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Jasmine Guffond’s reinvention under her given name appeared a few months ago amidst a surprising amount of buzz and favorable comparisons to artists like Grouper and early Julia Holter, which is somewhat surprising for an artist who is already this deep into her career.  I suppose those Grouper comparisons will certainly grab people's attention and I accept that Liz Harris is a decent reference point in some respects, but Jasmine's not-quite fully formed aesthetic sounds like it is mostly her own to me (or is at least amorphous enough to make her influences largely irrelevant).  At its core, Yellow Bell is very much a warm and lush drone album, but its appeal lies in how tender, human, and unconventional Guffond can be within those confines.  While not quite a start-to-finish triumph, the bulk of Yellow Bell is indeed quite good or even sublimely beautiful.  The buzz was not misplaced.
Guffond, an Australian currently living in Berlin, has been making unusual music for roughly two decades, which makes me puzzled as to how I have avoided encountering her work until now.  I went back and investigated her previous Minit and Jasmina Maschina projects and enjoyed them, so maybe the lesson here is that I need to pay closer attention to what Staubgold is releasing in the future.  In any case, Yellow Bell is a stylistic break from all that preceded it, which explains the new label and the name change.  The amusing irony here is that Guffond is actually stepping away from vocals and guitars, yet now she gets pegged with the Grouper comparisons.  In a general sense, Yellow Bell certainly has a Harris-esque mood of bleary mystery at times, but it mostly just seems like an atypically inventive drone album to me.  The catch is just that the album’s single most memorable moment is the crescendo in "Elephant" where Guffond’s achingly melancholy, reverb-swathed vocals unexpectedly emerge to supremely Grouper-esque effect.
Most of Yellow Bell’s other high points, however, come from either Guffond's unusual aesthetic choices or her use of field recordings.  In the aforementioned "Elephant," for example, Jasmine’s distant, wordless Siren-esque vocals emerge from a warmly quivering synth bed beset by layers of crackling found sounds,  soon disappearing entirely to be replaced by a heavy metallic shimmer and subterranean throbs.Although the vocals eventually return for the haunting refrain, the bulk of the piece’s 10-minute trajectory works so well primarily because of Jasmine’s intuitive and nuanced talent for dynamics, textures, and melody.  Jasmine's ability to manipulate density and seamlessly chain together disparate passages is extremely impressive.  It is hard not to think of liquid when listening to Yellow Bell, as its defining characteristic is most definitely its fluidity and ability to ebb and flow from one motif into another.
Another highlight is the shuddering, pulsing, and dreamy "Core Notions," which is kind of a production tour de force: not much changes structurally or melodically over the course of its six minutes, but Guffond juggles the various layers so masterfully that it feels like the piece is gradually being torn apart to reveal a harsher, more menacing interloper.  "Useful Knowledge" begins in similarly blissed-out and hallucinatory fashion, but then a sultry, shuffling pulse transforms it into something that would be right at home in a creepy seduction scene in Twin Peaks...before it seamlessly winds up in a very different place altogether.  Another piece, the double-entendre-friendly "Lisa’s Opening," is even more unusual, gradually shifting from something resembling sci-fi chamber music into a bittersweet reverie amidst ambient chatter (presumably from an art opening) before ultimately resolving into a ghostly, barely-there song.
Yellow Bell concludes with another epic, the complexly layered 10-minute "RR Variations," which explores another new direction that lies somewhere between analog synth drone and Reich-ian obsessive repetition.  It is probably the most ambitious, unusual, and labor-intensive piece on the album, as it sounds like there is an entire orchestra being chopped and sped-up by the end, yet it lacks the vulnerability and humanity that make the rest of Yellow Bell so great.  I suppose that gets at what is so unique and fascinating about this album: its flaws and its triumphs are nearly impossible to come to a firm opinion on.  When Yellow Bell seems derivative, it usually comes about in a fresh and memorable way; when it plunges into more abstract, comparatively untraveled territory, it sacrifices some of its character and ability to connect.  The reason it all works, of course, is because Guffond is able to so organically drift between those poles and always sounds great doing it.  That places Jasmine in a curious no-man’s-land, as I am very hard-pressed to nail down Yellow Bell’s aesthetic, but I was certainly very happy to drift around to wherever she decided to go.
