape the exasperating irony that Williams’s successful attempt to expand his scope as a composer coincides with the unfortunate decision to compose specifically for the media most ill-suited for its presentation.
 
Haley Fohr's Thrill Jockey debut finds her again returning to the idiosyncratic singer-songwriter vein that first surfaced on 2013's Overdue.  There is a new twist though: Fohr is now backed by a full band of Chicago music scene luminaries in additional to returning collaborator Cooper Crain (of Bitchin Bajas).  The result is quite a strange, kaleidoscopic, and temporally dislocated one, drifting from inspired experimentalism to '70s-style folk-rock to something resembling Diamanda Galas fronting a Led Zeppelin cover band.  Personally, I vastly prefer her experimental side ("Dream of TV" is absolutely stellar), but there is no denying the singular power and otherness of Fohr's voice.
Haley Fohr is the quintessential Artist That I Do Not Understand At All, which I suppose is what keeps me coming back to her work: I might not always like what she does, but I vastly prefer being puzzled to being bored.  For example, the Circuit Des Yeux albums before Overdue were largely experimental and instrumental, making little use of Fohr's incredibly haunting, unique, and powerful voice.  Now, with In Plain Speech, she is largely repressing her previous experimental tendencies to make a somewhat straightforward "rock" album, except that it actually sounds like a fantasia on four or five different albums from the '70s rather than like anything happening now.  That said, she also sometimes sounds incredibly contemporary or betrays her background in ethnomusicology–the cryptic, feminist first single "Do The Dishes" sounds an awful lot like a Sublime Frequencies' Thailand compilation before the singing comes in.  I never know exactly where she is coming from or why she is choosing to come from there.  Essentially, the entire album is just a whole lot of disparate things bizarrely colliding together or the proverbial square peg relentlessly, inexplicably trying to fit into a round hole (best exemplified by the bombastic, yodeling vocal pyrotechnics at the end of the subdued folk rock of "A Story of This World").
The best analogy that I can come up with for In Plain Speech is that it is like watching someone learning how to use a rocket launcher: every fresh attempt is certainly a compelling display of force, but the target is hit only rarely.  While there are ostensibly nine songs, a third of them ("KT 1," "KT 5," and "Guitar Knife") are very brief (if likable) instrumentals.  Then another four pieces find Fohr and her band trying on various classic rock guises with varying degrees of success, ranging from quasi-operatic hard rock ("Ride Blind") to mellow Eastern-tinged psychedelia ("In The Late Afternoon").  There plenty of fine performances and explosive crescendos scattered about, but the bulk of the album is just too chameleonic, too bombastic, and too "rock" for me to like almost any pieces in their entirety.  I often found myself wondering who this album could possibly be for, as it is variously deeply personal, wildly over-the-top, and unable to ever fully commit to any one clear aesthetic.  It admittedly works as a show of force, but I just could not connect with anything that was happening on any kind of deep level.
There is, however, one notable exception: the nearly 8-minute centerpiece "Dream of TV."  Beginning with gently plucked viola, the piece gradually becomes a beautifully arranged reverie of quavering flutes, guitar noise, melancholy strings, and hallucinatory electronic chaos…and then the drums come in alongside Fohr’s beautifully warbling, wordless vocals and it transforms from merely great to absolutely sublime.  I also like "Do The Dishes" quite a bit, but it is primarily "Dream of TV" that highlights the amazing potential that Fohr has when surrounded by appropriately sympathetic and talented collaborators.  I suppose the unfortunate downside is that "TV" unintentionally highlights the shortcomings of the rest of the album, but it is also the first clear evidence that Haley can be a great composer in addition to being a powerful and unique voice. Ultimately, In Plain Speech is still a mostly flawed (or at least deeply perplexing) album, but it is one that boasts one of the finest songs that I have heard this year.
 
 
 
Flying Saucer Attack release Instrumentals 2015, their first album in 15 years on Friday the 17th of July 2015. Comprised of 15 fresh David Pearce solo performances recorded in characteristically lo-fi manner at home, using guitars only on tape and CD-R, Instrumentals 2015 is an album that will appeal both to FSA diehards and those wholly unfamiliar with the outfit's recorded output.
The 15 tracks on Instrumentals 2015 present an impressionistic narrative which transports the listener through the excoriating dronescapes and rueful introspection of the album's early pieces to the more redemptive cadences of its closing half. Given its sense of momentum, maintained through Pearce's thoughtful sequencing, this is an album that should be experienced in its entirety, the better to appreciate its deliberate emotional arc.
More information can be found here.
Think big, girl, like a king, think kingsize. Jenny Hval’s new record opens with a quote from the Danish poet Mette Moestrup, and continues towards the abyss. Apocalypse, girl is a hallucinatory narrative that exists somewhere between fiction and reality, a post-op fever dream, a colourful timelapse of death and rebirth, close-ups of impossible bodies — all told through the language of transgressive pop music.
When Norwegian noise legend Lasse Marhaug interviewed Jenny Hval for his fanzine in early 2014, they started talking about movies, and the conversation was so interesting that she asked him to produce her next record. It turned out that talking about film was a great jumping off point for album production. Hval’s songs slowly expanded from solo computer loops and vocal edits to contributions from bandmates Håvard Volden and Kyrre Laastad, before finally exploding into collaborations with Øystein Moen (Jaga Jazzist/Puma), Thor Harris (Swans), improv cellist Okkyung Lee and harpist Rhodri Davis. All of these musicians have two things in common: they are fierce players with a great ear for intimacy, and they hear music in the closing of a suitcase as much as in a beautiful melody.
And so Apocalypse, girl is a very intimate, very visual beast. It dreams of an old science fiction movie where gospel choir girls are punks and run the world with auto-erotic impulses. It’s a gentle hum from a doomsday cult, a soft desire for collective devotion, an ode to the close-up and magnified, unruly desires.
Jenny Hval has developed her own take on intimate sound since the release of her debut album in 2006. Her work, which includes 2013's critically celebrated Innocence Is Kinky (Rune Grammofon), has gradually incorporated books, sound installations and collaborations with poets and visual artists. For Hval, language is central, always torn between the vulnerable, the explosive and total humiliation.
More information can be found here.
