25 January 2015

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Albums and Singles

2013's Era was a criminally underappreciated monster of an album that marked an significant, unexpected surge forward in forging a distinctive and wonderful aesthetic all Disappears' own.  I am not sure quite what I expected from this follow-up, but it certainly was not still another dramatic evolution.  That is exactly what I got though.  While I still give Era the edge from both a songwriting and simmering menace perspective, Irreal takes its predecessor's hypnotic, machine-like precision and echo-heavy minimalism and runs with it.  Admittedly, the band's brilliance is primarily stylistic this time around, but Disappears have nonetheless provided yet another thoroughly bad-ass avant-rock tour de force.

Kranky

I have liked (or loved) songs on just about every album that Disappears have released to date, but Era was noteworthy in being the first where the Chicago foursome have truly sounded like only themselves, whereas earlier works always made the band's shifting influences very apparent.  To its credit, Irreal stakes out that particular (and very cool) niche even more emphatically (in fact, one of the opening lines in the title track is "I’m onnnnn....some new trip" delivered with a singularly bad-ass drawl).  Notably, the new trip that Disappears are on sounds increasingly less and less like rock as I know it.  Sure, they look like a rock band and they play all the normal rock instruments, but their strain of rock is now just as informed by dub, experimental music, and minimalism as it previously was by Neu! And GVSB.  Equally important is the fact that Disappears' rhythm section of Damon Carruesco and Noah Ledger embraces an almost machine-like (and non-rock) degree of precision and repetition, though enough fluidity still creeps into their grooves to make them perversely sensual at times.

Aside from their wonderfully simmering, hypnotic pulse, Disappears' other major innovation is their increasingly minimal and non-traditional approach to guitars.  There is almost nothing resembling a chord progression or a riff on this album, aside from maybe the stumbling, broken-sounding harmonic hook of "Irreal."  The only real exception is "Halcyon Days," which unexpectedly boasts some chords and a delay-heavy guitar melody.  In all other respects, Irreal is basically a series of excellent bass-driven grooves colored by plenty of nuanced, effects pedal-heavy guitar textures.  That might not sound all that amazing on paper, but the execution of it all is both ingenious and damn near perfect.  I cannot begin to imagine how much work went into chiseling these songs into their final forms, as few bands that I know of make better use of space than Disappears.  Guitarists Brian Case and Jonathan van Herrick have almost completely carved away any traces of excess or ornamentation in their playing, so on the rare occasions when they actually do open up, it makes a real impact.  Otherwise, they are more than happy to just ride a single note if it suits the song, which I greatly appreciate.  Also, the relative absence of guitars creates room for neat tricks like the echoey dub effects on the drums in "Interpretation" (another highlight).

That said, there are a few ways in which Irreal falls a bit shy of its predecessor.  As noted earlier, the songwriting is a bit weaker than it has been previously.  That seems to be by design (the emphasis is now definitely elsewhere), but it would still be nice to have something as hooky as "Power" or "Pre Language."  The closest Irreal comes to a great single is the title piece, but it is sabotaged by an awkward segue into a three-minute outro.  The other perplexing aspect of this album is that it greatly downplays the presence of frontman Brian Case, as his half-spoken vocals are largely treated like just another instrument.  I do enjoy his disaffected mumbling, but not nearly as much as I like it when he sounds like he has a basement full of dead prostitutes.  That change drives me a little crazy, as he can be one of my favorite frontmen when he is "on" (his vocals on "New House" were the definite highlight of Era for me).  Consequently, I think the pendulum may have swung a bit too far towards "inhuman" with this album–a better balance between cold, minimalist perfectionism, hooks and charisma can definitely be found.  Despite those caveats, however, Irreal is probably still my second favorite Disappears album, as the elements that do work do so extremely well: hooks are nice, but a strong, singular, and beautifully executed artistic statement is quite satisfying too.