 
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I have always been a rather casual Six Organs fan, generally enjoying whatever it is that Ben Chasny is up to at a given time, but not exactly salivating over the prospect of a new album.  Something about Drag City's cryptic description of Hexadic piqued my interest though and rightly so: this is strange and fascinating album.  The most notable aspect, certainly, is that Chasny used a self-created system of playing cards based upon the wisdom of a 14th century monk to compose a "rock" album.  That certainly does not happen every day.  Aside from that, Hexadic boasts an absolutely incendiary psych-guitar tour de force called "Wax Chance" that easily stands with anything by Les Rallizes Denudes or Mainliner.  I definitely did not expect that either.
Hexadic takes its name from Chasny's card-based open system, which is largely rooted in the number six.  The system itself is going to be explained in detail later in a book, but the gist is that Ben synthesized the ideas of Gaston Bachelard, Frances Yeats, Morton Feldman, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, and (most significantly) Ramon Llull into an algorithm that provides a loose compositional blueprint that points toward a specific key, scale, and time signature.  How a given song actually takes shape afterwards is largely dependent on the artist, of course, but the hexadic system works by pushing the composer out of what is comfortable and routine.  That is at least the general idea, anyway.  Hexadic certainly still sounds a hell of a lot like a Six Organs album to me, but it definitely feels like one that Chasny was very enthusiastic about and is different enough to stand out from the rest of his discography in several ways.  It is more of skewed, unpredictable version of the familiar than a complete reinvention.
I have always had a hard time defining "the Ben Chasny sound," as he has covered a lot of stylistic ground over the years between Six Organs, Rangda, Comets on Fire, and other projects.  In general, however, I associate him with Eastern/raga-tinged acoustic guitars and guitar-solo heavy psych-rock.  Pieces from both of those admittedly vague directions turn up with regularity on Hexadic with varying degrees of success, but the pieces that I find most interesting are the ones that do not quite fit either category.  That said, Hexadic’s 9 pieces do lean quite heavily towards loud, wild psych-rock, which makes sense, given that Ben's backing band contains members (or former members) of bands like Comets on Fire, Deerhoof, and Sic Alps.  The rock in question is much more unhinged than I would have expected though, particularly on the face-melting, bulldozing "Maximum Hexadic," which is essentially 2 minutes of gnarled, free-form, and brain-melting guitar-spew over a driving bass-and-drum groove.  Elsewhere, "Sphere Path Code C" sounds like a guitar solo plucked from the midst of longer piece by a wildly indulgent guitar visionary like Keiji Haino or Kawabata Makoto: there is not really any "song" to speak of, just a cacophony of howling guitars, amp sizzle, and collapsing grooves.  "Hollow River" is quite similar, but alters the formula by slowing down to a doom crawl and offering some hints of correspondingly doomy riffage amidst all the noise and sizzle.
Most of the other "songs" are in a cleaner, more subdued vein, which is both somewhat disorienting and somewhat refreshing.  "The Ram," for example, sounds like a languorous surf instrumental that has been slowed down to such a degree that the drummer cannot even find the stumbling beat anymore.  "Future Verbs" sounds like a quiet interlude from the same imaginary doom album as "Hollow River," unraveling overlapping, woozy, descending melodies over a menacing sludge-slow bass progression.  Stranger still is "Hesitant Grand Light," which combines shimmering washes of hazy electric guitar over tremolo-picked acoustic noodling and yet another broken non-beat.  The weirdest part for me is that the scale used for the acoustic parts sounds like a weird cross between the pentatonic scale and some Eastern mode, tonally approximating some non-existent Indian rockabilly sub-genre.
Of the remaining, harder-to-define pieces, all three are quite wonderful.  The first, "Vestige," is an abstract drone piece featuring a surprisingly dissonant bed of squirming, oscillating, and nightmarish guitars that sound wonderfully sick and wrong.  "Wax Chance," on the other hand, sounds wonderfully sick and right.  In a lot of respects, it is every bit as harsh and indulgent as the rest of the noisy rock songs on the album, but in this case the drums and bass lock into a kind of sultry blues shuffle.  Also, Chasny's white-hot, overdriven guitar occasionally finds its way into an unexpectedly coherent and bad-ass riff.  That little bit of structure makes all the difference, as Ben's brilliantly outre free-form soloing desperately needs some kind of solid foundation to be truly effective (which "Wax Chance" definitely is).  The album's final piece, "Guild," initially seems like yet another sizzling flurry of overdriven guitar squall over a too-slow beat, but it gets gradually better.  Though it probably goes on for way too long, it has a weirdly appropriate valedictory feel to it and Ben's solo seems to at least hint at fragments of melody.  It also benefits from some unexpected transitions and a beautifully restrained and bittersweet coda.
