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

 

19 January 2015

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Albums and Singles

A reissue of a self-release from the enigmatic Grant Smith, the sound on this disc fits squarely in the world of guitar noise, but with a significant amount of development and variation within each of its six untitled segments. Sometimes harsh, sometimes pensive, and sometimes melodic, it results in a wonderful, mysterious album that is enjoyably unpredictable.

Tape Drift

The only overarching theme that seems to be prevalent on Exploding Diseases is a progression from harsher material into more meditative and hypnotic passages.The first segment opens with a deep, subterranean grinding noise that is likely guitar, but has a raw and otherworldly quality to it.Eventually Smith brings in a more standard sounding guitar layer, but with surges of a harsh and unidentifiable noise that balances out the familiar sounds very well.

Moving into the second piece, the overall structure continues with a power electronics bass crunch that would not be out of place on a Brighter Death Now record.The rawness is still present, but dialed back a bit and mixed with a layer of echoing, wobbly guitar noise.It might not be aggressive, but there is a bleak malevolence behind it.The fuzzy bass throb of the third part only slightly serves to obscure Smith’s introduction of an otherworldly melody low in the mix, a hint of what is to come on the album.

The melody was just a teaser, because the following piece leads off with a sharper noise sound that is far more abrasive than what preceded it.The piece may not be musical at all on the surface, but he keeps a churning vibration going that gives it at least a sense of rhythm, even if that is just undone by its grimy and nasty conclusion.

The final two segments are where Smith allows the more peaceful and meditative sounds shine through.The fifth piece opens with an ambient expanse:slowly humming guitar feedback results in a softer sound, and even with the distorted bassy loops, the whole thing is hypnotically droning.In a way, it is like the best moments of Spacemen 3 but more dissonant.The final piece is culled from a similar template, with a little more emphasis on the bass and noise.Kept at bay below the distorted stuff is a melodic loop that again offsets the noisy moments with something more melodic and engaging.

This is an obscure album from an enigmatic artist:there are no credits on the sleeve, and I could not find much information about him or his previous work via a quick Google search.That obscurity though makes Exploding Diseases even more captivating, like a lost artifact of brilliance that seemingly appeared out of nowhere.The mystery is not necessary to fully appreciate the album though, as the music stands on its own strongly.

samples:

• Exploding Diseases 2
• Exploding Diseases 3
• Exploding Diseases 5

 

19 January 2015

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Albums and Singles

Will Thomas Long has been less prolific as of late with material as Celer, his minimal ambient project. That longer space between releases has made each one all the more memorable, and that is no different with Sky Limits. Even though it is conceptually about the ephemeral nature of life and experiences, stopping to listen to these quiet pieces makes for a great metaphor of life on a grander scale.

Baskaru/Two Acorns

The composed pieces are consistent with what Long has done as Celer for years.Long constructs "Circle Routes" entirely of gliding tones and expansive electronics.Layered and slow, the piece is gentle, but commands attention and never becomes dull."In Plum and Magenta" features Long working in similar methods, but scaled back to be somewhat sparser, still conveying the same pensive emotions however.

The sound becomes a bit more intense on the middle pieces of the album, however."Tangent Lines" has a sound that is more commanding and dense, a cinematic heaviness that conveys drama expertly.Long keeps the electronics heavy on the following "Equal to Moments of Completion," emphasizing the lower end and creating an even greater sense of bombast.

In a similarly cinematic manner, the final two pieces have the sound retreating to a more gentle, placid conclusion."Wishes to Prolong" floats more than looms, slowly whisping away its calm tones and melodies.The concluding "Attempts to Make Time Pass Differently" has Long working with a similar ghostly feel, but enhances it with a rich, slow driving expanse of tones.The closing minutes go to near silence, requiring focus and dedicated attention to fully appreciate.

With the whole of the album inspired by daily life in Japan, the six major pieces of music are interspersed with field recordings of mundane life:watching television while drinking tea, traveling on a train, or simply the sounds outside.Kept at a low volume level, it requires deliberate focus to be able to fully hear what is going on, a great metaphor for the rest of life.