• Interpretation
• Irreal
• Halcyon Days

 

 

25 January 2015

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Albums and Singles

Second in a trio of inaugural cassette releases from Yucatán, México's Lengua de Lava, Harness joins two live performances recorded on the same night at Oberlin College's Fairchild Chapel. The first documents the gutsy force of Joe Panzner and Greg Stuart's machine noise, the second catches Jason Brogan and Sam Sfirri in slow-death mode, twisting canine howls and malfunctioning equipment into avian distress signals and seismic events. Each duo treats their material differently, but the attention paid to physical properties and processes links them. It's a detail picked up and echoed in the superb artwork from Matthew Revert, who channels the corrosive elements of both pieces into a frayed and intricate scrawl.

Lengua de Lava

"We Didn't Get There Tonight" begins with a short punch of hiss and a steady hum. It sounds like a machine rushing to life and blowing a fuse in almost the same moment. The ensuing brume of sine waves, atomic pops, and broken signals reinforces that image. Panzner and Stuart play with fields of electrical interference and evoke the flashing red lights of agitated equipment on the verge of meltdown. They mix that with the blistering friction of material bodies. Metal grinds against metal in some passages, then compressed air screeches from the speakers and the pocked surface of a worn-out asphalt slab is slammed against the blown-out flutter of busted speaker heads. Glass vibrates against an invisible surface at the end and then the piece comes to a sudden and jarring stop. At first blush the whole thing sounds improvised, but hints of structure seep out of the way Panzner and Stuart react to each other and move from one section to the next. Their interactions are too canny for the whole thing to be completely off the cuff.

The same can be said of Jason Brogan and Sam Sfirri's side, "Wolf." Against the odd sputtering of something that resembles a dot matrix printer, or the digital approximation of a sprinkler system, Brogan and Sfirri place howling wolves, chirping birds, running water, the sound of thunder, and eventually the alien quaver of creatures unknown. By the ten minute mark the initial scene has changed from a pastiche of the familiar to a disconcerting collage of ringing tones and murky field recordings. The conditions for the performance are partially set by the materials Brogan and Sfirri chose to play with, but the outcome depends on the transformation of those materials and the way in which they decide to layer everything. As "Wolf" goes on, that layering becomes sparser and sparser, until a new and artificial (but almost totally convincing) field recordings emerges. A coda is provided in the form of several time-altered howls. They move by so slowly that they register almost as fog horns, or as the mating calls of a whale pod.

Again, the physical elements of the performances come straight to the fore. Both the sound sources and the medium on which they are carried and transformed figure into the way the music is heard. It registers as tactile and malleable, as both music and as something like sculpture seen in four dimensions. The blueprints look rigid, firm, even definite, but as these two concerts demonstrate, the results are more like the shadows of those plans scattered on the crest of time.

samples:

• We Didn't Get There Tonight
• Wolf (1)
• Wolf (2)

 

24 January 2015

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Albums and Singles

England / Ohio's Mat Sweet presents his latest album under the Boduf Songs moniker via The Flenser!

Stench of Exist is at once his most accessible and most esoteric work to date; from the opium flow of the tracks, running headily into one another like tributaries to river, to the muted-industrial-electronic-effected drums underscoring the spiraling melodies and fluttering drones, to the clean and rich guitar, abstracted cycles and feedback walls, its whispered doom metal masquerades as a lullaby.

Stench of Exist unfolds languorously, laced with mysterious electronic filigree. Gorgeously intimate, it transforms the minimal into maximal with layers of electro-detritus wreathed in lush guitar strums, street-side field recordings, reverberating pianos and softly crooned vocals. It is a record of rain and cities and nighttime. The collision of arabesque tonalities with electronic sound and ambience brings to mind the promise of Blade Runner—half-asleep at 4:00 A.M. and slightly medicated, with pyramids and flame-spewing cityscapes in downpour glowing against the fluttering eyelids in the almost-dreaming consciousness. A record for saturnine commuters, on headphones, after sunset.

Coming February 2015.

More information can be found here.

24 January 2015

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Albums and Singles

Recorded Nov/Dec 2014.

Title lifted from the Joan Didion book The Year of Magical Thinking. Thanks Joan.

Samples and more information are available here.