Ultimately, I would describe Hexadic as an uneven experiment with a few flashes of brilliance rather than as a clear success or failure.  While its flaws are probably primarily due to its fundamental mathematic constraints, they also tend to be both glaring and recurring: the idea of slow-motion, electric guitar free-jazz is not at all appealing to me.  As much as I enjoyed Ben’s go-for-broke guitar squall, a little of that truly goes a long way and Hexadic is an album direly in need of more hooks and better grooves to balance its more indulgent aspects.  When Ben has both a riff and groove to work from, as with "Wax Chance," I am happy to let him go as far out as possible.  When he has neither, he just sounds like a guy pointlessly shredding in some weird scale until he gets tired of it.  More devoted fans might appreciate that freedom and intensity much more than I do and it might even work live, but it can be very tedious on an album when it is not couched within anything more rewarding.  On a more positive note, however, Hexadic at least strives for something surprising and different, which I heartily appreciate.  Also, it does not sound conspicuously chance-based, which is an impressive feat as well.  More significantly, three of its nine songs are quite good.  While I doubt I will ever listen to the rest of the album again, I am now considerably more interested in Ben's future work than I was before, which I suppose makes Hexadic a moral and intellectual triumph at least (just not quite a musical one).
 
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Mike Shiflet might be most well known for his work as a noise artist, but a significant portion of his work features him utilizing guitar. Here, in collaboration with High Aura'd (John Kolodij), the two coax a wide variety of sounds out of their respective six stringed instruments, resulting in an album that is as much noise as it is music.
Recent work from Shiflet has demonstrated less of a debt to the harsh noise scene from where he began, and more of an idiosyncratic take on composition and melody.That balance between order and chaos is a defining feature as well:"Demon Haunted World" hard pans separate guitar parts into the left and right channels, both being conventionally played in improvisation, while the right channel slowly unravels into harsh dissonance.
Kolodij and Shiflet also do an exceptional job blending light and dark on "Still Life With Wound."Initially a dark shimmering expanse of guitar noise, lighter moments shine through into the dark abyss, mixing the deep noise with magnificent drones.Alternating between full dissonance and glorious tone, it is a dichotomy that works brilliantly.
That same sort of balance from the two is prevalent on opener "Parlour Games," which begins with an inviting passage of guitar feedback and noise, like the most dissonant moments of shoegaze isolated and amplified.The piece slowly drifts into darker, bass heavy rumbling at its conclusion and as a result a very different atmosphere.On a piece such as "Stare Skyward," the emphasis is on the noisier end of the spectrum, with the duo casting dark waves and outbursts of guitar sound over an expanse of churning cavernous distortion.
The double climax of "Covered Bridge" and "A Wake" conclude the album on dramatic, intense notes.The former has a more inviting feel throughout:chirping birds and gentle guitar are offset by heavier drones.Even though there is a clear weight and density to the noisier elements of the song, the piece as a whole is anything but oppressive."A Wake" also is underscored by field recordings, but organ-sounding guitar drones and feedback scrape across deep, bassy undercurrents.Even with all its dissonance, the piece is as a whole more of a glorious, powerful drone that rises up forcefully, only to come to a calm and introspective conclusion.
Awake is one of those rare albums that manage to fit both in the world of noise, as well as conventional music.There is dissonance a plenty to be heard here, but rather than an attempt to blow out speakers, Shiflet and Kolodij shape and mold it into something abstract, yet beautiful.Structure and chaos, light and dark, all of these dichotomies can be heard here, and as they are presented here together, they are wonderful.
samples:
 
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A prolific DJ with a number of singles out, the descriptively titled A Tape is German artist Helena Hauff's first full length release. A combination of stripped down minimal techno, house beats, and industrial dissonance, it is a gripping tape of heavy percussion, noisy synth, and extremely memorable rhythms.
The songs I found myself coming back to most are the ones where Hauff turns the volume up and adds in a hint of distortion and noise.A piece like "c45p" is heavily built upon deep stuttering drum machine (from the sound I would guess the house music standby TR-707 is in there somewhere) and deep, sinister analog synth sequences."ff297-3" sits on the other side of the tape as its more menacing counterpart.She utilizes a similar heavy bassline and drum program, but pushed into the red for a nice overdriven sound.Both pieces have a sort of classic electro vibe to them, but with a more menacing edge.