Will Thomas Long's use of sparse and minimal electronics throughout Sky Limits should be of no surprise to anyone with even a passing familiarity with Celer's work.Weaved together with the bits of field recordings, the album almost becomes an anti-narrative.Unlike something of high concept and drama, the sounds are more about observing and appreciating the richness in the mundane, the every day experiences people ignore in the search for something bigger or more grandiose.

samples:

• Circle Routes
• Tangent Lines
• Attempts to Make Time Pass Differently

 

18 January 2015

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Albums and Singles

Richard Skelton has a long history of shifting monikers, unusual concepts, and stylistic evolutions, but this latest project still came as a bit of a surprise to me, as it does not particularly sound like a Richard Skelton album at all.  Not at first, anyway.  Rather, it sounds a bit like a warmer variation on classic Lustmord or one of Steve Roach's space-themed albums–a far cry from Skelton's vibrant and organic signature blend of bow-scrapes and rich, shimmering harmonics.  After a few listens, however, it becomes evident that Skelton's aesthetic is still perfectly intact, but has been slowed down and stretched to something approximating geologic time (appropriate, given his well-documented non-musical interests).  While Nimrod is definitely not representative of what Richard historically does best, it is nevertheless a deep and absorbing listen, boasting at least one piece that is probably as great as anything in the space music canon.

Corbel Stone Press

There are many aspects of Skelton's artistry that I find endearing, but one of the less obvious ones is that it feels like his recent music is only the tip of an intriguingly cryptic and deeply personal iceberg.  I also appreciate that he only seems to surface these days when he has something new and unusual to say.  Exactly what he is saying, of course, usually remains a pleasant mystery to me, but Richard certainly cannot be faulted for failing to provide enough supporting information.  As with many recent Skelton efforts, Nimrod's music is closely intertwined with text–in this case, an evocative book of re-purposed literary quotations (Da Vinci, Christina Rossetti, Rilke, etc.), close-up photography of bark patterns, and word-collages rooted in detourned forestry documents.  Surprisingly, given the album's title and the actual music, the writings are mostly a fairly earthbound (albeit eclectic) series of meditations on trees, light, shadow, the sea, and solitude.  The album and song titles, on the other hand, are all tied to the writings of English polymath Sir Thomas Browne, so I suspect everything ultimately traces back to him in some way.

Musically, Nimrod generally resembles a Richard Skelton album being played at a much slower speed and deeper pitch.  I have no clue how the album was constructed, but there is little that can be readily identified as violin or bowed guitar, though the sounds could have certainly originated from either (and then been laptopped into unrecognizability).  In a more specific sense, most of Nimrod sounds like warm, layered, slow-moving drone swells made from a cello or double-bass.  That is certainly pleasant, but the album's best pieces merely use that as the starting point for something a bit more unique and mesmerizing.  "Ancient Arithmetic of the Hand," for example, augments its dreamy thrum with a ghostly, quavering haze and a deep, insistent throb, while "Glimpses Of The Empyreal Light" sounds like an older-style Skelton piece beset by ominous, subterranean shudders.

Nimrod's two highlights are even more radical in their transformation of Skelton's aesthetic.  "Two Opposed Leaves At The Root" is the album's masterpiece, weirdly reminding me of Aphex Twin's wheezing, lurching NIN remix (in name, at least) "At The Heart Of It All," which is not at all something I would normally expect to be referencing in regards to a Richard Skelton album.  Remarkably, Skelton manages to one-up Richard James though, as the pulse of "Two Leaves" transcends mere rhythm to sound like something enormous and metal being endlessly bent and crushed by powerful exterior forces.  I have never heard anything else quite like it and it is absolutely beautiful in its context.  "And In Their Groves Of The Sun This Was A Fit Number" is not quite that stunning or unique, but works on a similarly grand scale.  In fact, there is even some similar crunching, but it is quite distant and strangely soothing as it is slowly enveloped by the piece's warm, engulfing roar.

I would not necessarily say that there are any weak pieces at all on Nimrod, but the album’s lengthiest work ("An Art to Make Dust of All Things") seems comparatively uninspired to me, as its cold emptiness and deep metallic swells seem too much like the territory of previous space-minded ambient artists without any substantial improvement upon the formula (though it was bit surprising to hear a (buried) percussion loop).  It is a perfectly fine piece, but it just does not feel like it belongs on this particular album by this particular artist.  In all other respects, however, Nimrod is an absolutely wonderful, beautifully realized, and unexpected album (and "Two Leaves" is easily one of the finest pieces in Skelton's entire discography).