24 January 2015

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Albums and Singles

"...And Wait For Something to Happen"

A dark, dark journey of spirits and alchemy conjured in the supernaturally hot, still spring of 2014 in Burlington, North Carolina, that haunted black X on the map buried deep in the Alamance foothills. These are the wailings of phantoms trapped beneath the floorboards and between the walls of our murky and crumbling 1910 home, buried on sleeping side-streets within a moment's reach of swarming, grasping woods. These are the sheets of rain swept in the doorway, the static churning of a possessed shortwave radio, the spitting demons of electricity and malfunction and broken, obsolete machines slowly giving way to organic sounds, light, an upward journey out of the very hands of night's oblivion and into more luminous, radiant decay. Here lies collapse, entropy, and rebirth.

More information can be found here and here.

24 January 2015

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Albums and Singles

The latest sonic throw-down between Jim O'Rourke and Christoph Heemann; a state where it's almost impossible to determine who is responsible for what. The plastic people have melted together, that's why!

(Slightly) more information can be found here.

24 January 2015

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Albums and Singles

After intense one-on-one dialogue with Heather Leigh on the label's renewed remit to present beautiful records that showcase all styles of "guitar" in all their extremities, Golden Lab is delighted to deliver to you what is, no question, an absolutely blinding example of just such a record.

A recording that captures Heather Leigh direct to cassette – one of those performances where the pedal steel was raging so hard that the vocals never had the opportunity to even make an appearance. Recorded in glorious mono and mastered to really bring out the harshness of those insane tones, the capturing of this performance to cassette gives the pedal steel an almost tape-like quality itself and its transfer to vinyl only warms it up further into a new zone of somehow cosy metallicism. This is an absolute joy – a real tear-yr-face-off record that sort of acts as a companion piece to HL's recent work w/ Stefan Jaworzyn in Annihilating Light. This won't stick around long.

More information can be found here.

24 January 2015

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Albums and Singles

Jasmine Guffond is an original creator of conceptual sound. This first output under her own name is its own study, and if you've heard her former projects Jasmina Maschina or Minit, you should not be surprised at the different driving force and fresh structure of sound behind this new venture. However, if you're anticipating veins of clean, melodious folk or purely experimental electronic, you should shift your expectations.

Yellow Bell presents a broad spectrum of musicality, floating within hazy electronics, lost vocals, and ambient dimensions. The balance of digital synthesizer, loops, processed voice, and guitar creates a meticulous soundscape that both intrigues and calms. With its delicacy and immediacy, Yellow Bell distorts the perception of time and creates an environment for engagement and understanding.

While creating its own memorable dynamic, Yellow Bell resonates with the delayed endlessness of Grouper or lovesliescrushing and touches on the early electronic sounds of Musique concrète.

More information can be found here.

24 January 2015

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Albums and Singles

166 minutes with

Charlemagne Palestine: piano Bösendorfer, orgue Yamaha and voice

Rhys Chatham: trumpet, loop pedal, electric guitar.

This is the first recorded collaboration between Charlemagne Palestine and Rhys Chatham. And it's precious. After the musical meetings with Tony Conrad (SR204) and Z'ev (SR340), these new Sub Rosa sessions create a form of trilogy.

More information can be found here.

19 January 2015

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Albums and Singles

Sometimes I wonder why the rest of the world does not seem to appreciate the singular genius of Colleen Kinsella and Caleb Mulkerin like I do.  Other times, an album like this comes along and reminds me how truly unhinged, prickly, and unsuited for mass consumption the duo can be and everything makes sense once more.  Given the diversity and volume of Big Blood's output to date, it is hard to say just how dramatic a divergence Unlikely Mothers actually is, but I normally associate the band with a uniquely raw, primal, and art-damaged strain of folk that defies easy categorization.  Unlikely Mothers also defies easy categorization, but calls to mind some sort of primitive, sludgy, and bass-driven strain of '70s hard rock.  Some of the grooves achieve an unexpectedly hypnotic momentum or bracing, wild-eyed power, but the shrillness and single-mindedness of some these pieces can definitely make for a rough ride.