Not all of the pieces on here are as oppressive, however."!#+#!" has Hauff using a pulsing synth and 808 cowbell to excellent effect, with the song coming together with a slightly sunnier atmosphere."hdowed" has the same lighter mood about it, with a more spacy edge that works in heavily flanged beats and an organ synth lead.The organ also features heavily in "split scission," amidst tight synth arpeggios and heavy thumping drum machine.
Both halves of the cassette end with Hauff stepping outside of the intentionally stiff, robotic rhythms and taut sequences and instead showing her adeptness at creating less conventional electronic sounds."for I am dead" is immediately a more distorted endeavor, with bitcrushed melodies and fuzzy electronics dueling it out before a bit of heavy bass drum appears at the end."$§"$43" is all dark, sweeping synth pads with the occasional blip or pulse.There is a mystery and darkness about it that would work excellently in a film score setting, but stands strongly on its own.
With a noticeable uptick in the amount of artists in this minimalist techno field, Hauff stands out strongly with her ability to weave together sharp drum programming with memorable synth patterns.Her work retains enough of the static nature of electronic music, but she is also an expert at slowly building and disassembling the music, resulting in an album that is entirely danceable, but is compelling to listen to intently on its own.
samples:
 
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Forse 3 is the final release in Alessandro Cortini's "Forse" trilogy. Like parts 1 and 2, Forse 3 has a distinct sound and feeling. Edition of 500.
Alessandro Cortini (Nine Inch Nails, How To Destroy Angels) recorded Forse using a Buchla Music Easel; of which only 13 are known to exist. "Forse," meaning "maybe" In Italian, is a series of 3 double LP releases.
"All pieces were written and performed live on a Buchla Music Easel, in the span of one month. I found that the limited array of modules that the instrument offers sparked my creativity.
Most pieces consist of a repeating chord progression, where the real change happens at a spectral/dynamic level, as opposed to the harmonic/chordal one. I believe that the former are just as effective as the latter, in the sense that the sonic presentation (distortion , filtering, wave shaping, etc) are just as expressive as a chord change or chord type, and often reinforce said chord progressions.
Of all the years with Nine Inch Nails the period spent writing and recording the instrumental record Ghosts I-IV is probably the one which changed my approach to music-making the most. After that record, I started getting more into instrumental composition, although I tried to approach it in a different way. While we had a vast array of tools and instruments at our disposal then, I decided to approach my pieces limiting myself to one instrument only, as I found myself being more decisive when faced with a limited creative environment."
-Alessandro Cortini
More information can be found here.
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This is certainly an early candidate for the most unexpected release of the year, as few people presumably anticipated that James Blackshaw would suddenly start singing ten albums deep into his career.  As it turns out, he handles the transition from guitar virtuoso to singer/songwriter quite well.  The nearest reference point is unavoidably something like Jim O’Rourke’s jaunty Eureka, as Blackshaw at his best displays a similarly eccentric sensibility and appreciation for kitsch mingled with impeccable musicianship and colorful arrangements.   Although Suns admittedly suffers as a complete statement due to a few lulls, missteps, and a wandering stylistic focus, it mostly makes up for it with the strength of its breezy, charming "singles" and a handful of great instrumental passages.
There is a huge difference between being a fine composer/instrumentalist and being a great songwriter.  I can think of very few artists who were able to shine at both, so Blackshaw's degree of success with Summoning Suns is quite an admirable feat.  I did not expect him to fall flat or anything, but I also did not expect him to come up with anything as fun, gleefully macabre, and infectiously hooky as the lead-off duet with Harry Nilsson's daughter Annie.  Also, "Confetti" is more than just a catchy song: it sounds like the work of very good band, as Simon Scott's thumping pulse and Blackshaw's upbeat arpeggios are enhanced with colorful splashes of piano and a great string crescendo.  While "Confetti" is admittedly quite indebted to the aforementioned O'Rourke, it also towers over the rest of the album and seems to be what Blackshaw does best.  Also, Jim does not seem to be using that style any more, so I say it is fair game.  Curiously, however, he never revisits that vein again and spends the rest of album trying on different stylistic hats with varying degrees of success.  Also curious: Blackshaw seems to be at his best when he is at his most lightweight, which is an odd talent for an erstwhile Current 93 member to possess.