• An Art to Make Dust of All Things
• Two Opposed Leaves at the Root
• And in their Groves of the Sun This Was a Fit Number

 

18 January 2015

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Bastard Noise was not as prolific in 2014 as previous years, with only a handful of releases appearing. From that handful, these two are very different in their respective approaches, with Live at Babycastles consisting of a single long-form piece recorded by the duo of Anthony Saunders and Eric Wood, and Uncertainty Principle being two short pieces in collaboration with two well known Japanese artists. The sound, however, stays consistent: a subtle, at times ambient series of sounds that manage to get very noisy, but never lose their direction.

Small Doses/RSM/Skull

The opening minutes of "Alien Mother Nest/Space Graves" from Babycastles are surprisingly hushed.Quiet, slow flanging tones are eventually mixed with very low frequency bass, almost below the range of human hearing.Bits of laser gun synth noise and subtle feedback drift in, but held at the same quiet volume.Things stay pretty calm until the duo crank the volume up, bringing in a passage that sounds like strings from the Psycho soundtrack stretched out into infinity.

Even as the volume builds, the performance by Saunders and Wood is more electro acoustic avant garde than harsh noise in nature.The near forty minute performance is an exercise in restraint, keeping the noise part of the project name to a minimum until the closing minutes.Even at the conclusion, when the distortion knobs are cranked up, the mix is kept controlled enough that the sound is never lost in a storm of white noise.

samples:

• Alien Mother Nest/Space Graves (Excerpt 1)
• Alien Mother Nest/Space Graves (Excerpt 2)
• Alien Mother Nest/Space Graves (Excerpt 3)

The 7" single of Uncertainty Principle, however, has Bastard Noise working with two legendary Japanese artists known for anything but their subtleness.With BN, however, each piece sounds exactly as it should:a blending of both artists.On "The Confusion Age," with Hiroshi Hasegawa (Astro, CCCC), Hasegawa’s spacy, psychedelic electronics are cut up to act as climaxes that are built up to, rather than a massive wall of noise.Taking a slow pace, the artists pair open, expansive moments with harsh noise outbursts, but in a very composed way, peppered with almost grindcore vocals.

"A Diabolical Journey," with Government Alpha (Yasutoshi Yashida) has a similar sound, but even slower and full of screechy, squelchy noises.Guttural vocals appear here too, painfully delivering the lyrics at a snail’s pace.BN and GA mix the harsher, distorted bits with bassy surges and ambient electronics, to create a significant amount of shifting and varying dynamics within the confines of a single piece.

Even though they have the word in their name, Bastard Noise do not choose to sit squarely in the harsh noise realm as many would expect.They may use some of the same sounds and strategies, but their work, especially on these two releases, strikes me as something much more composed and organized.There is nothing here that resembles that critique that noise is nothing but distortion and squall.

samples:

• The Confusion Age (with Hiroshi Hasegawa)
• A Diabolical Journey (with Government Alpha)

 

18 January 2015

Administrator

Albums and Singles

It has been quite a long wait since the last proper Black To Comm album (2009's wonderful Alphabet 1968), so it was an absolute delight to have Marc Richter unexpectedly re-surface in December with an inspired return to form (and one of the year’s finest and most singular albums).  While this latest release understandably bears almost no resemblance to Marc’s decidedly outré soundtrack for EARTH (2012), it also does not seem to follow any obvious, linear progression from his previous work either. Black To Comm is its own self-contained, anomalous world of vibrant, hallucinatory sound art brilliance, resembling nothing less than the beautiful nexus where drone, space rock, psychedelia, and the flickering unreality of late-night semi-consciousness meet.

Type

Richter does not waste any time at all in wrong-footing any listeners expecting a traditional drone album with this effort, as the beautifully woozy, shimmering, and squiggly synths of "Human Ghidrah" are relegated to the background by a bizarre (and impassioned) metaphysical spoken word performance that resembles late-night TV televangelism.  The speaker is definitely not a televangelist though, as a televangelist would never urge me to grab my own anus and pull myself inside-out like this guy does.  While no other pieces feature spoken-word other than the similarly unhinged closer ("Them"), "Human Ghidrah" sets an ambitiously unpredictable tone for the album that Richter does not waver from.  Also, the spoken-word bits are an admirably bold move on Richter’s part, as he deflects the focus from some rather beautiful underlying music, opting to embrace the weird and unexpected rather than settling for just an excellent drone piece.