Blackest Rainbow

I have wrestled with what to say about this particular album for months, which I find very amusing given that Unlikely Mothers was probably composed and recorded in significantly less time than that.  I do not mean that as a critique, as Big Blood's intention very clearly seems to have been to unleash something loose, spontaneous, and different (and Unlikely Mothers is certainly all of those things).  What troubled me instead was that a band I love made an album that I found very hard to embrace, yet they themselves thought enough of it to make it one of their more high-profile, widely distributed albums (plenty of perfectly fine Big Blood albums have historically gone into the world as self-released cassettes or CDRs).  Consequently, I figured that I was probably missing something significant and just needed to hear the album enough to unlock its secrets.  Now that I have listened to it quite a lot, I can safely say that Unlikely Mothers probably has no secret layers or great buried melodies to uncover, but that it is nonetheless an admirable and unique experiment.  It just is not one for me.

With just a couple of exceptions, these nine songs are basically all grooves built upon a single promising riff.  Most of the riffs are admittedly cool ones, particularly the bass lines in "Steppin’ Time, Pt. II" and "Watery Down, Pt. II," but those riffs rarely make the leap from "great groove" to "great song," a problem compounded by some rather indulgent song lengths.  It takes quite an exceptional vamp to hold my attention for ten solid minutes and Big Blood are unlikely to dethrone Fela Kuti in that regard any time soon, though the 15-minute closer (the aforementioned "Watery Down, Pt. II") admittedly works quite well.  Still, if a bunch of simple, fuzzed-out bass riffs was all Unlikely Mothers had to offer, it would be fairly easy to dismiss.  It is not easy to dismiss at all, however.  Some of that success is certainly due to some neat details (the primal, clattering drums in "Thumbnail Moon," the lazy psychedelic guitar meandering in "Watery Down, Pt. II," etc.) and some occasional strong melodies and songcraft ("Watery Down" yet again).  Most of the album's success, however, is due to the duo's decidedly unique aesthetic.

Quite simply, Unlikely Mothers sounds like the work of some kind of isolated, backwoods cult that has largely spent the last few decades consuming massive amounts of peyote, reading arcane books, and listening to Sabbath and Dead Moon.  In fact, I suspect this album sounds far more like a weird backwoods cult than an actual weird backwoods cult would sound.  Caleb and Colleen have always sounded delightfully ragged, but Mothers takes that tendency and amplifies it to a raucous, stomping, religious fervor.  While there are a few oases of genuine beauty to be found in these songs, the emphasis is much more on trancelike repetition and frayed abandon (Kinsella often sounds more like a banshee than a Siren this time around).

The tragedy here is that I am perfectly fine with absolutely all of that: I am quite happy to follow Big Blood as far out on their weird, precarious limb as they want to go.  In fact, I think Unlikely Mothers is a legitimate stylistic triumph, as it all sounds genuinely fiery, gut-level, and half-crazed without a trace of irony, artifice, or artistic detachment to be found.  I love that.  I just wish that the duo's shriller, more unhinged tendencies had been better balanced with strong melodic hooks (Big Blood are historically very good at finding ways to present beautiful melodies with sharp edges).  The most perplexing thing of all is that at least some of these songs are reworkings of older pieces (both "Away" and "Leviathan Song" previously surfaced on Old Time Primitives, for example).  If cannibalizing pre-existing songs was fair game, it seems like Unlikely Mothers could have been forged from much stronger raw material than it was.  Perhaps these were all chosen for thematic reasons (the title refers to the fact that both Kinsella's mother and her aunt were nuns), but I was unable to find any kind of overarching narrative thread or theme in the songs as a listener.  Consequently, this album feel like an exasperating missed opportunity to me, albeit a wonderfully wild and divergent one.  A better album than this one can definitely be made in this vein.  That said, however, both halves of "Watery Down" rank comfortably among Big Blood's finest work, so apparently even a somewhat frustrating Big Blood album is still good for roughly 20 minutes of sublime greatness.

• Thumbnail Moon
• Steppin' Time Pt. II
• A Watery Down Pt. II