The second tier of highlights is comprised of "Failure’s Flame" and the title piece.  Initially, the slow-moving and melancholy "Failure’s Flame" does not sound especially promising at all, resembling a decent Elliott Smith song with more intricate guitar-work.  Around the half-way point, however, the drums and vocals drop out and the piece transforms into a lushly beautiful guitar, flute, and piano outro.  "Summoning Suns," on the other hand, boasts an instantly infectious guitar hook and a pleasantly laid-back, shuffling pace.  The brief, totally anachronistic opener ("Averoigne") is another great moment, but it sounds like it belongs on a completely different album.  I have no idea which Blackshaw album a gorgeous major key organ and glockenspiel interlude could possibly have fit on though, so maybe it actually makes perfect sense that it wound up on an influence-juggling, "anything goes" gamble like this one.  In any case, I love it, regardless of how out of place it seems.
The remainder of the album consists of two definite non-highlights and yet another pleasing aberration.  The first lowlight, "Nothing Ever After," again returns to Elliott Smith territory, but does not offer any particularly great twists to elevate it above its general mopiness.  Then "Towa No Yume," a sleepy Japanese-language duet with Kaoru Noda, comes along and saps the momentum still more.  Finally, the album concludes with "Winter Flies," a great steel guitar instrumental that probably would have sounded perfectly at home on Blackshaw’s excellent The Glass Bead Game.  I am not sure how or why it ended up where it did, but it at least ends the album on a strong note.
As a whole, that all makes Summoning Suns a very perplexing mixed bag as a coherent artistic statement, as it feels far more like a collection of outtakes and compilation tracks than anything resembling a new album by a formidable and established artist.  I have no idea why Blackshaw thought that all of these songs belonged in the same place, unless he was attempting to hedge his bets in case his unexpected reinvention as a singer/songwriter was poorly received.  Even though the weaker songs made me wince a bit and I was dismayed by how openly derivative certain moments were, the real story here is what worked rather than what did not work.
Despite its considerable flaws, Summoning Suns is still mostly composed of great songs and some of them are quite gutsy.  I never expected anything as dynamic, hooky, and bouyant as "Confetti," for example.  Also, even some of the less surprising pieces stand among Blackshaw’s finest work.  More important still, I love that Blackshaw is game to take such big chances this deep into his career and I also love his unwillingness to keep revisiting what he has succeeded with in the past.  Consequently, Summoning Suns is ultimately quite an impressive and adventurous album, albeit one with plenty of asterisks.
 
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This 1989 album is most notable for being generally regarded as The Dead C’s "pop" album.  Also, a lot of people seem to rank it quite highly within the band’s discography.  I find both of those designations somewhat puzzling, however, as the only real concessions to conventional rock music are the stellar opener and a cacophonous, shambolic T. Rex cover.  Other than that, Eusa Kills is just a lot of messy, half-baked, and contrarian business-as-usual for The Dead C.  The band admittedly keeps most of the songs to pop song durations, but that is less of a structural and songcraft achievement than a decision to just fade out earlier than usual.  While Eusa Kills has its moments, it is far from The Dead C’s prime.
Flying Nun/Ba Da Bing/Jagjaguar
Notably, the lead-off song "Scary Nest" tends to get a lot of comparisons to early Sonic Youth, which seems a bit undeserved and off-the-mark for two reasons: 1.) early Sonic Youth were always much more arty and adventurous guitar-wise than anything in "Nest," and 2.) The Dead C are (and have always been) anything but derivative.  Maybe it sounds even less like a Dead C song than it does a Sonic Youth song though, as it is certainly uncharacteristically propulsive, urgent, and catchy: the drums play a consistent double-time beat, the guitars strum an actual satisfying chord progression, and there is even a hooky vocal melody.  The song itself could probably recall a vast array of other bands (good ones, even!), but the Sonic Youth tag has stuck primarily because of the lo-fi recording and the sputtering, chirping squalls of lead guitar.  There is nothing consciously arty about the noisy guitars though, as they share much more in common with a wild Neil Young performance than anything derived from Glenn Branca or Rhys Chatham.  That "feral" aspect is what makes all the difference for me (it helps that it is enhanced by plenty of wordless vocal howls as well).  The Dead C were not trying to redefine guitar music or ape what was happening in NYC: they were just playing with the perfect balance of controlled songcraft and reckless abandon.  As a result, "Scary Nest" is a great song unlike anything else in The Dead C discography,
Of course, once The Dead C had proven that they could write a killer song that people might like, they immediately set out to prove that they can also write very messy, chaotic songs that are nearly impossible to like by design.  Eusa Kills is full of such pieces.  Sometimes they take the shape of a piece like "Glass Hole Pit," which sounds great and promising, then abruptly ends after a minute.  Other times, the band just noodles and mumbles for several minutes ("Bumtoe") or unleashes a torrent of hookless guitar spew over a tom-heavy beat for 45 seconds, then stops ("Call Off Your Dogs"). Even the better, more fully formed pieces like "Phantom Power" dilute their better ideas with a lot of riffless, hookless, and melody-less guitar noise.  Admittedly, I love guitar noise and there are some cool moments strewn throughout Eusa, but the noise rarely seems to be in service of anything greater– it is mostly just something indulgent to tolerate until something interesting happens.