None of the eight pieces spanning Black To Comm share much in common in any specific sense, but they all display a similarly original vision and similarly ingenious construction.  The most instantly gratifying and accessible highlight is the effortlessly epic and haunting "Hands," which is probably the compositional high-water mark of Richter's career: its garbled and processed vocal melody, elegiac piano chords, swooping synthesizers, and surreal array of peripheral sounds seem to condense the beginning and end of an entire world into just under 5 minutes.  While nothing else on the album quite rivals that spectacular achievement, a few pieces come quite close.  For example, the 20-minute "Is Nowhere" is an absolute monster of a drone piece, effectively enhancing its fragile, haunting central motif with field recordings before bulldozing it all with some wonderfully harsh, gnarled synthesizers.  The aforementioned "Them" is yet another highlight, achieving nearly 15 minutes of sputtering, hallucinatory, and otherworldly grandeur before its deeply strange vocal catharsis erupts.

The remaining four pieces are similarly interesting and enjoyable, despite being somewhat less audacious in scope.  "Spectre Teeth," for example, is a buzzing, Middle Eastern-tinged drone piece featuring still more eerily tweaked vocals, while the heavy, engulfing thrum and exotic vocals of "1975" sound like the crescendo of an especially deranged and ambitious prog album.  Later, "Fackeln in Sturm" unfolds a subtly lysergic array of shimmers, swells, and warped vocals over an echoey krautrock-meets-dub groove.  Not to be left out, the remaining "Spiralen Der Errinerung" is possibly more bizarre than anything else on the album, resembling nothing less than some kind of ancient and deeply hallucinatory religious ceremony half-heard through heavy metallic grinding and something that sounds like heavily amplified Tibetan throat-singing.

At the risk of sounding somewhat hyperbolic, Black To Comm truly is a staggering and singular achievement and it is one that only could have come from Marc Richter: there are so many bewildering artistic choices, odd juxtapositions, eclectic influences, and disparate threads on display here that it is a marvel that it all works so well and feels so perversely natural.  I was also struck by how disorientingly timeless the album feels.  While the technology, techniques, and some of the influences certainly come from Earth (the planet) circa 2014, the music somehow always sounds completely unstuck in both time and place, seamlessly evoking at various points a lonely organist in an empty church, snatches of particularly weird half-remembered dreams, ancient cults, or something completely otherworldly altogether (and all while never lapsing into anything remotely mundane, derivative, or easily recognizable).  I truly cannot say enough good things about this album, as Richter has delivered a legitimate, unqualified, start-to-finish masterpiece.  This was my personal favorite release of 2014 by a landslide.

• Hands
• Is Nowhere
• Fackeln in Sturm

 

15 January 2015

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Albums and Singles

A master of romantic abstraction, Jefre Cantu–Ledesma is not new to the scene. In fact, he's been releasing a steady stream of music for nearly twenty years. With the brilliant album A Year With 13 Moons, however, the ever–prolific Ledesma appears to be hitting a new high. Or low, depending on how you like to see things. More on that later. First, some background.

Born & raised in Texas, Ledesma's formative artistic years were spent studying painting & sculpture in San Francisco. He began playing & releasing music in 1996 and has developed a steady relationship as a collaborator – he's released notable collaborations with Liz Harris (aka Grouper) as Raum, with Alexis Georgopoulos in his Arp project and with their ensemble The Alps, as well as filmmaker Paul Clipson. Ledesma also founded the influential label, Root Strata, who have released music by Oneohtrix Point Never, Keith Fullerton Whitman, and Grouper, and continue to release new and archival works.

A Year With 13 Moons, a nod to a Rainer Werner Fassbinder film, was recorded at the Headlands Center for the Arts, just across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco – where he and Clipson were artist in residence. It was a time of major transition. As he describes it, "the time at the Headlands was a real gift – of space, time and being cared for. This allowed me to create music in a way I never had before, on a day–in, day–out basis for hours on end. I stopped caring about end results and fell in love with the process. I learned how to let the music create itself in a way, to lead me rather than trying to force it down a path. I would start each session with a simple rhythm, or sound or a guitar riff & see where that led – it was cathartic, freeing and ultimately really transformed my approach to music making. In the end I was left with literally hours & hours of recordings. A Year With 13 Moons was culled from these and formed while traveling the week after I left the residence."

Using a friend’s reel-to-reel tape player, Cantu employed electric guitar, modular synthesizer, drum machine and concrète sounds from his surroundings at the Headlands, recorded while walking to the studio, cooking in the kitchen, talking with friends, the ocean, films he was watching, driving in a car. Everything was record stereo to tape. There is only one track with overdubs – otherwise each take is a true document of an entirely live take.

The result is gorgeous, haunting and sprawling. A companion to his last full-length LP, Love is A Stream, (Type, 2010), 13 Moons is a dense, swirling mass. A bookend to the end of a relationship. To say 13 Moons is comprised of "songs" might not be entirely accurate. They're closer to transmissions from a satellite of love. Opener "The last time I saw your face" sets the tone. A bittersweet goodbye letter that unites guitars and modular synthesizer to widescreen ends over the course of its 8 and half minutes. It works dramatically well as an opening statement, and also as a summary of what he's been doing in recent years. Second track, "In and Out of Love,” on the other hand, seems to represents where Cantu might be going.

Cantu was interested in ways of "conveying memory in music without being sentimental – somehow translating the fog of images, people and places that (he'd) experienced in the last two years into a body of work that could still be ambiguous & leave space for the listener to enter." As such, 13 Moons succeeds. Incisive editing allows hypnotic guitar and drum performances to be interrupted by Modular synth squalls and otherworldly textures –– combining overdriven guitars, avant-garde composition (a la Xenakis) with the informal approach of underground tape weirdos (like Robert Turman, K. Leimer) into a lovely brocade of harmony and dissonance.

Tracks like "Shadows," "Early Autumn" and "The Isar" bring these avant-gardisms to the fore, conjuring early experiments in industrial sound. "A portrait of you at Nico’s grave, Grunewald, Berlin (For B.K.)" might represent the album's loneliest moment, the air moving in hovering cloud formations. It would be perfect to soundtrack a Werner Herzog film. "Body of Moonlight" allows hope, a disappearing presence in the latter stages of 13 Moons, to resurface. It's a feeling Ledesma is very good at. That sense of something very intense at hand, and that fracturing sense of looking down at yourself. It's a feeling nearly impossible to describe. Then again, if words can't convey something, sometimes sound is better.

More information can be found here.

15 January 2015

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Albums and Singles

After America is the first solo album by Simon Crab - most well-known as the founder and front-man of the group Bourbonese Qualk (1979-2003). The album contains 20 new tracks recorded from 2010-2014 at various locations in the UK and featuring contributions from Geoff Leigh (Henry Cow, ExWiseHeads) and Dave Smith (Guapo).

"An audio tapestry, After America is a tonal epic poem of moods and texture that narrates an intense emotional journey. Instrumental melodies from horn, wind, drum kits, acoustic and electric guitar and even Gamelan percussive arrangements verge on orchestral as they relate tumultuous tales and respite in oasis' of calm. At moments, the instrumentals are pierced by Industrial-strength synths and machine drums; other moments are cocooned in shimmering electronics that echo Basic Channel at their most sublime; and still others are haunted by misty ambientdrone. Instrumental bard, Simon Crab seamlessly blends otherwise disparate textures into a cohesive narrative while dragging the music (and listener) through a "hall of mirrors" that flirt with psychedelics. Rather than push his sounds through exaggerations, Crab accentuates and emphasizes using real-time audio synthesis, Supercollider, to instill a distinctly 'other' quality. What might have passed as improvised, minimal folk, or traditional/ethno/post­jazz is actually a kind of 'cyborg­music,' a surprisingly harmonious blend of natural and synthetic. After America heralds the end of a colonial Empire that flails in a Brave New World where ideas and change fire across the globe and the speed of thought. In the way that a masterfully woven tapestry depicts tales, so too does After America, taking you on an Odyssey with each listen.

Simon Crab has been a music maker since the late '70s, where he founded Bourbonese Qualk, as well as Sunseaster, an experimental/improvised­/electro­acoustic noise project. Crab also learned traditional African and Middle Eastern music and is a member of London's Gamelan orchestra."

-Ibrahim Khider, Toronto, 2014

More information can be found here and here.

15 January 2015

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Albums and Singles

Fantastic Planet is the soaring, evocative new album from Noveller, the solo instrumental venture of Austin-based composer and filmmaker Sarah Lipstate. The LP is a journey through eclectic sonic terrain, blending rich waves of synth with soaring cinematic guitar lines, guiding the listener through Noveller's most diverse and compelling release to date.

Originally self-defined as an electric guitar project, Lipstate began recording under the name Noveller (pronounced "know-veller") in 2005 whilst living and studying in Texas. She uprooted to Brooklyn and subsequently made waves on New York's live scene and internationally, sharing the stage with the likes of Six Organs of Admittance, St. Vincent, Xiu Xiu, the Jesus Lizard, U.S. Girls, Aidan Baker and Emeralds, whilst capturing the attention of NPR, The Village Voice, Time Out New York and The Wall Street Journal.