Thankfully, there are a few enjoyable pieces of varying quality besides "Scary Nest."  The best one is "Now I Fall," which buries an actual coherent song beneath some wonderfully warped, too-loud guitar.  The closing "Envelopment" is also quite good, combining a lazy, overdriven bass melody and ripples of clean guitar to pleasantly warm, sleepy, and druggy effect.  A few other pieces have their champions as well, but I do not know quite what to make of them.  The more perplexing of the two is a cover of T. Rex’s swaggering, anthemic "Children of the Revolution," which is reduced to a dissonant, smoldering, and distinctly non-anthemic wreckage.  I cannot figure out the motive at all: mockery, homage...neither?  I have no idea.  In any case, it is an enjoyable (if puzzling) detournement.  Later, there is a 7-minute piece entitled "Maggot" which presages some of The Dead C’s superior longform work to come.  Unfortunately, it is mostly just notable as a proto-version of better songs like "Love" and "Outside."  I certainly like the snare-roll drums and the miasma of deranged and strangled noises, but it never quite catches fire and features a fairly annoying cackling refrain.  So close to greatness, but just off the mark.  Alas.
With the benefit of hindsight, I think it is safe to say that Eusa Kills is merely an intermittently promising album by a band that would eventually get much better, but I do wonder what I would have thought of this album if I had heard it in its original time and context.  It is hard to imagine a more clear and defiant "fuck you" to the overproduced and image-driven world of '80s pop music than this, so it definitely deserves a place of honor for its sheer wrongness: this is an archetypal "against the grain" album.  However, it is also just the start of something better rather than a golden age unto itself-–willful ugliness and a hilariously bad attitude are great, but it took the band a few more years to perfect the balance between negation, deconstruction, art, and accessibility.  Though Eusa Kills is probably still canonical among Dead C albums, its unevenness and exasperating proportion of filler prevent it from truly ranking among their best work.
 
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Prekop’s first modular synthesizer solo album (2010's Old Punch Card) came as quite a surprise, but he adapted to the instrument extremely well and later used it to excellent effect on The Sea and Cake's Runner. He returns with another solo synth opus and the only real surprise this time is how great it is: Prekop seems intent on making an unexpected run to the head of the synth revival pack.  While I do not think Alessandro Cortini needs to start panicking that he will stop getting calls for gigs anytime soon, the nine pieces that comprise the "Republic" half of The Republic are as masterfully composed, assured, beautiful, and effortlessly contemporary as anything by any of the genre's other luminaries.
The first half of The Republic is devoted to the 9-part title work, which comprises the meat of the album.  Unusually, the various segments of "The Republic" were composed to soundtrack an installation by David Hartt at the David Nolan Gallery in Manhattan, which makes perfect sense, as Sam himself is also an accomplished visual artist.  However, it has generally been my experience that releasing the musical component of a multimedia work by itself is a sure-fire recipe for disappointment.  The Republic, to its everlasting credit, somehow bucks that trend.  None of the pieces that comprise "The Republic" sound like a backdrop to anything: they all sound like lush, warm, complexly layered, vibrantly pulsing, and fully formed works.  Well, almost fully formed–the sole downside to "The Republic" is that several segments only last for a minute or less.  That is probably a limitation of the technology itself though: Prekop came up with a lot of great motifs that work very well together and was wise to keep his various patches from overstaying their welcome.  My favorite moments are the hissing and quivering drone of "Republic 1" and the insectoid chittering and sputtering of "Republic 5," but the whole suite stands as an excellent work.