Noveller's prolific output has seen her release albums via No Fun Productions and her own imprint, Saffron Recordings, including the Desert Fires LP and the critically acclaimed Glacial Glow. She also released a split LP with unFact (David Wm. Sims of the Jesus Lizard) and has collaborated with several renowned musicians, including live improvised duo performances with Carla Bozulich (Evangelista, The Geraldine Fibbers), Lee Ranaldo (Sonic Youth), and JG Thirlwell (Foetus, Manorexia). She has previously performed as a member of Cold Cave, Parts & Labor, and One Umbrella.

Upon returning to Texas, Lipstate developed her signature cinematic soundscapes further, and it was here she completed her spectacular new release Fantastic Planet. It is an album largely steeped in place, both real and fantastical, and influenced by Lipstate's various interchanges and relocations, physical and emotional.

Noveller takes the elements of rhythm and synth textures introduced in her previous album No Dreams and expands them to a new level of prominence through her guitar work on Fantastic Planet. From the dark beat propelling "Pulse Point" to the distorted synth on post-punk track "Rubicon," Lipstate pushes her sound in new directions that complement and elevate her intoxicating filmic soundscapes.

More information can be found here.

"Some artists traverse boundaries. Sarah Lipstate's work seems to come from a world where they never existed. Her color-rich visual art has a mournful literary quality to it; her short films trigger collisions of emotional crosscurrents; and her instrumental music, which she makes under the name Noveller (emphasis on the middle syllable), seems to call to attention all senses at once, to the point where even the word music seems somehow limiting." - Time Out NY

"...simultaneously soothing and mind-wrecking noise, along with a compositional depth that most loud-for-the-hell-of-it guitar droners never reach." - NY Press

"...hypnotic, rich-textured electric guitar works." - New York Times

"Sarah Lipstate creates miniature musical worlds, places that you feel like you'll never leave long as the record is playing." - Pitchfork

12 January 2015

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Albums and Singles

Considered "lost" for the better part of the past decade, these two live pieces, commissioned for a performance in Berlin, has some unexpected moments for those familiar with these two composers. Steve Roden and Frank Bretschneider blend their strengths of subtle electronics and improvisation, but also bring in some surprisingly conventional beats and rhythms, resulting in an unpredictable, yet diverse and gripping record.

LINE/Volume

The first piece, performed live for the 2004 Suite in Parochial festival, immediately begins with a surprising use of beats.The deep synthetic thuds, approximating 4/4 kick drums without fully sounding like a drum machine, lie somewhere between the electronic noise style of Raster-Noton and the submerged dub of the Basic Channel label.The duo continue this bizarre techno sound via tiny synthetic outbursts and bits of noise, drifting towards bleepy skittering techno that never manages to go full on dance in its structure.

From this misleading trip down rhythmic avenues, Roden and Bretschneider then choose to completely change things around.Rather than beats, the performance becomes heavy with crackling drones and massive sub bass passages.The middle segment features some stretched out DSP bell tones that sound nice in this context, but are a bit less distinctive than the rest of the performance.The duo eventually mangles what could almost pass for a harmonica melody, and closes the piece on a rhythmic, synth heavy conclusion.

The second piece, a recorded rehearsal, sounds like the duo working with the same settings and instrumentation, but the result is notably different in its style and structure.They retain the bass heavy drones from before, but first focus on abstract synth loops:a drastic departure from the beat centric opening of the live performance.Organic clinking and dripping sounds appear, making for a more textural introduction.

Compared to the performance, the rehearsal is less rhythmic and structured, instead seeing the two experiment with tones and textures.The hints at melody from before appear as well, but contorted and processed to be even more deranged than what was heard by the audience.The piece is just as dynamic as the other, but sounds even more experimental.The final ten or so minutes of the piece drift into that glitch heavy techno sound that characterizes what became the actual performance.

Considering that both of these lengthy pieces were performed solely by Bretschneider’s modular synth, with Roden manning effects, recordings, and various objects, the end result is far richer and nuanced than the instrumentation would suggest.Having sat in some digital limbo for the past decade, these two related, yet thematically similar performances finally seeing the light of day is a very good thing.

samples:

• Part 1 (Live) (Excerpt 1)
• Part 1 (Live) (Excerpt 2)
• Part 2 (Rehearsal)