The second half of the album consists of somewhat longer individual compositions that are unrelated to Hartt's installation.  As with the "Republic" material, they are all basically pure modular synth compositions, but they vary a bit more in aesthetic.  Also, each seems to depart from "The Republic" material in at least one significant way.  For example, "Weather Vane" initially seems like it would fit fairly well, but then a big, thumping kick drum pulse turns up.  "The Loom," on the other hand, features the kind of maniacal repetition that I associate with early Severed Heads, though Prekop uses it as starting point rather than an end unto itself.  The remaining four pieces, for their part, are all similarly divergent and range from candy-colored, cheery Kosmische pastiche ("A Geometric") to darker and chunkily propulsive works like "Music In Pairs."
While they are objectively good, I do not like the non-"Republic" pieces nearly as much as the "Republic" ones.  The reason for that is somewhat complex, but they essentially fall into the same trap that a lot of noise music does: it sounds like Prekop was pleased that he was able to wrest some appealing sounds from a complex, unpredictable piece of equipment and consequently put them on his album.  Unfortunately, when that happens, the result usually sounds a lot like other artists.  "The Republic" suite, on the other hand, sounds like a distinctive composition that evokes an appealingly bittersweet and mysterious mood.  While it was certainly made using modular synths, it feels like they were merely a tool used to realize a coherent, deliberate vision rather than the driving force for that vision.  That said, as far as I am concerned, the non-"Republic" pieces are basically bonus tracks tacked on to pad the main course.  Consequently, they do not diminish Sam’s achievement at all: I would probably prefer an album devoted entirely to "Republic"-style pieces, but I am certainly delighted by the nine that I got.
 
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Steve Flato's inaugural cassette release from Lengua de Lava bears two illuminating dedications: one to Richard Maxfield, the innovative American composer, Fluxus member, and electronic music pioneer, and one to Eliane Radigue, the French-born Buddhist convert, equally innovative, whose experiments with feedback, tape loops, and synthesizers gave birth to some of the subtlest and most hypnotic music of the 20th century. The influence of both can be heard on Mara's Daughters, but for the first 41 minutes—the entirety of side A—Radigue's ultra-precise, slowly-unfolding sound is upended. Flato plots his course over harsher terrain. His sound is confrontational and messy, a constantly churning chaos of grinding noise and digital squeals rendered with impressive clarity. It is the kind of bedlam that would ordinarily repel meditation or introspection, but Flato's stratified attack is so massive it implodes and, by unexpected means, pulls the listener into the reflective stillness at its center.
In some Buddhist scriptures, Mara is a demon who sends his three daughters to visit Siddhartha Gautama. Their aim is to seduce him and thereby tempt him away from enlightenment. Despite their beauty Siddhartha rebuffs them and, without celebration or any sign of self-satisfaction, continues down his path to egolessness. Whether or not he intended it, Flato's music reads as an abstracted mirror image of this story. Beside the obvious reference to Buddhism, so integral to Eliane Radigue's private and artistic development, "Mara's Daughters" offers up heavy, frequently strident sounds that harry the mind. They are forceful, emphatic, and distracting, the kind of noises that frustrate concentration on anything else. They are also physical and call to mind mechanical processes. Like Richard Maxfield, who recorded the sound of a tape machine's erase head and used it in his music, Flato documents the clamor of machines cannibalizing themselves. He generates spools of tumultuous racket from data files and alters their qualities by physically handling the tapes on which they are stored. Beneath and within these elements Flato has buried haggard tones that radiate a kind of wan melodiousness. As "Mara's Daughters" progresses those tones emerge more and more and the surrounding noises become just that. Patterns, imagined or otherwise, develop, sound sources become more distinct, and intense focus replaces reckless intensity.
On side B, "Mara's Veils" and "Salton Sea" paint a very different picture of Flato's music. "Veils" begins as a conflagration of rhythmic refuse and piercing sine waves, then slowly transforms into a resounding mass that rises and falls in long metallic breaths. It concludes with a series of harmonic shivers that glimmer in the silence the way mirages waver in the summer heat. This leads naturally to "Salton Sea," named for the accidental lake created in 1905 by engineers employed at the California Development Company. Like its namesake, the music is littered with debris. A constantly fluctuating drone fills the entire piece and above it, or perhaps beside it, bells, voices, and silvery harmonies resonate like ghostly voices echoing off the hardpan. They join the sound of bats and wild dogs barking in the distance, then lose their form. It all concludes with a stretch of manipulated tape. Flato pinches and presses the fabric of the recording, which warps, then bends, then loses its center. A short beep and an abrupt burst of static signals the end. It is an epiphany to realize that the same stillness is at the heart of both Flato's noise and the silence that circumscribes it.
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- Albums and Singles
Reel to Real collects Liquid Liquid percussionist Dennis Young's early home recordings while a member of the pioneering New York dance band. Captured on reel-to-reel recordings, hence its (somewhat painfully cliché) title, these pieces range from random experiments to near songs that still have an endearing demo quality to them.
Unsurprisingly, many of the 16 songs that make up this collection feature heavy use of drums and percussion, and end up being the ones I found myself coming back to most.Opening "Big Boom" is literally named, all hollow and pounding drum patterns, with Young's shouty lo-fi vocals appearing as a near afterthought.His playing on "Gravitation" takes on a weirder, almost synthetic quality and timbre, with the same vocal approach.
Complex polyrhythms dot the fittingly titled "Drum Solo," pounding along with a sharp, metallic edge to the icy snare patterns.His inclusion of what sounds like bits of primitive analog synth within the patterns of "More is Less" go a long way, fleshing out what would otherwise be another, less engaging drum solo piece.
Past the drumming, Young's early experiments also heavily focused on synthesizers.The odd "Panic in the Air" sees him pairing his voice with a rapid synth sequence and more traditionally played electric organ.Uptempo keyboard arpeggios and keyboard noodling also feature heavily on "Unknown Origins," though the mix is more expansive and his inclusion of vocals give a more fully realized feel.Similar is the tight sequences and dramatic flair of "Contortions" which, while still having a loose bedroom-recorded sensibility to it, feels more like a song rather than an experiment.
Peppered throughout are some less structured, more obvious experiments that range from interesting to skippable.Something like "Overdub Dub" sticks out as an odd bit of reggae sound, filtered through the lens of post-punk to resemble the likes of PIL or The Slits but less confident.There are also a few folksy passages, such as "Aliens," which is all cheap acoustic guitar and lighthearted vocals that bear more than a passing resemblance to Genesis P-Orridge.
Approaching Reel to Real as a traditional album would be a major mistake, since it is intended to be nothing more than a collection of forgotten, closeted demos and experiments.Personally, I have always been fond of these sort of compilations.There is an exuberance and excitement within the weird noises and odd experiments that might not be something for everyday rotation, but still great to dig into when the mood strikes.
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Sigmarsson's work with the Icelandic group Stilluppsteypa frequently showcases both absurdity and dissonance heavily, and while his own work bears traces of that, divorced from any imagery, has more of a dark quality to it. At times austere, but not at all devoid of humor, it is three long pieces that never become stagnant resulting in a gripping collection of tones and textures.
The title of the album is undoubtedly related to the length of time it took to complete:recordings on here date back to 1998 but not completed until just last year.The first piece has Sigmarsson weaving together field recordings and the ambiance of idling machines, sometimes dissonant and sometimes melodic.It is on here that he especially showcases some dark, dramatic passages and textural spaces.
The feel of the second section is not too dissimilar, beginning with a short lived metallic expanse.Much of the piece is constructed around complex, hollow humming noises that mimic that of air conditioners or heavy equipment, but treated to bring out different, almost musical qualities.Later on he brings in what sounds like a conventional synthesizer passage, bathed in distortion and noise.At this point the record seems to shift, with Sigmarsson bringing bits of music into the otherwise abstract space.Tones almost resemble otherworldly symphonies mixed with expansive field recordings, intangible yet impeccably composed.
A passage of organ music is introduced in the closing minutes of this second segment, according to the liner notes titled the "garage days organ session" with Helgi Thorsson (of Stilluppsteypa) and frequent collaborator BJ Nilsen.It is at this point that the lighter, more absurdist moments of Sigmarsson's other work becomes apparent. This loose bit of organ improvisation drifts into the third and final piece, which is comparatively more static.It is not repetitive, but it stays more within a single dynamic and overall sound compared to the drastic jumps and variations that appeared before.
Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson does not reinvent a genre or make drastic strides in the world of experimental electro acoustic composition on So Long.However, it is exceptional in the way he blends varying textures and noises, moods and spaces, into a constantly expanding and developing record.Any sort of narrative that he may be trying to convey is anything but obvious, but the content of the music itself was more than enough to sustain my interest.
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